Justin Halpern - More Sh*t My Dad Says

“Guess.”

“I don’t know. Sarah?”

“How’d you know that?”

“’Cause they’re all named Sarah.”

I described which Sarah I meant, and how the conversation had gone down, as he battered the wings.

“Well, I’m actually not able to be happy right now, but if I were, I’d be happy for you,” he said.

I couldn’t wait for work to end. I was so excited that I didn’t even mind it when Bob made me clean the Dumpster outside filled with rancid chicken wings.

Around midnight, after I finished cleaning out the oil in the fryers, Sarah and I made our way down to her Honda Civic and grabbed the six cans of warm Natty Ice she had rolling around in her backseat. We sat on the cement wall of the boardwalk looking out at the ocean and cracked the beers open and began drinking. I smelled like raw chicken, flour, and vomit. After a few moments of silence, though, I began to panic: here I was again, sitting next to a woman, with no idea how to talk to her.

“That guy really threw up everywhere,” I said as an opener.

“Yeah, that was really gross. I’d rather not talk about it,” she replied.

“Totally,” I said.

I decided my only chance at this going well was to stop talking and just go in for a kiss. So I did—until I realized she had a mouthful of beer, and my surprise kiss caused her to cough it up in my face.

“Oh my God, I’m really, really sorry,” I said, patting her on the back as she coughed.

“Wrong pipe,” she said between coughs. Finally she caught her breath. “Let me finish a couple more beers and then we’ll make out, okay?”

She did, and we did. And then we did the same thing the next night, and the night after that. Then make-outs at night turned into hang-outs during the day, and before I knew it we’d been hanging out and making out for about a month. I’d made out with a few girls before her, but I’d never had a consistent make-out partner. I felt like an athlete in the midst of a winning streak; I wasn’t sure why everything was working, but it was and I didn’t want to screw it up.

“You think she thinks you’re her boyfriend?” asked Dan one day at work while we cleaned the stainless-steel prep station in the back of the kitchen.

“I’m not sure. We just kind of only make out, and rent movies and watch them and don’t really talk a bunch. I like her, though. She’s cool,” I said.

“You’ve been hanging out with her a lot, dude. If you like her, you should just ask her if she’s your girlfriend, because if she is, you guys should be having sex, not making out,” Dan said.

“Get some stank on your hang low,” Bob yelled out from the manager’s office, where, evidently, he’d been eavesdropping.

Dan was right. I did like Sarah. She was quiet but very sweet and cute, and we had the same taste in rental movies. And if I liked her, and she liked me, why weren’t we having sex?

That night, when I was at Sarah’s little one-bedroom stucco apartment in Rancho Bernardo, we were making out on her fake leather couch the way we usually did. At one point she got up to get a glass of water and I followed her to the kitchen.

“This is a super-weird question to ask, but do you tell people I’m your boyfriend?” I asked.

She lit up a cigarette and took a few puffs.

“No one has really asked me. But, I mean, I like hanging out with you, so I guess you kind of are,” she said. “We haven’t had sex, though,” she added.

“Yeah, that’s why I thought maybe we weren’t,” I said.

“Well, we can. I just hadn’t ’cause we’d just been hanging out for a couple weeks, and then I’ve been on my period. But why don’t you rent a movie and come over Friday night?”

I could barely sleep the next two nights, I was so excited. I’d spent most of my adolescence fantasizing about sex, and now it was about to happen. I thought about how it might go down. Maybe I’d take off her bra with one hand while saying something cool, but not douchey. Then we’d turn off a couple lights, and go at it for forty-five minutes to an hour, and I’d give her two to three orgasms. The anticipation was killing me. I had struggled with women my whole life; I’d never been comfortable in my own skin, never felt like a man. I just felt like a boy who got older. And, while I didn’t know what the steps were to start to feel like a man, I was sure that having sex must be one of them.

The next day I bounded into work, tossed on my apron, and found Dan cutting limes in the kitchen.

“You didn’t come home last night. You guys do it?” Dan asked.

“No. But she says I’m her boyfriend, and the only reason we haven’t done it is because she’s on her period,” I said proudly.

“That’s why God made the butthole, my friend. One door closes, the other one opens,” Bob chimed in from a few feet away.

That Friday evening, a couple hours before my shift ended, Bob came into the kitchen to let me off early for the night.

“Before you go, though,” he said, “your skinny buddy said you’re about to get your cherry popped.”

I looked angrily behind Bob and spotted Dan trying to hide a smile as he scrubbed the mop sink.

“Let me tell you something,” Bob said earnestly as he put his hand on my shoulder. “I lost my virginity when I was fourteen, on mushrooms, to a two-hundred-pound woman who ran the Laundromat by my dad’s house. Then I spent the next two hours taking a dump in her toilet.”

“Okay.”

“I’m glad I got a chance to tell you that,” he said, then patted me on the back.

I got in my car and drove to the Blockbuster near my apartment, where I rented a copy of A Few Good Men. Sarah had never seen it, and it was one of my favorite movies.

As I drove over to Sarah’s, I was filled with nerves, excitement, and a little bit of nausea. It was the same feeling I’d had when I got up with the bases loaded in the championship game of my last year of Little League. That ended with me getting hit in the stomach with a fastball and puking on home plate. I could only hope that this would end differently.

I got to her apartment shortly before midnight, with a DVD, twelve condoms, and an entire chocolate cake, which seemed like a good idea when I was in the drugstore checkout line, but immediately felt ridiculous as I carried it through Sarah’s front door.

We had a couple beers on her couch, then crawled into her double bed and put on A Few Good Men. Usually, about five minutes into a movie we would start making out and one of us would pause the film. This time, though, I hesitated to make the first move, because for so long the first move had been the only move. Now there was supposed to be a second move: doing it.

Twenty minutes of the movie went by, then forty, and I still hadn’t done anything. Finally I started kissing Sarah’s neck, then lifted up her shirt. I couldn’t figure out how to unhook her bra, so I pulled it down and awkwardly put my mouth on her boob.

“What are you doing?” Sarah asked.

I popped my head up.

“What?” I asked.

“What are you doing?” she asked again.

“Kissing your boob?”

“Well, it’s just—they’re talking about whether or not Jack Nicholson ordered the code red on that guy,” she said, pointing at the TV screen.

I grabbed the remote and pushed pause.

“There you go. You won’t miss it,” I said.

She grabbed the remote and unpaused the movie.

“I want to see if he ordered the code red,” she snapped.

“He ordered the code red.”

“I don’t think he did.”

“Of course he did. That’s what the whole movie is about. I’ve seen the movie.”

“Geez, well, thanks for ruining it for me!”

“Ruining it for you? They tell you forty-five minutes into the movie that he ordered the code red. The rest of the movie is just about whether or not Tom Cruise can get him to say he ordered the code red.”