I Suck at Girls

by Justin Halpern

  “Before shoes and socks?” I asked.

  “Yep. You still have your wedding tuxedo on, you’re just not wearing pants or underwear,” he said, biting into a chocolate glazed donut.

  This was troubling information. As soon as breakfast was over, I got up from the kitchen table and went into my bedroom and closed the door behind me. Then I put on the only suit I owned, and proceeded to remove my pants and underwear, keeping on my shoes and socks and everything from the waist up. Then I looked in the mirror. Of all the disturbing images I’d encountered to that point in my life, that image of my skinny, half-naked body landed somewhere between “when this weird kid Andre in my class turned his eyelids inside out” and “seeing a car run over the head of my neighbor’s cat.”

  I couldn’t stand the idea of someone else seeing me in this compromising position, laughing uncontrollably. But before I took a vow to be a bachelor for life, there was one thing left to do: ask the only person I knew who was married, always honest with me, and never mocked my fears—my mom. I changed out of my suit, threw on my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pajamas, and ran to my parents’ room and knocked on the door. There was no answer and the door was locked. I was fairly sure they were in there, but then again they could have left before I woke up. I went back into the kitchen where my brother Dan was now working on a big bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

  “Do you know if Mom is here? Her door is locked and nobody said anything when I knocked,” I said.

  “Their bedroom door is locked?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just get a screwdriver and pop it open and see if they’re in there. If they’re sleeping they’ll probably want to be woken up so they won’t sleep in too late. You know how Dad hates that,” he replied.

  I should have sensed something was wrong, given my brother’s surprisingly helpful response, but he had a point. My dad did hate sleeping in, and rarely if ever did it. Armed with that reminder, and still panicked at the prospect of my future wife seeing me in half a tuxedo, I ran to the garage and grabbed a screwdriver from my dad’s toolbox.

  The locks in our house were pop locks, easily opened by shoving a flathead screwdriver inside a tiny hole and turning. And so I did.

  When I opened the door, I saw my mom and dad naked in bed together, one big entangled mess of middle-aged limbs and hair. Until that moment I didn’t know what sex looked like, but I knew immediately that this was it. They both turned and looked at me and froze.

  “I’m sorry!” I screamed.

  I slammed the door, ran down the hall, and sought refuge in my bedroom. About five minutes later, my dad opened my door, wearing a black terrycloth robe, his face contorted in the expression you make between the moment when you stub your toe and the moment you say “ow.”

  “Your mom wants me to sit down and tell you what you just saw, but I’m currently not in the mood to give a shit, due to being thrown out of bed because my eight-year-old suddenly turned into Harry fucking Houdini.”

  We stared at each other blankly, each waiting for me to say something. I was still in shock.

  “Well, I’m up, and my morning just took a left turn into a pile of shit, so you might as well tell me what has you picking my lock,” he finally said.

  I hurriedly explained to him my fears about wedding nights and sex and nakedness and the humiliation of having to wear socks and shoes but no pants or underwear.

  “You do realize the irony in this situation, right?” he asked.

  “What’s irony mean?”

  “You wanting to know about married people screwing and then walking in when … No. You’re not back-dooring me into a conversation about this shit.” He ran his fingers through his hair, and blew a deep breath out through his nose.

  “All right. Here’s the deal. You’re eight,” he said.

  “I’m nine,” I said.

  “Do I look like I carry an abacus with your name on it? Cut me some slack here, son.” He took another deep breath and started over. “What I’m trying to say is, you’re just a little kid. I’m going to make you a promise. On your wedding night, you are not going to be able to wait until your wife sees your penis. Half a tuxedo on, no tuxedo on, socks, shoes, you won’t fucking care.”

  “How can you be sure?” I asked.

  “Trust me. You’re going to be staring at your watch, wondering when this wedding is going to be over, so all these people will go on their merry fucking way so that your wife can see your penis.”

  “I will?” I asked, starting to feel comforted.

  “Yep. And if you’re still afraid that your wife is going to see your penis, that means she isn’t the one for you. It also means you got a bunch of fucked-up issues and I totally screwed up, and then I’ll pay for therapy if I have the money. But I probably won’t. Anyway, for now, here’s what the word marriage means: Don’t pick the lock on my bedroom door on Sundays.”

  He got up, padded back down the hallway, and locked his bedroom door behind him.

  You Will Never Screw a Woman Who Looks Like That

  If you discount countless, forgettable chunks of time spent at school, home, and 7-Eleven, I passed most of my waking hours from ages ten through twelve playing baseball and goofing off with friends at the Point Loma Little League fields. Those two adjacent baseball fields were about a mile from my house, and twice a week my team, the San Diego Credit Union Padres, would gather there to practice.

  “You should just be called the Padres, not all that bullshit about credit unions,” my dad said, as he drove me to the field on the opening day of the season when I was eleven years old.

  “But the credit union pays for us to have a team,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, I pay for you to do everything, and you don’t see me making you wear a shirt with my giant goddamned face on it.”

  “That would be a weird shirt,” I said.

  “Please. You wear all kinds of dopey shirts, and—what the fuck am I talking about right here? The shirt’s not real, I’m just making a point. You got your gear?” he asked, pulling up to the field.

  Saturdays were filled with a full lineup of games, all of which the league’s players were required to attend, so my parents could drop me off bright and early and then do whatever they wanted all day until my game. The prospect of a morning to himself was very exciting for my dad.

  “There’s a lot of good teams this year, I think,” I said, continuing our conversation as we arrived at the fields.

  He reached over me and popped open my door.

  “Fascinating. Now out of the car. Vamoose. Out! Out! Have fun and don’t screw with anyone bigger than you. I’ll be in the stands when your game starts,” he said.

  I put my hand up for a high five, and he used that hand to push me out of the car. Then his Oldsmobile screeched away up the street, like he was fleeing the scene of a double homicide.

  When we weren’t playing in a game, most of the Little Leaguers would keep busy playing tag in between the two fields or eating a spicy linguiça sausage made by the local Portuguese family that ran the snack shack above the field.

  Every once in a while, someone would raise talk of venturing into the canyon that sat about fifty yards beyond the outfield fences. We were all scared of the canyon. It was packed with trees that grew so close together their branches became intertwined like a bundle of snakes. The canyon’s ground was muddy, and it emitted an odor that registered somewhere between “maple syrup” and “rest-stop bathroom.” It was a group of cannibals short of being the perfect setting for an Indiana Jones film.

  Every kid you ran into had a different theory about what lurked inside the canyon walls. “My brother found a pile of poo there that he said was too big to be dog poo or cat poo, but not big enough to be human poo. He said it’s probably wolf poo,” said my friend Steven as we waited for the game ahead of us to finish so we could take the field.

  “Your brother’s an idiot,” said Michael, the chubby catcher on my team, who always wore his hat backwar
d, so that the back of it came down right above his dark-green eyes. “A bunch of gays live in there. That’s where they butt-fuck each other.”

  “What? Why wouldn’t they do that at their house?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, I’m not a homo. But if you want to get butt-fucked, go into that canyon,” he responded, inhaling a bite of sausage that would have killed a lesser twelve-year-old.

  At that point in my life, the only two things that scared me were the movie Arachnophobia and that canyon. I tried to never get too close to it, for fear that something might reach out of the forest and pull me in. If I absolutely had to go near to chase an errant throw, my neck would stiffen and my breath would quicken as my body prepared to flee. I decided to run the theories about its inhabitants past my father to see if he had a scientific opinion on the matter.

  “Why would gay people screw each other in a canyon filled with wolves?” my dad asked me as he drove us home after my game, my mom sitting beside him in the passenger seat.

  “No, that’s not what I said. One kid said there were wolves. It was a different kid who said the thing—”

  “Hey, look at me, I’m screwing. My pants are off. Oh shit, there’s an angry fucking wolf. Does that make any goddamn sense to you?”

  “No. But that’s not—”

  “Plus,” my dad interrupted again, “I don’t even think wolves are indigenous to this area. Your school takes field trips. You ever heard them say shit to you about wolves? You gotta think about these things critically, son.”

  “No, I do. I didn’t think that the wolves were—”

  My mom turned to face me in the backseat. “Also, Justy, you know that homosexuals have sex just like heterosexuals do: in the privacy of their homes. Not in the woods.”

  “Although sometimes straight people do screw each other in the woods. Mostly when you’re in high school, though,” my dad added.

  I decided to drop the conversation. But that week, on two consecutive nights, I had nightmares about the canyon. Each involved me finding something terrifying in a clearing at the center. In the first dream, I stumbled upon an aquarium that had a screaming Patrick Swayze trapped inside of it, begging me for help, but I was too scared to approach him. In the second, I was confronted by a large squid that had two or three sets of human legs. After that last dream I shot up out of bed, wide awake. I tried falling back to sleep, but every time I closed my eyes I pictured the canyon, then Swayze, then Squidman.

  Hoping it would relax me, I tiptoed out of my bedroom to grab some water from the kitchen. I was still shaken from the dream, and the shapes of the shadows on the hallway wall looked ominous. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw something move, and I froze in place. It’s just a shadow that looks like a person, I told myself. It’s not a person.

  “What in the hell are you doing?”

  I shrieked like a frightened monkey and jumped back, crashing into the bookcase behind me. As my eyes adjusted I realized that the shadow was my dad, sitting in total darkness in the La-Z-Boy chair that faced the windows to our backyard.

  “Jesus H. Christ. Calm down, son. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “I had a freaky dream,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m sitting in the dark drinking a hot toddy. What the hell does it look like?”

  “Why are you doing that right now? It’s the middle of the night.”

  “Well, contrary to popular fucking belief, I enjoy a little time to myself, so I wake up early so I can have it. Clearly I’m going to have to start waking up earlier.”

  “Oh. Well, sorry. Didn’t mean to bother you,” I said, turning to head back to bed, glass of water forgotten.

  “No apologies necessary,” he said.

  Maybe it was the bourbon in the hot toddy, or the serenity of the darkness all around him, but at that moment my dad seemed uncharacteristically at ease.

  “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 cou
rage. 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.”