Justin Halpern - More Sh*t My Dad Says

Hours later I sat in front of the TV, wondering what had happened at practice, whether Coach had called my dad, and, most of all, what awaited me in those buried pages. I had gotten a quick look, but I wanted to pore over those pictures like they were evidence in a crime I was investigating. Eventually my dad got home from work and set his briefcase down.

“So. How was practice?” he asked.

“It was good. Why? Did you hear it wasn’t?” I said, trying to keep my cool.

“Son, no offense, but you play Little League. It’s not the Yankees. I don’t get daily reports about who’s hitting the shit out of the ball.”

When I went to bed that night, all I could think about was those buried pages. I had worked hard for them, and I was determined to enjoy the fruits of my labor. I woke up in the middle of the night, and before I even opened my eyes, I thought, The porno! I hopped out of my bed, still in my underwear, and snuck out into the living room, through the back door, and into the backyard. I went to the shed, grabbed the shovel, found the spot with the freshly turned earth, jammed the nose of the shovel’s blade into the ground, and started digging in the moonlight. My shoulders burned, but I kept digging.

“Son. What in the fuck are you doing?”

I shrieked, dropped the shovel, and turned to see my dad standing behind me in his robe, holding a hot toddy.

“Oh my God, you scared me,” I said, completely forgetting that I should offer up some kind of excuse for what I was doing.

He clicked on the flashlight he was holding and shined it in my eyes, then down over the rest of my body.

“Please explain to me right now why you’re in your underwear digging a fucking hole in my backyard at three-thirty in the goddamn morning.”

There was no way out of this. I exhaled in defeat, then told him everything: about going into the canyon, finding the porn, running away from the homeless guys, then burying my loot.

He waited for a moment, processing everything, then quietly said, “All right, here’s the deal.”

Calmly but firmly, he instructed me to take all that porn out of his backyard and fill in the hole pronto. The next day, he explained, I would carry the magazine pages back to the entrance of the canyon and leave them there.

“Why can’t I just throw them out? I don’t want to go back to the canyon,” I said.

“Bullshit. Someone spent time collecting this shit. What if I threw out your baseball card collection? That wouldn’t be right.”

I nodded. His analogy made sense to me, and suddenly I felt a twinge of remorse, having deprived those men of one of their few—and probably most prized—worldly possessions. I bent down and lifted the big wad of dirt-covered porno out of the hole.

“Are you mad?” I asked, as I picked up the shovel.

“Nah. I don’t think this even cracks your greatest hits of stupid. But there’s one important thing I need you to know.”

I stopped shoveling and looked at him. He pointed at the pile of loose, grimy magazine pages on the ground.

“You will never screw a woman who looks like that. Understand?”

I nodded.

“Okay, good,” he said. He turned back and walked toward the house, then quickly turned back around.

“And women aren’t going to screw you in all those crazy ways, either. You got it? They don’t look like that and they don’t screw crazy. That’s what you’re taking away from this, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Come inside and fill in that hole tomorrow. I don’t want the neighbors thinking you’re batshit.”

I put down the shovel and followed him inside.

He sat down in his chair and turned on the small lamp next to him.

“The canyon was what I was freaked out about. That’s why I went down there, so I wouldn’t be freaked out about it,” I confessed after a moment of silence.

“Son, you’re a little on the jittery side. It’s okay. Don’t beat yourself up about it. It don’t mean you don’t have a pair of balls, it just means you’re more choosy when you use them. That’s not always a bad thing.”

He took a big sip from his hot toddy.

“Are you going to bed now?” I asked.

“No, but you are,” he said, turning off the lamp and filling the room with darkness. “I’m trying to get a damned minute to myself here.”

I spent the first couple years of high school trying to go unnoticed. My goal was to be the adolescent equivalent of one of those Saturday Night Live cast members who never seems to be in any sketches but is always on stage at the end of the show smiling and basking in the applause. I didn’t start out so unambitious. Like most teenagers, I went in aspiring to be popular. But I realized that wouldn’t be easy at a party early in freshman year. When my best friend Aaron and I walked into the party, the first guy we ran into took one look at us, removed the Bud Light from his lips, and shouted over the sound of Tupac blaring out of a nearby boom box: “What are you fags doing here?” His face showed the same genuine confusion you’d feel upon seeing a monkey operating a forklift at Costco.

Among my 2,500 classmates at Point Loma High School, I soon learned, there were popular people, unpopular people, and everybody else. Even just a couple weeks into high school, “everybody else” started to sound really good. Sure, maybe the popular kids were going to parties and getting hand jobs, but at least I wasn’t being tormented. The key to becoming “everybody else” was to draw as little attention to myself as possible. I ate lunch with a small group of friends every day in the lobby of the English building, while the cool kids ate in the quad and the nerds ate in the drama building. I was a good student, but not so good that people noticed, and I spoke in class so rarely that during my sophomore year my history teacher pulled me aside and asked me if I was fluent in English in that loud, deliberate way people speak to foreigners. Although I excelled as a pitcher on the baseball team, few of my classmates cared about high school baseball or attended the games. And when the weekend rolled around, instead of going to parties, I would get together with Aaron and a couple of our friends, order in pizza, and watch ’80s movies. By the start of my junior year, I had yet to go on a date, or even kiss a girl. But the older, popular kids had left me alone, and that was a tradeoff I was willing to accept.

The one person who wasn’t so satisfied with my pathetic social life was my father. “You two are staring at that TV like you want to screw it,” he said to me and Aaron one Friday night when he came across us watching Die Hard in his living room.

“Well… we don’t,” I replied, weakly

“Thanks for clarifying that, chief,” he said. He walked to the mahogany liquor cabinet next to the TV and poured himself a couple fingers’ worth of bourbon. “I don’t personally give two shits, but all I’m saying is, going out and drinking a beer and feeling a tit ain’t the worst goddamn thing in the world.” Then he padded back to his bedroom.

I shoveled another slice of pizza into my mouth and refocused on Bruce Willis, who was pulling broken glass out of his feet.

“Your dad’s right. We need to go to parties,” Aaron said.

“We’re not invited to them,” I replied, grabbing the remote control and turning the volume up.

We’d had this argument many times before. Aaron and I were now in our junior year and neither of us had been to a party since that very first embarrassment in ninth grade. Every so often Aaron would push me to go to a party or a dance, but it was as if there was a little sign in my brain reading, “It’s been this many days since the last time you were humiliated,” and I was determined to keep that number moving in the right direction. I had seen what had happened to some of my nerdier classmates when they dared to venture into social situations where they weren’t welcome. One had been pinned down while someone drew penises all over his face in permanent marker. Another had been pantsed in front of the entire P.E. class. And since nothing like that had ever happened to me, I had talked myself into thinking that I was perfectly happy with the way things were.