Justin Halpern - More Sh*t My Dad Says

I lay in bed one night, a month into our e-relationship, driving myself crazy wondering if she’d ever consider moving to Los Angeles and how it would work if she didn’t. I realized I needed to stop. My obsession was unhealthy; and I was setting myself up for potential heartbreak. I needed to think critically. I took a deep breath, tried to clear my head of all my hopes and fears, and focused on the most logical question I could ask myself: How could I possibly like her as much as I felt I did? The answer I came up with was that there was no way I could. In twenty seconds I went from head over heels to completely cold feet.

I didn’t e-mail her the next day. It was the first day I had missed in a month. If I backed off and put a little distance between us, I figured, maybe I could control myself, get a better handle on the situation. Plus, I wasn’t even sure how Amanda felt about me, and I was already hoping our kids would get her nose instead of mine. But I never got the chance to take a breather. The very next day, Amanda sent me this note: “I would love it if you would come see me in San Francisco this weekend. I’m having a Halloween party. I’m going to be dressed as Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas after she peed her pants on stage. Just in case you were thinking of going as that.”

Flights from LA to San Francisco started at a hundred bucks. I currently had one hundred and thirty-three dollars in my bank account. I knew that because I checked it online every day leading up to the end of the month. I lived in constant fear of my bank balance. I always got a paycheck around the first of the month, which usually gave me just enough money to pay my rent if I didn’t miss any shifts, but going to visit Amanda would definitely make me miss at least one. Still, I couldn’t shake how much I wanted to see her.

I decided to look online to see if I could find a sale on flights. I couldn’t. The cheapest was a hundred and fifty bucks, which would put me seventeen dollars in the red. But way down on the Google search results page was an ad for a company called Megabus, which was offering one-dollar round-trip rides from L.A. to San Francisco for the first ten people who bought tickets. There was one left for the upcoming weekend. I bought it and e-mailed Amanda to let her know I was coming.

That Saturday morning I stuffed a weekend’s worth of clothes in a backpack and headed over to Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, where I came upon a large blue bus emblazoned with a giant pig wearing a bus driver’s costume. I showed my ticket to the driver, who grunted and motioned for me to take a seat. The bus was dark and cold, yet somehow humid, like the dank pit where Buffalo Bill keeps his victims in The Silence of the Lambs. The forty or so seats were mostly empty, save for about ten occupied by fellow travelers, all of whom looked like they were fleeing LA rather than visiting San Francisco.

As I walked down the center aisle to find a seat, a man with a sleeveless T-shirt and one eye swollen shut looked at me, then put his feet up on the seat next to him. I headed all the way to the back, three rows away from the nearest passenger, sat down, and cracked open a book. Then, just before we were about to head out, a man in a wool cap carrying only a single fishing pole got on the bus, walked all the way to the back, and sat down right next to me. I thought about getting up to move, but then worried I’d insult him, and he didn’t look like the type of guy who took insults well.

For the next eight hours we sat in silence next to each other, save for a ten-minute break when we stopped off at a roadside Burger King. He stared straight ahead, motionless the entire time, with his hands in his pockets. I had planned to sleep, but I kept hearing the noise of something he was fidgeting with in his pants and started worrying that I wouldn’t be able to protect myself if it turned out to be some kind of weapon and he was in a stabbing mood, which didn’t look implausible.

Finally, at around five P.M., San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid and surrounding skyline appeared on the horizon. The fisherman shifted his weight and turned to me for the first time.

“Why are you here?” he said in a guttural voice.

“Like, why am I going to San Francisco? Or why am I on this bus?” I asked, sliding away from him and preparing for a defensive maneuver.

“San Francisco.”

“I’m visiting someone.”

“Do you enjoy this bus?” he asked.

“Do I enjoy it? I mean, not really. Do you?”

“I paid one dollar. For one dollar I would let them rape me on this bus,” he said, then broke into an uncomfortably boisterous laugh, as if he were in the audience of an episode of Cheers.

Amanda had given me directions from the bus station to her house via subway, and after getting on the wrong train twice in a row, I grog-gily walked up to an old Victorian apartment building near the Castro district. Door-to-door, it had taken me eleven hours to get to her. I was in a horrible mood, and I looked and smelled like a nineteenth-century miner who’d just traveled to San Francisco by boat to mine for gold. My head was throbbing as I walked up the stairs to her second floor apartment and knocked on the door.

The door flung open. Amanda grabbed me with both arms and squeezed.

“You’re here!” she said, holding on to me in the doorway. “How was the trip?”

“It was long,” I replied.

She grabbed my bags from me and led me into her apartment.

“Ugh. That sucks. Well, I’m really excited you’re here. I’m gonna put your stuff in my room. We have to grab some booze for the party, and I figured we could stop at a thrift store, too, so you could buy some stuff for a costume. Did you think of any ideas on the way up?”

“No. I sat next to a rapist.”

“What?”

“He might not have been a rapist. I shouldn’t say that. He just seemed like it. Anyway, I didn’t think about a costume.”

“Oh. Well, okay.”

Amanda set my bags down in a small, plaster-walled room, which looked like a converted dining area, now occupied by a neatly made bed that smelled like the opposite of me. I walked back down the hall to the lone bathroom. As I washed my hands and ran water over my face, I started thinking about having to make that bus trip several times a month. And then about how broke I was. And then it hit me that, last time I’d checked my bank account, I’d forgotten to account for my phone bill, which I had on auto-pay. I asked Amanda if I could jump on her computer, and when I did my online balance confirmed my anxiety. I now had fifty-four dollars in my account to last me for the rest of the month, and I still needed a Halloween costume.

I also realized I hadn’t really been putting on a good showing for Amanda. I had to buck up—especially because her costume was perfect, right down to the shape of the urine stain on the crotch, which perfectly mirrored the one in the photo of the soiled rock star she’d clipped out of a celebrity magazine. I should have been excited to be there with Amanda, after all those weeks of thinking of little else, but I was so consumed with worrying about money that all I could think about was that I’d never be able to afford the travel and the missed work it would take to date her, even if I was willing to take the dollar bus filled with suspected criminals. Determined to create the cheapest costume possible, when we got to the thrift store I ended up buying a three-dollar pair of brown slacks, a two-dollar shirt, and a thirty-cent hand broom. Then I scooped some black grease from the inside of a tire on the sidewalk in front of her house, rubbed it on my face, and called myself a chimney sweep. An hour later her tiny apartment filled with thirty or forty costumed partygoers.