My Dad Was a Ladies’ Man (Except He Wasn’t)
- Rick Hogart
- Aug 28
- 4 min read
I was thirteen when my dad sat me down and told me how to get laid.
Well, not in those exact words. He said something like: “Son, one day your nuts are gonna feel like they’re on fire. And when that day comes, I want you to have the tools to put ‘em out properly.”
We were in the garage. He had that big yellow fan running, the one that sounded like a helicopter stuck in traffic. I was pretending to change a bike tire. He was drinking something, leaning back in a lawn chair like he was about to drop one of his stories. He told me stories, a lot. Like the time he walked into a diner and left with the waitress’s number and her cousin’s. Yeah, those kinds of stories. Or how he once picked up a girl just by complimenting her shoelaces. Or how, at a house party, he told a woman her perfume smelled like "slow jams and bad decisions," and somehow… it worked.
He always had a story. And every story came with a rule.
“If you notice something specific, say it. Vagueness is for cowards.”
“You don’t need to be hot. You need to be interesting.”
“Confidence is 80% pretending and 20% doing it again.”
I didn’t use any of that advice right away. Hell, if you’ve read my first column, you know I was 21, still hiding in my goon cave, more familiar with hentai plotlines than real-life flirting. But once I started crawling out of that shell, first kiss, first date, first time, I realized those stories had stuck. My dad’s voice would pop up in the back of my head at just the right moments.
And later, as I started to climb out of my cave, get out more, meet people, try again… the stories started to feel less like fiction and more like blueprints. My dad hadn’t made me a player. But he’d planted the idea that I could be. Someday.
Dad passed two years ago. Sudden. Heart. Middle of the night.
We were all there, afterward. Me, my brother Lamar, Uncle Frankie, and Mom. Sitting around the dining table once the guests had gone, half-drunk coffee cups and dessert plates still scattered around. Nobody really looking each other in the eye. Just doing what families do when they’re trying not to fall apart, telling stories, laughing too loud, trying to keep the silence from swallowing the room.
We started swapping dad stories. His obsession with jazz records. His refusal to admit he needed glasses. That one time he tried to grill shrimp on a George Foreman and nearly burned the kitchen down. Then I brought up the stories. The ones he told me as a teenager.
“Oh yeah,” I said, “remember how he used to brag about being some kind of smooth-talking Casanova? Dude gave me flirting advice like it was the Ten Commandments.”
Lamar laughed. “Please, he once told me to impress girls by reciting poetry. Poetry! I was 12, man.”
Then Mom said something that made me drop my beer.
“He made most of that up, you know.”
We all turned to her.
“What do you mean?” I asked, blinking like she’d just told me Santa was real, but he sold weed now.
“He wasn’t… like that. When I met him, he could barely speak to me. Stuttered through our first three dates. Said he practiced what he’d say in the mirror, over and over. He had no game. None.”
I just sat there.
“But why, why would he tell me all that if it wasn’t true?”
She said he hadn’t always been confident. That he used to be shy, quiet, unsure of himself around women. That it took him years to feel comfortable in his own skin.
And that when I was born, he made a decision: his son wasn’t going to go through the same thing. He told stories, she said, because he wanted me to feel bold. Like I had it in me.
He made himself the hero so I could believe I could be one, too.
It took me a while to make peace with that. But in the end, I think it was his way of showing love, maybe the best way he knew how.
My dad created a whole alternate universe just to give me confidence. He lied, sure, but it wasn’t for vanity. It was an act of love. Of protection. He knew that teenage boys swim in a sea of insecurity, and that even one drop of belief can change how they float.
He wanted me to swim better than he ever did.
And you know what? I did. Eventually, I became someone who could talk to strangers. Who could laugh at his own bad jokes. Who could sit down and write a sex column without pretending to know everything. Not because I was born that way, but because someone I loved gave me permission to believe I could become it.
He pops into my mind at weird times. When I’m about to talk to someone who makes my stomach do dumb things. When I end up dancing, even though I’m built like a confused windmill. When I stop overthinking and just do the thing, because life’s too short to stay on the sidelines.
So yeah. My dad wasn’t a ladies’ man. He was a story man. And in the end, the story he told made me who I am.
Thanks, Pops. You might not have bagged two waitresses in a single day, but you raised someone who believes he could.
And that’s more than enough.
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