Justin Halpern - More Sh*t My Dad Says

Nevertheless, with each passing day, I had an easier time focusing on writing and having fun doing it. By the end of those eight months, I went to bed at night excited to wake up the next day and start writing again. I’m not sure if this is what my dad had meant when he told me to “get my shit right,” but at least I was no longer feeling the urge to toss my clothes in a trash bag and head to my parents’ house in San Diego on a Friday night.

A few weeks after that, an artist friend of mine named Theresa invited me to a show of her work at a gallery on Wilshire Boulevard in LA. The gallery was inside a refurbished warehouse and held a good-sized crowd, of which I was probably the only guy who didn’t have a mustache, a twenty-four-inch waist, and either a scarf or a porkpie hat. I felt like I’d walked into a Wes Anderson movie. So, after saying hello to Theresa and looking at her work, I was ready to take off. But then, just before I left, I noticed a friend of Theresa’s standing by herself in the middle of the show, looking as lost as I felt.

Her name was Amanda. I’d met her once before when she had come to visit Theresa from San Francisco for a couple days, but had spoken to her only briefly. She had wavy brown hair that fell just past her shoulders and a cherubic face that was lit up by two sparkly light-blue-green eyes. Unlike the rest of the girls in the party, she had actual curves that filled out the navy-blue dress she was wearing. She flashed a nervous smile at me and gave one of those quick waves you give someone when you’re not sure if he remembers you. I smiled and waved back, and she walked over to where I was standing, near the exit.

“I don’t know anyone here, and everyone is cooler than me,” she said.

“So you picked the least cool guy in the place to come talk to,” I replied.

“We can be uncool together,” she said.

I stayed at the show for another hour talking to Amanda. She was quick and funny and a little self-deprecating, but not in a way that seemed like a defense mechanism for a truckload of self-loathing. I tried my best not to weird her out and largely succeeded, except perhaps for one point when I described myself as looking like “Jason Biggs with a terminal illness.” It was the first time in as long as I could remember that I’d enjoyed a relaxed conversation with a woman.

“We should hang out sometime,” I said as I was leaving.

“I’m flying back to San Francisco tomorrow,” she replied.

“Maybe someone will call in a bomb threat and you’ll have to stay another night. Wow. That was a really terrible joke. I don’t know why I said that.”

“No, bomb jokes are always funny to people who are about to board a plane,” she said, laughing. “I wouldn’t worry, anyway. You’ve told way worse jokes within this last hour.” She gave me a hug good-bye.

I thought about Amanda quite a bit over the next few days. The situation seemed kind of hopeless, since she lived five hundred miles away, but my brain didn’t want to acknowledge the distance. I tried to put her out of my mind, to buckle down and finish a second screenplay I was working on. Then, a couple days later, as I was working in my living room, I heard a loud clang on my barbecue. I walked out to my backyard to find a rat splattered on the top of my grill.

“Hey! Stop throwing rats in my yard!” I yelled over the fence.

There was no answer so I grabbed an old newspaper from the recycling bin, used it to pick up the rat corpse, and tossed it back over the fence.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I heard my neighbor yell from behind the fence.

“Dude! Stop it! I’ve had enough of this crap!” I shouted.

“Okay. Shit. Chill out, man. I’m sorry. You don’t need to Nolan Ryan that shit at me, man.”

I went inside, washed my hands, and felt a huge sense of accomplishment. Sure, maybe getting a man to stop throwing dead rats into my yard wasn’t exactly on par with building schools for underprivileged Iraqi children, but at the time it felt significant and invigorating. I sat back down at my computer, opened up my Gmail, and sent Amanda an e-mail with the subject line, “I just threw a dead rat at my neighbor.”

When I was thirteen, my dad barged into my room after dinner one night while I was doing homework. Before I could set my pencil down, he said: “You’ve been jerking off a lot.”

“What? What are you talking about?” I shrieked.

“Relax. I could give a shit. Good for you that you can find the time. I can’t get a second to myself. But there’s two things I need you to know: one, I’m going to be doing the laundry for the next few months because your mom’s studying for the bar exam; and two, I’ll be goddamned if I’m gonna reach down into the laundry basket and pick up a towel that’s crunchy like a fucking Dorito ’cause you did your business in it, okay?”

He stared down at me. I was frozen in shock and humiliation.

“Say okay. I need to hear verbal confirmation,” he said.

“Okay,” my voice cracked.

“Thank you. Now that we got that unfortunate business out of the way, I figured now’d be a halfway decent time to bring up something else,” he continued.

“Really, I don’t do that, though,” I interjected.

“Are we going to talk like men or do I have to take up residence in your fantasy land?”

“What were you going to say, Dad?”

“Clearly your hormones are bouncing around like a puppy with two dicks. But I’m not here to give you some bullshit talk about women. There are three billion of them, and to generalize that many people with some blanket statement is the definition of being an asshole. Women are all different, so I don’t have any advice on them. But I feel fairly qualified to give you some advice about yourself.”

“Okay,” I sighed.

“Oh, I’m sorry, am I keeping you from a fucking appointment with the head of marketing or something?”

I sat back in my chair and put my feet up on the bed to signify my surrender.

“Someday you’re going to meet a fine woman. And hopefully, if I haven’t completely fucked you up, you’re going to recognize that. But I have never seen a human being drive himself more batshit than you when it’s time to make a decision. Every time you order lunch it’s like you’re presiding over the fucking Cuban missile crisis.”

“I’m a picky eater,” I said.

“You’re a picky everything. Probably my fault. Did my best. Not gonna dwell on it, though. Which brings me to my point. Someday you’re gonna go stupid for a woman. And when you do, do me this one favor: don’t get all caught up in the bullshit that’s going on in your head. If it’s right, then you put on your fuckin’ big-boy pants and you go for it.”

Twelve years later, I felt, for the first time in my life, like my dad’s prediction had come true: I was going stupid for a woman. Before meeting Amanda, I’d done plenty of stupid things for women, like the time I lent my car to my first girlfriend’s little brother, who used it to mule a thousand dollars of Viagra he bought in Tijuana back across the border. But even when I was infatuated with a girl in the past, she never became the only thing I could think about. With Amanda, everything changed.

In the month since I’d run into her at the gallery show, she and I had exchanged e-mails every day. We e-mailed about everything from past relationships to major league baseball to what scenario would make it okay to eat your family dog. (I said the apocalypse; she argued that I’d never survive the apocalypse because of my allergies, so why eat my only companion just so I could live a few more dark days?) I became so enamored of our discourse that I would sit down at my wobbly forty-dollar Ikea desk in the corner of my bedroom and spend two hours drafting, rewriting, and polishing a five-thousand-word e-mail—only to wake up the next day and find one just as long from her. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I thought about what she might be doing, what she was thinking, where she was right then. I thought about what it would be like to date her, or even be married to her. I had gone stupid. And we were just getting to know each other.