Justin Halpern: Sh*t My Dad Says

“It’s okay. You don’t have to try to cheer me up,” I replied.

“Shit, I know that,” he said. “But I figured I had to say something. Otherwise, just grabbing the cereal from you and leaving might seem a little callous.” He chuckled, hoping to lighten the mood.

The next day I woke up at around six-thirty in the morning. Unable to go back to sleep, I groggily sauntered out into the living room in my boxer shorts. My dad was sitting at the dining room table eating Grape-Nuts and reading the paper.

“When’d you wake up?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know, five maybe. Like usual.”

“Jesus, that’s early. Why do you wake up so early?” I said.

“Always have.”

“But why? You’re retired now. It makes no sense.”

“Son, am I being interrogated here? I’m an early riser, what the fuck you want from me?” he said before resuming reading the paper.

After a few moments he put the paper down.

“Why are you up so early?”

I told him I had woken up and couldn’t get back to sleep. He got up from his seat, walked into the kitchen, and poured me a cup of coffee.

“You want that bullshit you like in your coffee?” he asked, holding a mug filled with the dark black liquid.

“Creamer? Yes. I want creamer.”

He set my coffee down on the table and went back to reading his paper. I poured myself a bowl of cereal, and we sat in silence for a few minutes. My mind was quickly consumed with thoughts of my girlfriend and all the good times we had had, like one of those cheesy montages in eighties movies, when the angsty protagonist envisions himself and his ex holding hands on the beach, feeding a small puppy, getting into some kind of zany wrestling match with whipped cream. I interrupted my cliché memories by saying aloud, “Ugh, I’m feeling pretty low about this whole thing.”

“You just gotta try to put it out of your head,” he said, folding the paper halfway down to look at me.

“I know, it’s just hard. I mean, I still have stuff at her place. What am I gonna do about that? I still have a TV… ,” I said.

“Fuck the TV. Leave the TV. Cut your ties.”

“It’s a fifteen-hundred-dollar TV,” I insisted.

“Go get that fucking TV.”

I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to accomplish by having this conversation, but it wasn’t making me feel better. So I went to take a shower, got dressed, and began working on my latest Maxim.com piece, which was, ironically, a flow chart detailing the differences between the male and female brain during an argument. I worked straight until twelve-thirty, when my dad came into the living room. He had his fanny pack on, which indicated he was ready to go somewhere.

“I’m buying you lunch. Put your flip-flops on and let’s go.”

I dragged myself off the couch, followed him outside, hopped in his car, and we headed down the hill to my favorite lunch spot, an Italian place near our house called Pizza Nova. We got a table outside in the sun that overlooked dozens of white clusters of sailboats and motorboats in the San Diego harbor. The waitress brought us a basket of garlic rolls and a pair of iced teas. My dad took a sip of his and looked up at me.

“You don’t know shit about me.”

“Um, okay,” I said, a little confused.

“About my life. You don’t know shit about it. Because I don’t tell anybody.”

It wasn’t until he said it that I realized he was right. Sure, I knew the rough outline of my dad’s biography: He grew up on a farm in Kentucky; served in Vietnam; had two sons with his first wife, who passed away from cancer shortly after having my brother Evan; married my mom nine years later and had me; and spent his career doing cancer research as a doctor of nuclear medicine. But that was it. Now that I was thinking about it, I realized he was probably the most private person I knew.

“When I was in my early twenties, I was head over heels for this woman. She was gorgeous. Just a real beauty. And full of life,” he said between bites of a garlic roll.

Most of us like to assume, or wish, that our parents only had sex with each other, and only the necessary number of times it took to produce us and our siblings, so it was strange to hear my dad talk so highly about a woman other than my mother. He never had before, and I was intrigued.

“So me and her, we dated for a while. A long while. Then, one day, we got to talking, and I told her how much I loved her, and she looked at me and told me, ‘I don’t love you. I never will,’” he continued. “I’ll have a sausage-and-pepperoni pizza with the salad,” he said, turning to the waitress, who had been awkwardly standing next to our table waiting for my dad to finish his story so she could take our order.

I placed my order, and the waitress left.

“So what’d you do?” I asked.

“I told her I thought that I could change that. Maybe she didn’t love me right now, but she would eventually.”

“What’d she say?”

“She said okay. And we stayed together. And we fought. We fought a lot. And then I realized I had made a big mistake. She had given me her youth, and it was gone, and I didn’t know how to get out of it. And then she got sick. And she was dying,” he said, taking a deep breath, thinking for a moment, as if he were replaying something in his mind he hadn’t thought of in a long time.

“So I made good with her, and I stuck by her. And then she died. And I felt horrible. Because I felt like here was this woman who didn’t want to be with me, she told me that, and I ignored it. And she was spending the end of her life with someone she didn’t love. And now she was gone. And part of me felt relieved that I was freed out of this relationship, and that made me feel so terrible, I couldn’t deal with it.”

My dad sat back in his wicker chair for a few quiet moments. The waitress arrived with our food, and he picked at his salad before looking up at me.

“People are always trying to tell you how they feel. Some of them say it outright, and some of them, they tell you with their actions. And you have to listen. I don’t know what will happen with your lady friend. I think she’s a nice person, and I hope you get what you want. But do me a favor: Listen, and don’t ignore what you hear.”

A few months later, I began writing this book. I sat down with family and friends, rehashing many different stories about me and my dad. We recalled things he said, and things they said, and we pieced together as best we could everything that’s in these pages. As I was finishing up in December 2009, my dad called me one day while I was out buying groceries at Trader Joe’s.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey, what’s happening?” I asked.

“I know what your last chapter is,” he said.

“Oh yeah?”

And then he told me he wanted this story to be the last chapter. I told him that this anecdote and the advice that accompanied it had meant a lot to me, but I realized how personal it was, and how private he was. I asked him why he wanted it to be the last chapter, and told him that the request seemed out of character for a guy who a month prior had told me that he’d consider pulling his shotgun on any reporter who came too close, asking questions about this book.

“Well, I figure this book is about you and me. I mean, I’m the star, but you’re in it, too.” He laughed. “And when I told you that story, you were hurting. So I guess I want people to know that maybe I’m not the warmest human being on the fucking planet, but I love the shit out of you. The story I told you, the reason I don’t tell nobody is because I never had a reason to. You’re a pretty together kid.”

“Thanks, I appreci—”

“Don’t get me wrong, you’ve got a big fucking mouth, and you ain’t the prettiest to look at, but I love you, and I want people to know that when it comes down to it, I’d do things for my family that I wouldn’t do for nobody else.”