I Suck at Girls

by Justin Halpern

  By the time the DJ announced the next song would be the last, most people had been sweating through their tuxedos and dresses for hours, and the whole place smelled like a bathroom stall in a public library. As Dave Matthews’s “Crash” began to play, all my classmates grabbed their partners and made their way to the dance floor—but one look from Vanessa told me I should follow her to the nearest exit and take her home.

  “I’m drunk,” she hiccupped after a few minutes of driving in silence. “I’m sorry I called you a retard. I hope I didn’t ruin your night,” she added. When we arrived at her house, she got out of my mom’s car and walked up her steps without looking back.

  As I sat there in the car watching her front door close behind her, I took a deep breath. It was ten P.M. and my senior prom was the exact opposite of everything I’d hoped. Even in the worst-case scenarios I’d dreamt up, it had all gone wrong because I’d punched out somebody I hated and gotten dragged away by the cops. This was a total letdown.

  I couldn’t let the night end this way. I decided to turn my car around and head back toward the San Diego harbor, where the school-sanctioned, casino-themed after-party was being held at a restaurant called the Bali Hai.

  When I got there, my sophomore history teacher, Mr. Bartess, was standing at the door with a clipboard. He glanced at me, scanned the clipboard, and shook his head.

  “I have you marked as being here already. I’m sorry, no ins and outs. It says so on your ticket. We can’t have people leaving to go do cocaine or something and then coming back in here, on cocaine,” he said.

  “But I haven’t been here. And I don’t do cocaine.”

  “Listen, you might be right, but that also sounds like something someone who left the after-prom to do cocaine would say. That’s why we have no ins and outs, so I don’t have to be the judge.”

  I didn’t have the energy to keep arguing. The muffled sounds of music and laughter inside the Bali Hai drifted away as I walked along the boardwalk, which hovered just ten feet above the glassy ocean surface, back toward the lot where I’d parked. It was pitch-black out, save for the lights of the skyline glowing across the bay.

  As I neared my parking spot, I noticed someone about twenty feet away, struggling to heave a large rock into the water below. When I looked closer, I realized who it was: Michael, the toughest kid on my Little League team, my partner in the greatest homeless man’s porn heist our little suburb had ever seen, and the most fearless person I had ever known. I hadn’t stayed in touch with Michael since those days; all I knew was that he’d been expelled from our high school in tenth grade after he’d gotten into an argument with a classmate, then grabbed the kid’s bicycle, rode it two miles down to the cliffs above the Pacific, and hurled it into the sea.

  “Hey,” I yelled, walking toward him.

  “Fuck you! I’m allowed to throw rocks, dickhead,” he hollered back.

  “No, it’s Justin Halpern,” I said.

  “I know.”

  He set the large rock down onto the concrete and walked toward me. He was wearing a wife-beater and slacks, and had a collared shirt tied around his head like a bandana. His body had leaned out since our Little League days, but his face had hardened, and he looked as intimidating as ever.

  “Is there still a magician in there?” he asked, pointing at the Bali Hai.

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t get in. They said I’d already shown up and wouldn’t let me back in.”

  “Ah, fuck, sorry. I used your name to get in.”

  He grabbed a joint out of his pocket and lit it up. I decided I should probably head out before the combination of Michael and drugs landed me in jail.

  “All right, man. Well, good seeing you,” I said, turning to walk back to my car.

  “Can you find out if that magician is still in there?” he asked.

  “Why?”

  “He was doing some fucking dumb magic trick, trying to make this deck of cards disappear. So he’s like, ‘Does anybody know where my gay deck of cards are?’ and I raised my hand and said, ‘In your pussy.’ Fuckin’ guy had me thrown out.”

  Finding out whether the magician was still at the party seemed easy enough, and I felt a bit proud that Michael was asking me a favor, so I walked back to Mr. Bartess, who confirmed that the magician was still inside. Then I went back and told Michael, who was lying on the jagged rocks between the boardwalk and the ocean, polishing off his joint.

  “I’m going back in there,” Michael said, sitting up quickly. “If you come with me, I’ll sneak you in.”

  “Uh … I don’t know, dude. If they catch us, it wouldn’t be good. I think I’m just gonna go home.”

  “Fine. I’ll go by myself,” he said without hesitation.

  “What if they arrest you or something?” I asked, genuinely wondering whether Michael ever thought things through before he acted.

  “Look. All I know is, that magician thinks I’m his bitch. And I’m not leaving tonight until I tell him he can eat a dick.”

  My gut told me just to leave; I didn’t need this night to get any worse. But I thought about what leaving meant. I’d drive home, crawl into bed, turn off the lights, and that would be the end of prom—and, really, the end of high school. Maybe I hadn’t had the kind of prom they made movies about, but sneaking into the after-party with Michael felt like giving myself one more chance.

  “Okay. Let’s do it,” I said.

  We approached the restaurant, walked around to the back, and waited for one of the kitchen staff to open the service door. When a heavy-set cook in a white smock came out carrying a huge bag of trash, we snuck past him into the kitchen, which was dark and empty. Beyond the dining room door, I could hear the sounds of a crowd.

  “When we get in, we should just hang out in a corner or something for a bit, so no one notices us,” I said.

  “That sounds fuckin’ dumb,” Michael said. With that, he pushed through the kitchen doors into a room filled with makeshift blackjack tables and fake palm fronds. Michael headed straight toward the balding forty-year-old magician, who was surrounded by a dozen of my classmates, all staring at him like they were either on drugs or really into disappearing birds.

  Michael pushed aside a skinny kid and planted himself in front of the magician.

  “Hey, you fucking piece of shit!” Michael yelled.

  The magician and all of the students surrounding him froze, staring at Michael, wondering what would come next.

  “Eat my dick!” Michael yelled.

  The magician’s face turned bright red. He whirled to his right and, before his cape could catch up with his body, screamed for security. Within seconds, two large men with black, puffy EVENT STAFF jackets stormed Michael from behind and grabbed him by the arms. Michael immediately went limp, forcing the guards to drag his lifeless body out of the restaurant as he shouted obscenities. Just as they pulled him through the doorway, he threw both his arms up in triumph and yelled, “Fuck everyone!”

  I glanced around the room and saw that none of my friends were there. They’d probably already checked into hotel rooms somewhere. I was about to leave when I spotted Nicole by the ice-cream bar. She was wearing a long cream-colored dress that perfectly accented her olive skin. As I watched her shake sprinkles onto her soft serve, I realized that my prom night had really started going wrong two weeks before, when I’d wussed out on asking her. Here was my chance to redeem myself. Still reeling from Michael’s scene, I suddenly realized: this could be my Eat a dick! moment. I strode up to Nicole with a sense of purpose I hadn’t felt all night.

  “Hi,” I said, gently tapping her on the shoulder.

  “Oh, hey!” she said, beaming and giving me a hug.

  “How was your night?” I asked.

  “Awesome. How was yours?”

  “Pretty awesome. So, this is going to sound really weird, but I wanted to ask you to prom,” I said.

  As soon as I said it, I felt as if my stomach had dropped out of my pants.

&nb
sp; “You did?”

  “Yeah,” I said, a bit more sheepishly.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because I thought you’d say no and then nobody else would want to go with me because they’d think they were my second choice. But I really should have just asked you, right?”

  It felt good to tell her. Even more than that, my mind filled with fantasies about what her response might be. Even though she wasn’t my official prom date, maybe we could hang out the rest of the night. Maybe we could even start dating. I had my mom’s Oldsmobile Achieva for at least another hour, and it still had a half tank of gas. Maybe Nicole and I could actually get crazy after all.

  “Awwww,” she said sweetly, my heart rate picking up as she smiled at me. “I would have said no, though,” she added.

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m just being honest. You’re not really my type. I wouldn’t have gone to prom with you.”

  Just then, a thin, handsome guy with a goatee came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. He looked old enough to be in college.

  “Ready?” he said softly into her ear.

  Nicole nodded, then gave me another quick hug and left, her fingers entwined in her date’s.

  Nicole’s rejection didn’t sting quite as much as I expected, and the only reason I could figure was because for the first time that night, I had done exactly what I wanted to do.

  You Are Good at Sit Down

  In the fall of 1998 I began my freshman year at San Diego State University, which my dad commonly referred to as “Harvard, without all the smart people.” Even though the campus was only eight miles from my parents’ house and about a fifth of my high school graduating class was also heading to SDSU, I felt like it would be a new adventure and I was excited to begin.

  “I’m pretty sure no one knew who I was in high school,” I said to my best friend Dan, who was also going on to SDSU, as we drove to freshman orientation a few weeks before classes started.

  “I dunno. I think people knew who you were,” Dan said as he merged onto the 8 freeway. “I was telling this guy on my volleyball team that we were both going to State and he was like, ‘Isn’t he that guy who wears sweatpants to school sometimes?’”

  “Ideally I’d like to be known as something other than that.”

  “Who gives a shit about high school? We’re going to be in college now. Nobody knows us here. Girls want to party with crazy dudes. You could be the crazy party guy. Or I could be, and you could be that guy’s friend.”

  The idea that I could entirely change all the things I didn’t like about myself and wipe my slate clean was enticing. Unfortunately, I was going to have to try to do so while living at home, because, despite working all summer, I had less than five hundred dollars to my name when the fall rolled around.

  My mom understood my plight and tried her best to offer up a solution.

  “If you want to make love to a woman in the house, I promise we won’t bother you,” she said one night during dinner when I was a couple weeks into my first semester.

  “Let me add an addendum to that. You find a woman that’ll screw you with your mom next door, you run the fuck the other way,” my dad said.

  Despite my hopes of reinventing myself as a fearless social animal, I spent the first year of college the same way I had spent high school—hanging out with my high school friends and meeting practically no one new. When it came to partying, San Diego State seemed like the major leagues: it was as if every high school had sent its craziest party animals to compete in a tournament. When I did make it to a party, I usually found myself standing to the side, moving only when some incredibly drunk person stumbled toward me and said something like, “I’m gonna pee here. Could you stand in front of me?” Whenever I was given the chance to melt into the walls, I did.

  My friend Ryan, who also attended San Diego State, was similarly frustrated with his freshman year experience, so I was not entirely surprised when, midway through our second semester, he suggested that the two of us get out of Dodge for the summer. Ryan suggested we should take the money we had saved from our job cleaning boats all year and backpack through Europe.

  “Everyone I know who’s gone over there has partied with girls and had a bunch of sex,” Ryan said as we drove home from class one day.

  “How many people do you know that’ve gone over there?” I asked.

  “Hmm. I guess I only know one guy. But that’s what he said.”

  That was good enough for me. And I could think of no better travel companion than Ryan, whom I’d been friends with since I was five years old. He was a grade above me, so it wasn’t until I started college, and found myself in a lot of classes with him, that we became really close. Lean and sinewy, with a mop of so-blonde-it’s-white hair on top of his head, Ryan looks like a cross between a mad scientist and the winner of a surfing competition. He is easily the most positive human being I’ve ever met but also one of the strangest, as evidenced by the time he sat me down in high school and informed me, “There’s a fifty-fifty chance the moon is actually an alien spaceship that’s observing us.” But he could be convincing—at least when it came to more earthly pleasures—and together we booked plane tickets for Europe, leaving in July and returning in early August, along with an unlimited EuroRail pass.

  The night before we left, I excitedly stuffed my suitcase with as many pairs of underwear and condoms as possible. I was still a virgin, but I was pretty sure Europe would put an end to that. I hadn’t been to another country since I was three years old, and I’d spent the whole second semester of my freshman year waiting for this trip. It was going to be the first real adventure of my life, although I stopped referring to it as an “adventure” after my brother told me that was “the pussiest thing I’ve ever heard someone say.” Regardless, I could barely contain my enthusiasm when my parents came into my bedroom as I was cramming a toothbrush into the tiny front pouch of my oversized Jansport backpack.

  “All right, real quick, couple things,” my dad said, sitting down on my desk chair. “You know how I get pissed off when we’re driving around San Diego and some asshole in a rental car doesn’t know where the hell he’s going?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Well, over there, you’re the asshole in the rental. Be respectful of people and their culture, okay? I don’t want to pull you out of a secret prison because you pissed on some sacred monument when you were drunk.”

  “I’ll have Ryan with me,” I said.

  “That guy’s a minor head injury away from eating his own shit. Not much of a case you’re making.”

  “Call us every couple of weeks to let us know you’re okay,” my mom said.

  “I don’t know if there’s always going to be a phone around.”

  “You’re not leading a fucking expedition to Antarctica. Find a phone. Call,” my dad insisted.

  The next day Ryan and I flew from San Diego to London, via New York. After eighteen hours of traveling, just after sunrise, we dropped our packs in our crammed room in a dingy hostel near Trafalgar Square. We grabbed breakfast at a nearby pub, where Ryan studied his copy of Let’s Go Europe like he was going to have to recite it for his Bar Mitzvah.

  “Ibiza!” he said, looking up from the book like he’d uncovered a clue in a murder case.

  “What’s that?” I asked in between forkfuls of overcooked eggs.

  “It’s an island near Spain where I guess people just party twenty-four hours a day,” he explained, as he scanned the book. “Whoa. It says there’s a club on the island where two people just have sex in the middle of the dance floor the whole night,” he added, continuing to read.

  The whole reason I had come to Europe was to go to places like Ibiza, places where letting loose and getting crazy were my only option and I would be forced into the ring. I was in.

  The next few days we toured London, seeing Buckingham Palace, the Tower Bridge, and finally getting into a heated argument with a Londoner after Ry
an suggested that Big Ben should be called Medium Sized Ben, because “it’s not even that big.” After packing in as much sightseeing as we could, we took the Chunnel from London to Paris, where we spent a couple days rushing through museums and eating anything that had butter on it, and from Paris we headed to Switzerland for several days and then Florence.

  When we arrived in Florence, it was a hundred and ten degrees. We checked into our hostel, which consisted of two large rooms packed with twenty bunk beds each, and two bathrooms total. Ryan and I walked through the narrow passageway between the beds, all the way to the back of the room, where the top bunks of two beds were open. On the bottom of Ryan’s bunk lay a very thin Vietnamese man in his early twenties. Despite the oppressive heat, he was wearing a denim jacket, denim jeans, a blue T-shirt with Michael Jordan’s face on it, and a pair of matching blue Chuck Taylor Converse shoes. Beads of sweat covered his forehead, dripping down his face as he lay there. Ryan reached his hand out and introduced himself.

  “Hey, I’m Ry.”

  “Vietnam Joe,” the man said, in a thick accent.

  “Aren’t you kinda hot in all that stuff, Joe?” Ryan asked.

  “Large hot,” Joe said, grabbing a tissue out of his jacket pocket and wiping his forehead.

  “If you’re worried about your jacket getting stolen, I have a lock on my bag—you can put it in there and it’ll be fine,” I said.

  Joe had no reaction, so I pointed at his jacket, then at my bag and my lock.

  “No,” Joe said.

  “I like Joe’s style. Fuck it, it’s hot, but he likes how he looks in his jacket. I understand that,” Ryan said.

  When we left the hostel a few minutes later to go to dinner, Joe walked out with us. He proceeded to follow us, two steps behind, all the way to a nearby restaurant whose menu we couldn’t decipher but whose prices looked affordable.

  “Do you want to have dinner with us, Joe?” I asked.