Justin Halpern: More Sh*t My Dad Says

“Mr. and Mrs. Halpern, this morning Justin gave this drawing he made to a girl he sits next to in class,” my teacher said, sliding a piece of lined paper across the table to my mom and dad.

My parents both leaned in to examine it. My mom took one look and let out a sigh in disappointment. My dad leaned in for a closer look.

“Jesus, what the hell kind of drawing is this?” he said.

It was a crude drawing of a smiling, female stick figure with red hair and a T-shirt that read “Kerry.” Above Kerry’s head was a yellow dog. Those two elements alone, of course, would not have caused a problem. Unfortunately, there was a third element to the drawing: a shower of large brown clumps raining down from the yellow dog’s rear onto Kerry’s face. And just in case the viewer wasn’t sure how Kerry felt about that, a thought bubble protruding from her head read, “I like it.”

“It’s very upsetting,” my teacher said.

“Why is the dog above her head? That doesn’t even make sense. How’d he get above her head?” he asked, turning to me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You have to draw a hill or something under the dog. A dog can’t just float up into the atmosphere and take a shit on someone’s head. I mean, I know you’re six or seven or whatever, but that’s pretty basic physics right there,” he said.

“Mr. Halpern, that’s really not the issue,” my teacher said.

“I dunno, seems like a pretty big issue to me. At least we know we can cross artist off the list,” he said.

“Sam, let her talk,” my mom said, sternly. My dad leaned back, mumbled, “Not the issue, my ass,” then sat silently. I listened as Mrs. Vanguard chronicled my behavior toward Kerry over the past two weeks, behavior she felt bordered on harassment. Without proper discipline, she told my parents, she feared I might turn dangerous. I wasn’t sure what my feelings about Kerry meant, but as I listened to Mrs. Vanguard and recalled how I’d made Kerry cry, I suddenly felt terrible.

“Excuse me for saying this,” my mom interrupted, “but I think you may have the wrong idea. It seems pretty clear what this is.”

“And what would that be?” my teacher asked.

“He’s sweet on her,” my dad responded. “Jesus H. I woulda figured you see this kind of stuff all the time. Look, trust me, I know the kid can be dopey as all hell. I caught him eating a sandwich on the shitter just a month ago. But he’s a sweet kid. He’s not goddamn Manson.”

My teacher sat there speechless until my mom broke the silence by assuring her that they would take me home at once and talk to me about my inappropriate behavior.

“We’ll make sure this stops,” she said.

I rode home with my mom, since my dad announced he’d just had his car cleaned and wished to keep it “booger-free for as long as fucking possible.”

As she pulled into our driveway, my mom told me to go to my room and wait for her and my dad. About ten minutes later they both appeared. My mom sat next to me on my bed. My dad grabbed a chair, shook the Legos off it onto the ground, and sat down.

“Justy, do you know why you can’t draw pictures like the one your teacher showed us?” she started.

“Yes. Dogs can’t fly above people’s heads,” I said.

“No, honey, that’s not why,” my mom said.

“Well, that’s part of the reason why,” my dad said.

“No, Sam, you’re confusing him.”

“He’s confusing me. He’s got dogs flying around, people wearing fuckin’ T-shirts with their names on them, like everybody works at a goddamn auto shop. All I’m saying is, there’s multiple problems at work here. Let’s not condone some fantasyland where—”

“Sam!”

My dad went silent and nodded.

“Do you like sitting next to Kerry?” my mom asked.

I nodded yes.

“All right. Well, from now on, if you like somebody, you don’t do mean things to them, even if they seem like they don’t like you back,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Lots of people will like you back in your life, Justy,” my mom said, giving me a hug and then getting up to leave. “For today, though, you need to sit in your room and think about what we talked about.”

My mom left the room, and a moment later my dad stood up to do the same. Just as he was about to close the door, though, I felt the need to apologize.

“I’m sorry I made Kerry cry,” I said.

He turned around and looked me in the eye.

“I know you are. When you’re sweet on a woman, you do crazy shit. It happens. You ain’t used to feeling that way about somebody.”

“I feel that way sometimes about Mom,” I said.

“What? No you don’t. Jesus, that’s the creepiest goddamn thing you’ve ever said to me,” he said, as he started to close the door.

“Wait,” I said.

My dad stopped once again.

“Yeah?”

“What do I do now?” I said.

“What do you do with what?” he said.

“With Kerry.”

“Jack shit. You’re seven.”

When I was little, my two favorite things were Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal and learning new words. I was obsessed with expanding my vocabulary. Every time I heard a word I didn’t recognize, I’d ask the nearest adult what it meant. No one had a more extensive vocabulary than my father, who spent a lot of time reading with me each night to indulge my thirst for language.

“My teacher says someday I’m going to know as many words as you do,” I told him one night as we sat at the dinner table after I aced an oral test in my third-grade English class.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but your teacher is full of dog shit. I practice medicine, which opens up my vocabulary to thousands of words you will never encounter. I know a hundred goddamn ways to talk about blood vessels,” he said, grabbing a bowl full of green beans and spooning a few onto his plate.

“That’s really cool,” I said.

“It’s not cool. It makes my head want to explode. It’s like a garage filled with useless shit. It ain’t how many words you know, it’s how you use them.”

A couple days after that conversation, my dad was appointed head of his department, nuclear medicine, at the University of California, San Diego.

“So now you’re the boss!” I said when he told my family the news over a spaghetti dinner.

I looked at my mom, expecting her to be excited, but she just looked tense and unhappy.

“Being the boss ain’t always a good thing,” my dad said as he took a sip of red wine.

“Why not?” I asked.

“You like playing baseball, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, what if the coach quit one day and they made you coach because no one else wanted to do it? So you’d have to coach the team instead of being able to play, and then you’d have to sit and do all the bullshit that comes with coaching.”

“Coach likes being the coach.”

“That’s because he’s an asshole who’s trying to live out his dreams through that kid of his, who’s five years away from a fucking heroin addiction because his dad’s a psycho.”

“Sam, you know he’s going to repeat that,” my mom said.

“Don’t repeat that,” he said to me. “Anyway, my point is, I became a doctor to practice medicine and help people. Now I gotta sit in an office and do paperwork. Not your problem, it just means you’re not going to see a lot of me.”

After that, my dad started leaving for work before I woke and arriving back home after 9:00 p.m. He worked a full day most Saturdays, too. Sunday was his only day off, but even then he often went in to the office. Nevertheless, no matter how late it was when he walked through our front door or how tired he was, he would grab my favorite book, J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit, and call me into the living room, flip on a lamp next to our brown fabric couch, sit down right next to me, where he’d read to me or I’d read to him. Whenever I encountered a word I didn’t understand, I’d stop and ask him what it meant. One night, while I was reading to him, he started laughing.