Sh*t My Dad Says

by Justin Halpern

  “Dude, you going on the date with Dad’s lady?”

  “Yeah,” he replied, half asleep. “I smell, like, really gross. I should probably shower,” he added. And off he went.

  When I got off work a few hours later, I crawled out of my disgusting Hooters uniform and drove home shirtless, in an effort to prevent my car from smelling like chicken and hot garbage. I jumped in the shower and, when I came out, found my dad sitting in his recliner in the living room, asleep. Then I heard the front door open and saw Evan walk into the hallway and tiptoe toward his bedroom like a cat in a cartoon trying to sneak past a sleeping dog. Unaware that he was trying to go to bed without talking to anyone, I immediately jumped in.

  “How was it, dude? Was she hot?” I shouted excitedly.

  My dad snorted himself awake, and a look of fear shot over Evan’s face.

  “Big dude, how’d it go?” my dad asked, closing his robe back up.

  “It was okay, but I’m tired,” my brother said, trying to slip off to his room.

  “Bullshit. Get back in here, let me know how it went.”

  Although Evan is quiet and demure most of the time, every once in a while he snaps. This was one of those times.

  “She’s a resident in neurosurgery who used to be Miss Oklahoma or something!” Evan screamed, his eyes suddenly venturing into angry crackhead territory.

  “I know—good stuff, right?” my dad said, confused as to why Evan was upset.

  “NO! I’m twenty-eight, and I live at home! I wash dishes at FUCKING

  Hooters!”

  Evan rarely cursed, and never, ever, ever cursed at my dad. I don’t know if my dad was angry or shocked, but he got stern real quick.

  “What is your fucking point?” he said.

  “My point is it was humiliating to sit there with some woman that’s probably used to dating doctors and models and whatever the fuck else!”

  Then came the line that sent my dad into a frenzy.

  “She’s out of my league! It was humiliating!”

  My dad looked down at the floor and mumbled quietly to himself “out of your league?” over and over, like he was Indiana Jones trying to figure out if what a weird tribal person had told him right before he died was a clue. Then he exploded.

  “This is complete fucking bullshit!” he screamed.

  At that point I left the living room and tried to hide in the hallway so I could still listen.

  “Out of your league?! What fucking league are you talking about?! You are a man, she is a fucking woman! That is all that matters, goddamn it!”

  After that I couldn’t make out the yelling, but a few minutes later Evan stormed past me. I peered into the living room and could see my dad felt bad about what had happened. Normally after arguments, he wore a red-faced look of conviction that you see on famous world leaders addressing a hostile United Nations. This time he just looked sad. I went to bed, not wanting to agitate him.

  Nobody talked about what had happened those next few days. I figured the argument had passed. Then, my dad came home from work about a week later and told Evan and me to get in the car, that we were going to dinner at Black Angus, which, in my opinion, was the Kansas City Royals of steak houses. Yes, it technically qualifies as a franchise, but it’s not worth getting excited about.

  “Black Angus?” I replied, a little disappointed.

  “Don’t be an asshole,” my dad said.

  We drove to Black Angus, where we sat down in a dark booth with cracked leather seats, and my dad ordered three porterhouse steaks, his favorite cut. I had no idea what my brother was thinking, but I was wondering why in the hell we were at Black Angus, given that this was not a holiday and there was no apparent cause for celebration. Generally, steak is eaten by my family only on special occasions.

  My dad exchanged a few pleasantries, asked us how we were doing, how our week was, and then, as the waitress set down our steaks in front of us, he said, “I want to tell you a story about the time I get mono from a stewardess.”

  He dove into a long, convoluted story about meeting some stewardess, how they “spent some time together,” and what followed.

  “I told everyone I got mono from this stewardess. You know why? Because I couldn’t believe a woman that attractive would be with a guy like me, so much that I was bragging about getting goddamned mono. Then I went into the hospital with fucking Guillain-Barré syndrome, and it was a whole mess, and I almost died. Anyway, my point is: It took me a long, long time to realize that I was worth a damn to women. You don’t have to brag about getting mono.”

  The three of us sat quietly for a moment before my dad called the waitress over to our table and said, “Let’s see a dessert menu, I’m feeling frisky.”

  Evan and I glanced at each other, unsure if we were supposed to comment on our dad’s anecdote.

  “Gee, Dad, that’s a great story,” I said sarcastically, trying to stifle my laughter.

  Evan started giggling, which sent me into a fit of laughter. My dad shook his head.

  “Well, you both can go fuck yourselves,” he said. “I’m trying to impart some fucking wisdom about women.”

  This only made the two of us laugh harder, to the point that Evan was almost unable to breathe and nearby patrons looked sympathetically at my dad, pitying the man who had to suffer two such inconsiderate sons. But he just started chuckling as well.

  “As long as you two jerk-offs are happy, I guess that’s all that matters,” he said, as the waitress returned with the dessert menu.

  On Taking My First Girlfriend to Las Vegas

  “Vegas? I don’t get it, neither of you are old enough to gamble. You’re not old enough to drink. The only thing you’re old enough to do is rent a hotel and—ah, I gotcha. That’s smart.”

  On Realizing He Was Starting to Shrink Due to Old Age

  “I’m five foot eleven! I used to be six feet, goddamn it. Boy, going bald and shitting infrequently ain’t enough for God, huh? Gotta rub it in, I guess.”

  On the Death of Our First Dog

  “He was a good dog. Your brother is pretty broken up about it, so go easy on him. He had a nice last moment with Brownie before the vet tossed him in the garbage.”

  On Getting Dumped by My First Girlfriend

  “Listen, I understand you’re upset. But you’re both nineteen, you can’t think you were only gonna screw each other forever. That’s just silly talk.”

  On My Attempt to Hide a Hangover

  “Coming down with something? Please. You reek of booze and bullshit. Don’t lie to a Kentuckian about drinking or horses, son.”

  On Shopping for Presents for His Birthday

  “If it’s not bourbon or sweatpants, it’s going in the garbage…. No, don’t get creative. Now is not a creative time. Now is a bourbon and sweatpants time.”

  Focus on Living, Dying Is the Easy Part

  “When I die, I die. I could give a shit, ’cause it ain’t my problem. I’d just rather not shit my pants on the way there.”

  Although my mother came from a Catholic family, and my father, though not religious himself, developed a great understanding of Judaism and its customs, they decided to raise me and my brothers in a totally secular home. My dad is not a fan of organized religion. He’s a scientist, and he believes in science, and that’s that. “People can believe whatever the fuck they want. A turtle is God, whatever, I don’t give a shit. I got my own beliefs,” he told me when I first asked him about God over breakfast at age eleven.

  In fact, the only time I ever experienced any sort of religious education was when my mother insisted I get in touch with my “Jewish roots” and sent me to a day camp in north San Diego County for kids who had one Jewish parent and one Catholic parent and wanted to learn more about Judaism. I lasted about three sessions before the rabbi complained to my parents that I just kept asking him to prove how he knew there was a God.

  “Well, what’d you tell him?” my dad said to the rabbi.

  “I discu
ssed the idea of faith with him, and how God—”

  “Listen, I think he just hates giving up his Sundays learning about it. No offense,” my dad said, cutting the rabbi off.

  I never went back.

  But my brush with religion had done nothing to abate my fear of death. Like a lot of people, I have always been afraid of death and plagued by the question, What am I doing here anyway? And having been raised with zero religion or spirituality, I never received any answers—or anything to comfort me when my anxiety got the best of me. Every once in a while I’d hear that someone famous or a friend of the family had died, and I’d start thinking about death and how I had no idea what was going to happen to me, where I would go, if I’d even be cognizant of what was going on. As my thoughts spiraled, my heart rate would quicken, I’d lose color in my face, and then I would have to lie down.

  During a baseball practice in college, I heard that a kid I had gone to high school with had died in a car crash. As was par for the course, I got so light-headed I had to lie down. When my teammates and coaches asked why I was lying down on the field, I went with the obligatory no-one-will-question-this-excuse excuse: “I think I have diarrhea.”

  I realized then that while my paralyzing fear of death probably wasn’t going to kill me, it was something I should learn to deal with in an adult way sooner rather than later. I decided to talk to my dad about it since he was the most unflappable person on the subject of death I’d ever met.

  “When I die, I die. I could give a shit, ’cause it ain’t my problem. I’d just rather not shit my pants on the way there,” is a line I’d heard out of his mouth more than a handful of times. I wanted that same attitude. Or, at least, I wanted to understand how he was able to be so cavalier about it.

  So one morning during college, when he was eating Grape-Nuts at the kitchen table and reading the newspaper, I sat down next to him and poured myself a bowl. After listening to us both crunch our way through two suggested daily portions of natural whole-grain wheat and barley, I spoke up.

  “Hey, Dad. I have a question.”

  He peered over the newspaper to look at me.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  I began a very roundabout way of getting to the point, philosophizing about religion and the possibilities of heaven and hell, until he cut me off.

  “Is there a question somewhere on the fucking horizon?”

  “What do you think happens after you’re dead?”

  He set his paper down and scooped a big bite of soggy Grape-Nuts into his mouth.

  “Well. It’s nothingness for eternity,” he said casually, then picked up his paper and began reading again.

  “What do you mean, ‘nothingness’?” I asked, feeling my heart start to beat a little faster.

  He put down the paper again.

  “Nothingness, you know. Nothing. Like, you can’t even describe it because it’s not anything. I don’t know, if it makes you feel better, just picture infinite darkness, no sound, no nothing. How’s that?”

  My heart rate rose further, and I started to feel light-headed. I couldn’t comprehend how he could believe this and be okay with it. Plus, his concept of death only added to my fears the fact that it was infinite. I’ve always had an obsession with keeping track of time. One night in college when I smoked pot, my roommates came home to find me sitting by the microwave, setting fifteen seconds on the timer over and over again so I could keep count of how many minutes were passing. Now I was being told that not only was there no afterlife, but what we all had in store was nothingness, an infinite period of it.

  “How do you know that? You don’t know that, it’s just your opinion,” I said.

  “Nope. Not my opinion. That’s what happens. Fact,” he replied, pulling the paper back up and starting to read. I could feel I was about to pass out, so I stumbled away from the table and walked toward my parents’ room, where my mom was sitting on their bed. Immediately she could see there was something wrong.

  “Justy, you look terrible! What’s the matter?” she said, patting the space on the bed next to her, ushering me to sit down.

  I told her what my dad had said, and she tried to calm me down by telling me that obviously he had no idea what happens after we die.

  “He’s never been dead, and that’s the only way you can know, right?” she murmured soothingly.

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I replied, not fully convinced.

  My dad entered the room at that moment, and my mom looked him sternly in the eye and said, “Sam, tell Justin that you have no idea what happens when you die. He knows it, but just admit it.”

  “I will not. I know exactly what happens, and that’s what happens.” And he left the room.

  I slept very little that night. I kept trying to wrap my head around the idea of infinite nothingness. The last time I had had that much difficulty sleeping was when I was fifteen years old and stayed awake half the night overanalyzing Back to the Future II and brainstorming all the parallel Hill Valley neighborhoods that would result from Michael J. Fox’s traveling back and altering time. That time, excitement mixed with confusion kept me up; this time, it was sheer terror.

  After tossing and turning most of the night, I finally gave up on sleep and dragged myself out of bed at 5:30 A.M. I strolled out of my bedroom to find my dad back at the kitchen table, eating Grape-Nuts. He asked me to sit down, so I did.

  “Do you know the great part about infinity?” he said.

  “No.”

  “It’s never over. You, your body, the energy inside it, it all goes somewhere, even after you die. You’re never gone.”

  Clearly, my mom had had a word with him.

  “So you’re saying you think we live forever? Like, ghosts and all that stuff?” I implored.

  “No. Jesus Christ. You need to take a fucking science course or something. What I’m trying to say is that what makes you up, it’s always been around, and it always will be around. So really the only thing you should worry about is the part you’re at right now. Where you got a body and a head and all that bullshit. Just worry about living, dying is the easy part.”

  Then he put down his spoon, looked at me, and stood up.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to do one of the best things about being alive: take a shit.”

  On Telemarketer Phone Calls

  “Hello?…Fuck you.”

  On My Interest in Smoking Cigars

  “You’re not a cigar guy…. Well, the first reason that jumps out at me is that you hold it like you’re jerking off a mouse.”

  On Entertaining the Notion of Getting a Tattoo

  “You can do what you want. But I can also do what I want. And what I’ll be doing is telling everyone how fucking stupid your tattoo is.”

  On House-Sitting

  “Call me if something’s on fire, and don’t screw in my bed.”

  On the Television Show The X-Files

  “So, the woman and the dopey-looking guy screw, and then they look for aliens—or they just screw and sometimes aliens follow them?”

  On Deciding to Use His Senior Discount for the First Time

  “Fuck it, I’m old. Gimme free stuff.”

  On Whether to Vote for George W. Bush or Al Gore

  “Gore seems kind of like a pompous prick, but every time I see Bush I feel like he’s probably shit his pants in the last year, and it’s something he worries about.”

  On My Trip to Europe

  “I know you think you’re going to get all kinds of laid. It’s not a magic place, it’s the same as here. Don’t be stupid.”

  On Baseball Cards

  “If you sell them over the age of twenty, it means you either never get laid or you have a drug problem.”

  Don’t Be So Quick to Buy into What Authority Prescribes

  “What I’m saying is: You might have taken care of your wolf problem, but everyone around town is going to think of you as the crazy son of a bitch who bought land mines to get rid of wolves
.”

  At about nine years old, I started developing a strange, uneasy feeling in my joints. It felt kind of like a little tiny person was inside them, tickling me. I wasn’t in pain, but I was uncomfortable a lot of the time, and the sensation had an unfortunate side effect: it caused frequent muscle spasms. My mom encouraged me to see a doctor, but the physician I went to couldn’t find anything wrong with me. “He’s growing fast, and it’s taking a toll. It’s natural. It will pass,” he said.

  My brother Dan offered a different diagnosis: “Maybe it’s because you’re a gay,” he suggested one night, after I had complained to my dad for the umpteenth time at dinner.

  “Quiet,” my dad barked at my brother. “Does it hurt?” he asked me.

  “No. It’s just, I don’t know. Weird.”

  “Thank you for that detailed description, Ernest fucking Hemingway. If you’re not feeling pain, then what’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know, it makes me have to stretch and stuff,” I responded.

  “He twitches all the time, Dad,” my brother chirped.

  “Your mouth twitches all the time,” my dad snapped at him. Then he turned to me. “Okay, well, if it starts hurting, let me know.”

  From that point forward, everyone in my family referred to the uneasiness in my joints as The Twitches, which sounds like some kind of eighteenth-century sexually transmitted disease British aristocrats got from prostitutes, but it was a catchy name, and it ended up sticking.

  When I was growing up, my dad personally selected my primary care doctor. For the most part, he picked doctors he had professional relationships with. The one time I expressed annoyance at having zero say in choosing my doctor, he snapped, “I’m sorry, did you go to medical school? Did you spend the last twenty-five fucking years of your life in medicine? No, you did jack shit. Let me handle picking your doc, and do me a favor and put a thumb in your ass and be quiet.”