The third seat was next to a red-haired girl I’d never seen before. She had a smattering of freckles across her face and a button nose that made her look like she’d been created by a Disney animator. I didn’t like girls—not because I thought they were gross or had cooties, but for the same reason I didn’t like underwear: they seemed unnecessary and mildly annoying. But this seat appeared to be the least of the three evils, so I headed in that direction and slung my backpack over the chair. My red-haired classmate turned and smiled at me, and for some reason, I was taken aback. I tried to greet her, but my brain couldn’t decide whether to say “hi” or “hello.”
“Halo,” I spluttered.
“Hi. I’m Kerry Thomason,” she replied brightly.
That was all she said to me that day, but it was enough to make my stomach feel a little queasy. I didn’t know why, but I wanted Kerry to pay attention to me. And, as the weeks went on, it seemed like antagonizing her was the best and most fun way to get her to do so. I spent that first week poking her sides with my pencil eraser, stealing her My Little Pony–themed Trapper Keeper, and generally doing anything I could to get her to notice me, except for actually speaking to her. The only words she said to me that week were “please stop,” and that only made me want to keep doing whatever I was doing.
About two weeks into the school year, I finally pushed my luck too far. I brought into school a drawing I had spent half the night and a full carton of crayons creating and plopped it down on Kerry’s desk before the first bell rang. She took one look at it and burst into tears. At the first sound of crying, Mrs. Vanguard popped her head up from her prepackaged weight-loss meal and rushed over to Kerry. She was asking Kerry what was wrong when she saw the drawing—and gasped in horror.
She turned to me and asked, “Did you do this?”
“Yes?” I responded hesitantly as I began to realize that my plot to impress Kerry might not come off as planned.
“That is disgusting,” Mrs. Vanguard said. She grabbed my arm above the elbow, her fingers cutting off my circulation, and walked me straight down the hall to the principal’s office.
I had never seen the inside of the principal’s office before, but I’d always imagined it would be like a king’s chamber in a palace, complete with fresh bowls of fruit, a throne, and a small disfigured man who did all the principal’s bidding. Instead, the waiting room was disappointing: a drab ten-by-ten room featuring a framed poster of a bodybuilder struggling to deadlift a huge weight bar, captioned with the slogan BELIEVE IN YOURSELF AND ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE. Mrs. Vanguard dumped me in a metal folding chair next to a desk, behind which sat the principal’s secretary, a short, squat woman in her sixties with a huge nose and ears like a fifty-year-old prizefighter. She looked at me and shook her head, and it was at that moment that I realized I was in pretty big trouble. I managed to keep my composure until Mrs. Vanguard said, “We’re going to call your parents, Justin.”
“No! Please, no,” I said, starting to cry and shaking my head in fear like someone pleading with a killer for his life. She stepped out of the office, and when the door shut behind her it was so quiet that I could hear my heart pounding in unison with the ticking of the wall clock. The secretary consulted her ledger, picked up the phone, punched a few numbers, and said, “Can I speak to Mr. Halpern, please? It’s about his son.”
The hours that followed were some of the longest of my life. Every time I heard approaching footsteps, I was sure they belonged to my parents, and my muscles tensed in fear. As frightened as I was, though, I also found myself thinking about Kerry. I didn’t want her to see I’d been crying, so I dried my tears with the backs of my hands and used my shirt cuffs to wipe the snot that was running down my nose. I thought about how she smiled at me on the first day of class. I thought about how I liked the way she dotted her I’s with hearts, and the way she sneered at me every time she came back from the bathroom and I asked her if she had taken a poo. I thought about Kerry so intently during those two hours that I almost forgot how terrified I was that my parents were coming.
And then the door opened, and my dad entered. I had prayed my mom would arrive first, but she was never as punctual as my dad. He was carrying his brown leather briefcase, and his eyebrows were like two tiny arrows pointing almost straight down toward his nose. He was not happy.
“Okay, I’m here. What in hell is going on?” he asked, looking at me and then the principal’s secretary.
I sat quietly, staring at the ground, avoiding eye contact with my father.
“Hi, Mr. Halpern. Thank you for coming,” the secretary said.
“Yeah, no problem. Just a thirty-five-mile drive in the middle of my workday. Goddamn pleasure.”
The secretary shot me a look, a silent cry for help. I glanced back at the floor; she was on her own.
“Uh . . . well . . . Justin acted incredibly inappropriately in class, and his teacher had no choice but to remove him,” she said.
“Ah, hell. What’d he do? He pull out his pecker and show it to somebody?” my dad asked.
“Uh, no,” the secretary said, between deep breaths. “His teacher will be with you shortly. She can explain,” she added quickly.
My dad plopped himself down in a chair directly across from mine, so that he could focus his intense stare on me without any obstruction, and silently mouthed the words “You’re in deep shit, chief.” I don’t think I saw him blink or look away once. A few minutes later, when my mom entered the small office, the secretary stood up from behind her desk, reopened the door, and walked us back down the hallway to my classroom. With every step my throat tightened. It was recess, so my classmates were playing outside; at least Kerry wouldn’t be privy to my humiliation. When we got to the classroom Mrs. Vanguard was sitting behind her big wooden desk, and she motioned for us to sit down in front of her. As my mom and I quietly took our seats, my dad wrestled to squeeze himself into one of the tiny chairs. Finally he just said “Screw it” and sat on top of the desk.
“Mr. and Mrs. Halpern, this morning Justin gave this drawing he made to a girl he sits next to in class,” my teacher said, sliding a piece of lined paper across the table to my mom and dad.
My parents both leaned in to examine it. My mom took one look and let out a sigh in disappointment. My dad leaned in for a closer look.
“Jesus, what the hell kind of drawing is this?” he said.
It was a crude drawing of a smiling, female stick figure with red hair and a T-shirt that read “Kerry.” Above Kerry’s head was a yellow dog. Those two elements alone, of course, would not have caused a problem. Unfortunately, there was a third element to the drawing: a shower of large brown clumps raining down from the yellow dog’s rear onto Kerry’s face. And just in case the viewer wasn’t sure how Kerry felt about that, a thought bubble protruding from her head read, “I like it.”
“It’s very upsetting,” my teacher said.
“Why is the dog above her head? That doesn’t even make sense. How’d he get above her head?” he asked, turning to me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You have to draw a hill or something under the dog. A dog can’t just float up into the atmosphere and take a shit on someone’s head. I mean, I know you’re six or seven or whatever, but that’s pretty basic physics right there,” he said.
“Mr. Halpern, that’s really not the issue,” my teacher said.
“I dunno, seems like a pretty big issue to me. At least we know we can cross artist off the list,” he said.
“Sam, let her talk,” my mom said, sternly. My dad leaned back, mumbled, “Not the issue, my ass,” then sat silently. I listened as Mrs. Vanguard chronicled my behavior toward Kerry over the past two weeks, behavior she felt bordered on harassment. Without proper discipline, she told my parents, she feared I might turn dangerous. I wasn’t sure what my feelings about Kerry meant, but as I listened to Mrs. Vanguard and recalled how I’d made Kerry cry, I suddenly felt terrible.
“Excuse me for sayi
ng this,” my mom interrupted, “but I think you may have the wrong idea. It seems pretty clear what this is.”
“And what would that be?” my teacher asked.
“He’s sweet on her,” my dad responded. “Jesus H. I woulda figured you see this kind of stuff all the time. Look, trust me, I know the kid can be dopey as all hell. I caught him eating a sandwich on the shitter just a month ago. But he’s a sweet kid. He’s not goddamn Manson.”
My teacher sat there speechless until my mom broke the silence by assuring her that they would take me home at once and talk to me about my inappropriate behavior.
“We’ll make sure this stops,” she said.
I rode home with my mom, since my dad announced he’d just had his car cleaned and wished to keep it “booger-free for as long as fucking possible.”
As she pulled into our driveway, my mom told me to go to my room and wait for her and my dad. About ten minutes later they both appeared. My mom sat next to me on my bed. My dad grabbed a chair, shook the Legos off it onto the ground, and sat down.
“Justy, do you know why you can’t draw pictures like the one your teacher showed us?” she started.
“Yes. Dogs can’t fly above people’s heads,” I said.
“No, honey, that’s not why,” my mom said.
“Well, that’s part of the reason why,” my dad said.
“No, Sam, you’re confusing him.”
“He’s confusing me. He’s got dogs flying around, people wearing fuckin’ T-shirts with their names on them, like everybody works at a goddamn auto shop. All I’m saying is, there’s multiple problems at work here. Let’s not condone some fantasyland where—”
“Sam!”
My dad went silent and nodded.
“Do you like sitting next to Kerry?” my mom asked.
I nodded yes.
“All right. Well, from now on, if you like somebody, you don’t do mean things to them, even if they seem like they don’t like you back,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Lots of people will like you back in your life, Justy,” my mom said, giving me a hug and then getting up to leave. “For today, though, you need to sit in your room and think about what we talked about.”
My mom left the room, and a moment later my dad stood up to do the same. Just as he was about to close the door, though, I felt the need to apologize.
“I’m sorry I made Kerry cry,” I said.
He turned around and looked me in the eye.
“I know you are. When you’re sweet on a woman, you do crazy shit. It happens. You ain’t used to feeling that way about somebody.”
“I feel that way sometimes about Mom,” I said.
“What? No you don’t. Jesus, that’s the creepiest goddamn thing you’ve ever said to me,” he said, as he started to close the door.
“Wait,” I said.
My dad stopped once again.
“Yeah?”
“What do I do now?” I said.
“What do you do with what?” he said.
“With Kerry.”
“Jack shit. You’re seven.”
When You’re Married, Your Wife Sees Your Penis
When I was little, my two favorite things were Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal and learning new words. I was obsessed with expanding my vocabulary. Every time I heard a word I didn’t recognize, I’d ask the nearest adult what it meant. No one had a more extensive vocabulary than my father, who spent a lot of time reading with me each night to indulge my thirst for language.
“My teacher says someday I’m going to know as many words as you do,” I told him one night as we sat at the dinner table after I aced an oral test in my third-grade English class.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but your teacher is full of dog shit. I practice medicine, which opens up my vocabulary to thousands of words you will never encounter. I know a hundred goddamn ways to talk about blood vessels,” he said, grabbing a bowl full of green beans and spooning a few onto his plate.
“That’s really cool,” I said.
“It’s not cool. It makes my head want to explode. It’s like a garage filled with useless shit. It ain’t how many words you know, it’s how you use them.”
A couple days after that conversation, my dad was appointed head of his department, nuclear medicine, at the University of California, San Diego.
“So now you’re the boss!” I said when he told my family the news over a spaghetti dinner.
I looked at my mom, expecting her to be excited, but she just looked tense and unhappy.
“Being the boss ain’t always a good thing,” my dad said as he took a sip of red wine.
“Why not?” I asked.
“You like playing baseball, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, what if the coach quit one day and they made you coach because no one else wanted to do it? So you’d have to coach the team instead of being able to play, and then you’d have to sit and do all the bullshit that comes with coaching.”
“Coach likes being the coach.”
“That’s because he’s an asshole who’s trying to live out his dreams through that kid of his, who’s five years away from a fucking heroin addiction because his dad’s a psycho.”
“Sam, you know he’s going to repeat that,” my mom said.
“Don’t repeat that,” he said to me. “Anyway, my point is, I became a doctor to practice medicine and help people. Now I gotta sit in an office and do paperwork. Not your problem, it just means you’re not going to see a lot of me.”
After that, my dad started leaving for work before I woke and arriving back home after 9:00 p.m. He worked a full day most Saturdays, too. Sunday was his only day off, but even then he often went in to the office. Nevertheless, no matter how late it was when he walked through our front door or how tired he was, he would grab my favorite book, J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit, and call me into the living room, flip on a lamp next to our brown fabric couch, sit down right next to me, where he’d read to me or I’d read to him. Whenever I encountered a word I didn’t understand, I’d stop and ask him what it meant. One night, while I was reading to him, he started laughing.
“This might just be because I’m tired as hell, but you know what I just realized?” he asked.
“What?”
“Nobody ever gets laid in these Hobbit books. This thing spans Bilbo’s whole goddamn life, but the guy never gets laid. Not once. No sex,” he said.
“Bilbo doesn’t have any kids,” I said.
“What does that have to do with anything?” he asked.
“Well, if he had sex, then he’d have kids.”
My dad let out a huge, long belly laugh.
“Jesus Christ. Thank God it doesn’t work like that. I’d have populated fucking Rhode Island.”
I didn’t understand why my dad was laughing, and I was insulted by his mockery.
“You get married and then, if you want, you have sex and have kids,” I said, firmly.
“If you want? Ha. Shit, don’t tell your mother that or I’d never get laid. I don’t think you know what marriage means,” he said, laughing again.
“I know what it means. That’s, like, a first-grade word. I’ve known what it means for a long time,” I scoffed.
“I’m fairly certain you haven’t the faintest goddamn clue, trust me,” he replied.
“Fine. Then tell me what it means,” I demanded.
“Son, I just worked fifteen hours, and I’m dog tired, and you don’t have a single hair on your balls. I think that conversation can wait until one of those things changes.”
The next day at school, as I sat in the cafeteria unpacking my lunch, I told my best friend, Aaron, what my dad had said about sex and marriage and asked him what he knew about the relationship between the two. A slender kid with shaggy brown hair and pasty white skin, Aaron grew up a few blocks from me. He had HBO, which instantly made him an expert about sex as far as I was concerned. He put down his Cheetos and wiped his
hands on his University of Michigan Fab 5 basketball shirt.
“I can’t believe you don’t know this,” Aaron said. “On the night you get married, you have to have sex, otherwise it doesn’t count as getting married. It has nothing to do with babies,” he added.
“I already knew that it didn’t count unless you had sex. I already knew that,” I lied.
“You’re supposed to start kissing your wife, then she takes your penis and she puts it in her, and you have sex,” he said.
“Does she see your penis?” I asked, panic creeping into my chest.
“No. They just put their hand down there and grab it, but they can’t look at it and see it unless you tell them they can,” Aaron answered.
I’m not sure if it was an adverse reaction to the fact that my dad often walked around our house in the nude like a Playboy playmate in Hefner’s mansion, or if I was just self-conscious about my body, but there was nothing I hated more than the thought of someone seeing me naked. Not skinning my knees. Not pooping in public restrooms. Nothing.
My brothers were usually my go-to for information, and even though they almost always made up ridiculous answers to my questions in an effort to make me look stupid, I still went back to the well time after time. One Sunday morning, over breakfast, I asked them about the wedding night ritual. My brother Dan, who was well acquainted with my fear of nudity, was the first to weigh in.
“There’s a little more to it than that,” he said. “Basically, you stand in one corner of the room, and she stands in the other. You each take off one piece of clothing at a time. Pants and underwear go first,” he said.
“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.
More Sh*t My Dad Says Page 2