Justin Halpern - More Sh*t My Dad Says

“Hey, I’m Ry.”

“Vietnam Joe,” the man said, in a thick accent.

“Aren’t you kinda hot in all that stuff, Joe?” Ryan asked.

“Large hot,” Joe said, grabbing a tissue out of his jacket pocket and wiping his forehead.

“If you’re worried about your jacket getting stolen, I have a lock on my bag—you can put it in there and it’ll be fine,” I said.

Joe had no reaction, so I pointed at his jacket, then at my bag and my lock.

“No,” Joe said.

“I like Joe’s style. Fuck it, it’s hot, but he likes how he looks in his jacket. I understand that,” Ryan said.

When we left the hostel a few minutes later to go to dinner, Joe walked out with us. He proceeded to follow us, two steps behind, all the way to a nearby restaurant whose menu we couldn’t decipher but whose prices looked affordable.

“Do you want to have dinner with us, Joe?” I asked.

“Yes.”

The three of us sat down at a table in the restaurant’s air-conditioned interior, and Ryan and I learned quickly that Joe’s English vocabulary was limited to about fifty words. Food was either “large delicious,” “delicious,” or “not delicious.” Temperatures were either “large hot” or “not hot.” Oddly, there was one full English sentence he could manage: “Second-year guard Ray Allen has a silky-smooth, NBA-ready game.” When Joe saw how entertained we were by this, he showed us the Ray Allen basketball card that he kept in his wallet, which bore this very sentence. Since Ryan and I knew not one word of Vietnamese, we tried to communicate with Joe using the English words he knew, so he wouldn’t feel left out.

After dinner, and over the next couple days, Joe joined me and Ryan as we explored Florence. He was up for any activity, especially if it involved going somewhere near to a leather goods shop. He loved leather, insisted on browsing through any store that sold it, and at one point purchased a pair of burgundy leather shorts, which he later tried on for us at the hostel before pronouncing them “unstoppable” (another word he’d found on the Ray Allen card). Joe was good-natured, a fun guy to have around, and he seemed to have traveled to Europe for the same reasons we had. A couple days after meeting him, the three of us sat down for lunch at a small café near our hostel and Ryan broke down our plan.

“Ibiza,” Ryan said, pointing at a picture of one of the island’s many nightclubs in a Spanish travel guidebook he’d bought that day.

“You, me, Ryan, Ibiza?” I said to Joe.

“Large hot?” Joe said, looking at the picture.

“Everywhere is large hot, Joe. There’s a heat wave in Europe,” Ryan responded.

Joe sat back for a moment thinking as he picked up his glass of ice water and ran it against his forehead.

“Large girls?” Joe asked.

“Oh, dude. Tons of large girls. This is why we’re here, Joe. We’ve waited the whole trip to meet girls in Ibiza and start partying,” Ryan said.

“Hmmmm,” Joe said.

“Joe. You will like Ibiza. Silky-smooth guard Ray Allen and his NBA-ready game would like Ibiza.”

Joe laughed. “Second-year guard Ray Allen has a silky-smooth, NBA-ready game.”

“I think that’s a yes,” Ryan said to me.

The three of us walked to the train station and bought tickets for the following day to Barcelona, where we’d catch the ferry to Ibiza. We must have looked like one of those movies where three animals that would never get along in the wild join forces to find their way back home.

I figured the next couple days were going to be a total blackout, so I decided to give my parents a call that evening. After I chatted with my mom for a few minutes, she put my dad on the line.

“So, how’s it going? You seeing some art and history or you too busy trying to slap your pecker against anything with a wet spot?”

“No, I saw some art. We spent like two hours in the Louvre.”

“Nice. Two thousand years of priceless works of art and you bust through it in two hours. Eat shit, da Vinci,” he said. “Where you heading next?”

“An island called Ibiza,” I said.

“It’s pronounced Ibitha,” he replied.

“You’ve heard of it?”

“I hate to shit on your preconceived notions of me, but I’m pretty goddamn worldly.”

“Well, that’s where we’re going,” I said, looking at my watch to make sure I hadn’t used up too much of my prepaid calling card.

“Feel free to tell me to piss off, but why in the hell are you going to some shit stain in the middle of the ocean?”

“It’s supposed to be one big party, twenty-four hours a day.”

“Sounds like the worst place on earth. Woulda thought you hated shit like that.”

“Well, I don’t,” I said.

“Whatever floats your boat. Well, anyway, have fun and don’t screw a woman if she’s on drugs.”

It’s not often that a sane human being thinks, “I’ll show my dad I can party,” but that phrase reverberated in my head for the next couple hours.

The next day, Ryan, Joe, and I boarded a train to Barcelona. Our train car looked and smelled like it had once been used to transport slaughtered livestock. There was no air-conditioning on board, and each train car was filled with sweaty travelers. By the time we found seats, Joe had already broken into a full body sweat that was threatening to seep through his denim jacket.

Just before the train took off, a group of three girls in their late teens wearing summery dresses and carrying backpacks embroidered with the Mexican flag sat down in the row ahead of us. Joe looked at us, then the girls, then back at us. Then he gave us a thumbs-up.

“It’s a super-long train ride. We should talk to these girls. Try and get them to go to Ibiza with us,” Ry whispered.

“Totally,” I whispered back.

“Maybe we wait until they get up to go to the bathroom or something, then start up a conversation. Ask them what the weirdest house they’ve ever seen is, or something,” Ry said.

“I don’t think that’s a good opener,” I whispered.

“What? Yes it is. It’s not a yes-or-no question. They have to talk about the house and why it’s weird, and that starts a conversation.”

Before we could argue, Joe was tapping the girl in front of him on the shoulder. She turned around.

“Train large hot, yes?” Joe said to her.

“It is really hot. Our whole trip, everywhere has been hot,” the girl said with a thick Spanish accent.

“Vietnam Joe,” he said, sticking his hand out to shake.

“Abelena,” she said, shaking his hand. “Where are you going to?”

“Hey, we’re Joe’s friends. You guys are from Mexico, huh? What’s the weirdest house you’ve ever seen there?” Ryan interrupted.

“We’re going to Ibiza,” I quickly added.

“Fiesta,” Joe said, smiling and nodding his head, causing all the girls to laugh.

“That’s funny,” Abelena said to Joe.

Within twenty minutes the three girls had turned around in their seats and were focusing intensely on Joe, who was showing them detailed pencil drawings of motorcycles he had sketched in a journal.

“For Joe,” he said, pointing at one specific drawing of an aerodynamic-looking motorcycle.

“That is definitely the best one. I can see why you like it,” Abelena said to him.

“Which one is for me?” her friend asked, smiling at Joe like he was a celebrity she had waited in line to meet.

Ryan turned to me in disbelief.

“Dude. I don’t even know what’s going on right now, but it is super awesome,” Ryan said.

By the time we reached Barcelona, not only had Joe invited Abelena to sit next to him, where she now slept with her head on his shoulder, but he had gotten her travel companions warmed up to us. Ryan and I spent most of the ten-hour ride chatting with Eloisa and Anetta, who, we learned, were freshmen in college and lived in Mexico City. The weirdest house they’d ever seen, they told us, was a house in Tijuana that looked like a giant naked woman. At about four in the morning, when almost everyone else on the train was sleeping, I asked Eloisa if she and her friends wanted to come to Ibiza with us. She said yes.