Justin Halpern: Sh*t My Dad Says

When I entered junior high, I was five feet tall, weighed eighty pounds, wore gigantic glasses, and—according to my grandpa—sounded like a tiny woman. I sort of knew where I stood, physically, when on a trip to Sea World, a caricature artist drew a picture of me and it didn’t look all that exaggerated. I was basically a character a lazy screenwriter might come up with while half-assing a script: stereotypical nerd. My mom thought “awkward” just meant I was creative. So when I was heading into seventh grade, she talked my dad into sending me to a performing arts school where all the kids were just as awkward. But after seventh grade, my parents decided that the school was a waste.

“I didn’t see them make you create or perform anything the whole year. Kinda defeats the fucking point of paying extra money for you to go to a place called the School for Creative and Performing Arts,” my dad said when alerting me that I was going to go back to public school.

By the start of eighth grade I still hadn’t hit my growth spurt, and I looked the same as I had a year prior. In fact, I think my voice might actually have been higher. I had a good idea how eighth grade was going to go about five minutes into my first day.

“Justin Halpern,” I announced when my homeroom teacher asked for my name.

A big kid with a mustache named Andre leaned over to me. “Eh, puto,” he whispered.

“Yeah?” I said, nervous.

“Why you sound like a fucking bitch?”

Fast-forward a year later to when I entered high school. I had grown several inches, I felt more confident, and I was being called “fag” around 85 percent less. I had a few friends, and everybody who had picked on me in eighth grade basically left me alone now.

My dad noticed when I came home from school looking and feeling upbeat and content after the first week was over. “There’s a hop in your step now,” he said. “You look like you just finished taking a shit all the time.”

But with my newfound happiness and social life, I started to neglect my classes. And after the first progress report of ninth grade, I had a 2.33 GPA, which I knew wasn’t good, but I didn’t think was all that terrible. My dad thought otherwise.

“Not that bad? This ain’t fucking MIT, this is ninth grade! Look at this shit!” he said, holding the progress report up. “You got a fucking C in ninth-grade journalism? How does that even happen? You work for the New York fucking Times? Couldn’t break that big corruption story? Jesus Christ. Unbelievable.”

After my parents discussed in private how to handle my falling grades, my dad sat me down and told me that for the next week I wasn’t allowed to leave my room, except to go to school and to the bathroom. They’d serve me my meals in my room.

“WHAT?!” I shouted. “That’s ridiculous! Lots of kids get worse grades than I do. And it’s a progress report! It’s not even on my permanent record!”

“Blah-blah-blah, I don’t want to fucking hear it. You’re too smart for grades like this. It means you were lazy and didn’t do shit,” my dad replied.

“This is unbelievable! You’re putting me in prison! This is prison! For a 2.33 GPA!”

“Oh spare me, being stuck in your bedroom is not like prison. You don’t have to worry about being gang-raped in your bedroom.”

The subject that was dragging me down the most was math, but the next day at school I found out that I wasn’t alone. Two-thirds of the class received an F, including me. My teacher was a real tough guy, and he often told us that he wasn’t going to hold our hands. We either got it, or he’d flunk us out.

On the first night of my imprisonment, my dad came home from work, tossed on some sweatpants, and strolled into my room.

“Get out your math book. We’re gonna cure this case of the stupids,” he said as he sat down next to me on my bed, pointing at a stack of books underneath a pile of my dirty clothes. “Jesus, open a window, it smells like death shit in here,” he added.

As we started to go through the book, he realized that not only did I not know how to do any of the problems, I didn’t understand the basics I needed to even tackle them.

“They didn’t teach you this shit?” he asked.

I told him they hadn’t, and then I told him what the teacher had said about either getting it or flunking out.

“What? That’s bullshit. What kind of asshole says something like that? Me and this teacher are having a chat. I’m coming to your goddamned school tomorrow.”

The next day, I sat at my desk in homeroom, terrified that at any moment my dad would show up. You know that feeling you get when you’re going up a huge climb on a roller coaster, waiting for that first big drop to come? Imagine that, but then imagine, too, that you have diarrhea. Which I happened to have that day due to a combination of queso fundido I had eaten the night before at a Mexican restaurant and the boxes of Nerds candy I’d been downing all morning. I spent periods one through three running between my classes and the bathroom, praying that my dad didn’t burst into my classroom while I was on the toilet.

Then, during fourth period, I saw him out in the hallway being pointed to my English classroom by a janitor. He walked over and waited by the door, pacing back and forth, holding his briefcase. I slumped down in my chair. This stoner kid named Brandon leaned over to me, and pointed at my dad.

“I bet that dude’s from the fucking FBI or some shit,” he said.

“He’s not,” I muttered.

When the bell rang, I walked out into the hallway, where he said, “Grab your shit. Let’s go see your teacher.”

“Can’t we just do this after school, Dad? Why do you have to do this during school?”

“Son, relax. I just want to chat with the man. I’m not gonna rip his head off and shit down his throat,” he said. “Unless he provokes me.”

We walked up toward the bungalow on the outskirts of campus where my math class met. Kids were already starting to file in, and my crusty teacher was sitting in the corner behind his desk. He looked like Dustin Hoffman, if Dustin Hoffman’s skin was made of newspapers that had been left out in the sun. My dad barreled into the room and walked right up to him. I lingered outside, trying not to be seen.

“You’re the math teacher?” my dad barked.

My math teacher looked up, annoyed.

“I am. Can I help you?”

The ten or so students who were already seated took notice.

“That there, outside, is my kid. He’s in your class,” my dad said.

I ducked behind a tree.

“Justin, get in here. What are you doing, son?”

I came out from behind the tree and walked up the steps into the bungalow.

“Now, you’re flunking him, and that’s fine. If he deserves to flunk, then flunk his ass out. But when I went through the math with him, he didn’t even know the basic concepts, and said you never taught them,” my dad said.

“This is an advanced math class, and if the students can’t follow along, they should transfer to a class that’s more suited to their skill level. I’ve been teaching this class for twelve years the same way,” my teacher responded.

“I don’t give a good goddamn how long you’ve been teaching this class. He tells me all these kids are flunking out, and they all think they’re losers,” my dad said as he turned and pointed at all the students sitting in the class—who, for the most part, hadn’t thought they were losers. “That’s when I got a problem,” he added.

At that point I think my teacher realized he wasn’t dealing with a normal angry parent, but rather with someone who was making him look like an idiot in front of his students, so he took my dad outside. I traded places and moved inside. All of my classmates were staring at me, as the room was almost full now. I sat down in my seat, avoiding eye contact. Every ten or fifteen seconds we’d hear words and phrases coming from outside: my teacher yelling, “I will not tolerate this!” followed by my dad responding, “NO—NO! You will tolerate it!”