Justin Halpern: Sh*t My Dad Says

“Holy shit, you did what?” Dan said to me, in between giant belly laughs. “Dude, Dad is going to—I don’t even know what Dad’s going to do. You better be prepared to leave his house. Like, if I were you, I’d pack up my stuff beforehand, fugitive-style. Only important belongings that can be carried with one arm.”

I decided to take a walk around the block and gather my thoughts before I confronted my father. A walk around the block turned into a few miles around the block, and as I was finally heading back toward the house an hour later, I spotted him sitting on our front porch looking like he was in a good mood. I figured it was now or never.

“Hey, Dad, I have to tell you something… weird,” I said, tentatively sidling up next to him on a nearby deck chair.

“You have to tell me something weird, huh? What is weird that you have to tell me?” he replied.

“So, there’s this thing called Twitter,” I said.

“I know what Twitter is, goddamn it. You talk to me like I don’t know what shit is. I know what it is. You have to start up the Internet to get on Twitter,” he said, making the universal sign for turning a key in the ignition when he said the words “start up the Internet.”

I laid it all out there: the Twitter page, the hundreds of thousands of followers, the news articles, the book publishers, the TV producers, all of it. He sat quietly and listened. Then he laughed, stood up, ironing out his pants with his hands, and said, “Have you seen my cell phone? Can you call it? I can’t find it.”

“So you’re… cool with all this? You’re cool with me writing a book, the quotes, everything?” I asked.

“What do I give a fuck? I don’t care what people think of me. Publish whatever you want. I just got two rules: I’m not talking to anyone, and whatever money you get, keep. I got my own fucking money. I don’t need yours,” he said. “Now, call my cell phone, goddamn it.”

In the summer of 1987, when I was six years old, my cousin got married on a farm in Washington state. My family lived in San Diego, and my dad decided there was no way he was paying a thousand dollars for himself, my mother, my two brothers, and me to fly up the coast.

“Why am I going to pay two hundred dollars so a six-year-old can see a wedding?” he said to my mother. “You think that’s a moment Justin cares about? Two years ago he was still shitting in his pants. If everyone has to go, we’re driving.”

And so we did. I squished in between my two older brothers—Dan, who was sixteen at the time, and Evan, fourteen and gangly—in the backseat of our ’82 Thunderbird. My mom rode shotgun, and my dad took the wheel as we began the 1,800-mile trip up to Washington. We made it about four miles before my brothers and I started tormenting one another, which mostly consisted of them hitting me and saying stuff like, “How come you’re sitting like a gay? I bet it’s ’cause you’re a gay.” My dad dramatically swerved off to the side of the road, tires squealing in our wake, and whipped his head around to the three of us.

“You listen to me. I’m not going to deal with any of your bullshit, understand? We will all behave like human fucking beings.”

But we didn’t. There was no way we could have. This wasn’t a situation that “human fucking beings” were built for. We were five people, three of us males under the age of seventeen, sitting a half-inch from one another for sixteen hours a day as the seemingly endless highway inched by. This was not a normal sightseeing family vacation. It was like we were running from the law: We drove all day and all night, growing more and more sweaty and on edge by the hour, with my dad regularly making desperate comments to himself like, “We just gotta fucking get there, it can’t be that much farther.”

More than a day and a half later, after twenty-four hours of driving, we made it to Olympia, Washington, where we met our extended family in the lobby of a hotel. In total, about sixty of us Halperns were staying there, including my ninety-year-old grandpa, my dad’s father. A quiet but tough guy, he hated when people made a big deal about him. He had run a tobacco farm in Kentucky until he was seventy-five, and just because he was older now, he wasn’t about to start accepting help where, in his opinion, it wasn’t necessary.

My family had reserved a block of hotel rooms, each to be shared by two people, but no one had been assigned to a specific room yet. My brothers quickly decided they would share a room with each other, and my mom and dad would obviously share one, which left me without a partner. For some reason, all my adult relatives thought “it would just be so cute” if I shared a room with Grandpa. Grandpa had stayed with us in San Diego before, and I remembered that he always kept a bottle of Wild Turkey in his room, and would clandestinely take a swig from time to time. Once when my brother Dan caught him in the act, Grandpa shouted, “You got me!” and then laughed hysterically. I also remembered that he needed help getting out of bed but got really angry when anyone tried to assist him. There was no way I wanted to share a room with Grandpa, but I kept my concerns to myself because I figured my family would hate me for being so unfriendly.

So, like any six-year-old who doesn’t want to do something, I faked being sick, which attracted a lot more attention to me. Upon hearing that I wasn’t feeling well, my aunts hurried me down the carpeted hallway to my parents’ room and burst into it like it was an episode of ER .

“Okay, everyone calm down, goddamn it. Now leave, so I can check out the boy,” my dad shouted. My aunts cleared out, leaving the two of us alone. He looked me in the eye and felt my forehead with his hand.

“You say you’re sick, huh? Well, it looks like you’ve come down with a case of bullshit. You ain’t sick. What’s the problem here? We just drove a goddamned continent, and I’m tired. Spit it out.”

“Everybody wants me to share a room with Grandpa, but I don’t want to,” I replied.

“Well, what the fuck makes you think Grandpa wants to sleep in the same room as you?”

I hadn’t thought about that. “I don’t know.”

“Well, let’s go ask him.”

We walked down the hallway to the room Grandpa had staked out. He was busy getting ready for bed.

“Look here, Dad. Justin doesn’t want to share a room with you. What do you think about that?”

I cowered behind my dad’s leg, as he kept shoving me away toward my grandfather to make me face him. Grandpa looked me in the eye for a second.

“Well, I don’t want to share a room with him, neither. I want my own room,” he said.

My dad turned and looked at me like he had just uncovered the missing clue in a murder case. “There you have it,” he said. “Apparently you’re no goddamned peach, either.”

“You are four years old. You have to shit in the toilet. This is not one of those negotiations where we’ll go back and forth and find a middle ground. This ends with you shitting in a toilet.”

“You thought it was hard? If kindergarten is busting your ass, I got some bad news for you about the rest of life.”

“I don’t give a shit how it happened, the window is broken…. Wait, why is there syrup everywhere? Okay, you know what? Now I give a shit how it happened. Let’s hear it.”

“No, you can’t have a bouncy house at your birthday party…. What do you mean why? Have you ever thought to yourself, where would I put a goddamned bouncy house in our backyard?… Yeah, that’s right, that’s the kind of shit I think about, that you just think magically appears.”