Justin Halpern - Sh*t My Dad Says

He paused and looked around the restaurant, and then right at the college kids next to us, who quickly glanced away.

“You give a shit what all these people think, huh? Even though you never met a goddamned one of them,” he said.

He nodded, grabbed the newspaper next to him, and began reading, which was almost more awkward, since now I had nothing to do but stare at the flip side of his paper, alone with my humiliation. We ordered our food and sat in silence until the waitress returned with my dad’s scrambled eggs and my pancakes.

“Dad. What was the point you were trying to make?” I said, finally, in a hushed voice.

“Son, you’re always telling me why women don’t like you. No one wants to lay the guy who wouldn’t lay himself.”

“That’s all you were gonna say?” I asked.

“No. But if you give a shit about what a bunch of people in Denny’s think about you, then the rest of what I was gonna say doesn’t even matter.”

I told him to stop reading his newspaper, and he put it on the greasy table and looked me in the eye.

“So is that why you took me here? Some kind of test to see if I’d get embarrassed?”

“Son, do I look like the type with a master fucking plan? I just wanted to talk to you and eat some eggs. Let me finish doing one of them.”

“What are you doing with that rake?… No, that is not raking…. What? Different styles of raking? No, there’s one style, and then there’s bullshit. Guess which one you’re doing.”

“I’m not sure you can call that roughing it, son…. Well, for one, there was a fucking minivan parked forty feet from your sleeping bags.”

“Sorry to hear that. Hey, have you seen my fanny pack?… No, I care about what you said, I told you I was sorry to hear it. Jesus, I can’t be sorry and wonder where my fanny pack is at the same fucking time?”

“What the fuck are you doing on the floor writhing around?… I’m not sure what break dancing is, but I sincerely hope it’s not what you’re doing.”

“This is what happens when you have a family. You sacrifice. [Pause] You sacrifice a lot. [Long pause] It’s gonna be in your best interest to stay away from me for the next couple days.”

“Remember, it’s just a test. If you fuck up, it doesn’t mean you’re a fuckup. That said, try not to fuck this up. It’s pretty important.”

“Don’t pick some place just because you think it’ll be easy to get laid there…. No, no, that’s a very good reason to pick a lot of things, just not this.”

“You borrowed the car, and now it smells like shit. I don’t care if you smell like shit, that’s your business. But when you shit up my car, then that’s my business. Take it somewhere and un-shit that smell.”

“I don’t give a shit what time you get home, just don’t wake me up. That’s your curfew: not waking me up.”

“It looks fine, you just smell weird. I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like rubbing alcohol and—I don’t know—shit, I guess.”

About once a year when I was growing up my family would head to Champaign, Illinois, where several generations of Halperns would congregate at my aunt Naomi’s house. Unlike my dad, his relatives are the mellowest, warmest, most nurturing people I’ve ever meet. Whenever we’d visit them in the Midwest, I felt like I was in a Christmas special; everyone wore bright, multicolored sweaters, and any time I saw an adult relative for the first time, he or she would exclaim, “Look at you! You’re all grown-up and so handsome!” before turning to my mom and dad and saying with a smile, “Isn’t he handsome?” My dad always responded the same exact way, which was to say, “Yeah, I’m waiting for the modeling checks to come in so I can retire,” and then laugh for an awkwardly long period of time, sometimes to the point of wheezing because he was out of breath, while the rest of us stood around in our Technicolor sweaters quietly waiting for his cackling to cease.

At our annual reunion in Illinois in November 1997, we had quite a few of my little cousins running around the house. They were all great kids, but one in particular I found to be especially entertaining: Joey, who was three years old at the time. The last time I had seen Joey was a few months prior, at a cousin’s house in Seattle, on his birthday. He was so excited it was his birthday that he had spent the better part of an hour running around my cousin’s house at full speed, coming to an abrupt stop every minute or so in front of a relative and screaming, “IT’S MY HAPPY BIRTHDAY, OH YEAH!” He was like a tiny David Lee Roth pumping up the crowd at a Van Halen concert right before he sang “Jump.” Every time Joey stopped in front of me, before he could blurt out his line, I’d egg him on by asking, “Joey’s happy birthday?!” Then his eyes would go wide, as if I’d just levitated in front of him, and he’d shriek, “JOEY’S HAPPY BIRTHDAY, OH YEAH!” We did this probably twenty-five times until my brother Dan came up to me and said, “Dude, fucking stop it.”

Now, a few months later, at this family gathering, I was seeing Joey for the first time since his birthday. The instant he saw me, his face broke out in a huge grin, and he ran up to me and screamed, “JOEY’S HAPPY BIRTHDAY, OH YEAH!” I laughed and told him it was nice to see him, but he didn’t acknowledge my greeting in the slightest. He just kept saying his catch phrase over and over. For the first ten minutes or so, my relatives thought it was cute and smiled at him or affectionately tousled his hair. My dad had been in the bathroom the whole time Joey had been carrying on like a parrot on speed, and when he walked out, he simply said, “Hey there, Joey.”

“JOEY’S HAPPY BIRTHDAY, OH YEAH!” Joey screamed before running off.

My dad turned to me. “It’s Joey’s birthday?”

I explained the situation, and in the midst of my explaining, Joey interrupted.

“JOEY’S HAPPY BIRTHDAY!”

“He and I need to have a talk,” my dad said matter-of-factly as Joey dashed into another room.

My dad talks to everyone, no matter his or her age, as he would to a forty-five-year-old physicist, so I had a pretty good idea how this was going to go.

“Just let him tire himself out, Dad.”

“He doesn’t want people thinking he’s an idiot, right?” my dad replied.

“He doesn’t even know other people think anything. He’s three.”

“A three-year-old doesn’t have a license to act like an asshole.”

On cue, Joey once again ran full speed into the room and screamed, “JOEY’S HAPPY BIRTH—”

“No,” my dad said, cutting him off.

Joey paused for a moment. “Joey’s happy birthday?” he said, totally devoid of conviction.

“No, Joey, it’s not your happy birthday. You need to stop saying to people it’s your birthday.”

Joey looked confused and horrified, like a stripper bursting out of a cake only to realize she’s been accidentally delivered to a baby shower.

My dad knelt down to Joey’s level and added, “It is not. Your. Birthday.”