More Sh*t My Dad Says

by Justin Halpern

  “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.

  Do You Know What Makes a Shitty Scientist?

  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.

  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.<
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  “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 . . .

  By the time I stumbled through the large black double doors of Foreign Cinema, sweat was starting to drip down my face, which must have looked particularly alarming since it was a cool fifty degrees outside. A young pale-faced hostess with long black bangs asked, “Can I help you?” the way you ask someone who you hope will turn around and leave.

  “Hi. I’m supposed to ask someone to marry me?” I said.

  “Uh, okay . . .”

  “Sorry—I mean, I have a reservation, I think. Or I should . . .”

  “Oh wait, are you Justin?” said a friendlier coworker from behind the bar.

  “Yes,” I said, wiping the sweat from my brow.

  “Come this way,” she said. She led me through a crowded outdoor dining area, packed with
dozens of customers enjoying eggs benedict, waffles, and bloody marys, and into a plaster-walled room that looked like a miniature art gallery. It was empty, save for one corner where three waiters stood in front of a wooden counter folding napkins and chatting. She grabbed a wooden chair and placed it in the exact center of the empty room, as if it were a piece of art on display.

  “Okay, good luck!” she said, then walked away.

  I sat down on the chair in the center of the room with the waiters staring at me and looked at my phone. It was 10:20. I noticed that my phone hand was trembling. I knew I was being irrational. This was Amanda, the girl who once told me, “You are my Brad Pitt. And not the weird Brad Pitt when he grew a long beard for some reason.” If I could just think of something to say to her, maybe I could calm myself down.

  “Okay,” I thought, “when she walks in, I’m definitely not gonna get down on one knee and say a bunch of really clichéd things. Amanda hates that stuff as much as I do. I’m just going to walk up to her and tell her exactly how I feel, and how much she means to me, and then ask her if she’ll marry me. Then, if she says no, I’ll be standing on my own two feet, and I’ll be able to walk right out of the restaurant, head held high.”

  Then I heard voices. I looked up and saw Amanda’s friend Madeleine walk into the room, followed by Amanda, who was wearing a lime-green dress that clung to her body. She entered the room, looked right at me, looked away as if she hadn’t seen me. “Why can’t we just wait for the table by—oh my God!” she said, turning back to me.

  All my plans to stay standing were forgotten. I dropped onto one knee, wrestled the ring box from my pocket, and spluttered, “Will you marry me I love you.”

  “Yes,” Amanda said, bursting into tears.

  She was still standing about four feet away from me. I got up, approached her, and gave her a kiss. She hugged me and shoved her face into my chest.

  “You’re really sweaty,” she said, laughing as tears streamed down her face.

  All the insanity and neuroses that had engulfed my brain washed away. I had a smile so big it seemed impossible, as if I were the guy in an ad for the state lottery and I was holding the winning ticket.