Sh*t My Dad Says

by Justin Halpern

  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.”

  “What time was that, Dad?”

  “I don’t fucking know, a different one. Jesus, stop asking me questions and just be thankful I give a shit.”

  Despite his ever-present fear of burglars, my father likes to get comfy when he goes to bed. Meaning that he always sleeps naked. And when he’s naked, he looks like something that pops up from behind a bush in a Jim Henson film and starts singing: superhairy, with eyebrows that defy gravity.

  One night shortly after he showed me his shotgun, my dad awoke to hear a rumbling in the kitchen at about 1:45 A.M. He immediately grabbed his gun from over the bed, told my mom to stay put, and walked bare-ass naked toward the noise, gun out in front, hand on the trigger. I woke up when I heard him clomp past my door, and peeped my head out of my bedroom just in time to see him get down on all fours with his shotgun and army-crawl toward the door that led to the kitchen. My dad stopped in the middle of the hallway, then aimed his shotgun at the closed door and yelled, “Come through this door, and I’ll fucking kill you!”

  Inside the kitchen was my mom’s sister, Aunt Jeanne, who was staying with us, and, unaware of the 1:00 A.M. burglar rule, had decided to fix herself a late-night snack. Upon hearing his threat, she opened the door, spotted my father naked on the floor, with a shotgun pointed at her and his exposed rear reflecting the light from the kitchen. She ran past him into her room and slammed the door. My dad assumed she was just afraid of the burglar and remained agitated.

  Oblivious to what was going on outside her bedroom, my mom called 911. “Sam! The police are on the way! Put your gun down and your clothes on!” she hollered from the other side of the house.

  “Fuck that, I ain’t doing either! This is my house, goddamn it! I gotta defend MY house!” he yelled back.

  The police finally showed up, determined that there had been no foul play, and encouraged my father to put his clothes on and disarm himself.

  The next morning my brothers, my parents, and I sat silently at the breakfast table. When my aunt came out of her room for the first time since she had retreated from my naked, gun-wielding father, she was not talkative, either. Just in case I hadn’t realized what had happened, my brother Dan leaned over and whispered to me, “She saw Dad’s wiener, then he tried to kill her.”

  My dad turned to us and said in a serious tone, “I guess I should fill you in on what happened last night. No one broke into the house. BUT, remember, a man’s house is his house.”

  He took one last bite of Grape-Nuts and chirped, “Okay, gotta go to work.”

  On Chivalry

  “Give your mother the front seat…. I don’t give a shit if she said you could have it, that’s what she’s supposed to do, and you’re supposed to say, ‘No, I insist.’ You think I’m gonna drive around with my wife in the backseat and a nine-year-old in the front? You’re a crazy son of a bitch.”

  On Candy

  “Jesus Christ, one fucking Snickers bar, and you’re running around like your asshole is on fire. Okay, outside you go. Don’t come back in until you’re ready to sleep or shit.”

  On Going Away to Camp

  “Relax, it’ll be fine. You’ll build fires, set up tents, sleep outside, it’ll be fun…. Oh, it’s basketball camp? Huh. Well, cross out that shit I said you were gonna do and just replace it with ‘play basketball,’ I guess.”

  On Summer Vacation

  “Watching TV all day is not an option. If this were Let’s Make a Deal, that would not be behind one of the doors to choose from.”

  On Off-Limits Zones in Hide-and-Go-Seek

  “What the fuck are you doing in my closet? Don’t shush me, it’s my fucking closet.”

  On Sportsmanship

  “You pitched a great game, you really did. I’m proud of you. Unfortunately, your team is shitty…. No, you can’t go getting mad at people because they’re shitty. Life will get mad at them, don’t worry.”

  On Getting in Trouble at School

  “Why would you throw a ball in someone’s face?…Huh. That’s a pretty good reason. Well, I can’t do much about your teacher being pissed, but me and you are good.”

  On Making a Christmas List

  “You ranked the twenty-five presents you want, in order of how much you want them? Are you insane? I said tell me what you want for Christmas, not make a fucking college football poll.”

  On Waterslides

  “You go on ahead. I’d rather not be shot out of a tube into a pool filled with a bunch of nine-year-olds’ urine.”

  On Packing My Own Lunch

  “You have to pack a sandwich. It can’t just be cookies and bullshit…. No, I said if you packed it yourself, you could pack it how you want it, not pack it like a moron.”

  It’s Important to Behave Oneself

  “Fucking hell! All I asked, goddamn it, was that you sit still for a couple hours while I lectured on thyroid cancer!”

  When I turned ten, my mom decided she wanted to go to law school. My dad was supportive of her career goals, even though they meant that he’d have to assume more of the responsibility of watching me.

  “Me and you are gonna be spending more time together, but a lot of that time, I’m going to be working, and I’m going to need you to not talk and entertain yourself,” he explained to me after my mother showed us her first semester’s class schedule.

  Like a lot of kids, I never really understood what my dad did for a living. All I knew was that it was called “nuclear medicine” and that he often came home from work tired and irritable. On a couple weekday afternoons before my mom went back to school for her law degree, she’d been unable to watch me and had dropped me off at the V.A., which was one of the hospitals my dad worked at. On each occasion, he’d come out of his office to greet me, hand me a Snickers bar from his pocket, then walk me into a spare, unoccupied office near his.

  “I got a couple more hours of work, so, you know, just sit here for a bit,” he’d say.

  Inevitably, I’d try to get him to nail down a specific time frame. “Is two hours the longest I’ll be here, or could it be longer?” I’d ask.

  “I don’t know, son, I’m not a fucking psychic. I promise you as soon as I’m done, we’ll leave, and I’ll buy you an ice cream.”

  Then he’d look around the office and find a magazine for me to read.

  “Here, you can take a look at the New England Journal of Medicine. Lots of interesting stuff in there.”

  Once my mom got into the thick of her
law school classes, my dad had to pick up more and more of her slack, and I spent frequent afternoons counting down the minutes until he and I could leave the hospital and head home. Weekends were usually fine, because I could go to a friend’s house, but on one particular weekend my mom was busy preparing for a test, and my dad had to give a speech to a hundred doctors, and none of my friends or family could watch me.

  “I think we can just leave him at the house. He’ll be fine,” my dad said to my mom.

  “Sam, I’m not leaving him alone here by himself. He’s ten,” my mom replied.

  “Fine, I’ll take him, goddamn it.”

  I hopped into my dad’s Oldsmobile and we headed up to the University of California–San Diego campus. He didn’t say much as he was driving, but I could see he was annoyed. As we pulled up to the lecture hall, he turned to me and said, “I need you to be well behaved, you understand? No bullshit.”

  “Can I draw stuff?” I asked.

  “What does that mean? What would you draw? I don’t want one of these guys walking up to you and you’re drawing two dogs fucking or something. I gotta be professional here.”

  “I don’t know how to draw that. I just draw airplanes,” I said.

  He opened up his black leather briefcase, grabbed a piece of lined notepad paper and a multicolored pen, and handed them to me. We got out of the car, and I followed him through the glass doors of a big university building and through the lobby to a lecture hall that was filled with doctors, all of whom seemed to know my dad. He introduced me to a few people and then took me over to the back row of chairs that stood about a hundred feet from the stage and podium at the front of the room.

  “Okay, here’s your seat. Here’s a king-size Snickers. If you start to get sleepy, eat it,” he said, giving me a candy bar the size of my forearm. “All right. I gotta go do my shit.”

  The doctors filed into the rows, took their seats, and the conference started. My dad sat up onstage while some other guy with a giant forehead starting talking. About two minutes in, I had already devoured the entire Snickers bar and was beginning to feel the effects of the thirty-five grams of sugar that were making their way into my bloodstream. Every minute of the lecture felt like an hour. I couldn’t sit still and decided I needed to get on the ground so I could blow off some steam where nobody could see me. I crawled down onto the floor right as I heard the man speaking introduce my dad. I popped my head up, and as I did, I saw him, a hundred feet away, staring at me intensely, as if he had been tracking me the entire time. I quickly ducked back down behind the chairs in front of me.

  As I crouched on the ground, I realized that I could fit in between the legs of the chairs, and that each row contained a few chairs that were empty. I thought it would be a really fun game—and no bother to anyone—if I crawled on my hands and knees, from my row in the back, to the front row, using the empty chairs to advance forward. I carefully began my journey, crawling laterally, underneath the unsuspecting rears of oncologist after oncologist, until I reached an open chair in the row in front, and then I’d move forward a row. It was like a real-life game of Frogger. And I was doing pretty well until I’d advanced seven rows forward and realized there were no more open chairs in front of me. But when I turned around to go back, I saw that someone had filled in the one empty chair in the row behind me. I was stuck.

  The sound of my dad’s voice over the speaker system sounded like the voice of God, if God were talking about molecular biology. I decided my only shot at getting back to my seat was to crawl over the feet of the fifteen or so doctors who sat between me and the aisle, where I figured I could get really low to the ground and slither back to my chair without my dad spotting me. Unfortunately the doctors didn’t share my determination to hide my antics and did not play along as if nothing was happening. Instead, they stood up one by one as I tried to crawl past, whispering expressions of irritation to one another. And although I was on the ground and couldn’t see anything, I heard my dad abruptly stop speaking. He knew something was up. I froze. When he started speaking again, I thought I was in the clear and forged ahead—until I accidentally smashed my knee into the loafer of a bearded guy sitting two seats from the aisle.

  “Ah—God—this is ridiculous!” he huffed through his whiskers.

  My dad stopped speaking again. I slowly crawled out past the last chair, then turned my head toward the stage, where he was staring right at me, along with everyone else.

  The lecture hall was completely silent as I stood up, pretending nothing at all had happened, and walked back to my seat, averting my eyes from the room full of disbelieving gazes. I sat back down in my chair. After a couple moments, my dad began speaking again. His face was bright red and looked like a dodgeball with a furious frown and angry eyebrows. Suddenly his lecture on thyroid cancer had the same inflection as a coach tearing his football team a new one at halftime.

  My dad ended his talk quickly and rushed through answering a couple of questions. As the audience applauded, he hopped down off the stage, choosing not to use the stairs. He made a beeline toward me, ignoring all the doctors who stood up to chat or compliment his lecture. He picked me up by my belt from the back of my pants like he was holding a six-pack of beer, pushed through the doors to the lobby, and then outside into the light. He carried me like that all the way to the car, opened the door, and tossed me in the front seat. He got in the driver’s seat, where he took a few deep breaths, the veins in his neck bulging with anger. Then he turned to me and through clenched teeth yelled, “Fucking hell! All I asked, goddamn it, was that you sit still for a couple hours while I lectured on thyroid cancer!” He peeled out of the parking lot and drove us home in complete silence.

  When we arrived at our house, he opened the front door. I was standing next to him on the doormat when he turned to me and calmly said, “Listen, that was not a place where a kid should have been. I get that. But I’m going to go inside this house, and you are not. You are going to play outside of this house, because right now, my fucking head is going to explode.” Then he closed the door, and I stood outside, not sure what to do. From inside the house, I heard an echoing scream, “FUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCCK!!!!!”

  About an hour and a half later, he poked his head out the back door. I was sitting in the grass in our backyard.

  “You can come on in if you want,” he said. “Also, wash your hands before you touch stuff. That conference hall floor smelled like dog shit and you were crawling around like a little monkey on it.”

  On Finding Out I Didn’t Make the Little League All-Star Team

  “This is bullshit. All the coaches just put their kids on the team. That shit bag’s son isn’t worthy of carrying your jock strap…. You don’t wear a jock strap? What the hell is wrong with you, son?”

  On Dropping Me Off at School

  “Your friends’ parents drive like assholes. Tell them it’s an elementary school parking lot, not downtown fucking Manhattan.”

  On Getting a Dog

  “Who’s going to take care of it? You?…Son, you came in the house yesterday with shit on your hands. Human shit. I don’t know how that happened, but if someone has shit on their hands, it’s an indicator that maybe the whole responsibility thing isn’t for them.”

  On Showering with Regularity

  “You’re ten years old now, you have to take a shower every day…. I don’t give a shit if you hate it. People hate smelly fuckers. I will not have a smelly fucker for a son.”

  On LEGOs

  “Listen, I don’t want to stifle your creativity, but that thing you built there, it looks like a pile of shit.”

  On Bring-Your-Dad-to-School Day

  “Who are all these fucking parents who can take a day off? If I’m taking a day off, I ain’t gonna spend it sitting at some tiny desk with a bunch of eleven-year-olds.”

  On My Sixth-Grade Parent-Teacher Conference

  “I don’t think that teacher likes you, so I don’t like her. You ding off more shit than a pin
ball, but goddamn it, you’re a good kid. She can go fuck herself.”

  On My First School Dance

  “Are you wearing perfume?…Son, there ain’t any cologne in this house, only your mother’s perfume. I know that scent, and let me tell you, it’s disturbing to smell your wife on your thirteen-year-old son.”

  On Being Afraid to Use the Elementary School Bathrooms to Defecate

  “Son, you’re complaining to the wrong man. I can shit anywhere, at any time. It’s one of my finer qualities. Some might say my finest.”

  On My Last-Place Finish in the 50-Yard Dash During Little League Tryouts

  “It kinda looked like you were being attacked by a bunch of bees or something. Then when I saw the fat kid with the watch who was timing you start laughing…. Well, I’ll just say it’s never a good sign when a fat kid laughs at you.”

  Do Not Be a Goddamned Liar

  “You have shamed the entire scientific community. Fucking Einstein, everybody.”

  I’ve never been very good at math or science. I enjoyed the stories embedded in history and literature but lost interest when it came to periodic functions and the table of elements. So in sixth grade, when each member of my class was responsible for creating an experiment to show at the school’s science fair in late April, I felt about as excited as I’d feel today if I were told I had to attend a live reenactment of the entire first season of Grey’s Anatomy. My dad, on the other hand, was thrilled. He had spent the past twenty-five years performing medical and scientific research.