Justin Halpern: More Sh*t My Dad Says

“Can I ask you a question?” I said, turning to face him again.

“Fire away.”

“If something’s freaking you out, what do you do to not freak out about it?”

“Is this about that Arachnophobia movie, again? I told you, a spider that large couldn’t sustain itself in an urban environment. The ecosystem is too delicate. Not fucking plausible.”

“It’s not about Arachnophobia. It’s just—if something’s freaking you out, how do you get it to not freak you out?”

He raised his mug of hot toddy to his lips and took a big slurp.

“Well, scientifically speaking, human beings fear the unknown. So, whatever’s freaking you out, grab it by the balls and say hello,” he said.

I had no idea what that meant, and even in the dimly lit living room he could tell.

“I’m saying, if something’s scaring you out, don’t run from it. Find out everything you can about it. Then it ain’t the unknown anymore and it ain’t scary.” He paused. “Or I guess it could be a shitload scarier. Mostly the former, though.”

As I padded down the hallway back to my room, I knew what had to be done: I had to enter the canyon. There was just no way I was going it alone.

The next day I sat in my sixth-grade class watching the clock as the hour hand inched closer to 3:00. Michael was also in my class. He sat at the desk in front of mine, which meant that every day I spent eight hours face-to-face with whatever slogan was on the No Fear T-shirt he chose to wear that day. The inspirational messages printed on the backs of No Fear T-shirts all sounded like they’d been written by the president of a fraternity moments after he pounded his sixth beer. And the message on Michael’s shirt that day was no exception: THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS UNNECESSARY ROUGHNESS. NO FEAR.

I tapped him on the shoulder. “Michael,” I whispered.

Without looking behind him, he reached up with his left hand and grabbed my index and middle fingers, twisting them till I winced in pain.

“I just learned that in karate,” he said, turning around, then letting go of my fingers. “I’m probably a year away from black belt.”

I opened and closed my hand to get the feeling back in my fingertips.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“You’re going to baseball practice after school today, right?”

“Duh. I just got a new bat. It’s part ceramic. It’s awesome. You can touch it if you want,” he said, pulling a bag from under his desk and unzipping it to show the blue-and-white bat inside.

He stared at me, then at the bat, then back at me, and I realized that his offer to let me touch it was more of a demand. We stared at each other for a moment, then I quickly poked it with my index finger.

He put the bat away. “Fucking awesome, right?” he asked.

“Yeah. It’s cool. So anyway, I was thinking, since we both just go straight to practice after school, we could get there early today and go into the canyon.”

Michael and I weren’t friends, not exactly. He was a tough kid, the kind who spent most of his free time with older kids who had mustaches and were always throwing things at cars after school. But Michael was always willing to share with us what he’d learned from the older kids, and that was a real benefit to all of us.

I owed pretty much everything I knew about women at that point to Michael. During recess one day he pulled us into a corner of the yard behind the library and took out a folded-up picture. It was a page from a medical journal, featuring a photo of a forty-five-year-old naked woman, with possible postmenopausal cancerous areas highlighted on her body. Except for my mother, it was the first naked woman I’d ever seen. Michael pointed at the woman’s crotch with his stubby finger. “That’s where you stick your dick. They also pee out of that, and sometimes shit out of it if their butt’s clogged.”

It was this very wisdom and worldliness that inspired me to ask Michael to explore the canyon with me. I was, admittedly, a kid who was easily shaken. I wished I could be as fearless as my dad, but I seemed to have a different biological makeup when it came to courage. Michael was the only kid I knew who wasn’t afraid of that canyon.

“So are you cool with going into the canyon with me?” I asked.

“I guess. If you buy me a Slurpee. Don’t try and touch my dick, though.”

One seventy-nine-cent stop at 7-Eleven later and we were walking toward the Little League field. The closer we got, the more I could feel the pit of nerves in my stomach tightening.

“So you’ve never gone really far into the canyon before?” I asked, trying to calm myself.

“Why are you so gay for the canyon?” Michael asked.

“I’m not. I just want to go in, look around, then come back out before practice.”

“Are you retarded? You can’t just go into the canyon and not know where the coach is,” he said. “What if he gets to practice early, then sees us coming out of the canyon?”

“So what do we do?”

Michael quickly laid out a plan that seemed foolproof and tossed his thirty-two-ounce Slurpee container into a bush as we arrived at the empty field.

Sure enough, he was right about Coach. He’d arrived early for practice, and would surely have caught us sneaking out of the canyon if we’d opted for my plan. The rest of the team straggled in soon after. My friend Steven, who I always warmed up with, grabbed a ball and walked up to me.

“Ready to warm up?” he asked, popping a ball in and out of his glove.

“Not today. Go warm up with a big dick,” Michael said to Steven, grabbing my arm and dragging me to the far end of the field. I glanced back at Steven and winked, assuming he’d understand that something was up and he shouldn’t take it personally.

Michael and I started playing catch in the outfield. At any moment, Michael was going to say the code words and it would be go time. The anticipation was unbearable. I could barely hold on to the ball, my hands were trembling so badly with excitement. Suddenly, Michael’s face hardened. He looked at the coach who was helping another kid about fifty feet away, then looked back at me and uttered the code words: “My dog peed in the house yesterday.”

I took a deep breath, reached my arm back, and hurled the ball at least ten feet above Michael’s head. It shot well past him and deep into the darkness of the canyon behind him.

“Coach!” Michael yelled.

Coach looked up from the lesson he was giving to another kid.

“Our ball went into the canyon. We’re gonna go look for it, okay?”

“Fine. But if you can’t find it quickly, come back up,” Coach replied.

We nodded and jogged through the outfield and down the twenty-foot grass embankment that led to the canyon. At the bottom of the embankment we looked up. It was impossible for anyone on the field above to see us.

“Okay,” said Michael.

“Okay,” I replied.

“Okay what? This is your thing, shithead. What do you want to do?” he asked impatiently.

“Oh. Right.”

I looked into the canyon, now just ten feet or so away. I could see past the first layer or two of tree branches and bushes, but beyond that it dropped off into darkness. I took a deep breath. There is no Patrick Swayze in an aquarium, I thought to myself. There s no Squidman.

“Okay. Let’s go in through that part right there,” I said, pointing to a small path that crawled through two trees.

Michael took the lead, and within twenty seconds we were deep enough into the canyon that when I turned to look back in the direction we had come from, all I could see were trees. The floor of the canyon was covered with dead leaves and some garbage: a few candy wrappers, a few empty 7-Eleven cups, which I strongly suspected had been hurled there by my comrade. My nerves were slowly subsiding. The farther we went, the less there was to look at. Just more trees, dead branches, and bushes. The unknown was quickly becoming known.