Justin Halpern - More Sh*t My Dad Says

I awoke to my father standing above me in the same clothes, drinking a mug that was now filled with coffee, holding a thick book in his hand.

“It’s go time,” he said, poking me in the face with the book.

“Did I sleep through my alarm?” I said, still not totally awake.

“No idea.”

“What time is it?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

“Four A.M.”

“Dad, I set my alarm for five thirty. I’m really tired,” I replied, closing my eyes and turning away from him.

“Bullshit. It’s all in your head. In med school I used to sleep an hour a night and get up the next day to deliver a fucking child.”

“That sounds very irresponsible,” I said, pulling my T-shirt over my head in hopes he’d leave me alone.

“Get up. I made breakfast,” he said, flipping on a switch that caused the light to blast through my eyelids.

There was no chance I was going to be allowed to get back to sleep, so I sat up and groggily made my way over to the breakfast table, where there were two plates, each filled with at least ten pieces of bacon and one piece of toasted multigrain bread. My dad handed me a mug of steaming coffee. Then he sat down across from me and opened up the book he had poked me with, a large biography of Harry Truman. He sat silently reading as he periodically brought a slice of bacon to his lips. After about a minute, I couldn’t stand it anymore.

“You woke me up to eat breakfast and you don’t want to talk or anything? You just want to… eat here in silence?” I asked.

“Sounds like a plan,” he said, not taking his eyes away from the book.

“Well,” I continued. “I took your advice and spent all day in the park thinking about proposing.”

“Must have gone well, since you’re going through with it,” he mumbled, as he flipped a page and continued reading.

“It did. I feel like I’m one hundred percent sure. She’s it. That’s it.”

His head jerked up from his book and he stared at me, his eyebrows creasing together to form what looked like a caterpillar crawling across his forehead.

“That is a load of horseshit,” he said, closing his book and setting it on the table.

“What? No, it’s not.”

“You’re a hundred percent sure this marriage will work out?” he asked.

“What kind of question is that?”

“You know what makes a shitty scientist?”

“No. I don’t know. I don’t care. I don’t want to have this conversation right now,” I snapped.

“Kindly calm the fuck down and eat your bacon.”

I pushed my plate in front of me an inch, sat back in my chair, and defiantly crossed my arms, as if refusing to eat any more bacon would register my displeasure.

“A shitty scientist goes into an experiment determined to get a specific result.”

“Don’t all scientists do that? Isn’t that what a hypothesis is?” I responded.

“What? No. What the fuck? Jesus Christ. Fucking public schools. A hypothesis is when the scientist says, ‘This is what I think might happen.’”

“Right.”

“But when you go into an experiment and you’re abso-fucking-lutely sure you’re going to be right, the experiment inevitably goes to shit, because you’re not prepared for anything unexpected. Then, when something fucked-up does happen—and it will—you either don’t see it, or you just pretend like it never happened because you refuse to believe you could have fucked up. And you know what that does?” he asked.

“Ruins your experiment?”

“Bingo. So the only way to run an experiment successfully is to start by accepting the fact that your experiment might fail.”

I sat quietly, digesting what I’d just heard.

“I’m sayin’ marriage is the same thing,” he said.

“Yeah, I gathered that.”

“Well, shit, you didn’t know what the fuck a hypothesis was. Just trying to make sure you grasp the analogy.”

“So how do you make sure it doesn’t fail?” I asked.

“Beats the dog shit out of me. I mostly just try to remember that I found someone who seems to enjoy all the bullshit that comes with being married to me, so I should probably be real fucking nice. Also I don’t go in the bathroom and shit when she’s taking a shower.”

“I feel good about proposing,” I said.

“Good, you should. She’s a fine woman,” he said.

“I really hate it when you say that. It sounds like you’re talking about a horse.”

He laughed. “Go shower so you don’t smell like hell when you propose to your wife.” Then he grabbed his Harry Truman book and resumed reading.

An hour and a half later, my dad pulled his Chevy Blazer up to the loading zone in front of San Diego International Airport. It was still dark outside.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said as I stepped out of the car.

“Not a problem. Last thing I’ll say: Try not to be too sweaty when you ask. It’s disconcerting—it’s an evolutionary sign of weakness. Hits her on the subconscious level.”

“Um, okay.”

I shut the passenger door and he drove off.

I entered the airport and breezed through check-in since I had no carry-on luggage. When I got to security, I put only two things in the plastic bin for scanning: my cell phone and the little black box containing my ring. The portly female security guard doing the pat-downs stopped and said, “Look. At. You. Boy!” then started clapping.

Although I was a bit thrown by my dad’s insistence that the only way to make a marriage work was to accept that it might not, my anxiety was taking a backseat to my growing excitement as I walked toward my terminal. Asking Amanda to marry me would be one of the biggest, boldest moves of my life—a huge leap for an awkward teen who spent Friday nights watching ’80s action movies instead of going to parties, for a Little Leaguer who buried armfuls of porno in his backyard in an insane quest to see his first naked woman. I sucked at girls. I had always sucked at girls. But now I was about to not suck, and it made all the pathetic moments of my past feel like trifles I could laugh at, like bits in a blooper reel at the end of a movie. I couldn’t wait to ask her to marry me and take that ring out of the box and slide it on her finger.

What didn’t occur to me until I sat down in my aisle seat and we started taxiing down the runway was that I had no idea how I was going to ask her. I’d seen the scene in a hundred movies where the guy gets down on one knee, looks his girlfriend in the eye, and proceeds to put into eloquent words all the reasons he loves her and wants her to be his wife. Then she weeps, and they kiss, and her gay male friend says something witty, and her hard-edged sassy female friend who sleeps around breaks down and cries.

I wanted to do something different. But my mind went blank. And stayed that way through the entire hour-and-twenty-minute flight up the California coast. And through the forty-minute subway ride that followed. And after I disembarked and walked through the Mission District, which was bustling with pedestrians, taquerias, and small clothing outlets. And when I realized I had only a few more blocks until I reached the restaurant. My excitement about proposing had become just plain nerves, and all those irrational fears came flooding back.

What if she says no in front of all these people at the restaurant? Why the hell did I want to do this in a crowded place? What if she says no and somebody takes a video of it and puts it on YouTube? Under some title like “Total loser blows proposal.” Maybe they wouldn’t put “total.” That seems egregious. But what if they put bald?! Why am I even worried? There are millions of YouTube videos. No one would ever see it. Maybe I should speak quietly so they won’t be able to get good audio. I’ve become an insane person. I have to calm down…