Justin Halpern: Sh*t My Dad Says

“So the dog recognizes shapes, huh?”

“Yeah, it’s weird,” I said, trying to sound ambiguous.

“Yeah, that is weird,” he said. “You obviously don’t mind then if I run a little test on the dog, just so I can see for myself,” he added.

At that moment I went a bit numb. All I could think was that maybe somehow, some way, the dog would know the shapes and react how I had written down that he reacted. My dad grabbed the crumpled pictures of the shapes from the floor of my room and walked outside.

“Sometimes the dog doesn’t do it, though. It depends on how he’s feeling and stuff,” I said, trying to cover myself for any possible outcome.

My dad wasn’t listening. He called the dog’s name, and Brownie ran over toward us. My dad proceeded to hold the first shape, a triangle, in front of Brownie’s slobbering face. According to my “data,” Brownie was supposed to do nothing when he saw the triangle. Which he did. Unfortunately that was also his reaction to the circle and the square, which he was supposed to react to by sniffing my hand, in anticipation of a treat, and sitting down, respectively. Brownie ran off, and my dad turned to me. He looked me in the eye with an eerie sense of calm.

“I’m going to give you a chance right now to tell me anything you want to tell me,” he said.

I started crying immediately and, between heaving sobs and snorts, confessed that I had forgotten to do the experiment and faked the data. My dad grabbed my notebook, tore it in half, and attempted to hurl it over the fence. But the loose pages fluttered about like a disappointing confetti celebration. He started kicking them around and then, still not satisfied, grabbed one of the dog’s toys and hurled it across the yard like a shot-putter going for the gold. When Brownie retrieved the toy and pranced up for round two of what he thought was their game of fetch, my dad exploded.

“ALL BULLSHIT! YOU WROTE ALL BULLSHIT!” he screamed.

“I thought you said you’d give me a chance to tell you!” I yelled back.

“Yeah, you told me, and then it was all bullshit, goddamn it!”

My mom hurried out to see what was happening. She calmed my dad down and led him up to their bedroom so they could talk. After about ten minutes, he returned to the backyard, still simmering.

“You have shamed the entire scientific community. Fucking Einstein, everybody.”

I told him I knew that, and I was sorry.

“This is what I do for a living, goddamn it, and I take it very, VERY fucking seriously.”

“I know you do.”

“No. You don’t know shit. So here’s what’s gonna happen.”

He proceeded to tell me that I had to go to my teacher and confess that I didn’t do my experiment and faked the data instead, and ask her if I could deliver an apology for cheating to my classmates.

“And if she says you don’t need to do that, tell her tough shit, you’re doing it anyway. And I want to see the statement you’re going to read BEFORE you read it. I got final say.”

The next day before science class I explained to my teacher what had happened, and when the bell rang she turned to my sixth-grade class and told them I had something to say. I got up and read my prepared statement, which opened with something like this: “To my classmates and to the science community, I have committed an act of fraud. I falsified my data, and in doing so, have taken a process that is important to the development of the human race and disgraced it.” After that it went on for a few more lines, but no one, including myself, had any idea what in the hell I was talking about. In between sentences, I glanced out at thirty sixth-graders staring blankly at me. After I was done reading my statement, I sat down. The teacher thanked me, said a few words about cheating, and then we moved on.

When I got home that night, my dad asked me how it went. I told him I had read the apology and that the teacher had thanked me.

“I’m sorry I had to be so hard on you, but I don’t want people thinking you’re a lying sack of shit. You ain’t. You’re a quality human being. Now go to your room, you’re grounded.”

“Get the fuck outta here, I’m doing stuff.”

“When it’s asshole-tightening time, that’s when you see what people are made of. Or at least what their asshole is made of.”

“No. There’s no scenario where I’d eat a human being, so you can stop making them up and asking me, understood? Jesus, is this how you spend your day, just coming up with this shit?”

“Listen, I know you hate playing with that chubby kid because his mom’s a loudmouth, but it’s not that kid’s fault his mom’s a bitch. Try to be nice to him.”

“Cheating’s not easy. You probably think it is, but it ain’t. I bet you’d suck more at cheating than whatever it was you were trying to do legitimately.”

“Goddamn it, I just sat on your goddamned truck guy…. Optimus Prime? I don’t give a shit what it’s called, keep it away from where I like to put my ass.”

“Don’t touch that knife. YOU never need to be holding a knife…. I don’t give a shit, learn how to butter stuff with a spoon.”

“There’s chips in the cabinet and ice cream in the freezer. Stay away from knives and fire. Okay, I’ve done my part. I’m going to bed.”

“I’m sorry, but if your brother doesn’t want you to play with his shit, then you can’t play with it. It’s his shit. If he wants to be an asshole and not share, then that’s his right. You always have the right to be an asshole—you just shouldn’t use that right very often.”

Both of my parents grew up poor—my mom, in an underprivileged Italian community on the outskirts of Los Angeles (her mother and father both passed away before she turned fifteen, at which point she and her five siblings were split up between a few different relatives); and my dad, on a farm in Kentucky, where he and his family worked as sharecroppers until he was fourteen and his dad bought the farm.

“When I had an earache, my mom would piss in my ear to kill the pain,” my dad once told me in an effort to illustrate the depths of his family’s poverty.

“That just seems weird, Dad. Not something poor people do.”

“Yeah, maybe that was a bad example,” he said after thinking about it for a moment.

Regardless, my parents never missed an opportunity to remind me and my brothers that we had it good. “You prance around on your fucking skateboards and bikes like you’re the goddamned Queen of England,” he used to tell us when we spent our weekends goofing off with friends and neglecting our chores.

Sometimes my parents worried that my brothers and I had it too easy; that we’d grow up not understanding the value of a dollar, or how it feels to struggle. Even before my mom attended law school and began working in poverty law, she spent a lot of her free time volunteering in the poor communities of San Diego. She worked with parents on welfare and with homeless families, organizing afterschool programs or helping them become self-sufficient to get off welfare. Anytime I complained about anything, she’d invoke those families.

“Why aren’t you eating your pasta?” she asked me one night over dinner when I was ten years old.