Justin Halpern - Sh*t My Dad Says

“Damn. Your dad is making Mr. Jensen his bitch. Niiiiiice,” the kid next to me said, smiling.

After a couple minutes, our teacher came in, his leathery face now a little more bronzed with fury. My dad walked into the classroom as well, right up to where I was seated at my desk.

“Don’t worry about paying attention, you’re transferring classes tomorrow,” he said before exiting.

At dinner that night, my dad acted as if nothing had happened, but right before I went to bed, he called me over to the couch in the living room where he was sitting.

“Let’s be honest. You’re not Einstein, but don’t let assholes like that teacher make you feel stupid. You’re plenty smart, and good at other stuff. You know that, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t just say yeah like a fucking mope. Let me hear you say it. Say you know you’re good at stuff.”

“I’m good at stuff.”

“That’s right. You’re good at stuff. Fuck that math teacher,” he said. “Oh, one last thing,” he added. “Tomorrow see your counselor before you go to class. I think they’re transferring you to one of those math classes where everybody uses their calculator for everything.”

“A no-fucking-hitter?! And I missed it. Shit. Well, the Derby was fantastic, if that makes you feel any better.”

“You have to be fucking kidding me! They need to stop scheduling these games on Derby Day. That’s just silly.”

“You got good friends. I like them. I don’t think they would fuck your girlfriend, if you had one.”

“I don’t need more friends. You got friends and all they do is ask you to help them move. Fuck that. I’m old. I’m through moving shit.”

“Jesus, it’s like going to a fucking Greek wedding with you. You need to master the coordination thing, because right now it’s busting your balls.”

“Not a fucking chance…. Yeah, you’re responsible, but I’ve seen those kids you go to school with, and if they weren’t so stupid, they’d be criminals.”

“I’m gonna put a handful of condoms in the glove compartment of the car…. I don’t give a shit if you don’t want to talk about this with me, I don’t want to talk about this with you, either. You think I want you screwing in my car? No. But I’d much less rather have to pay for some kid you make because there ain’t condoms in there.”

“You have to do something you love…. Bullshit, you clearly have not heard this speech before, because you’re working at Mervyn’s.”

“There is no movie good enough for me to wait in a line longer than the run time of the movie. Either we’re seeing something else or I’m leaving, and you can take a cab home.”

One day when I was fourteen, my friend Aaron barged through my front door after school, out of breath and sweaty. I could tell by the intense look on his face that whatever he was about to tell me just might be the most important thing I had heard in my entire life up to that point. It turned out I was right.

“Dude. I found a porno movie in the alley behind 7-Eleven,” he said.

From his backpack he pulled out a VHS copy of New Wave Hookers , whose weathered, stained cardboard packaging left no question as to the fact that someone else had gotten his money out of this puppy. We reacted like a pair of farmers who had discovered a bag of money in one of their cornfields: jubilant, then immediately paranoid and distrustful of each other. But we knew we had to work together to make sure we didn’t blow this opportunity and decided that the best idea was to take a time-share approach. I would take the porno the first and third weeks of every month, and Aaron would take it the second and fourth.

Though I watched the movie fifty-plus times, to this day I’m not sure what the plot line of the film is, because I never made it past the first twenty minutes. The only place I could watch it was in my parents’ room. They had the only VCR in the house, which made me feel like a gazelle finding out that the only watering hole in a thousand-mile radius was inside a lion’s den. Never once, though, did I think, It’s not worth it . I’d wait until my parents had left the house, and then go into their room and do my business. I even worked out a plan for when I heard the front door open: I’d pull my underwear up from around my ankles as I hit EJECT, and then in one motion, remove the tape and hit the TV/VIDEO button so that they wouldn’t know the VCR had been used. It was a well-thought-out, efficient plan, and it never failed.

Unfortunately I still got caught.

I woke up one morning to find my dad hovering above me, waving my copy of New Wave Hookers like it was a winning lottery ticket. I had violated the cardinal rule of watching porn: Don’t leave the evidence in the VCR.

“I don’t give a shit if you watch porn, watch away,” he said. “But (a) don’t do it in my room (the last thing I need is to come home from work and sit on some of your nasty business); and (b) I can’t have your mother finding porn in my room and thinking that it’s mine. Then that becomes my problem, and I’m not about to take the fall for somebody else’s porn movie.”

“Are you gonna tell Mom?” I asked in a panic.

“Nah, I’ll keep quiet about it as long as you don’t do that shit on my bed,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.

I reached my hand up assertively, assuming that now that we’d had our man-to-man he’d give me the movie back. “Ha, nice fucking try.” He turned and left with it under his arm, laughing.

Having your father find your porno and laugh at you is an embarrassing moment in a teenager’s life. I experienced a far more embarrassing one the next morning when I awoke to find my mother standing above me, holding my copy of New Wave Hookers . My dad had turned me in!

When my mom finished describing the ills of the porn industry and detailing the unrealistic nature of the sex depicted in its products, all the while screaming at me, I marched out into the living room like a man who had traveled a long distance to avenge a death.

“Hey!” I shouted at my dad, who was eating his daily bowl of Grape-Nuts.

He looked up at me, making a face that said, “Be careful in choosing your next words.”

“You told Mom about my,” and then I silently mouthed the word porn . “You said you wouldn’t!” I added at full volume.

He put down his paper, looked at me, and replied in a measured voice, “Yeah, I thought about that. Too risky for me not to tell her. You shouldn’t have left that porno in our VCR. Your penis betrayed you, son. Made you think stupid. It won’t be the last time that happens.”

“I don’t know why people keep coming to me when they can’t get hard-ons. If I knew how to fix that I’d be driving a Ferrari two hundred miles an hour in the opposite direction of this house.”