Justin Halpern: Sh*t My Dad Says

“So you’re saying he grew funny, huh?” my dad replied.

“Well, more or less, yes.”

At last I had an answer.

We left the doctor’s office and, as we were walking down the hospital hallway, my dad turned to me and whispered, “Shit. I could’ve told you that. Fucking doctors, huh?”

“It’s watering plants, Justin. You just take a goddamned hose and you put it over the plant. You don’t even pay rent, just do it. Shit.”

“I’d say I was gonna miss you, but you’re moving ten minutes away, so instead I’ll just say don’t come over and do your fucking laundry here.”

“Pick your furniture like you pick a wife; it should make you feel comfortable and look nice, but not so nice that if someone walks past it they want to steal it.”

“Why is there a mural of two people fucking on your wall?… Son, let me be the first to tell you that you’re not Andy fucking Kaufman. When you get famous maybe shit like this will be funny, but right now all it says to me is this kid never gets laid. Ever.”

“Oh, don’t go to the goddamned cops. They’re busy with real shit. I don’t want my tax dollars going to figuring out who thinks you’re an asshole.”

“Why are you going over your monthly expenses?

…No, let me shorten this process for you:

You make dog shit, so don’t spend any money.”

“He cried? Jesus, don’t ever have that happen to you…. Well, no, try not to get a ticket, sure, but if you do, don’t cry like a fucking baby.”

“That is one ugly son of a bitch…. Oh, yeah, no, congratulations. If you see him, try not to stare at his face if you’ve eaten anything.”

“You won’t go do that, I know it…. Son, I used to wipe your ass, I know you better than you know you.

…Fine, Mom used to wipe it, but I was usually nearby.”

“I’m really sorry, son. If you’re pissed off and you need to blow off some steam, let me know. We’ll go smash some golf balls or something…. Oh right, the arm. Well, there’s other, nonphysical ways to blow off steam.”

“I’m not eating something called ‘pizzalicious.’ That’s not even a fucking adjective. You can’t just add ‘licious’ to nouns. That’s bullshit.”

By my junior year of college, I had moved out of my parents’ house and into a three-bedroom house in Pacific Beach, San Diego, which I shared with my best friend, Dan, and a girl we were friends with. Even though my new place was only ten minutes away from my parents’, it might as well have been in Sweden for all my dad cared. There was no way he was going to visit.

“I don’t want to know what goes on in that house,” he said when I finally asked him if he wanted to come check it out.

“Dad, there’s nothing bad going on in the house.”

“No. You’re not understanding me. I don’t care what goes on in that house. It’s called apathy . Look it up.”

I was living on my own, but I still headed home once a week to do my laundry, raid the fridge, and take advantage of anything else I possibly could while I was there.

“You just barge in and take whatever you want, whenever you want it. It’s like you’re the goddamned SS and I’m living in fucking Nazi Germany,” my dad said after coming in from the backyard, where he was watering his roses one afternoon, to find me in the kitchen eating the bagel with cream cheese he had prepared for himself just moments earlier.

Even though he wouldn’t admit it, I always knew my dad was happy to see me when I came home. I’d usually head over at night, when he was home from work, and we’d have a nice chat about things that were going on in each other’s lives. It was the first time I had ever felt like I had an adult relationship with my dad. We were growing closer and becoming friends. I realized that we’d really broken down some barriers one evening in late June when he asked me to help him with a project in his garden that Friday.

“Friday, come over at four. Don’t be late, I don’t want to be fucking with this after dark. I’ll buy you dinner afterwards,” he offered.

Since he’d purchased the house in 1972, my dad’s garden had taken over almost every spare inch of our yards, front and back, and he’d planted not only flowers but tomatoes, lettuce, even corn. He loved his garden and spent most of his free time taking meticulous care of it. He was also very particular about who touched it. That Friday he was going to put up some fencing to grow tomatoes, a difficult job for one guy. He normally did the tough jobs on his own anyway. One time many years earlier I had tried to help him on a similar project and while bending the wire fence to wrap it into a cylinder, my hand had slipped and accidentally released the metal, which whipped around and stabbed my dad in the leg.

“GODDAMN IT FUCK!” he had screamed in pain, before turning to me and adding, “GO! AWAY!”

So when my dad asked me to help out on his garden that coming Friday, the request meant a lot to me. He didn’t need my help—he wanted it.

On Thursday, the night before I was supposed to help him out, I was studying with a girl named Stacy from my communications class. We were taking a summer school course because each of us had dropped a class during the school year. I had been in a few classes with Stacy before and had developed a major crush on her. I had never asked her out or even hinted at my feelings, mostly because she had a boyfriend, but even if she hadn’t, I doubt I would have gotten up the courage to make a move. She was blond, with large breasts, which I had pictured in my head numerous times during a variety of different fantasies I played out while masturbating. As we sat studying on a futon in her bedroom, she turned to me and said, “I’ve got to tell you something. Peter and I broke up.”

This was exactly how 96 percent of all my masturbatory fantasies of her started.

“I can’t study right now. I can’t concentrate. I want to do something fun. You want to do something fun?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, trying to act cool.

“Some of my friends and I are going down to Rosarito tonight for the Fourth. We rented a hotel room. You should come.”

She could have said, “Some of my friends are going to shove bottle rockets in our asses and then light them and shoot them at a police station—you should come,” and I would have said yes.

I told her I needed fifteen minutes to pack my stuff and strutted as calmly as I could out of her house. Then I dashed through the dark to my car, where, with beads of sweat forming at my temples I pressed my foot all the way down on the accelerator. Unfortunately the top speed of my 1986 Oldsmobile Brougham was around fifty-seven miles an hour, so it took me longer than I hoped to get home. I nervously tossed a few shirts, a pair of swim trunks, and every single condom I could find—which was about thirty—in my backpack. I drove back to Stacy’s house and she, her three best girlfriends, who had arrived in my absence, and I hopped in her friend’s Chevy Blazer and took off for Mexico.