Sh*t My Dad Says Page 11
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.
“Well, I figure this book is about you and me. I mean, I’m the star, but you’re in it, too.” He laughed. “And when I told you that story, you were hurting. So I guess I want people to know that maybe I’m not the warmest human being on the fucking planet, but I love the shit out of you. The story I told you, the reason I don’t tell nobody is because I never had a reason to. You’re a pretty together kid.”
“Thanks, I appreci—”
“Don’t get me wrong, you’ve got a big fucking mouth, and you ain’t the prettiest to look at, but I love you, and I want people to know that when it comes down to it, I’d do things for my family that I wouldn’t do for nobody else.”
A week or so later I finished the book. I was at the end of an all-nighter and strolled into the living room, where my dad was eating breakfast and reading the paper.
“I’m done! I finished the book,” I boasted.
“I cannot believe someone is going to publish something you wrote,” he said.
“I know. Crazy, right?”
“You have never, ever in your life, had anything published. Ever. You’ve never had one goddamned word of yours published anywhere!” he said, still in disbelief. (My dad has never counted my online writings “published”—or publishable.)
“I mean, not one fucking thing! Not a thing! And now YOU, you’re going to have a book in stores and shit?! Jesus H. Christ. Un-fucking-believable. To think—”
“OKAY, I GET IT. I’ve never published anything, I’m the luckiest person on earth. I don’t deserve it. I get it,” I shouted.
“Oh shit, sorry, son, I didn’t mean to bust your balls there. It’s just, well, it’s fucking unbelievable, that’s all.” He paused and offered me a seat on the couch next to him. “Congratulatio
ns, I’m proud of you. Have some Grape-Nuts.”
He poured me a bowl and handed me the sports section. It was quiet for a few moments as we ate breakfast and read the paper.
“It’s just, I’m having trouble wrapping my head around it,” he said, looking up from his paper again and shaking his head. “I mean, they gave you money to do this. YOU. Amazing.”
Acknowledgments
One of the best parts of writing this book was sitting down with my brothers, mom, and, of course, my dad, and remembering all these quotes and stories about our family. Without them, I never could have recalled the details that hopefully make this book an enjoyable one for people to read, and that really capture what my dad is like. Dan, Evan, José, Mom, and Dad, thank you.
I think any time you write about your life, you’re never sure if it’s going to be interesting or funny to anyone else, so thankfully I was lucky to have a few friends and colleagues help me along the way. Thanks to Amanda Schweizer, Cory Jones, Robert Chafino, Patrick Schumacker, Lindsay Goldenberg, Brian Warner, Dan Phin, Ryan Walter, George Collins, Andrew Fryer, Katie Deslondes, Kate Hamill, and Byrd Leavell.
I feel so fortunate to have been given the opportunity to write this book. As my dad said when I finished it, “Hopefully people give a fuck. Hopefully for you, not me.”
About the Author
JUSTIN HALPERN is the founding editor of the comedy website HolyTaco.com and a senior writer at Maxim.com. Halpern created the Twitter page “Shit My Dad Says,” which boasts more than a million followers, and is cowriting and coproducing a sitcom adaptation for CBS. He splits his time between Los Angeles and his parents’ home in San Diego.
www.Twitter.com/ShitMyDadSays
www.ShitMyDadSays.com
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Credits
Jacket design by Milan Bozic
Jacket photograph courtesy of the author
Copyright
The names and identifying characteristics of some of the individuals featured throughout this book have been changed to protect their privacy. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
SH*T MY DAD SAYS. Copyright © 2010 by Justin Halpern. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
EPub Edition © March 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-200294-5
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)
Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900
Toronto, ON, M5R, 3L2, Canada
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com