Justin Halpern - More Sh*t My Dad Says

“What are you doing? It’s green,” my dad said, pointing at the light.

“I know, but I think it’s going to turn yellow,” I said, brushing sweat from my eyes.

“But it ain’t. You’re almost there. Come on now.”

I hit the gas, but just as I did the light finally turned yellow. I panicked, convinced I was still too far away to get through it safely, but driving too fast to stop in time. Paralyzed by indecision, I froze, my foot leaden on the gas pedal. As the light turned red, our truck raced into the intersection and toward an oncoming Nissan hatchback. My dad reached over, grabbed the wheel, and pulled it hard toward him, causing the truck to jerk right and narrowly miss a collision.

“I can’t believe you grabbed the wheel. I can’t believe you grabbed the wheel,” I said, mumbling like an insane person, once I’d hit the brakes and pulled over.

“You weren’t doing anything. I had to do something,” he said.

I wiped my face dry with my T-shirt. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry,” I said, feeling embarrassed at my incompetence.

“It’s all right,” he said.

By the end of the second week of my dad’s driving school, I felt prepared to retake the state test, even if he wasn’t convinced that I’d be able to get my future four-year-old son to the emergency room before he hemorrhaged to death. I had scheduled a second test, and felt like I had a real shot at getting my license this time, but my dad had been working me so hard I’d mostly forgotten that the end goal was being able to drive to homecoming. With the dance now only a week away, I realized I had to start working on the second part of my plan: landing a date.

Eduardo had said his cousin Jenny liked me, but then Eduardo had also told me once that he was taking woodshop so that he could “build a wooden knife and stab you, fool.” I thought Jenny was cute, but I’d never asked a girl out before, and the thought of getting rejected—coupled with the threat of being stabbed with a shoddily made wooden knife for disrespecting Eduardo’s cousin—was concerning. I decided to talk it over with Aaron at lunch the Monday before the dance.

“He never ended up making that knife. He made a bird feeder for his abuela,” Aaron said as he wolfed down an avocado sandwich.

“Still, it doesn’t make me trust him,” I said.

“Just talk to Jenny. Wait for the right time, then ask.”

“But I don’t want to ask her if she doesn’t like me. What do you think I should look for? Just eye contact and stuff like that?”

“Dude. I eat lunch with you every day and masturbate like ten times a week. I have no fucking clue. Just ask her.”

Later that afternoon, I walked into my public speaking classroom, sat down behind Jenny, and waited for the right moment. I’m not sure how I thought the right moment would make itself known, but apparently it never did. In fact, I was so nervous at the prospect of asking her out that I couldn’t even talk to her about class-related things. At one point, we had to break into small groups to formulate our arguments for and against legalizing drugs. When Jenny asked me to contribute, I said, “I like drugs, but also I don’t like them,” then immediately got up and walked out of class to the bathroom, where I paced around for a couple minutes to make it seem like I’d actually left the room for a purpose.

After three straight days of staring at the back of Jenny’s head, trying to figure out what I should say, I finally worked up the nerve to attempt a conversation with her. I was confident that I’d come up with a pretty solid opener

“Have you ever taken Flaming Hot Cheetos and dumped nacho cheese on them?”

“Yeah. It’s good,” she said.

“Yeah.”

I said nothing else to her for the remaining fifty-four minutes of class.

On the walk home from school that day, I started to panic. There were two days left until the dance, and if I didn’t get a date fast I was going to be sitting at home watching movies on my own when Friday rolled around. Aaron’s move had spurred all of our other friends to take the plunge and get dates of their own and the thought of me watching Predator by myself made me ill.

I was so preoccupied with anxiety over homecoming that it wasn’t until I walked into my house, and saw my dad holding his car keys with a big smile on his face, that I remembered that today was the day of my second driver’s test.

“Let’s shove this test up the DMV’s ass,” he shouted. He tossed me the keys to the Oldsmobile and led me out of the house. He grabbed the newspaper on our front lawn, opened the door to the backseat, and got in.

“Why aren’t you sitting in the front seat?” I asked.

“I’ve always wanted to be chauffeured. Two birds, one stone,” he said, reaching out and pulling the door shut.

I climbed into the driver’s seat, started up the big silver sedan, and began my drive to the DMV. My dad opened up his newspaper and read in silence for a few moments before flipping down the top half of the paper and catching my eye in the rearview mirror.

“Hey, real quick. I don’t want to flood your brain with a bunch of shit, but can I give you one piece of advice?” he said.

“Sure.”

“Don’t trust your instincts.”

“What?”

“Your instincts are dog shit,” he said, then went back to his newspaper.

“You’re just gonna say something like that and then start reading the paper?!”

“Well, it’s not really getting chauffeured if you don’t get to do something like read the paper,” he said.

“That is a messed-up thing to say to me right before the test!” I yelled.

He flipped the newspaper back down, revealing a quizzical expression.

“What crawled up your ass?”

“You did,” I said, starting to get flustered.

“Look, calm down. It wasn’t a dig. I just mean that every time you’re uncomfortable and you get the option to sit something out, you sit it out. So all I was saying to you was: when your asshole gets tight, don’t listen to your gut, ’cause you’ve filled it with shit.”

He flipped the newspaper up once more and we rode the rest of the way to the DMV in silence. I was seething with anger the whole way there, thinking about what my dad had said. “I don’t always sit things out. He doesn’t even know what I do. He’s only around me an hour a day,” I told myself, getting angrier by the minute.

My father’s voice reverberated in my head for the next hour, as I left him outside, checked in at the DMV, and sat in the waiting room alone. It followed me as my name was called, I led my lab coat-wearing test administrator to my car, and my test began. The truth is, I had no answer for my dad’s accusation, and it infuriated me. With the DMV employee in the passenger seat next to me, I merged onto the freeway, but this time I was so preoccupied that I did so seamlessly. I was hell-bent on trying to find an example of when I had been confronted with something tough and not sat it out. Eventually, my thoughts led to asking Jenny to the homecoming dance. “That was something tough, and I didn’t sit that out,” I thought, as I turned onto the freeway exit and made a complete stop at the stop sign. Then I remembered that I hadn’t actually asked Jenny out yet. I’d only decided to ask her out. Deflated, I made a left and pulled back into the DMV’s parking lot. I felt like a total loser.

“You passed. Congratulations,” the test administrator said as I put the car in park.

At first I didn’t even hear him. Then he said it again and it sunk in. I had passed my driver’s test. I had accomplished one of my two goals. My dad was wrong. I got out of the car and slammed my door in triumph.