Sh*t My Dad Says

by Justin Halpern

  “I’ve seen the way they look at you,” he said as he drove me home after a game.

  I tried to explain to him that they didn’t look at me any way at all; that if they looked at anything during a game it was at their watches in hopes it was almost over.

  “Bullshit,” he said.

  Fortunately, he left it at that. But not for long.

  On Sundays, my dad would usually wake up early and head down to Winchell’s Donut House, where he’d buy a dozen donuts for my family’s breakfast, including six chocolate-glazed twists specifically for me. But on one Sunday in the spring of 1997, I woke up to discover there wasn’t a box of donuts sitting on the dining room table next to the kitchen.

  “Get dressed, let’s go get some donuts,” he said as I groggily padded into the dining room.

  I tossed on a pair of basketball shorts and a T-shirt, and we headed out into my dad’s silver Oldsmobile. When I tried to turn the car radio on and he quickly shut it off, I knew he wanted to talk to me about something.

  Then we cruised right past Winchell’s.

  “I thought we were getting donuts,” I said.

  “Nah, we’re going to have a real breakfast,” he replied as he pulled into the parking lot at our local Denny’s.

  “This is Denny’s,” I said.

  “Well, aren’t you the fucking Queen of England.”

  We walked in, and my dad signaled to the hostess he’d like a table for two. A waitress led us to the far corner of the restaurant, where a small, square table was nestled right up against a larger rectangular table occupied by six hungover-looking college kids, including two guys who were wearing T-shirts commemorating a “solid rush class” for their San Diego State fraternity. The tables were basically attached, save for a leaf that had been folded under to provide some semblance of privacy. We sat down, and my dad told the waitress he wanted a couple glasses of orange juice for us. She left, and he turned his attention to me.

  “I’m a man, I like having sex,” he said.

  The group of college kids next to us froze, then burst into muffled laughter. In a growing panic, I realized he was about to lay whatever his version of a sex talk was on me here, now, in Denny’s.

  “No—no, Dad. What are you talking about? Maybe we shouldn’t eat here. I think we should go somewhere else. I don’t think we should eat here. Let’s go—let’s go.”

  “What in the hell are you talking about? We just sat down here. Denny’s ain’t the best food, but you eat garbage like this shit all the time,” he said right as the waitress dropped off two glasses of orange juice.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that the college kids were now focused on my dad and me like they had paid money to be there. I half-expected one of them to pull out a giant bucket of popcorn. Oblivious to my growing discomfort, my dad continued, telling me that in his day, he’d “had a lot of fun” and slept with, apparently, a significant number of women.

  “I’m not that good-looking. Never was. But I didn’t give a shit. You’re not a bad-looking kid. Better-looking than I was. But nobody’s paying either of us to take our picture, right?”

  I nodded in agreement, and right as I did I heard one of the college kids say “wow,” prompting his group of pals to burst into laughter again.

  Then, my dad told me that the only way to meet women is to “act like you been there before. Don’t worry about them telling you they don’t like you. It’s gonna happen. You can’t give a fuck. Otherwise, guys like you and me will never get laid.”

  Our waitress was ten feet away and quickly approaching to take our order. I was crawling out of my skin. I felt like all of Denny’s—all of San Diego—was listening, watching, and laughing, and I just wanted it to end. So I did something I rarely do to my dad: I cut him off.

  “Dad, can you please get to the point you’re trying to make? I don’t want to talk about this the whole breakfast with all these people around us,” I said, as I looked to my left and right, indicating that people were listening and that it was embarrassing for me.

  He paused and looked around the restaurant, and then right at the college kids next to us, who quickly glanced away.

  “You give a shit what all these people think, huh? Even though you never met a goddamned one of them,” he said.

  He nodded, grabbed the newspaper next to him, and began reading, which was almost more awkward, since now I had nothing to do but stare at the flip side of his paper, alone with my humiliation. We ordered our food and sat in silence until the waitress returned with my dad’s scrambled eggs and my pancakes.

  “Dad. What was the point you were trying to make?” I said, finally, in a hushed voice.

  “Son, you’re always telling me why women don’t like you. No one wants to lay the guy who wouldn’t lay himself.”

  “That’s all you were gonna say?” I asked.

  “No. But if you give a shit about what a bunch of people in Denny’s think about you, then the rest of what I was gonna say doesn’t even matter.”

  I told him to stop reading his newspaper, and he put it on the greasy table and looked me in the eye.

  “So is that why you took me here? Some kind of test to see if I’d get embarrassed?”

  “Son, do I look like the type with a master fucking plan? I just wanted to talk to you and eat some eggs. Let me finish doing one of them.”

  On Yard Work

  “What are you doing with that rake?…No, that is not raking…. What? Different styles of raking? No, there’s one style, and then there’s bullshit. Guess which one you’re doing.”

  On Being One with the Wilderness

  “I’m not sure you can call that roughing it, son…. Well, for one, there was a fucking minivan parked forty feet from your sleeping bags.”

  On Getting Rejected by the First Girl I Asked to Prom

  “Sorry to hear that. Hey, have you seen my fanny pack?…No, I care about what you said, I told you I was sorry to hear it. Jesus, I can’t be sorry and wonder where my fanny pack is at the same fucking time?”

  On My Attempts to Participate in Urban Culture

  “What the fuck are you doing on the floor writhing around?…I’m not sure what break dancing is, but I sincerely hope it’s not what you’re doing.”

  On Selling His Beloved 1967 Two-Door Mercury Cougar

  “This is what happens when you have a family. You sacrifice. [Pause] You sacrifice a lot. [Long pause] It’s gonna be in your best interest to stay away from me for the next couple days.”

  On the SATs

  “Remember, it’s just a test. If you fuck up, it doesn’t mean you’re a fuckup. That said, try not to fuck this up. It’s pretty important.”

  On Picking the Right College

  “Don’t pick some place just because you think it’ll be easy to get laid there…. No, no, that’s a very good reason to pick a lot of things, just not this.”

  On Proper Etiquette for Borrowing His Car

  “You borrowed the car, and now it smells like shit. I don’t care if you smell like shit, that’s your business. But when you shit up my car, then that’s my business. Take it somewhere and un-shit that smell.”

  On Curfew

  “I don’t give a shit what time you get home, just don’t wake me up. That’s your curfew: not waking me up.”

  On Using Hair Gel for the First Time

  “It looks fine, you just smell weird. I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like rubbing alcohol and—I don’t know—shit, I guess.”

  Always Put Your Best Foot Forward

  “A three-year-old doesn’t have a license to act like an asshole.”

  About once a year when I was growing up my family would head to Champaign, Illinois, where several generations of Halperns would congregate at my aunt Naomi’s house. Unlike my dad, his relatives are the mellowest, warmest, most nurturing people I’ve ever meet. Whenever we’d visit them in the Midwest, I felt like I was in a Christmas special; everyone wore bright, multicolored sweaters, an
d any time I saw an adult relative for the first time, he or she would exclaim, “Look at you! You’re all grown-up and so handsome!” before turning to my mom and dad and saying with a smile, “Isn’t he handsome?” My dad always responded the same exact way, which was to say, “Yeah, I’m waiting for the modeling checks to come in so I can retire,” and then laugh for an awkwardly long period of time, sometimes to the point of wheezing because he was out of breath, while the rest of us stood around in our Technicolor sweaters quietly waiting for his cackling to cease.

  At our annual reunion in Illinois in November 1997, we had quite a few of my little cousins running around the house. They were all great kids, but one in particular I found to be especially entertaining: Joey, who was three years old at the time. The last time I had seen Joey was a few months prior, at a cousin’s house in Seattle, on his birthday. He was so excited it was his birthday that he had spent the better part of an hour running around my cousin’s house at full speed, coming to an abrupt stop every minute or so in front of a relative and screaming, “IT’S MY HAPPY BIRTHDAY, OH YEAH!” He was like a tiny David Lee Roth pumping up the crowd at a Van Halen concert right before he sang “Jump.” Every time Joey stopped in front of me, before he could blurt out his line, I’d egg him on by asking, “Joey’s happy birthday?!” Then his eyes would go wide, as if I’d just levitated in front of him, and he’d shriek, “JOEY’S HAPPY BIRTHDAY, OH YEAH!” We did this probably twenty-five times until my brother Dan came up to me and said, “Dude, fucking stop it.”

  Now, a few months later, at this family gathering, I was seeing Joey for the first time since his birthday. The instant he saw me, his face broke out in a huge grin, and he ran up to me and screamed, “JOEY’S HAPPY BIRTHDAY, OH YEAH!” I laughed and told him it was nice to see him, but he didn’t acknowledge my greeting in the slightest. He just kept saying his catch phrase over and over. For the first ten minutes or so, my relatives thought it was cute and smiled at him or affectionately tousled his hair. My dad had been in the bathroom the whole time Joey had been carrying on like a parrot on speed, and when he walked out, he simply said, “Hey there, Joey.”

  “JOEY’S HAPPY BIRTHDAY, OH YEAH!” Joey screamed before running off.

  My dad turned to me. “It’s Joey’s birthday?”

  I explained the situation, and in the midst of my explaining, Joey interrupted.

  “JOEY’S HAPPY BIRTHDAY!”

  “He and I need to have a talk,” my dad said matter-of-factly as Joey dashed into another room.

  My dad talks to everyone, no matter his or her age, as he would to a forty-five-year-old physicist, so I had a pretty good idea how this was going to go.

  “Just let him tire himself out, Dad.”

  “He doesn’t want people thinking he’s an idiot, right?” my dad replied.

  “He doesn’t even know other people think anything. He’s three.”

  “A three-year-old doesn’t have a license to act like an asshole.”

  On cue, Joey once again ran full speed into the room and screamed, “JOEY’S HAPPY BIRTH—”

  “No,” my dad said, cutting him off.

  Joey paused for a moment. “Joey’s happy birthday?” he said, totally devoid of conviction.

  “No, Joey, it’s not your happy birthday. You need to stop saying to people it’s your birthday.”

  Joey looked confused and horrified, like a stripper bursting out of a cake only to realize she’s been accidentally delivered to a baby shower.

  My dad knelt down to Joey’s level and added, “It is not. Your. Birthday.”

  The next sound I heard was a high-pitched squeal coming from Joey’s mouth. Then tears began streaming down his face and he ran away, arms at his sides, dangling like two limp strands of overcooked spaghetti.

  Completely ignoring the disapproving glances from nearby family members, my dad got up from his crouch and turned to me. “Hey, it’s a tough realization it ain’t your birthday, but he’s a better man for it,” he said with satisfaction.

  On My Bloody Nose

  “What happened? Did somebody punch you in the face?!…The what? The air is dry? Do me a favor and tell people you got punched in the face.”

  On the Democratic System

  “We’re having fish for dinner…. Fine, let’s take a vote. Who wants fish for dinner?…Yeah, democracy ain’t so fun when it fucks you, huh?”

  On Remaining a Gentleman No Matter the Situation

  “I personally would never go to a prostitute, but if you’ve paid money for some strange, that doesn’t mean you can act like an idiot once you get it.”

  On Getting My Own Apartment Even Though I Attend College 20 Minutes from Home

  “You want your independence, huh?…Every time you tell me about your independence, I just replace that word with the word money. Then it’s easy to say no.”

  On Finding Out I Tried Marijuana

  “Pretty great, right?…Really? Well, we differ in opinion then. Don’t tell your mom I said that, though. Tell her I yelled at you and called you a moron. Actually, don’t tell her anything. See, now I’m paranoid, and I didn’t even smoke any.”

  On Giving Up a 450-Foot Home Run in My First College Baseball Game

  “Jesus. That wasn’t even a home run, that was a fucking space experiment that should be written about in science journals or something.”

  On Attending the Student Film Festival Where My First Short Film Played

  “I enjoyed it thoroughly…. I know which one was yours goddamn it, it was the one with the car…. Well shit, I thought that one was yours, so I left after. Don’t bust my balls, that festival was like sitting through a three-hour prostate exam.”

  On My Responsibility to Do Chores

  “You’re a grown man in college, but you still live in my goddamned house. Huh. That sounds way shittier for you when I say it out loud.”

  On Getting a Job as a Cook at Hooters

  “You, my good man, are not as dumb as I first fucking suspected.”

  On Meeting My First Girlfriend, Who Worked at Hooters

  “I thought she’d have bigger breasts. I’m just being honest. That’s not a bad thing or a good thing, that’s just a thing I thought.”

  You Have to Believe You’re Worth a Damn

  “You are a man, she is a fucking woman! That is all that matters, goddamn it!”

  I am not the first Halpern son to live at home in his late twenties. In fact, my two older brothers, Dan and Evan, did so as well. Evan is nine years older than me, and, along with Dan, is the product of my dad’s first marriage. Evan is pretty much the nicest, most considerate human being you could ever meet. Plus, he just might be the only person to graduate from Humboldt State University, in Northern California, who has never smoked marijuana. After college, Evan wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, and he spent the next few years working various jobs in various cities. But at twenty-eight, he found himself living at home with me, my dad, and my mom, who raised him since he was seven and who he considers his mother. It wasn’t exactly a high point in Evan’s life.

  At the time, I was going to college at San Diego State, also living at home, and working at the Hooters in Pacific Beach, a nearby beach town. My best friend, Dan, and I had applied for jobs there a year earlier as a joke, and lo and behold, Hooters was looking for cooks and hired us. Contrary to what a teenaged guy might think, it quickly became the worst job I’ve ever had. As soon as you get over the fact that you work around a lot of boobs, you realize the job entails a bit of cooking, a ton of cleaning, and trying to meet the needs of insecure women yelling at you to make their fries faster. I spoke openly—and frequently—about my hatred for my job to everyone I knew, always comforting myself with, “But it could be worse. I could be the dishwasher at Hooters.”

  So when Evan asked me, “Hey, could you get me a job washing dishes at Hooters?” I knew he was in a bad place. Even though he’d heard me vent endlessly about working there, he still wanted the job. So I got it for him.


  Five nights a week, he would come from his volunteer internship at a sleep therapy lab and go straight to Hooters, where he’d start washing dishes in slacks and a dress shirt. Then he’d head home to sleep, and do it all over again the next day.

  My dad was concerned that Evan seemed lost and unhappy, and even more concerned that he wasn’t meeting any women.

  “He’s a fine-looking young man. Your twenties is a time for screwing and so forth. He needs to meet some women,” my dad told my mom after dinner one night while Evan was scraping buffalo sauce off of plates at Hooters.

  In an effort to liven up Evan’s romantic life, my dad decided to step in.

  “I got a woman for you, big dude,” my dad said to him one night after he came home from work. (My dad calls Evan “big dude” since he’s the tallest in the family.)

  “I’m pretty busy, Dad,” my brother responded.

  But my dad had already set up a blind date, and my brother, unlike myself, rarely puts up a fight.

  “You’re going to like her,” my dad said, and Evan nodded warily.

  I was shocked that Evan didn’t ask our dad more about her, but that’s not his style. Later, when I questioned his reticence, he explained, “I sort of do what Dad says. You get mouthy with him, and then he yells at you. I always figured if you could stay the kid he yelled at, I wouldn’t be that kid.”

  So, the next Saturday night, Evan asked to get off early from his dishwashing shift at Hooters. I was working in the front of the kitchen and spotted him on his way out. He was covered in dishwater and looked like he had fallen on a grenade filled with hot sauce and blue cheese dip.