Justin Halpern: Sh*t My Dad Says

About an hour and a half later, he poked his head out the back door. I was sitting in the grass in our backyard.

“You can come on in if you want,” he said. “Also, wash your hands before you touch stuff. That conference hall floor smelled like dog shit and you were crawling around like a little monkey on it.”

“This is bullshit. All the coaches just put their kids on the team. That shit bag’s son isn’t worthy of carrying your jock strap…. You don’t wear a jock strap? What the hell is wrong with you, son?”

“Your friends’ parents drive like assholes. Tell them it’s an elementary school parking lot, not downtown fucking Manhattan.”

“Who’s going to take care of it? You?… Son, you came in the house yesterday with shit on your hands. Human shit. I don’t know how that happened, but if someone has shit on their hands, it’s an indicator that maybe the whole responsibility thing isn’t for them.”

“You’re ten years old now, you have to take a shower every day…. I don’t give a shit if you hate it. People hate smelly fuckers. I will not have a smelly fucker for a son.”

“Listen, I don’t want to stifle your creativity, but that thing you built there, it looks like a pile of shit.”

“Who are all these fucking parents who can take a day off? If I’m taking a day off, I ain’t gonna spend it sitting at some tiny desk with a bunch of eleven-year- olds.”

“I don’t think that teacher likes you, so I don’t like her. You ding off more shit than a pinball, but goddamn it, you’re a good kid. She can go fuck herself.”

“Are you wearing perfume?… Son, there ain’t any cologne in this house, only your mother’s perfume. I know that scent, and let me tell you, it’s disturbing to smell your wife on your thirteen-year-old son.”

“Son, you’re complaining to the wrong man. I can shit anywhere, at any time. It’s one of my finer qualities. Some might say my finest.”

“It kinda looked like you were being attacked by a bunch of bees or something. Then when I saw the fat kid with the watch who was timing you start laughing…. Well, I’ll just say it’s never a good sign when a fat kid laughs at you.”

I’ve never been very good at math or science. I enjoyed the stories embedded in history and literature but lost interest when it came to periodic functions and the table of elements. So in sixth grade, when each member of my class was responsible for creating an experiment to show at the school’s science fair in late April, I felt about as excited as I’d feel today if I were told I had to attend a live reenactment of the entire first season of Grey’s Anatomy . My dad, on the other hand, was thrilled. He had spent the past twenty-five years performing medical and scientific research.

“Now you can get a glimpse into what my life is like every goddamned day,” he told me the night I received my assignment. “I’m going to be on your ass every step of the way. You will have the greatest science experiment that school has ever seen, or you will fucking die trying.”

“Will you do it with me?” I pleaded.

“What? No, I already do it all the goddamned day on my own. That’s what I just told you.”

He took a seat on our living room couch and motioned for me to take a seat next to him.

“Now, experiments start with a question. What do you want to know?”

I thought about it for a few seconds.

“I think the dog is cool,” I said, motioning toward Brownie, our five-year-old chocolate Lab mix.

“What? What the hell does that mean? That’s not a fucking question.”

“What if I said: Do people think the dog is cool?”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said, rubbing his temples. “Think of a question like Do larger objects fall faster than smaller ones? Something like that.”

“Okay. Well, can the question be something about the dog?”

“It can be about whatever the fuck you want. Okay, you’re stuck on shit with the dog, so how about this: Can dogs recognize shapes? How does that sound?”

It sounded good. I loved Brownie, so I was glad he could be part of my experiment. My dad helped me outline exactly how the experiment would work. Basically, every day I would hold up in front of the dog three pieces of paper, each of which had a drawing of either a triangle, circle, or square. I would give him a treat every time I held up a circle, tell him to sit every time I held up a square, and do absolutely nothing every time I held up the triangle. After fifteen days of training, I’d perform two days of trials when I’d hold up the drawings of the shapes without giving any of the corresponding rewards. The goal was to see whether or not he’d respond to the shapes in anticipation of the actions that had followed during the lead-up to the trials. I was supposed to record my findings in a journal throughout the entire seventeen days.

When I did my “research” the first day, it was really boring. The dog didn’t understand what was going on; he just stared at me while I held up the pieces of paper, and occasionally licked himself. He mostly just wanted to play, so I started running around the backyard, having him chase me, until I got tired. My dad worked late every night, so he didn’t know I wasn’t following through with my experiment. He’d check in from time to time, and I’d tell him my research was going fine. I just assumed I had plenty of time. As long as I started seventeen days before we had to turn in our findings at school, I’d be fine. But then I forgot about the experiment altogether.

One afternoon, the teacher reminded us our experiments were due in three days, and my stomach dropped. My mom picked me up from school that day, and when we got home I ran into my bedroom and shut the door. I took out my journal and began making up fake results from my nonexistent tests, complete with fake corresponding dates. I figured that a sly way of hiding my laziness was to report that the dog had slowly started to recognize the shapes toward the end of the experiment. Then when I did the trials without the rewards, he’d reacted in such a way that I knew he recognized the shapes. I remembered hearing a story about Pavlov’s dogs. Pavlov sounded like a madcap scientist, and this experiment sounded like one he might even have performed himself. This was enough reasoning for me.

My dad happened to get home early that day, and I heard him barrel through the front door right as I finished writing up the last of my “findings.” I threw my pen across the room to get rid of any evidence of my fraud. Almost as if he knew what I was up to, my dad immediately came into my room.

“How goes the science life?” he asked on cue.

Before I could answer, he saw my journal and picked it up.

“All the data is in there, Dad.”

He was no longer paying attention to me, just perusing the data. After turning the pages and digesting my results for a minute, he set my journal down on my desk and looked at me.