So, on a sunny Saturday morning in April, I drove down to San Diego with Angus on my lap, and walked into my parents’ house unannounced, carrying him like an oversized baby.
“Awww, look at him, he’s so cute!” my mom said, coming out from the kitchen, where she had been cooking, to pet him.
“That is a good-looking dog right there,” my dad said, reaching over and rubbing his ears.
“Wait. Whose dog is this?” my mom asked, suddenly suspicious.
“Well, here’s the thing,” I said.
I went on to explain the whole scenario, fudging a few details to make me sound less impulsive and Angus like less of a handful.
“We can’t take this dog. This is your responsibility—we can’t just take a dog because you didn’t think things through,” my mom said, her tone increasingly annoyed with every word she spoke.
I was surprised and became worried because if my mom was reacting like this, I could only imagine what my dad was going to say. He was quiet for a few moments, and then he grabbed Angus and held him up.
“We can take care of him.”
“Sam?” My mom was as surprised as I was.
“It’s a dog. It’s not like Justin knocked up some lady and he’s walking in with a kid.”
“Yeah, I didn’t do that,” I said, chuckling.
“You bet your fucking ass you didn’t,” my dad snapped, without an ounce of humor in his voice.
My dad took Angus outside, rubbed his belly, and set him down on the ground.
“This is your new home. Shit and piss where you like,” he said to Angus.
I felt the way I did at age twenty-one when I gambled in Las Vegas for the first time and won a hundred dollars on my first slot machine pull: unsure about what had happened but confident that I should take off before my luck turned.
“Okay. Well, I better get going, you know. I’ve got work tomorrow, and it’s a long drive, so….”
And with that, I hurried down the driveway, got in my car, and drove back up to Los Angeles.
Every couple months or so, I’d head home, and each time, Angus would be larger. Eight months later, he was 105 pounds. He looked like Scooby-Doo on steroids.
“Dad, he’s so…buff. What are you feeding him?” I asked, during a visit around Angus’s first birthday.
“In the morning he gets a half pound of ground beef, half pound of potatoes, and two eggs, then I cook that together and put some garlic salt on it.”
“Garlic salt? Like he wouldn’t eat it if it didn’t have garlic salt?”
“Listen, the dog likes garlic salt, so I give him fucking garlic salt.”
“So he’s eating, like, three thousand calories a day?”
“Well, probably more, since I give him that same meal at night, too.”
“Jesus Christ, Dad. That’s why he looks like a WWF wrestler.”
My dad explained to me that he had tried lots of traditional dog foods, but that Angus liked human meals cooked for him best.
“Isn’t that a lot of work? I mean, you’re like his personal chef.”
I followed my dad outside as he carried the bowl of food he had just prepared for Angus. The instant he smelled the meal, Angus jumped up in excitement and put his paws on my dad’s chest like a long-lost lover.
“Okay, okay, take it easy, you crazy son of a bitch,” my dad said. Turning to me, he added, “Yeah, it’s a lot of work, but he’s my friend.”
I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. Was my dad becoming sentimental in his old age?
“Wipe that stupid fucking look off your face. I ain’t crazy. They’re called ‘man’s best friend,’ for chrissakes. It’s not like I made that up.”
I told him I was glad that Angus had become a good friend.
“You know, I was never really a dog person before this. I mean, Brownie was great, but he was your brother’s dog. And I had lots of dogs on the farm, but they were work dogs. I guess with all you guys gone, and Mom working all the time, it’s nice to have somebody around who depends on me. And who tears up my fucking rose garden—goddamn it, Angus,” he said, turning and pointing toward the churned-up soil that had once hosted his red roses.
“He’s just like you: He’s a pain in my ass, but I love him. And he shits everywhere. Which is mostly why he’s like you,” he added with a smirk.
On Airport Pickup Duties
“My flight lands at nine-thirty on Sunday…. You want to watch what? What the fuck is
Mad Men
? I’m a mad man if you don’t pick me the hell up.”
On Built-Up Expectations
“Your brother brought his baby over this morning. He told me it could stand. It couldn’t stand for shit. Just sat there. Big letdown.”
On Canine Leisure Time
“The dog is not bored. It’s not like he’s waiting for me to give him a fucking Rubik’s Cube. He’s a goddamned dog.”
On Talking Heads
“Do these announcers ever shut the fuck up? Don’t ever say stuff just because you think you should. That’s the definition of an asshole.”
On Long-Winded Anecdotes
“You’re like a tornado of bullshit right now. We’ll talk again when your bullshit dies out over someone else’s house.”
On Today’s Hairstyles
“Do people your age know how to comb their fucking hair? It looks like two squirrels crawled on their head and started fucking.”
On Tailgating the Driver in Front of Me
“You sure do like to tailgate people…. Right, because it’s real important you show up to the nothing you have to do on time.”
On My Brother’s Baby Being a Little Slow to Start Speaking
“The baby will talk when he talks, relax. It ain’t like he knows the cure for cancer and just ain’t spitting it out.”
On the Right Time to Have Children
“It’s never the right time to have kids, but it’s always the right time for screwing. God’s not a dumb shit. He knows how it works.”
You Have to Listen, and Don’t Ignore What You Hear
“Sometimes life leaves a hundred-dollar bill on your dresser, and you don’t realize until later it’s because it fucked you.”
As I mentioned in the introduction to this book, it was a breakup with a girlfriend that landed me back at my parents’ house at age twenty-eight. Our split hadn’t been one of those overdramatic ones where we screamed and cursed each other’s names, then I left with the slam of the door and a “go to hell!” I’d been through a couple breakups before, one of which ended with my ex saying, “Go fuck yourself, you stupid fuck.” That was easy to get over; you don’t stay up late at night hoping the woman who called you a stupid fuck comes back. In fact, none of my previous relationships ever felt that serious. But I had been with this girlfriend for three years, and I was sure that we were right for each other and had thought we would marry at some point.
When she decided to call it quits, it wasn’t because of anything specific. Something that had been there before was now missing, and neither of us could figure out what. Our relationship just wasn’t working. So when I moved into my parents’ house, I was really down. I don’t generally wear my emotions on my sleeve, but my dad could tell I was upset.
“Sometimes life leaves a hundred-dollar bill on your dresser, and you don’t realize until later it’s because it fucked you,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder while I was eating breakfast one morning about a week after I’d moved back home.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to try to cheer me up,” I replied.
“Shit, I know that,” he said. “But I figured I had to say something. Otherwise, just grabbing the cereal from you and leaving might seem a little callous.” He chuckled, hoping to lighten the mood.
The next day I woke up at around six-thirty in the morning. Unable to go back to sleep, I groggily sauntered out into the living room in my boxer shorts. My dad was sitting at the dining room table eating Grape-Nuts and reading the paper.
“When’d you wake up?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know, five maybe. Like usual.”
“Jesus, that’s early. Why do you wake up so early?” I said.
“Always have.”
“But why? You’re retired now. It makes no sense.”
“Son, am I being interrogated here? I’m an early riser, what the fuck you want from me?” he said before resuming reading the paper.
After a few moments he put the paper down.
“Why are
you
up so early?”
I told him I had woken up and couldn’t get back to sleep. He got up from his seat, walked into the kitchen, and poured me a cup of coffee.
“You want that bullshit you like in your coffee?” he asked, holding a mug filled with the dark black liquid.
“Creamer? Yes. I want creamer.”
He set my coffee down on the table and went back to reading his paper. I poured myself a bowl of cereal, and we sat in silence for a few minutes. My mind was quickly consumed with thoughts of my girlfriend and all the good times we had had, like one of those cheesy montages in eighties movies, when the angsty protagonist envisions himself and his ex holding hands on the beach, feeding a small puppy, getting into some kind of zany wrestling match with whipped cream. I interrupted my cliché memories by saying aloud, “Ugh, I’m feeling pretty low about this whole thing.”
“You just gotta try to put it out of your head,” he said, folding the paper halfway down to look at me.
“I know, it’s just hard. I mean, I still have stuff at her place. What am I gonna do about that? I still have a TV…,” I said.
“Fuck the TV. Leave the TV. Cut your ties.”
“It’s a fifteen-hundred-dollar TV,” I insisted.
“Go get that fucking TV.”
I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to accomplish by having this conversation, but it wasn’t making me feel better. So I went to take a shower, got dressed, and began working on my latest Maxim.com piece, which was, ironically, a flow chart detailing the differences between the male and female brain during an argument. I worked straight until twelve-thirty, when my dad came into the living room. He had his fanny pack on, which indicated he was ready to go somewhere.
“I’m buying you lunch. Put your flip-flops on and let’s go.”
I dragged myself off the couch, followed him outside, hopped in his car, and we headed down the hill to my favorite lunch spot, an Italian place near our house called Pizza Nova. We got a table outside in the sun that overlooked dozens of white clusters of sailboats and motorboats in the San Diego harbor. The waitress brought us a basket of garlic rolls and a pair of iced teas. My dad took a sip of his and looked up at me.
“You don’t know shit about me.”
“Um, okay,” I said, a little confused.
“About my life. You don’t know shit about it. Because I don’t tell anybody.”
It wasn’t until he said it that I realized he was right. Sure, I knew the rough outline of my dad’s biography: He grew up on a farm in Kentucky; served in Vietnam; had two sons with his first wife, who passed away from cancer shortly after having my brother Evan; married my mom nine years later and had me; and spent his career doing cancer research as a doctor of nuclear medicine. But that was it. Now that I was thinking about it, I realized he was probably the most private person I knew.
“When I was in my early twenties, I was head over heels for this woman. She was gorgeous. Just a real beauty. And full of life,” he said between bites of a garlic roll.
Most of us like to assume, or wish, that our parents only had sex with each other, and only the necessary number of times it took to produce us and our siblings, so it was strange to hear my dad talk so highly about a woman other than my mother. He never had before, and I was intrigued.
“So me and her, we dated for a while. A long while. Then, one day, we got to talking, and I told her how much I loved her, and she looked at me and told me, ‘I don’t love you. I never will,’” he continued. “I’ll have a sausage-and-pepperoni pizza with the salad,” he said, turning to the waitress, who had been awkwardly standing next to our table waiting for my dad to finish his story so she could take our order.
I placed my order, and the waitress left.
“So what’d you do?” I asked.
“I told her I thought that I could change that. Maybe she didn’t love me right now, but she would eventually.”
“What’d she say?”
“She said okay. And we stayed together. And we fought. We fought a lot. And then I realized I had made a big mistake. She had given me her youth, and it was gone, and I didn’t know how to get out of it. And then she got sick. And she was dying,” he said, taking a deep breath, thinking for a moment, as if he were replaying something in his mind he hadn’t thought of in a long time.
“So I made good with her, and I stuck by her. And then she died. And I felt horrible. Because I felt like here was this woman who didn’t want to be with me, she told me that, and I ignored it. And she was spending the end of her life with someone she didn’t love. And now she was gone. And part of me felt relieved that I was freed out of this relationship, and that made me feel so terrible, I couldn’t deal with it.”
My dad sat back in his wicker chair for a few quiet moments. The waitress arrived with our food, and he picked at his salad before looking up at me.
“People are always trying to tell you how they feel. Some of them say it outright, and some of them, they tell you with their actions. And you have to listen. I don’t know what will happen with your lady friend. I think she’s a nice person, and I hope you get what you want. But do me a favor: Listen, and don’t ignore what you hear.”
A few months later, I began writing this book. I sat down with family and friends, rehashing many different stories about me and my dad. We recalled things he said, and things they said, and we pieced together as best we could everything that’s in these pages. As I was finishing up in December 2009, my dad called me one day while I was out buying groceries at Trader Joe’s.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey, what’s happening?” I asked.
“I know what your last chapter is,” he said.
“Oh yeah?”
And then he told me he wanted this story to be the last chapter. I told him that this anecdote and the advice that accompanied it had meant a lot to me, but I realized how personal it was, and how private he was. I asked him why he wanted it to be the last chapter, and told him that the request seemed out of character for a guy who a month prior had told me that he’d consider pulling his shotgun on any reporter who came too close, asking questions about this book.