Justin Halpern: Sh*t My Dad Says

“Me and you are gonna be spending more time together, but a lot of that time, I’m going to be working, and I’m going to need you to not talk and entertain yourself,” he explained to me after my mother showed us her first semester’s class schedule.

Like a lot of kids, I never really understood what my dad did for a living. All I knew was that it was called “nuclear medicine” and that he often came home from work tired and irritable. On a couple weekday afternoons before my mom went back to school for her law degree, she’d been unable to watch me and had dropped me off at the V.A., which was one of the hospitals my dad worked at. On each occasion, he’d come out of his office to greet me, hand me a Snickers bar from his pocket, then walk me into a spare, unoccupied office near his.

“I got a couple more hours of work, so, you know, just sit here for a bit,” he’d say.

Inevitably, I’d try to get him to nail down a specific time frame. “Is two hours the longest I’ll be here, or could it be longer?” I’d ask.

“I don’t know, son, I’m not a fucking psychic. I promise you as soon as I’m done, we’ll leave, and I’ll buy you an ice cream.”

Then he’d look around the office and find a magazine for me to read.

“Here, you can take a look at the New England Journal of Medicine . Lots of interesting stuff in there.”

Once my mom got into the thick of her law school classes, my dad had to pick up more and more of her slack, and I spent frequent afternoons counting down the minutes until he and I could leave the hospital and head home. Weekends were usually fine, because I could go to a friend’s house, but on one particular weekend my mom was busy preparing for a test, and my dad had to give a speech to a hundred doctors, and none of my friends or family could watch me.

“I think we can just leave him at the house. He’ll be fine,” my dad said to my mom.

“Sam, I’m not leaving him alone here by himself. He’s ten,” my mom replied.

“Fine, I’ll take him, goddamn it.”

I hopped into my dad’s Oldsmobile and we headed up to the University of California–San Diego campus. He didn’t say much as he was driving, but I could see he was annoyed. As we pulled up to the lecture hall, he turned to me and said, “I need you to be well behaved, you understand? No bullshit.”

“Can I draw stuff?” I asked.

“What does that mean? What would you draw? I don’t want one of these guys walking up to you and you’re drawing two dogs fucking or something. I gotta be professional here.”

“I don’t know how to draw that. I just draw airplanes,” I said.

He opened up his black leather briefcase, grabbed a piece of lined notepad paper and a multicolored pen, and handed them to me. We got out of the car, and I followed him through the glass doors of a big university building and through the lobby to a lecture hall that was filled with doctors, all of whom seemed to know my dad. He introduced me to a few people and then took me over to the back row of chairs that stood about a hundred feet from the stage and podium at the front of the room.

“Okay, here’s your seat. Here’s a king-size Snickers. If you start to get sleepy, eat it,” he said, giving me a candy bar the size of my forearm. “All right. I gotta go do my shit.”

The doctors filed into the rows, took their seats, and the conference started. My dad sat up onstage while some other guy with a giant forehead starting talking. About two minutes in, I had already devoured the entire Snickers bar and was beginning to feel the effects of the thirty-five grams of sugar that were making their way into my bloodstream. Every minute of the lecture felt like an hour. I couldn’t sit still and decided I needed to get on the ground so I could blow off some steam where nobody could see me. I crawled down onto the floor right as I heard the man speaking introduce my dad. I popped my head up, and as I did, I saw him, a hundred feet away, staring at me intensely, as if he had been tracking me the entire time. I quickly ducked back down behind the chairs in front of me.

As I crouched on the ground, I realized that I could fit in between the legs of the chairs, and that each row contained a few chairs that were empty. I thought it would be a really fun game—and no bother to anyone—if I crawled on my hands and knees, from my row in the back, to the front row, using the empty chairs to advance forward. I carefully began my journey, crawling laterally, underneath the unsuspecting rears of oncologist after oncologist, until I reached an open chair in the row in front, and then I’d move forward a row. It was like a real-life game of Frogger. And I was doing pretty well until I’d advanced seven rows forward and realized there were no more open chairs in front of me. But when I turned around to go back, I saw that someone had filled in the one empty chair in the row behind me. I was stuck.

The sound of my dad’s voice over the speaker system sounded like the voice of God, if God were talking about molecular biology. I decided my only shot at getting back to my seat was to crawl over the feet of the fifteen or so doctors who sat between me and the aisle, where I figured I could get really low to the ground and slither back to my chair without my dad spotting me. Unfortunately the doctors didn’t share my determination to hide my antics and did not play along as if nothing was happening. Instead, they stood up one by one as I tried to crawl past, whispering expressions of irritation to one another. And although I was on the ground and couldn’t see anything, I heard my dad abruptly stop speaking. He knew something was up. I froze. When he started speaking again, I thought I was in the clear and forged ahead—until I accidentally smashed my knee into the loafer of a bearded guy sitting two seats from the aisle.

“Ah—God—this is ridiculous!” he huffed through his whiskers.

My dad stopped speaking again. I slowly crawled out past the last chair, then turned my head toward the stage, where he was staring right at me, along with everyone else.

The lecture hall was completely silent as I stood up, pretending nothing at all had happened, and walked back to my seat, averting my eyes from the room full of disbelieving gazes. I sat back down in my chair. After a couple moments, my dad began speaking again. His face was bright red and looked like a dodgeball with a furious frown and angry eyebrows. Suddenly his lecture on thyroid cancer had the same inflection as a coach tearing his football team a new one at halftime.

My dad ended his talk quickly and rushed through answering a couple of questions. As the audience applauded, he hopped down off the stage, choosing not to use the stairs. He made a beeline toward me, ignoring all the doctors who stood up to chat or compliment his lecture. He picked me up by my belt from the back of my pants like he was holding a six-pack of beer, pushed through the doors to the lobby, and then outside into the light. He carried me like that all the way to the car, opened the door, and tossed me in the front seat. He got in the driver’s seat, where he took a few deep breaths, the veins in his neck bulging with anger. Then he turned to me and through clenched teeth yelled, “Fucking hell! All I asked, goddamn it, was that you sit still for a couple hours while I lectured on thyroid cancer!” He peeled out of the parking lot and drove us home in complete silence.

When we arrived at our house, he opened the front door. I was standing next to him on the doormat when he turned to me and calmly said, “Listen, that was not a place where a kid should have been. I get that. But I’m going to go inside this house, and you are not. You are going to play outside of this house, because right now, my fucking head is going to explode.” Then he closed the door, and I stood outside, not sure what to do. From inside the house, I heard an echoing scream, “FUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCK!!!!!”