Justin Halpern - More Sh*t My Dad Says

For the next couple of hours, I stood silently next to Amanda as she made her rounds, seeing all of her friends. I felt like it was my first day on the job and I was shadowing my trainer. The place was jammed; ’90s rap music was blasting out of the small living room, where a tightly packed dance party had broken out. Despite the noise and crowd, Amanda was doing her best to introduce me to her friends and make sure I had a good time. And, like a total self-consumed jerk, I was no help whatsoever.

“People are liking your costume,” Amanda said as she poured vodka into two plastic red Solo cups.

“Really? Who told you that?” I replied.

“You know, just people at the party.”

“Nobody told you they liked my costume, did they?”

“No. But it was a vibe I got.”

Meeting your date’s friends for the first time is like playing poker; you have to read each one of them, and then put forth just the right amount of conversation. If you go all in on someone who just wanted to say hi, you’ll risk seeming pushy and desperate. If you fold and stand there silent when you’re introduced to her chatty best friend, you might come off as weird and antisocial. And if you put on a face that says “Don’t come near me,” everyone else will fold—which is what was happening to me. I was tired and nervous, it was loud, and I was talking myself out of every fantasy that had consumed me through those past couple weeks. I was failing miserably, and Amanda could see it.

After a while, she grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the dance floor. But just as she did, I felt the Burger King Chicken Griller I’d eaten during the one middle-of-nowhere stop on the bus ride suddenly snap awake in my stomach. It wanted out, and it wanted out now. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be headed out the way it came in. At least if I puked, I could blame it on alcohol or bad food. It happens: people puke all the time at parties. No one gets explosive diarrhea.

Amanda tried to pull me toward her, but I didn’t move.

“Let’s dance,” she yelled over the music.

“I, uh—I think I need to use your bathroom,” I said.

“You know where it is, right?”

“Yeah. I’ll be right back.”

I quickly walked down the hall. With every step, my need to avail myself of her toilet grew exponentially, the way earthquakes get ten times more devastating with every tenth of a point on the Richter scale. I opened the bathroom door, only to find a man dressed as Gandalf from Lord of the Rings with his back to me, peeing. I quickly closed the door and hurried back to Amanda, who was on the dance floor with a few friends, moving to the thumping bass of Digital Underground’s “Humpty Dance.” I pulled her aside.

“Does your bathroom have a lock on the door?” I yelled.

“No. But just close it. No one’s gonna come in, I promise.”

“So there’s no way to lock it?” I said, starting to panic.

“Well, no. Why, what’s wrong?”

“I just… I’m not feeling well and I sort of need to spend a little while in there, and I really can’t have somebody coming in. Is there like a chair or something I can borrow to keep it closed?”

“A chair? You want to barricade the door closed?”

“I just don’t want anyone to come in.”

“I don’t think anyone’s going to come in, but I guess if you’re worried I could stand next to the door and guard it,” she said.

“Is that weird?” I asked.

“Yes. That’s really weird.”

“I’m really sorry, but can you do that?”

She nodded and I immediately turned, swam through a group of a half dozen girls dressed as a six-pack of Budweiser—planting my palms on their backs and shoving off them like I was climbing up a rocky hillside—and hustled toward the bathroom with Amanda close behind. I reached the door and turned to find her right behind me.

“Good luck. We’re all pulling for you,” she said, holding back a laugh.

I feigned a smile, but I had no time to waste. I burst into the bathroom and onto the toilet. And that is where I sat for the next ten minutes as my body expressed its distaste for rest-stop Burger King. In no uncertain terms.

As I sat there relieving myself, I started mulling over everything that had led me to this point. I was broke. I hated traveling. I barely knew Amanda. And yet for some reason I’d allowed myself to blow our relationship out of proportion in my mind and convinced myself that I could make things work with her. Even by coming to see her, I was leading her on. To be fair to her, I had to end this.

Just as I finished and was pulling up my pants, I heard the door handle jiggle.

“No, no! There’s somebody in there,” I heard Amanda’s muffled voice insist.

“So you’re next in line?” another voice asked her.

“Uh—yeah.”

She didn’t need to go to the bathroom. She probably decided it would be much more humiliating to say, “No, I’m guarding the door for this guy I’m dating while he poops.” But now she would have to come in after me—which would be much, much worse than a stranger walking in during my session.

I quickly washed my hands, grabbed a pack of matches, and lit three of them in quick, desperate succession. I pried open the only window as far open as it would go with the force of someone trying to rip it from its hinges. Then I opened the bathroom door, where Amanda—and three others—were waiting.

As she walked in, I gave her a look that said, “I am so, so sorry.” Then I waited outside the bathroom. A minute later came a flush; then Amanda reappeared, with the stunned look of a rookie cop leaving the scene of her first homicide.

To make matters worse, as the next guy in line stepped into the bathroom, he let out a resounding “Whoa!” The two other people waiting looked accusingly at Amanda.

We walked down the hall and back into the party.

“Do you want to go outside for a second?” I shouted over the music.

We went out onto a small balcony, overlooking a courtyard thirty feet below that was littered with cigarette butts.

“You owe me. Like, a lot. There are now people walking around thinking I took, no offense, a really, really nasty poo in the middle of a party I was throwing. That is some above-and-beyond stuff I did right there,” she said.

“I am really sorry. I can go tell them it was me.”

“Yeah, that sounds like that would make things less weird,” she said, laughing.

“Again, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. What can I do to make it up to you?”

“How about you just loosen up a little bit and we have a good time?”

That didn’t really seem possible, and although this didn’t seem like the best time to bring up my fear that a relationship between us could never work, it seemed worse to pretend everything was fine. I had never been very good at doing that anyway.

“I kinda wanted to talk to you about that,” I said.

“About what?” she asked.

“I know I’ve been a little weird since I got up here, and I mean, I’ve been thinking about how you live in San Francisco and I live in LA, and we’re both broke, and clearly I don’t travel well, as you just witnessed, and I don’t know…”

I trailed off in a cowardly fashion, hoping she would finish the thought for me.

“So then it won’t work,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Well, that’s what I’m saying I’m worried about.”

“Right, but either it won’t work, or it will. I don’t know you super well, but what I know I really like, and that’s why I wanted you to come up here. Do you feel the same way about me, or no?”

Not once in the past few hours had I asked myself that question. In fact, I had basically asked myself every other question I could think of. I had focused on all the reasons why our relationship would be tough. But I’d avoided the one thing that had brought me here in the first place. Hearing her ask me point-blank how I felt about her shoved all my anxieties out of the way. The answer to her question popped into my head as if it had sprung from a cage.