Justin Halpern - More Sh*t My Dad Says

“My stomach hurts,” I said.

“Point where,” she said.

I gestured toward my entire stomach area and she nodded. Five minutes later she led me to a private room, where she started an IV in my left arm. Twenty minutes later I was standing in front of an X-ray machine.

The X-ray technician rattled off some directions in Spanish and I figured out from the key words that he wanted me to take off my clothes. Then I realized from the look on his face that at no point had he asked me to take off my underwear. I pulled them back up as quickly as I could, which in my pathetic condition wasn’t very quickly at all. After he snapped a couple X-rays, I waited with Ryan until the nurse brought us into a small office where the doctor, a young woman in scrubs and a white lab coat, sat behind a desk, a set of X-rays spread out in front of her.

“ No hables espanol, si?” she said.

“Not really,” I said.

“Okay. I try explain in English,” she replied as she held up an X-ray in front of us.

“Your stomach is very mad. It do not work. Here,” she said, pointing to two dark areas under my ribcage. “This is, ah…” she added, then turned to the nurse and rattled off a question in Spanish.

The nurse picked it up where the doctor had left off. “Ah, I know this is not most correct but for understand—too much poo poo and fart,” she said, pointing at the dark spots on the X-ray.

“That was the most awesome diagnosis I’ve ever heard in my life,” Ryan said.

“Thank you,” the nurse said without a hint of humor.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“You got too many poo poos and farts in your stomach, dude. That’s pretty clear,” Ryan said, laughing.

“Have you eat drugs?” the doctor asked.

“No. Not at all.”

“Alcohol?”

“Yes. A lot.”

“We went to Ibiza,” Ryan interjected.

The nurse and the doctor exchanged brief but satisfied smirks, as if they’d been placing bets on Ibiza.

“Okay, Justin,” the doctor continued. “Some people, they are very good at alcohol, and they go to many discos, and it is okay. Some people, they are very bad at alcohol, and it is not good for them discos, and they are good at sitting. You are good at sit down.”

She went on to tell me that, because of the drastic change in my lifestyle over the past forty-eight hours, my stomach had reacted violently and basically stopped working. Constipation and a buildup of gas were causing all the pain. She said I wouldn’t really be able to walk around for the next few days, then handed me a prescription to alleviate the blockage and pain. I thanked her profusely and we left the emergency room and hobbled next door to the pharmacy.

As I rifled around in my wallet, preparing to pay the bill, I noticed my prepaid calling card and remembered that I owed my parents a call. After settling up, Ryan and I took a cab back to our hostel room where, exhausted, I sat down and dialed my parents’ number. The phone picked up after one ring.

“It’s four thirty in the fucking morning,” my dad said.

“Oh, sorry, I forgot.”

“Well who in the hell is this?”

“It’s Justin, Dad.”

“Justin? You sound like shit run over, son.”

“Yeah, I’m not feeling well.”

“Not feeling well how?” he said, his voice quickening with concern.

“Okay, well, don’t tell Mom because she’ll freak out, and I’m gonna be fine, but I just had to go to the emergency room.”

“Aw, hell. For what?”

I explained everything I’d done in the past couple days: Ibiza, the minibottles of booze, the stomach pains, the X-rays, right down to the prescription I’d just been given. He listened quietly until I was finished.

“Can I make a suggestion?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Maybe next time you’re thinking about getting shithouse drunk all night, you don’t.”

“Dad, I barely ever drink.”

“Yeah, that’s my point. You can’t hold your liquor for shit. So maybe drinking a whole bunch of it and shaking your ass ain’t your thing.”

“We were just having a good time and trying to meet people, you know?”

“Well, you don’t need to get shithoused and go to Europe to do that. You’re over six feet tall and your mom says you’re funny. I’d say run with those two things and see where it gets you.”

We said good-bye just as my calling card was about to run out of minutes. Then I sat down on my bed, and, for what felt like the first time in days, I fell asleep.

A week later, Ryan and I were in Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, waiting to board our flight back home. My stomach was feeling infinitely better, although I was still relatively weak and couldn’t walk more than a few blocks without having to sit down. We had an hour before our flight took off, so I decided to check my e-mail at an Internet kiosk in the terminal. At the top of my inbox was an e-mail from Vietnam Joe:

Justin, I hope you have a great trip. I am using Vietnamese to English translation, so I apologize if there is incorrect grammar. I had a great time and met many very attractive women. I am on a good streak that I want to say that meeting you and Ryan and I think you are very great man. You must know a lot of attractive women. I hope to go out with you all one day when I came to the United States. I want to meet the women you know. I will not steal from you. Oh no I can not promise!

Between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, each of my friends lost his virginity. One by one they fell, until finally, at the age of twenty, my friend Jeff and I were the only virgins left. I was in my second year of college and lived in a run-down five-bedroom house in Pacific Beach, San Diego, with Jeff and three other close friends. The morning after a party we threw celebrating the end of the first semester, I stumbled out of my bedroom and found my roommates hanging out in the grease-stained kitchen.

“Any milk left?” I asked, hoping to drown my hangover with Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

“Jeff had sex last night,” my friend Dan said.

I froze.

Maybe he’s joking, I thought. I looked at Jeff, who was standing in the corner of the room sipping a Gatorade with the swagger of someone who had won seven Super Bowls, and knew it was no joke.

“Jeff had sex? Jeff?” I said, in disbelief.

“Well, fuck you too, dude,” Jeff replied.

“Sorry, I’m just surprised. I’m happy for you,” I said.

I was not happy for him. Imagine if you and a friend were stranded on a desert island for the last five years. Then one day you wake up and saw your friend on a raft in the ocean, paddling toward a rescue ship. Then, as you scream, “Come back! Don’t leave me!,” your friend laughs and waves at you, then keeps paddling, without even looking back. That is exactly how I felt in that moment. It didn’t seem that terrible to be a virgin when I wasn’t the only one. Now I was the only member left in the club, and it was awful.

I never felt pressure from my friends to have sex. Nobody was getting laid that regularly, and even Dan, who probably had more sex than any of my other friends, rarely talked about it, for a reason he put rather eloquently: “I play tennis every once in a while, but I don’t brag about it because I suck at it.” But now that Jeff had had sex, I couldn’t help but feel like they had stepped into manhood and I was on the outside looking in.

It wasn’t like I hadn’t been trying. It’s not like I had some special being-awesome-with-the-ladies gear that I just hadn’t chosen to shift into. I’d always been terrified of talking to women and usually just avoided it. When I headed to college, I tried to relax and not obsess over having sex, hoping it would just happen.