Sh*t My Dad Says

by Justin Halpern

  But when I was twenty-one years old, my physician moved away, and when my insurance company gave my dad a list of doctors to choose from, it turned out that he was unfamiliar with all of them. So he let me review the list and pick out a doctor myself.

  “Okay, listen, this is going to sound biased, but pick someone with a Jewish last name,” he instructed me.

  “That’s racist, Dad.”

  “Racist? Oh give me a fucking break. It’s not racist, I just know a lot of Jewish doctors and they’re good. And let me remind you that I’m a Jewish doctor and—you know what? Fuck you, pick whoever you want,” he said as he stormed out of the living room.

  So I picked a doctor at my dad’s hospital, and a few months later I went in for a routine checkup. The doctor was a young guy, short, with dark hair. He was like a Jewish Tom Cruise…with a lisp. We went through all the normal checkup routines: breathe in and out, turn your head and cough, slam the minihammer on my knees, etc.

  “Okay, you’re healthy,” he said, as we were wrapping up. “Is there anything else?”

  I thought about it and was about to say no, but then remembered The Twitches and figured I might as well speak up. I described my symptoms, and he spent the next few minutes asking questions and doing a few more physical tests, moving my legs back and forth, pressing on my joints. He asked me to wait in his office and left the room for a couple minutes.

  “Listen, there’s a drug called Zoloft,” he said as he entered his office with a prescription pad in hand. He launched into a description of Zoloft and its history, and told me that he thought it might help me.

  “I don’t know that it will, but it might. You might be able to get rid of your joint problems entirely. I think we should take a shot,” he said.

  I told him I’d love to, and he wrote me a prescription, which I took straight to the pharmacy and got filled.

  That night, my dad and I sat down to dinner just the two of us, since my mom was working late. When he asked me how my doctor’s appointment went, I told him that I was given a clean bill of health.

  “Oh, also, he prescribed some stuff for The Twitches,” I added.

  “What kind of stuff?” he asked, his eyebrows furrowing into a steep mountain of hair.

  “Well, you know, the doctor was talking about how he wasn’t sure what was causing my twitches so, you know….”

  “No, I do not know. Enlighten me,” he said between clenched teeth.

  I told him I’d filled a prescription for a drug called Zoloft.

  “Bring me those fucking pills right now!” he shouted, holding out his hand as if I were going to make them magically appear.

  “What? Why? What is your problem?”

  “You have no idea what that shit is for. It’s an antidepressant. It’s for depressed people. Are you depressed?”

  I told him that I didn’t think I was, but that I was tired of having The Twitches. They kept me up at night, and I always sounded ridiculous when I tried to explain to people why parts of my body would suddenly jerk.

  My dad took a deep breath.

  “You’re making that face like you gotta shit. Calm down for a moment,” he said. Then he sat back in his chair.

  “Listen. Imagine you own a farm. On that farm, you got a bunch of sheep. And every night, wolves come and kill your sheep. It’s a problem, you want to fix it. Now, you could go and put a bunch of land mines around your farm, and every time one of the wolves comes near your farm, it steps on one of them land mines and blows it to fucking pieces. You think, ‘problem solved,’ right?”

  He stared at me for a few moments, until I realized he wanted me to answer that question.

  “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about right now,” I said.

  “Jesus Christ, you’re fucking obtuse. 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. That’s how they’ll treat you—in fact, that will be the first thing they associate you with. And not only that, now the only way you know how to get rid of wolves is blowing them the fuck up. You get what I’m saying now?”

  He sat back in his chair, and a few moments of silence passed as the two of us stared at each other.

  “Dad, I’m taking the pills.”

  “Goddamn it! The hell you are!”

  He shot up out of his chair and stormed into my room. I heard him rooting around furiously, opening and closing drawers, unzipping and rummaging through my backpack. When he returned to the dining room, he was holding my bottle of Zoloft. He marched over to the sink, poured the $20 worth of pills down the drain, and turned on the garbage disposal for good measure.

  “You’ll thank me later,” he said as he returned to the table and resumed eating.

  “What in the hell do I tell the doctor?” I asked.

  “I don’t give a shit. Go back to your doctor and tell him to kiss my ass.”

  A few weeks later, my dad came home early from work and popped his head into my bedroom, where I was doing homework.

  “Grab a snack to take with you. We’re gonna go down to the hospital,” he said.

  “Why? Please don’t harass my doctor.”

  “Give me a fucking break. I’m not a maniac.”

  I got in his car, and we drove to UCSD Medical Center. We walked into the waiting area, where my dad approached the reception desk and checked us in. Two minutes later, the nurse called my name and led my dad and me back to a room where an older, gray-haired doctor was waiting.

  “Sam, good to see you,” the older doc said, extending his hand to shake my dad’s.

  They chatted for a couple minutes, making incomprehensible doctor jokes that ended with punch lines like, “and then it turned out it wasn’t even a goddamned myocardial infarction!” followed by hysterical laughter. I sat atop the doctor’s table, stone-faced and trying to minimize the rustling noises emanating from the thin white paper that coated it, while I waited to be acknowledged.

  “So, what can I do you for, Sam?” the doctor said.

  “The kid’s got some uneasiness in his joints. I was hoping you could help him, because it’s really a pain in his ass. Tell him, son.”

  “Well, it sort of feels like I’m being tickled from the inside of me—”

  “Goddamn it, use medical terms, he’s a doctor,” my dad barked.

  The old doctor performed the same tests my other doctor had and then turned to my dad, as if I wasn’t in the room.

  “I think the culprit here is your boy had quite a growth spurt, and it put a lot of strain on his joints. Now he’s feeling the effects of it.”

  “So you’re saying he grew funny, huh?” my dad replied.

  “Well, more or less, yes.”

  At last I had an answer.

  We left the doctor’s office and, as we were walking down the hospital hallway, my dad turned to me and whispered, “Shit. I could’ve told you that. Fucking doctors, huh?”

  On the Proper Technique for Growing a Garden

  “It’s watering plants, Justin. You just take a goddamned hose and you put it over the plant. You don’t even pay rent, just do it. Shit.”

  On Moving Out of My Parents’ House for the First Time

  “I’d say I was gonna miss you, but you’re moving ten minutes away, so instead I’ll just say don’t come over and do your fucking laundry here.”

  On Furnishing One’s Home

  “Pick your furniture like you pick a wife; it should make you feel comfortable and look nice, but not so nice that if someone walks past it they want to steal it.”

  On Coming Over to My New Apartment Unannounced and Seeing My Room for the First Time

  “Why is there a mural of two people fucking on your wall?…Son, let me be the first to tell you that you’re not Andy fucking Kaufman. When you get famous maybe shit like this will be funny, but right now all it says to me is this kid never gets laid. Ever.”

 
; On My Response to Having My Tires Slashed

  “Oh, don’t go to the goddamned cops. They’re busy with real shit. I don’t want my tax dollars going to figuring out who thinks you’re an asshole.”

  On Living on a Budget

  “Why are you going over your monthly expenses?…No, let me shorten this process for you: You make dog shit, so don’t spend any money.”

  On My Friend’s Response to Getting a Minor-in-Possession Ticket

  “He cried? Jesus, don’t ever have that happen to you…. Well, no, try not to get a ticket, sure, but if you do, don’t cry like a fucking baby.”

  On Getting an Internship at Quentin Tarantino’s Production Company

  “That is one ugly son of a bitch…. Oh, yeah, no, congratulations. If you see him, try not to stare at his face if you’ve eaten anything.”

  On My Interest in Going Skydiving

  “You won’t go do that, I know it…. Son, I used to wipe your ass, I know you better than you know you…. Fine, Mom used to wipe it, but I was usually nearby.”

  On the Arm Injury That Ended My Baseball Career

  “I’m really sorry, son. If you’re pissed off and you need to blow off some steam, let me know. We’ll go smash some golf balls or something…. Oh right, the arm. Well, there’s other, nonphysical ways to blow off steam.”

  On Pringles Flavors

  “I’m not eating something called ‘pizzalicious.’ That’s not even a fucking adjective. You can’t just add ‘licious’ to nouns. That’s bullshit.”

  You Never Stop Worrying About Your Children

  “They’ll gut you like a pig, piss on your corpse, and then say ‘Welcome to Mexico!’”

  By my junior year of college, I had moved out of my parents’ house and into a three-bedroom house in Pacific Beach, San Diego, which I shared with my best friend, Dan, and a girl we were friends with. Even though my new place was only ten minutes away from my parents’, it might as well have been in Sweden for all my dad cared. There was no way he was going to visit.

  “I don’t want to know what goes on in that house,” he said when I finally asked him if he wanted to come check it out.

  “Dad, there’s nothing bad going on in the house.”

  “No. You’re not understanding me. I don’t care what goes on in that house. It’s called apathy. Look it up.”

  I was living on my own, but I still headed home once a week to do my laundry, raid the fridge, and take advantage of anything else I possibly could while I was there.

  “You just barge in and take whatever you want, whenever you want it. It’s like you’re the goddamned SS and I’m living in fucking Nazi Germany,” my dad said after coming in from the backyard, where he was watering his roses one afternoon, to find me in the kitchen eating the bagel with cream cheese he had prepared for himself just moments earlier.

  Even though he wouldn’t admit it, I always knew my dad was happy to see me when I came home. I’d usually head over at night, when he was home from work, and we’d have a nice chat about things that were going on in each other’s lives. It was the first time I had ever felt like I had an adult relationship with my dad. We were growing closer and becoming friends. I realized that we’d really broken down some barriers one evening in late June when he asked me to help him with a project in his garden that Friday.

  “Friday, come over at four. Don’t be late, I don’t want to be fucking with this after dark. I’ll buy you dinner afterwards,” he offered.

  Since he’d purchased the house in 1972, my dad’s garden had taken over almost every spare inch of our yards, front and back, and he’d planted not only flowers but tomatoes, lettuce, even corn. He loved his garden and spent most of his free time taking meticulous care of it. He was also very particular about who touched it. That Friday he was going to put up some fencing to grow tomatoes, a difficult job for one guy. He normally did the tough jobs on his own anyway. One time many years earlier I had tried to help him on a similar project and while bending the wire fence to wrap it into a cylinder, my hand had slipped and accidentally released the metal, which whipped around and stabbed my dad in the leg.

  “GODDAMN IT FUCK!” he had screamed in pain, before turning to me and adding, “GO! AWAY!”

  So when my dad asked me to help out on his garden that coming Friday, the request meant a lot to me. He didn’t need my help—he wanted it.

  On Thursday, the night before I was supposed to help him out, I was studying with a girl named Stacy from my communications class. We were taking a summer school course because each of us had dropped a class during the school year. I had been in a few classes with Stacy before and had developed a major crush on her. I had never asked her out or even hinted at my feelings, mostly because she had a boyfriend, but even if she hadn’t, I doubt I would have gotten up the courage to make a move. She was blond, with large breasts, which I had pictured in my head numerous times during a variety of different fantasies I played out while masturbating. As we sat studying on a futon in her bedroom, she turned to me and said, “I’ve got to tell you something. Peter and I broke up.”

  This was exactly how 96 percent of all my masturbatory fantasies of her started.

  “I can’t study right now. I can’t concentrate. I want to do something fun. You want to do something fun?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said, trying to act cool.

  “Some of my friends and I are going down to Rosarito tonight for the Fourth. We rented a hotel room. You should come.”

  She could have said, “Some of my friends are going to shove bottle rockets in our asses and then light them and shoot them at a police station—you should come,” and I would have said yes.

  I told her I needed fifteen minutes to pack my stuff and strutted as calmly as I could out of her house. Then I dashed through the dark to my car, where, with beads of sweat forming at my temples I pressed my foot all the way down on the accelerator. Unfortunately the top speed of my 1986 Oldsmobile Brougham was around fifty-seven miles an hour, so it took me longer than I hoped to get home. I nervously tossed a few shirts, a pair of swim trunks, and every single condom I could find—which was about thirty—in my backpack. I drove back to Stacy’s house and she; her three best girlfriends, who had arrived in my absence; and I hopped in her friend’s Chevy Blazer and took off for Mexico.

  A small Mexican beach town right next to Tijuana, Rosarito is a lot like the bleachers in Fenway Park during a Yankees–Red Sox game: crowded, dirty, and filled with thousands of loud, drunk Americans who haphazardly throw their garbage on the ground. Yet somehow it’s still kind of charming. Rosarito’s biggest draws are that the drinking age is eighteen, and everything is dirt cheap. The five of us spent the ride down the Pacific Coast Highway drinking Tecates and talking excitedly about how drunk we were going to get as soon as we arrived in Mexico.

  “I’m gonna get so fucking wasted,” Stacy’s friend in the passenger seat said. “Justin, are you going to get fucking wasted, or are you gonna be a fag?” she asked, turning to me.

  I wasn’t sure how she decided those were the only two paths to go down this weekend, but I clearly saw the direction she was hoping I would lean toward.

  “I’m getting fucking wasted!” I screamed, trying to match her intensity.

  Apparently I did, because everyone cheered, and then Stacy grabbed my crotch. It was a pretty unsexy move—and sort of hurt—but any interaction my crotch had with Stacy’s hand was welcome.

  A couple hours later, we pulled up to our hotel in Rosarito and checked into our dingy room, which contained only one bed, a bathroom, and three different paintings of a large-breasted Mexican woman being carried off by a Spanish conquistador. We immediately started taking shots of tequila from the bottle we had purchased at the hotel’s gift shop. I went into the bathroom and put one condom in my sock and one in my baseball hat, just in case Stacy and I didn’t make it back to the hotel room. I threw some water on my face, patted my hair into place, and brushed my teeth.

  W
hen I came out of the bathroom, all three of Stacy’s friends were crowded around her, and she was curled up in a ball on the floor, crying hysterically.

  “I miss Peter! I can’t believe we’re fucking broken up!” Stacy sobbed as her friends tried to calm her down.

  Then Stacy got up, ran past me to the bathroom, and vomited in the toilet. For the next day and a half, Stacy sat in the hotel room with her friends, bawling and rehashing every detail of the breakup. A couple times I went out to a bar by myself, stood around for an hour, talked to no one, then went back to our room, which still reeked of vomit.

  On Saturday afternoon, we piled into the Blazer and drove silently back up the coast to the U.S.–Mexico border. Stacy sat next to me the entire time, sleeping. As we crossed the border, I turned my cell phone back on, since I hadn’t had reception in Mexico. It began buzzing to indicate that I had new messages. As I punched in my voice mail access code, it dawned on me that I had forgotten to help my dad with the garden.

  “You have four new messages,” the robotic voice declared. I was half expecting it to add, “You are so fucked.”

  The first message played. “Son, it’s Dad, I need you to pick up something from the Home Depot before you come over. Call me back.”

  “Next message,” the robotic voice mail alerted me as I began to feel nauseous.

  “Son, where the fuck are you? I said to be over at four, right? It’s four-ten. Call me.”

  The next message contained just a few moments of silence, and then the sound of hanging up. I felt a little relieved. Maybe he was over it by now.

  “Next message, received today at three-thirty P.M,” said the robot.

  “WHAT IN THE FUCK IS GOING ON? I stopped by your place and your roommate said you’re in Mexico! Are you in fucking Mexico?! CALL ME!”