Justin Halpern: More Sh*t My Dad Says

Which is why, all these years later, I was looking to him for advice.

“You really like Amanda,” I said to my dad, unsure if I was making a statement or asking a question.

“I mean, we haven’t sat in a foxhole shooting at fucking Germans, but from what I know of her, yes, I like her a whole lot. But who gives a shit if I like her?” he said.

“I do.”

“Bullshit. You don’t give a rat’s ass, and you know why?” he said, cocking his head and raising an eyebrow.

“Why?”

“Because no one in the history of relationships has ever given a flying fuck about what other people think about their relationships—until they’re over,” he said. “Now that’s a pizza! Thank you kindly, ma’am,” he chirped as the waitress dropped off our orders.

“Well, it’s a big decision,” I said, “so I’m trying to get some perspective. I just want to make sure I’m not making a mistake—that I’m not going to end up screwing her over, or me, you know? I think that’s a pretty normal feeling most people have,” I explained, suddenly feeling defensive and embarrassed.

“Most people are stupid. Nothing seems like a mistake until it’s a mistake. You stand in front of an electric fence and whip your dick out to take a piss on it, it’s pretty clear you’re about to make a mistake. Other than that, you pretty much have no way of knowing.”

I leaned back in the booth, quietly gratified that my dad still reached back twenty-five years, to the time when my brother urinated on our neighbor’s electric fence, as his template for a mistake.

Between voracious bites of pizza, my dad noticed that I wasn’t satisfied by his response, so he wiped his mouth and said, “All right. I’m gonna tell you two things. But neither of them is advice, okay? Advice is bullshit. It’s just one asshole’s opinion.”

“Fair enough,” I replied.

“First and foremost, I’m a scientist,” he said, clearing his throat.

“I agree.”

“I don’t give a shit if you agree. It’s not up for debate. I’m telling you: First and foremost, I’m a scientist. And as a scientist, I can’t help but think about things critically. Sometimes it can be a curse. What I wouldn’t give every once in a while to be a blithering idiot skipping through life with shit in my pants like it’s a goddamned party.”

I sprinkled red chili flakes on my barbecue chicken pizza and sat back to listen.

“So, scientifically speaking, marriage breaks down like this: There are six billion people on the planet. Say half are women. Now, taking into account age ranges and all that, even if you were picky—”

“I’m picky,” I interrupted.

“I’m speaking universally, not about you specifically. The world doesn’t constantly revolve around you. Just eat your fucking pizza and listen.”

He waited silently until I grabbed a slice of pizza and shoved it in my mouth.

“Okay, so even if you were picky, you could probably be happily married to any one of a hundred and fifty million different women,” he said.

This was surprising. My parents had been married thirty-two years, and my dad worshipped my mother. He was never shy about telling us that she came first. Once, when I was six, my dad put down a science journal he was reading over breakfast. It had a giant asteroid on the cover. He looked at me and my brothers and said, “If an asteroid hit the earth and it was a nuclear holocaust and the air was breathable, which it wouldn’t be, I could be okay with your mother and I being the last two people alive.”

“What about us?” my brother Evan asked.

“Well, I wouldn’t just move on. There’d be a grieving period, obviously. I’m not an asshole,” my dad replied before letting out a big belly laugh.

My dad loves my mother as if he has a biological need to be with her. So hearing him tell me casually that any one of us could be happily married to one hundred and fifty million different people seemed inconsistent with his own example.

“You don’t buy that. I know you don’t think you could have what you have with Mom with someone else,” I said.

“I said I had two things to tell you. Now, scientifically, that’s how it breaks down. But we’re complex animals, and we’re constantly changing. Things I thought ten years ago seem like absolute bullshit now. So there’s no scientific formula to predict how things are going to work out with a marriage, because a marriage in year one is completely different from the same marriage ten years later. So when you’re dealing with something incredibly unpredictable, like human beings, numbers and formulas don’t mean shit. The best you can do is take all the information you have and, scientifically speaking, do what?” he asked, staring at me, awaiting an answer.

“Uh… I don’t know,” I said, unsure if this was a rhetorical question.

“I should buy you a fucking sign that says ‘I don’t know’ to save you time. The best you can do is make an educated guess, son.

“So I’ll tell you what I did right before I asked your mother to marry me: I took a day and I sat and I thought about all the things I had learned about myself, and about women, up to that point in my life. Just sat and thought. I may have smoked marijuana as well. Anyway, at the end of the day, I took stock of everything I’d gone through in my head, and I asked myself if I still wanted to propose to your mother. And I did. So that’s what I humbly suggest you do, unless you think you’re somehow smarter than I am, which, considering you share my genetics, is unlikely,” he said, laughing as he sat back and took a big sip of Diet Coke.

I paid the tab and I dropped off my dad back at home.

The next day was the day I’d planned to propose to Amanda.

I had booked a flight to San Francisco, and arranged for her best friend to bring her to a restaurant for brunch, where I’d be waiting to surprise her and pop the question. From the time I dropped my dad off, I had exactly twenty-four hours until I was due to meet Amanda.

I got in my Honda Accord and drove to Balboa Park in downtown San Diego. When I got to the parking lot, I got out of my car and started walking in no particular direction. There, in the shadows of the large Spanish buildings that housed most of San Diego’s museums, I spent the entire day doing just as my dad suggested: thinking as far back as I could remember and replaying every moment that had ever taught me anything about women and myself, from the awkwardness of childhood to the tribulations of adolescence and early manhood, in hopes that, before the day was done, I would know that the decision I was about to make was, at the very least, an educated guess.

In elementary school, the first day of school is a big one for many reasons—mostly because it’s when students find out where they’ll be sitting for seven hours a day for the next nine months. One poor choice can doom a youngster’s social life for the year. Three weeks before I entered second grade, my teacher, Mrs. Vanguard, a slender woman in her fifties with a haircut that made her look like George Washington, sent her students’ parents a letter announcing that seats would be determined on a first-come, first-served basis. If ever there would be a Black-Friday-at-Walmart stampede of marauding seven-year-olds, this was surely it.

“I want to be there at six in the morning,” I announced to my parents in our kitchen the evening before school started.

“Six A.M.? You running a fuckin’ dairy farm? No. Not happening,” my dad said.

I remembered what my friend Jeremy had told me that afternoon—that he was planning to be first in line outside the school doors at sunrise, to make sure he got the best possible seat—and started to work myself into a panic.