Sh*t My Dad Says Read online

  Sh*t My Dad Says

  Halpern, Justin

  Sh*t My Dad Says

  by

  Justin Halpern

  For my dad, mom, Dan, Evan, José, and Amanda Thank you for all your love and support

  Introduction

  “All I ask is that you pick up your shit so you don’t leave your bedroom looking like it was used for a gang bang. Also, sorry that your girlfriend dumped you.”

  When I was twenty-eight years old, I lived in Los Angeles and was in the third year of a long-distance relationship with my girlfriend, who lived in San Diego. Most Fridays I’d sit in traffic for three and a half hours as my 1999 Ford Ranger crawled 126 miles down the I-5 to San Diego. Every once in a while my car would decide to shut off its engine. Meanwhile, its radio was busted, so I only got one station, whose playlist seemed limited to songs from the burgeoning rapper Flo Rida. There’s nothing like merging onto a freeway only to have your engine stop, steering wheel lock, and a deejay scream, “And here’s MY MAN, Flo Rida, with his new hit ‘Right Round’! Let’s get this party started!”

  In short, doing the long-distance thing was wearing on me. So when I received a job offer in May 2009 from Maxim.com that would allow me to work from anywhere, I jumped at the opportunity. I could move down to San Diego and live with my girlfriend. The only hitch in my plan was that my girlfriend was not as excited as I was. And by “not as excited,” I mean to say that when I showed up at her doorstep to deliver the good news in person, she broke up with me.

  Driving away from her house, I realized that not only was I now single, I had no place to live since I had already told my landlord in Los Angeles that I was terminating my lease at the end of the month. Then my engine shut off. As I sat in my car vigorously trying to restart it, it dawned on me that the only people I knew in San Diego who might have room for me were my parents. My stomach started to tense up as I turned the key back and forth in the ignition. It also dawned on me that the family barbecuing on the deck of the house in front of which my car had stalled just might think I was a perv who’d pulled over to pleasure himself. Luckily my car started up within a minute and I sped off for my parents’ house.

  The reason I had become so nervous so quickly was because asking my father for a favor is like arguing a case in front of the Supreme Court: You have to lay out the facts clearly, organize them into an argument, and cite precedents set in previous cases. Shortly after showing up unannounced at my parents’ modest three-bed room house in our San Diego suburb, Point Loma, I was pleading my case before my parents in the living room. I cited My Dad v. My Brother Daniel Halpern, which led to my brother Dan living at home when he was twenty-nine and going through a “transitional phase.” About halfway through my argument, my dad cut me off.

  “It’s fine. Jesus, you didn’t have to go through that whole bullshit song and dance. You know you can stay here. All I ask is that you pick up your shit so you don’t leave your bedroom looking like it was used for a gang bang,” he said. “Also, sorry that your girlfriend dumped you.”

  The last time I had lived at home was ten years prior, During my sophomore year at San Diego State University. At the time, both my parents worked—my mother, as a lawyer for a nonprofit; and my father, in nuclear medicine at the University of California–San Diego—so I didn’t see them very often. Ten years later, my mom was still working full-time, but my seventy-three-year-old dad had retired and was around the house. All. Day. Long.

  After my first night back home, I crawled out of bed at around 8:30 A.M. and set up my “office” (read: my laptop) in the living room, where my dad was watching TV, to begin writing my first column. Michael Jackson had just died, and I was working on a comic portraying Jesus overlooking the pedophile charges against Michael Jackson and letting him into Heaven anyway, because he was such a fan of the King of Pop. (My editor later pointed out that it should have been Saint Peter ushering M.J. through the gates of Heaven, but that’s beside the point.) My dad had a hard time understanding that someone sitting in his pajamas and searching through Google images for silly pictures of Jesus Christ was working. So he treated me like I wasn’t.

  “Why the fuck is Wolf Blitzer talking to me about Michael Jackson?” he barked. “The president is in fucking Russia trying to get those sons of bitches to stop with the nukes, and he’s talking to me about Michael Jackson? Fuck you, Wolf Blitzer!”

  Every so often throughout the rest of the day, my dad would get fired up about something, bound into the living room from the kitchen or front yard or wherever he’d been, and shout something like, “Are you putting ketchup on that hamburger I made you?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Why? What the fuck do you mean, why? That’s a gourmet hamburger. This ain’t some horseshit you cook. I spent time on that. Next time, I make shit for you.”

  It was good to be home.

  For as long as I’ve known him, my father has been a blunt individual. When I was little, I mostly felt terrified of him, so I couldn’t appreciate that I was dealing with the least passive-aggressive human being on the planet. Now, as an adult, all day long I dealt with people—friends, coworkers, relatives—who never really said what they were thinking. The more time I spent with my dad in those first couple months back home, the more grateful I started to feel for the mixture of honesty and insanity that characterized his comments and personality.

  One day I was on a walk with him and my dog, Angus, who was sniffing around in a bush outside a neighbor’s house. My dad turned to me and said, “Look at the dog’s asshole.”

  “What? Why?”

  “You can tell by the dilation of his asshole that he’s going to shit soon. See. There it goes.”

  It was at that moment, as my dog emptied his bowels in my neighbor’s yard and my dad stood there proudly watching his prediction come true, that I realized how wise, even prophetic, he really is.

  I took that quote and posted it as my instant messenger away status that evening. And every day after that, I’d take one funny remark my dad said and use it to update my status. When one of my friends suggested I create a Twitter page to keep a record of all the crazy things that come out of his mouth, I started “Shit My Dad Says.” For about a week, I had only a handful of followers—a couple friends who knew my dad and thought he was a character. Then one day I woke up to find that a thousand people were following me. The next day, ten thousand. Then fifty thousand. Then one hundred, two hundred, three hundred thousand, and suddenly a picture of my dad’s face and his quotes were popping up everywhere. Literary agents were calling, wanting to represent me; TV producers were inviting me onto their shows; and reporters were asking for interviews.

  My first thought was: This is not good. The emotion that followed can only be described as sheer panic.

  To illustrate how much my father hates any kind of public attention, let me share his opinion of contestants who compete on Jeopardy! My dad’s a well-read, educated guy, and one evening when I was watching Jeopardy! he strolled into the living room and correctly answered every question Alex Trebek posed. “Dad, you should totally go on Jeopardy!,” I said.

  “Are you fucking kidding me? Look at those people. They have no fucking respect for themselves. No dignity. Going on a reality show like that, it sickens me.”

  I knew I had to tell my dad that I had been posting his quotes and quips online and now had publishers and TV studios interested in adaptations of the material. But before I did, I figured I’d call my oldest brother, Dan, with the hope that he would tell me I was blowing the situation out of proportion and that our dad would be fine with it.

  “Holy shit, you did what?” Dan said to me, in between giant belly laughs. “Dude, Dad is going to—I don’t even know what Dad
’s going to do. You better be prepared to leave his house. Like, if I were you, I’d pack up my stuff beforehand, fugitive-style. Only important belongings that can be carried with one arm.”

  I decided to take a walk around the block and gather my thoughts before I confronted my father. A walk around the block turned into a few miles around the block, and as I was finally heading back toward the house an hour later, I spotted him sitting on our front porch looking like he was in a good mood. I figured it was now or never.

  “Hey, Dad, I have to tell you something . . . weird,” I said, tentatively sidling up next to him on a nearby deck chair.

  “You have to tell me something weird, huh? What is weird that you have to tell me?” he replied.

  “So, there’s this thing called Twitter,” I said.

  “I know what Twitter is, goddamn it. You talk to me like I don’t know what shit is. I know what it is. You have to start up the Internet to get on Twitter,” he said, making the universal sign for turning a key in the ignition when he said the words “start up the Internet.”

  I laid it all out there: the Twitter page, the hundreds of thousands of followers, the news articles, the book publishers, the TV producers, all of it. He sat quietly and listened. Then he laughed, stood up, ironing out his pants with his hands, and said, “Have you seen my cell phone? Can you call it? I can’t find it.”

  “So you’re . . . cool with all this? You’re cool with me writing a book, the quotes, everything?” I asked.

  “What do I give a fuck? I don’t care what people think of me. Publish whatever you want. I just got two rules: I’m not talking to anyone, and whatever money you get, keep. I got my own fucking money. I don’t need yours,” he said. “Now, call my cell phone, goddamn it.”

  Never Assume That Which You Do Not Know

  “Well, what the fuck makes you think Grandpa wants to sleep in the same room as you?”

  In the summer of 1987, when I was six years old, my cousin got married on a farm in Washington state. My family lived in San Diego, and my dad decided there was no way he was paying a thousand dollars for himself, my mother, my two brothers, and me to fly up the coast.

  “Why am I going to pay two hundred dollars so a six-year-old can see a wedding?” he said to my mother. “You think that’s a moment Justin cares about? Two years ago he was still shitting in his pants. If everyone has to go, we’re driving.”

  And so we did. I squished in between my two older brothers—Dan, who was sixteen at the time, and Evan, fourteen and gangly—in the backseat of our ’82 Thunderbird. My mom rode shotgun, and my dad took the wheel as we began the 1,800-mile trip up to Washington. We made it about four miles before my brothers and I started tormenting one another, which mostly consisted of them hitting me and saying stuff like, “How come you’re sitting like a gay? I bet it’s ’cause you’re a gay.” My dad dramatically swerved off to the side of the road, tires squealing in our wake, and whipped his head around to the three of us.

  “You listen to me. I’m not going to deal with any of your bullshit, understand? We will all behave like human fucking beings.”

  But we didn’t. There was no way we could have. This wasn’t a situation that “human fucking beings” were built for. We were five people, three of us males under the age of seventeen, sitting a half-inch from one another for sixteen hours a day as the seemingly endless highway inched by. This was not a normal sightseeing family vacation. It was like we were running from the law: We drove all day and all night, growing more and more sweaty and on edge by the hour, with my dad regularly making desperate comments to himself like, “We just gotta fucking get there, it can’t be that much farther.”

  More than a day and a half later, after twenty-four hours of driving, we made it to Olympia, Washington, where we met our extended family in the lobby of a hotel. In total, about sixty of us Halperns were staying there, including my ninety-year-old grandpa, my dad’s father. A quiet but tough guy, he hated when people made a big deal about him. He had run a tobacco farm in Kentucky until he was seventy-five, and just because he was older now, he wasn’t about to start accepting help where, in his opinion, it wasn’t necessary.

  My family had reserved a block of hotel rooms, each to be shared by two people, but no one had been assigned to a specific room yet. My brothers quickly decided they would share a room with each other, and my mom and dad would obviously share one, which left me without a partner. For some reason, all my adult relatives thought “it would just be so cute” if I shared a room with Grandpa. Grandpa had stayed with us in San Diego before, and I remembered that he always kept a bottle of Wild Turkey in his room, and would clandestinely take a swig from time to time. Once when my brother Dan caught him in the act, Grandpa shouted, “You got me!” and then laughed hysterically. I also remembered that he needed help getting out of bed but got really angry when anyone tried to assist him. There was no way I wanted to share a room with Grandpa, but I kept my concerns to myself because I figured my family would hate me for being so unfriendly.

  So, like any six-year-old who doesn’t want to do something, I faked being sick, which attracted a lot more attention to me. Upon hearing that I wasn’t feeling well, my aunts hurried me down the carpeted hallway to my parents’ room and burst into it like it was an episode of ER.

  “Okay, everyone calm down, goddamn it. Now leave, so I can check out the boy,” my dad shouted. My aunts cleared out, leaving the two of us alone. He looked me in the eye and felt my forehead with his hand.

  “You say you’re sick, huh? Well, it looks like you’ve come down with a case of bullshit. You ain’t sick. What’s the problem here? We just drove a goddamned continent, and I’m tired. Spit it out.”

  “Everybody wants me to share a room with Grandpa, but I don’t want to,” I replied.

  “Well, what the fuck makes you think Grandpa wants to sleep in the same room as you?”

  I hadn’t thought about that. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, let’s go ask him.”

  We walked down the hallway to the room Grandpa had staked out. He was busy getting ready for bed.

  “Look here, Dad. Justin doesn’t want to share a room with you. What do you think about that?”

  I cowered behind my dad’s leg, as he kept shoving me away toward my grandfather to make me face him. Grandpa looked me in the eye for a second.

  “Well, I don’t want to share a room with him, neither. I want my own room,” he said.

  My dad turned and looked at me like he had just uncovered the missing clue in a murder case. “There you have it,” he said. “Apparently you’re no goddamned peach, either.”

  On Toilet Training

  “You are four years old. You have to shit in the toilet. This is not one of those negotiations where we’ll go back and forth and find a middle ground. This ends with you shitting in a toilet.”

  On My First Day of Kindergarten

  “You thought it was hard? If kindergarten is busting your ass, I got some bad news for you about the rest of life.”

  On Accidents

  “I don’t give a shit how it happened, the window is broken. . . . Wait, why is there syrup everywhere? Okay, you know what? Now I give a shit how it happened. Let’s hear it.”

  On My Seventh Birthday Party

  “No, you can’t have a bouncy house at your birthday party. . . . What do you mean why? Have you ever thought to yourself, where would I put a goddamned bouncy house in our backyard? . . . Yeah, that’s right, that’s the kind of shit I think about, that you just think magically appears.”

  On Talking to Strangers

  “Listen up, if someone is being nice to you, and you don’t know them, run away. No one is nice to you just to be nice to you, and if they are, well, they can go take their pleasant ass somewhere else.”

  On Table Manners

  “Jesus Christ, can we have one dinner where you don’t spill something? . . . No, Joni, he does do it on purpose, because if he doesn’t, that means he’s
just mentally handicapped, and none of the tests showed that.”

  On Crying

  “I had no problem with you crying. My only concern was with the snot that was coming out of your nose. Where does that go? On your hands, your shirt? That’s no good. Oh, Jesus, don’t start crying.”

  On Spending the Night at a Friend’s House for the First Time

  “Try not to piss yourself.”

  On Being Teased

  “So he called you a homo. Big deal. There’s nothing wrong with being a homosexual. . . . No, I’m not saying you’re a homosexual. Jesus Christ. Now I’m starting to see why this kid was giving you shit.”

  On Feeling Comfortable in One’s Own Skin

  “It’s my house. I’ll wear clothes when I want to wear clothes, and I’ll be naked when I want to be naked. The fact that your friends are coming over shortly is inconsequential to that—aka I don’t give a shit.”

  A Man’s House Is His House

  “This is my house, goddamn it! I gotta defend MY house!”

  When I was seven years old, my dad invited me into his bedroom to show me his Mossberg shotgun. “Here’s the trigger, here’s the loading mechanism, here’s the sight so you can see whatever the fuck you’re shooting, and here’s how you hold it,” he said, cradling the gun. “Now, don’t ever fucking touch it.”

  The reason that my dad kept a shotgun on top of the cabinet above his bed was because he was convinced that we were always just about to be robbed. “We have a lot of shit in this house. People want that shit. I do not want them to get our shit. Make sense?” It did, but to my dad, anyone making noise inside our house after 1:00 A.M. was likely a burglar. I never understood where his anxiety came from, because we lived in a suburb. I once asked him about it, and he responded simply, “I came from a different time.”