Justin Halpern - More Sh*t My Dad Says

“Yeah, I do. I really like you, too. That’s why I wanted to come up here.”

“All right. Well, why don’t we keep coming to see each other until we don’t like doing it, and if that other stuff is just too hard to get past, then I guess we’ll deal with it then. We’re not making any big decisions.”

“I’m down with that. Sorry, I kinda freaked out. I’m pretty neurotic,” I said.

“Yeah, I picked up on that when you asked me to guard the door while you pooped,” she said.

I leaned in to kiss her and she backed away.

“No, no. I taste like booze and Thai food. Super gross. We’ll make out later,” she said, and we walked back inside and onto the dance floor.

For the first time that night I felt unencumbered. I was simply happy to be around Amanda and even happier that she wanted to be around me. The beginning of House of Pain’s “Jump Around” began to play and Amanda grabbed me.

“It’s like a law that white people have to dance to this. FYI, I told people we’re dating,” she said, as she pulled me close to her.

Four years later, I sat down across from my father at a restaurant on the San Diego Harbor and told him I was going to put on my big-boy pants and propose to the first and only woman I’d gone stupid for.

In the four years since Amanda and I first got together at her Halloween party in San Francisco, we’d been through bus rides; plane flights; one breakup; one makeup; a Christmas at my parents’ house where my dad told her a twenty-minute story about the “most diseased penis” he’d seen in forty-eight years of medicine; a Thanksgiving at her parents’ house where I told the story of my dad telling her that story, which proved to be just as inappropriate; two thousand-plus hours watching HGTV; a couple of funerals; way too many weddings; and at least three more dire occasions when she had to guard a bathroom entrance for me.

Now we were living together in a small apartment in a sleepy neighborhood of San Diego called North Park. She was in a PhD program in San Diego, and I was between jobs writing for bad television shows. When you move in with someone, you can’t hide all the weird and annoying things you do, and while sometimes that unveiling ruins the relationship, often it seals the deal. It’s like being a meat eater and having your vegetarian friend e-mail you one of those videos that shows you what goes on behind the scenes at a slaughterhouse; if you can make it past that, you’ll probably be a meat eater for life.

Amanda and I found that we were a great team. When I would get too neurotic, her blunt, confident, unflinching loyalty would smack me back to sanity, like when she’d tell me, “Just do what you think is right, and I’ll always have your back. Unless what you think is right is some other girl. ’Cause then I’ll stab both of you and go to jail.” When she would get stressed out because she put so much pressure on herself to succeed, I’d be there to make her laugh and tell her, “I’ll still love you if you’re a failure. Just not as much.”

After a few months living together we started to talk about marriage, and as soon as we did, I realized that marrying Amanda was something I wanted to do, not just the next logical move. I confidently conceived of a plan for how I would propose, and I bought a ring. When I finally held the ring in my hand, though, I was struck by the magnitude of what I was about to do, and my anxiety wormed its way back into the equation. When I invited my dad to lunch at Pizza Nova, I hadn’t yet told anyone else about my plans; I was looking for affirmation from the only person I could count on to give me a straight answer. And after our lunch I took my dad’s advice and spent the afternoon in Balboa Park looking back over all my experiences with love, sex, and yearning, in hopes of gaining confidence in my decision.

What jumped out at me, as I looked back, was that I’d spent most of my time in relationships trying not to screw them up. I was like a backup quarterback, just happy to be sitting there holding the clipboard and wearing a headset, but much too scared to get in the game and play. And as I sat there in that park I realized just how much that had sucked. For years, I’d been so busy worrying about whether I might do or say something stupid—like drawing a picture of a dog crapping on a girl’s head—that I never had any fun.

With Amanda, I was finally having fun. And it wasn’t as if I’d consciously decided to stop worrying. She put me at ease, and my desire to enjoy my time with her superseded all the fears that usually rattled around in my head. She was the only person I’d ever met who made me feel calm and confident, like one of the guys in the Ocean s Eleven movies (and not just the little curly-haired guy who’s there because he’s good with numbers). And as I headed out of the park six hours later, as the sun was setting, I knew I wanted to marry Amanda. I also knew I’d better go before the security guard in the park decided this guy roaming the park aimlessly was some kind of schizophrenic or pedophile.

Amanda was visiting San Francisco that weekend, and I’d arranged to surprise her on Sunday at a brunch spot in the Mission district called Foreign Cinema, where I would pop the question. In order to make my 10:30 A.M. reservation in San Francisco, I had booked a seven o’clock flight from San Diego, which meant I had to wake up at five. That night, I plugged in my cell phone to charge it, then set two alarms on it, one for 5:00 and one for 5:10, just in case I slept through the first one. Then I hit the sack.

When I woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, I discovered that the power had gone out. I scrambled around in the dark and grabbed my cell. It was shortly after 1 A.M. and my phone only had one bar of battery left. I had to go someplace where I could charge my phone and be sure my alarm would wake me up. I got out of bed, grabbed the ring box off my dresser, threw on the dress pants and pale blue button-down shirt I’d laid out the night before, and headed out the door.

Twenty minutes later, I pulled into my parents’ driveway. I walked up the narrow path to their front door as quietly as I could, slid my key into the lock, and gingerly opened the door. It was pitch-black inside. I made an immediate right into the living room with my hands in front of me to avoid bumping into anything.

“You better be fucking related to me,” I heard my dad say from somewhere in the room.

“It’s me! It’s Justin!” I said, my heart leaping into my throat.

Suddenly a lamp went on. My dad was sitting in his recliner, wearing his casual sweats (gray, no action stripes), holding a mug filled with a steaming hot toddy I could smell across the room.

“Sorry. I didn’t know anybody was awake,” I said.

“Do you realize I’m a crazy son of a bitch who owns a shotgun and hates shadowy figures walking around in his fucking home?”

“I’m sorry. I figured everyone was sleeping. I was trying not to wake anybody up.”

“Well, what the hell are you doing here, son?”

I explained to him about the power going out, and needing to charge my cell phone so my alarm would go off so I’d wake up in time for the flight to San Francisco so I could get to the Mission and—

“All right, all right, I don’t need you to perform a fucking monologue,” he said. “Crash on the couch, charge your phone, set your alarm, and I’ll make sure you’re up in time and give you a lift to the airport.” He took a final sip of his hot toddy and sauntered down the hallway to his bedroom. I plugged my phone into the nearest outlet, removed my pants and shirt so as not to wrinkle them, lay down on the couch, shut my eyes, and fell asleep.