“I don’t give a shit if you watch porn, watch away,” he said. “But (a) don’t do it in my room (the last thing I need is to come home from work and sit on some of your nasty business); and (b) I can’t have your mother finding porn in my room and thinking that it’s mine. Then that becomes my problem, and I’m not about to take the fall for somebody else’s porn movie.”
“Are you gonna tell Mom?” I asked in a panic.
“Nah, I’ll keep quiet about it as long as you don’t do that shit on my bed,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.
I reached my hand up assertively, assuming that now that we’d had our man-to-man he’d give me the movie back. “Ha, nice fucking try.” He turned and left with it under his arm, laughing.
Having your father find your porno and laugh at you is an embarrassing moment in a teenager’s life. I experienced a far more embarrassing one the next morning when I awoke to find my mother standing above me, holding my copy of
New Wave Hookers.
My dad had turned me in!
When my mom finished describing the ills of the porn industry and detailing the unrealistic nature of the sex depicted in its products, all the while screaming at me, I marched out into the living room like a man who had traveled a long distance to avenge a death.
“Hey!” I shouted at my dad, who was eating his daily bowl of Grape-Nuts.
He looked up at me, making a face that said, “Be careful in choosing your next words.”
“You told Mom about my,” and then I silently mouthed the word
porn
. “You said you wouldn’t!” I added at full volume.
He put down his paper, looked at me, and replied in a measured voice, “Yeah, I thought about that. Too risky for me not to tell her. You shouldn’t have left that porno in our VCR. Your penis betrayed you, son. Made you think stupid. It won’t be the last time that happens.”
On an Elderly Family Friend’s Erectile Dysfunction
“I don’t know why people keep coming to me when they can’t get hard-ons. If I knew how to fix that I’d be driving a Ferrari two hundred miles an hour in the opposite direction of this house.”
On My Frequent Absences at High School Dances
“You bitch about not going, so why don’t you just go?…So then find a date…. So then meet more women…. Jesus Christ, son, I’m not continuing on with this line of questioning, it’s depressing the shit out of me. Do what you want.”
On Practicing
“Nobody likes practice, but what’s worse: practicing, or sucking at something?…Oh, give me a fucking break, practicing is not worse than sucking.”
On Getting Rescued by a Lifeguard at the Beach
“What were you doing that far out? You can’t swim…. Son, you’re a good athlete, but I’ve seen what you call swimming. It looks like a slow kid on his knees trying to smash ants.”
On Breaking the Neighbor’s Window for the Third Time in a Year
“What in the hell is the matter with you? This is the third time! You know, at this point I think it’s the neighbor’s fault…. No not really, it’s your fucking fault, I’m just in denial right now that my DNA was somehow involved in something this stupid.”
On the Varsity Baseball End-of-the-Year Fund-raiser
“Just tell me how much money I have to give you to never leave this couch.”
On Video Game Systems
“You can’t have one…. Fine, then go play it at your friend’s house. While you’re there, see if you can eat their food and use their shitter, too.”
On the Importance of Watching the Evening News
“Let’s finish talking in a bit, the news is on…. Well, if you have tuberculosis, it’s not going to get any worse in the next thirty minutes.”
On Appropriate Times to Give Gifts
“Yeah, I got him a gift. He got his kidney stone taken out. If you shoot a rock through your pecker, you deserve more than just a pat on the fucking back.”
On My First Driving Lesson
“First things first: A car has five gears. What is that smell?…Okay, first thing before that first thing: Farting in a car that’s not moving makes you an asshole.”
Confidence Is the Way to a Woman’s Heart, or at Least into Her Pants
“No one wants to lay the guy who wouldn’t lay himself.”
Between the end of my freshman year of high school and the beginning of my junior year, I grew ten inches. Suddenly I was six feet tall. “You’re starting to look like a man, sort of,” my dad told me on my sixteenth birthday, as I bit into a filet mignon he ordered for me at Ruth’s Chris Steak House.
The downside of such a quick growth spurt was that I wasn’t really in control of my body. I moved around like I was being puppe-teered by someone with cerebral palsy. The good news was: Despite barely being able to walk ten feet without tripping over something, I could throw a baseball pretty hard. I was moved up to the varsity baseball team as a pitcher and led the team in wins and strikeouts.
That year, my school’s cheerleading coach decided that in a show of school spirit, she was going to force her squad to attend all of the baseball games. Going to a high school baseball game is a lot like going to a student film festival; you’re there because you feel obliged to someone involved in it, and after two repetitive, mind-numbing hours of “action,” you congratulate that person and try to leave as quickly as possible. Needless to say, the cheerleaders mostly passed the time doing their homework and watching the grass grow on the sidelines. But my dad, who came to most of my games, thought otherwise.
“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, and 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.”