Justin Halpern - More Sh*t My Dad Says

Finally I got up and knocked on the bathroom door.

“Hey, ah, I think I’m gonna take off. I had a really nice time, though,” I said.

“Me too. See you later,” she yelled over the sound of a hair dryer.

After work the next Friday, we did the same thing. As we did the following Friday, and the one after that, and the one after that. I got so used to having sex on Friday nights after work that the smell of the Villa Sorriso’s Friday night bacon-wrapped scallop special began to turn me on.

We never found what you might call a sexual rhythm. She mostly just wanted me to lie there and do nothing while she took advantage of the opportunity to sit on top of me. When I tried to “join the show,” the results were usually horrible. This was never more evident than one time when she started yelling, “How do I get so wet? How do I get so wet?” Thinking she was asking me because she wanted an answer, I said, “I don’t know?” Which only caused her to stop what she was doing and let out a long, deflated sigh.

I did my best to ignore things she did that made me really dislike hanging out with her, like how she never actually listened to anything I said, or how she always said “disgusting” when she walked past a homeless person. But our lack of any sort of emotional or intellectual connection eventually started to wear on me. One Friday night during the third month of our “relationship,” Simone failed to show up at work. While I was disappointed not to be having sex that night, I was sort of relieved not to have to spend time with her. Toward the end of the night, after the dinner rush, I walked out the back door and into the alley to get some fresh air. The back door to the kitchen opened and the dishwasher, a young Hispanic guy named Roberto, whom everyone called “Beto,” came out lugging a huge trash bag, a brown liquid dripping from its bottom.

“Hey, guero,” he said, calling me the name all the Hispanic cooks called the white coworkers.

“Hey, Beto. How’s it going?”

“Hey, guero, I fuck your girlfriend.”

“She’s not my girlfriend, but thanks for letting me know you think she’s fuckable,” I said, laughing.

“No. Guero, I fuck your girlfriend. Last month ago. I fuck her,” he said, setting down the bag, then reaching his stubby arms out and thrusting his pelvis back and forth a few times in a humping motion.

“What? Really?”

“Yeah. You have the AIDS now. I am just kidding,” he said, laughing.

“Wait, so, you didn’t fuck her?”

“No. I fuck her. But I don’t have the AIDS,” he said. Then he picked up the trash bag and walked down the alley toward the Dumpster.

I felt like I should be upset. In an attempt to drudge up some feelings of anger, I even stood there trying to picture Beto on top of Simone, doing his thrusting move and laughing maniacally, in the bed where I’d planned on having sex that evening. But the most upsetting thing was, that after learning that the girl I was sleeping with was also sleeping with someone else, I discovered that I didn’t care. I’d spent thousands of hours of my adolescence wishing for the scenario I’d been living for the past two months—having sex with a gorgeous woman who demanded and expected nothing more than sex from me—and yet the vacuity of our relationship was depressing me.

I considered going to her apartment to talk to her but decided it could wait a week. The next Friday I came in to work early and walked over to the cocktail waitress station hoping to find Simone, but again she wasn’t there.

“Hey, Nick, is Simone here yet?” I asked.

“Uh, dude, she quit and moved to New Jersey or something,” he said, as he shook a martini with one hand.

“What?”

“Yeah, I think she told the managers a couple weeks ago. She didn’t say anything?”

“No. I only see her on Fridays. I just thought she was off last Friday or sick or something,” I said.

“Damn. Sorry, man.”

“Eh, it’s okay. Just weird,” I replied.

“Onto the next bone down. That’s what it’s all about,” he said.

I was stunned. This was the second time I’d dated a waitress who’d broken up with me by skipping town altogether. I walked back to the napkin-folding station and tried to perform an autopsy on this newly deceased relationship. Normally, after a breakup, it would take me days or weeks of feeling down in the dumps, mulling over all the things that went wrong, before I started making sense of it and feeling better. But this time around, I arrived at a conclusion almost immediately: I was ready to be in a relationship that would evoke some kind of emotional response from me if I ever found out that my girlfriend had slept with a guy I worked with and/or had moved across the country without telling me. I was looking for someone I could fall in love with, someone who would give her dying rabbit painkillers.

I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday inside a tiny linen closet at the Villa Sorriso, with six other waiters and an overweight line cook named Ramon who had a teardrop tattoo on his cheek that may or may not have signaled that he killed a man in prison.

“Happy birthday,” they whispered as Ramon handed me a tiramisu with a single candle flickering in the middle of it.

They were whispering because management had implemented a new rule prohibiting more than two employees from congregating on the restaurant’s grounds during work hours, which made this gathering feel more like an underground Communist meeting in the 1950s than a celebration of my first quarter-century of existence. Despite the unnatural volume of our voices and the smell of cleaning supplies and dusty linens, it was a touching gesture by my friends.

“I didn’t get you a present. But I shot a pig in the head on my cousin’s farm and I made carnitas. I’ll save some for you,” Ramon said.

As I blew out the candle and my colleagues very quietly applauded, it dawned on me that I’d also spent my seventeenth birthday working at a restaurant, which meant I’d been working in restaurants for the last eight years. I was no longer the fresh-faced kid chasing his dreams; instead I was in danger of becoming the bitter lifer who uses dated pop-culture references and depresses younger employees. I had moved to LA to break into screenwriting, and while I’d sold a script during my first year there, these days I was doing very little writing and working seventy to eighty hours a week at the restaurant. I had upped my hours for the simple reason that I needed to save money to fix my truck, a 1999 Ford Ranger that started only half the time and had a set of brakes that made a high-pitched shrieking noise my mechanic had eloquently likened to “the sound a girl makes when you fuck her good.” Coincidentally, that was a sound I’d become unfamiliar with in real life, as I’d also hit a huge dry spell with women.

I had been single so long that, on the rare occasion when I had a sex dream, it tended not to involve actual women—only visions of me pleasuring myself to pornography, as if my brain had forgotten what sex was. I was so desperate to be in a relationship that, when I did go out on dates, I usually scared off my companions by trying to lock them down for future dates right away, or asking them repeatedly, “Are you having fun?” There’s nothing less fun than someone asking if you’re having it.

My life had fallen into a rut so slowly that I didn’t even know it was happening, until I walked out of that linen closet to go take the orders of a dining room full of hungry septuagenarians and realized I was anywhere but where I wanted to be.

A few weeks after my birthday, I found myself with the first weekend I’d had off in months. All my friends were working at the restaurant and there was no way I was going to spend that free time alone in my dumpy ground-floor apartment in Hollywood—which had begun to stink more than usual, thanks to my pothead neighbor’s new favorite hobby, which was catching rats with a mousetrap, then hurling their corpses over the fence into my backyard when he thought I wasn’t looking. When I caught him in the act, he pretended to be offended. “Maybe it jumped, and thought there was gonna be water on the other side, but then there wasn’t and it died or something?” So, with nowhere to go and in need of a break from LA, I tossed some clothes into a trash bag and headed down to my parents’ house in San Diego.