Justin Halpern - More Sh*t My Dad Says

I pulled up to their house midday on Friday and knocked on the front door. My dad opened it and stood in front of me wearing a gray sweatsuit with royal-blue racer stripes.

“Whoa. What in the fuck are you doing here?” he said.

“Just thought I’d come down and see you guys for a couple days. Sort of spur of the moment,” I replied.

“Oh. Well, all right. Good to see you, son. Come on in and quiet yourself. I’m watching a show about dark matter.”

After I set my things down I called my best friends Dan and Ryan, who still lived in San Diego, to see what they were up to. Unfortunately Dan was going out of town with his girlfriend to visit her parents, and Ryan was trying to track down a man with a goat so that he could talk the guy into letting him milk it. He asked if I wanted to join him, but it seemed like there were a lot of ways for that to end badly, so I declined.

My mom came home from work a couple hours later and was thrilled to see me. She whipped up some pesto and the three of us took our seats around the dinner table in the living room.

“It’s such a nice surprise to see you, Justy. What are you doing down here?” my mom asked, dumping a ladle full of pasta onto my plate.

“He hates LA,” my dad said.

“I don’t hate LA,” I replied.

“Look, I’m on your side. All that traffic, people pissing and shitting on the street. No kind of place to live,” he said.

“No one is going to the bathroom on the street, Sam,” my mom said.

“Bullshit. There’s rivers of excrement. I could fucking raft down them. Trust me. I know. Connie and I had an apartment in Brent-wood for three years,” he said, referring to his first wife.

My dad didn’t talk about Connie very often. She had died of cancer when my brothers were one and three years old. Connie’s death, and the seven years that followed before my dad met my mother, was a part of his life he didn’t revisit often, and one I knew almost nothing about. On the rare occasion when he mentioned Connie, I tried as gently as I could to ask about his life with her.

“Did Connie live in this house?”

“I bought it for her. Then she passed and it was just me and your brothers. They were in diapers,” he said.

“You should have seen this place when we started dating,” my mom chimed in. “Every room was just medical books and fishing poles, and the only thing in the cupboards was peanut butter,” she added, with a big smile on her face.

“Guess what? I like medical books, fishing, and fucking peanut butter. And plus, I didn’t give a shit. I had given up on women,” he added.

“Oh, please. You drove an Alfa Romeo Spider convertible and wore a leather jacket,” my mom said.

“I said I gave up on women, not on getting laid,” he replied.

“You wore a leather jacket?” I said, laughing.

“Yeah, it’s a garment commonly worn by individuals who get laid.”

“You’d be surprised. He’s very charming,” my mom said, getting up to retrieve something from the kitchen, leaving me and my dad alone.

“How long after Connie died did you start dating?” I asked.

“A while. Not sure exactly, but a while.”

“Did you go out a lot?”

“Oh, yeah. I went up and down this goddamn city. I was going out a couple times a week at least.”

“What’d you do about Dan and Evan?” I asked.

“I took them with me and had my dates wipe their shitty asses. What do you think? I put them to bed, then hired a babysitter.”

“Were any of them girlfriends, or just a few dates and that was it?” I asked.

“Mostly that,” he said, taking a drink from his bourbon.

“Why do you think none of them worked out?”

“Son, my wife was dead and I was lonely. That’s a pretty shitty place to start from,” he said.

I had never before heard my father confess to being lonely. This is a man who wakes up at 4:30 in the morning for the sole purpose of spending a few extra minutes alone. He even takes vacations alone. “It doesn’t matter where I go, just as long as no one goes with me,” he says. “I could vacation in my own home if everyone would leave me the fuck alone.” I also couldn’t imagine him dating. He hates small talk, which is exactly what most people suffer through on first dates. I wanted to know how he’d gone from a guy lonely enough to engage in a conversation he hated, with a woman he probably didn’t care about, to a guy comfortable enough with himself to walk into restaurants and ask for a “table for one… with no other chairs.”

With little else to do, I spent the next two days thinking about my dad’s transformation while going to the beach and taking hikes with my family’s dog, Angus. On Sunday night, after a restful, rejuvenating couple days, I dumped my freshly laundered clothes into a new trash bag, threw it in the passenger seat of my truck, and said good-bye to my parents on the front porch. When I went to give my dad a hug, he handed me a check. It was for seven hundred dollars, and on the memo line he had written, “to fix your fucking car.”

“Oh, wow, no, you don’t have to do that. I’ve been saving up,” I said.

“Let’s not go through the fucking dog and pony show here. You’re broke, I got a little money, your car is a piece of shit that needs to be fixed. Is any of that incorrect?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Okay then.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. I know you been working like crazy, so let me suggest something.”

“Sure.”

“Fix your car, cut back on some of your hours, and take a little time for yourself. Get your shit right. I like seeing you, but I’d rather not on a Friday night. Catch my drift?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“You are welcome here any time,” my mom interjected.

“Well, of course he is. That’s not what I was saying,” he said.

“I know that, but I wanted to make sure he knew that,” she replied.

“He knew it. He’s not slow. Tell her you get fucking subtext,” he said to me.

“I understand subtext, Mom.”

“There you go. Now get the hell out of here. I’m taking your mom out to dinner,” he said.

The next day, back in LA, I took my car to the shop. They spent a week fixing everything from the starter to the air-conditioning, which for years had been blowing warm, uriney air at my face. I cut my shifts at the restaurant back to five nights a week and suddenly found myself with more energy and two full days off on my hands.

As soon as I had a moment to myself, I started thinking about what I was doing in LA. I called myself a writer, but so did my rat-hurling neighbor. In fact, when I’d run into him in the parking garage a few weeks before, he’d told me he was almost finished writing a comic screenplay about “an alien that comes to earth but people just think he’s a gay.” If this guy could finish Gaylien (his title, not mine), I told myself, I had to be able to finish the scripts I’d been working on. I was determined not to spend any more birthdays inside a closet, eating the same preservative-laden dessert that my restaurant gave away for free to children under five who ordered the chicken fingers. I decided to pour myself into my writing.

Over the next eight months, I spent any free time I had either working on a screenplay or trying to figure out if I was going to go bald. Both endeavors proved productive: I finished one script and concluded that my head hair would soon be a thing of the past. My dry spell with women continued, but I did my best not to obsess over it. I did develop a recurring dream in which a woman in a tree hurled oranges at me while repeatedly screaming, “I hate you, Jason!” Although that’s not my name, I was fairly confident that my penis was sending me a message that it was furious at me for rendering it useless.