Justin Halpern - More Sh*t My Dad Says

“Don’t tell me what the movie’s about! I know what it’s about!”

By now, of course, I had absolutely destroyed any mood there was to begin with, and hurt her feelings in the process. I needed to think of something fast.

“I’m sorry. Do you want some cake?” I asked.

“What?”

“Let’s just watch the movie. I promise I didn’t ruin it for you,” I said.

“Sorry, I’m just into the movie. Why don’t we just have sex right now? That way we can watch the movie afterward and not have to worry about having sex,” she said.

Now that I’m older, it seems like a pretty obvious sign that your relationship isn’t going well if your partner asks you to get sex out of the way so she can finish a movie. At the time, though, it sounded like a perfectly reasonable request and I jumped at her offer.

I pressed pause again, pulled out a condom, and started to open it—first with my hands, then with my teeth, then, finally and frantically, with both teeth and hands, which proved successful. Then I reached over and flipped off the lights, and for about a minute and thirty seconds we had sex. In all the thousands of sexual fantasies I’d had, I only concerned myself with making exactly one person happy: me. But as I rolled around on top of her, like a zombie trying to maul a sleeping camper in a horror film, I fully realized all the pressures that come with having sex with someone. I was supposed to try to make it as good for her as it was for me. I had responsibilities. And it soon became evident—as soon as I realized it would be over very quickly—that I didn’t know what it would take to make things enjoyable for her. Before that night, when I’d heard someone say their first time was disappointing, it had always rubbed me the wrong way, like hearing a millionaire tell you their life is too complicated. But now that I’d had sex, I was disappointed—because I had sucked so badly at it. There was nothing romantic about it.

After I finished, I collapsed on top of her. She tilted her body and I slid off her. She went to the bathroom, then got back in bed and hit the play button on the remote. I was asleep before Jack Nicholson yelled “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!”

The next morning, Sarah left early to pick up her sister from the airport; when I woke up she had already gone. I drove back to my apartment, unsure whether what had happened could be considered a success. When I walked in, Dan was having breakfast.

“You do it?” he asked as soon as I walked in.

“I did it,” I said.

“Let me guess how long. Five minutes?”

“Divided by two… and then minus another minute, I think.”

“Look who just became a man!” he said, laughing.

A couple days later, Sarah called me while I was at work. Bob called me into his office and handed me the phone.

“I don’t like personal calls, Skippy,” he said.

“Sorry, I’ll make it quick,” I said, and picked up the phone.

“What’s up?” I said into the receiver.

What was up was, she thought we should break up.

“So, you’re really nice, but I just don’t think I’m going to work at Hooters anymore, and it’ll be hard for us to see each other and stuff,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, trying not to reveal my hurt feelings.

“Okay. Sorry. Could you put Bob back on? I want to tell him where to send my last check.”

I handed Bob the phone.

“She needs to talk to you,” I said.

I turned to walk away.

“Hey,” Bob said, stopping me. He held his hand over the receiver. “Just make sure you remember what she looked like naked so you can jerk off to her later, bud.”

I walked into the kitchen and told Dan the news, trying to hide my embarrassment.

“Well, at least you got to have sex, right?” he said.

I kept waiting for that to register with me, but the truth is, I felt no more like a man than I had felt before I’d had sex.

Bob came out of the office and grabbed a six-pack of Bud Lights.

“We need to have a quick chat. Grab yourself a brewski and come meet me on the upstairs balcony,” he said to me before walking upstairs. “Nothing imported. I got corporate on my ass.”

I grabbed a Bud Light and headed up to the balcony where Bob was sitting at an open table, with the ocean behind him. In the minute I had taken to find a beer and head upstairs, he’d already finished one beer and was halfway through another. I sat down and cracked one open.

“Nothing better on a sunny day than a beer and another dude’s hard-on,” he said.

“What?”

“Just messing with you. I’m not trying to pull any gay stuff on you,” he said, laughing loudly. “Wait, how old are you?” he asked, his laugh immediately ceasing.

“Twenty.”

He yanked the beer from my hands and set it down next to him. “Fuck me. I can’t have underage drinking on the premises. You’re better than that, Bob,” he said to himself before chugging the rest of his open beer.

“What’d you want to talk to me about?”

“Well, I consider the kitchen staff here to be my family…” he started.

“What about your wife and kid?”

“Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, the kid’s two. He’s not even a person. And the wife’s the wife. But you guys here, when one of you is cut, I bleed. And I know some girl just gave you a dick up the ass, and I know what that can do to a man. But you’re on a team here, and I need to know that you are still focused and it’s not going to affect your work,” he said.

“Bob, I wash dishes.”

“And you’re one of the three best I’ve ever seen at it. Swear to Jesus. I’m not blowing smoke up your ass. But I’m not going to sit by and watch your skills erode because some woman has got you unfocused,” he said. Then he grabbed the beer he’d confiscated from me and pounded half of it.

“I’ll be focused,” I said.

“Good. Because that’s what a man does. He takes his shots and then he goes back into that dish pit and he scrubs the shit out of some dishes,” he said, standing up and patting me on the back as he walked past me.

I went back to the kitchen, where a mountain of dishes had piled up in my absence. I put on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and turned on the hot water and got to work scrubbing. Bob was wrong: washing a lot of dishes did not make me feel like a man. Right that minute, though, neither did having sex. A rite of passage I’d expected to mean so much had left me feeling no different at all. I had no idea when I would feel like a man, or what it would take. All I could safely say was that I was a boy who had had sex, and was really, really good at washing dishes, and that would have to be enough for now.

After graduating from college in 2003, armed with a film degree, I moved from San Diego to Los Angeles to pursue a career in screen-writing. Unfortunately, in LA, everyone has a film degree. It’s like owning a toaster, if you had to take out a loan to buy the toaster, and then when it comes time to use the toaster, it doesn’t work. But I was broke and had bills to pay, so while I kept writing screenplays, hoping to break in, I took a job waiting tables at a giant, two-story Italian restaurant in Pasadena called Villa Sorriso, which was decorated with fake plants and generic pictures of Frank Sinatra. I was one of about forty waiters and bartenders, all between the ages of eighteen and thirty, save for one guy in his fifties whom I would often spot standing motionless in the center of the dining hall, lost in thought, with a look on his face that seemed to say, “Next time I need to remember to bring my gun to work so I can open fire on all these assholes.”

Within a week of joining Villa Sorriso’s staff, I came to the conclusion that there are basically three types of employee who work at restaurants in Los Angeles. There are people who want to be actors, people who want to be writers, and people who want to sell drugs to people who want to be actors and writers. And all three of these types usually end up having sex with each other.