Sh*t My Dad Says (2 page)
“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.”
“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.”