More Sh*t My Dad Says

Sometimes You Have to Be Hurled off a Diving Board Against Your Will

I spent the first couple years of high school trying to go unnoticed. My goal was to be the adolescent equivalent of one of those Saturday Night Live cast members who never seems to be in any sketches but is always on stage at the end of the show smiling and basking in the applause. I didn’t start out so unambitious. Like most teenagers, I went in aspiring to be popular. But I realized that wouldn’t be easy at a party early in freshman year. When my best friend Aaron and I walked into the party, the first guy we ran into took one look at us, removed the Bud Light from his lips, and shouted over the sound of Tupac blaring out of a nearby boom box: “What are you fags doing here?” His face showed the same genuine confusion you’d feel upon seeing a monkey operating a forklift at Costco.

Among my 2,500 classmates at Point Loma High School, I soon learned, there were popular people, unpopular people, and everybody else. Even just a couple weeks into high school, “everybody else” started to sound really good. Sure, maybe the popular kids were going to parties and getting hand jobs, but at least I wasn’t being tormented. The key to becoming “everybody else” was to draw as little attention to myself as possible. I ate lunch with a small group of friends every day in the lobby of the English building, while the cool kids ate in the quad and the nerds ate in the drama building. I was a good student, but not so good that people noticed, and I spoke in class so rarely that during my sophomore year my history teacher pulled me aside and asked me if I was fluent in English in that loud, deliberate way people speak to foreigners. Although I excelled as a pitcher on the baseball team, few of my classmates cared about high school baseball or attended the games. And when the weekend rolled around, instead of going to parties, I would get together with Aaron and a couple of our friends, order in pizza, and watch ’80s movies. By the start of my junior year, I had yet to go on a date, or even kiss a girl. But the older, popular kids had left me alone, and that was a tradeoff I was willing to accept.

The one person who wasn’t so satisfied with my pathetic social life was my father. “You two are staring at that TV like you want to screw it,” he said to me and Aaron one Friday night when he came across us watching Die Hard in his living room.

“Well… we don’t,” I replied, weakly

“Thanks for clarifying that, chief,” he said. He walked to the mahogany liquor cabinet next to the TV and poured himself a couple fingers’ worth of bourbon. “I don’t personally give two shits, but all I’m saying is, going out and drinking a beer and feeling a tit ain’t the worst goddamn thing in the world.” Then he padded back to his bedroom.

I shoveled another slice of pizza into my mouth and refocused on Bruce Willis, who was pulling broken glass out of his feet.

“Your dad’s right. We need to go to parties,” Aaron said.

“We’re not invited to them,” I replied, grabbing the remote control and turning the volume up.

We’d had this argument many times before. Aaron and I were now in our junior year and neither of us had been to a party since that very first embarrassment in ninth grade. Every so often Aaron would push me to go to a party or a dance, but it was as if there was a little sign in my brain reading, “It’s been this many days since the last time you were humiliated,” and I was determined to keep that number moving in the right direction. I had seen what had happened to some of my nerdier classmates when they dared to venture into social situations where they weren’t welcome. One had been pinned down while someone drew penises all over his face in permanent marker. Another had been pantsed in front of the entire P.E. class. And since nothing like that had ever happened to me, I had talked myself into thinking that I was perfectly happy with the way things were.

In fact, I had done such a good job of it that when I turned sixteen, making me eligible for a driver’s license, my parents had to force me to make an appointment to take the test. Unlike most teenagers, who long for the day they can get behind the wheel and drive with their friends to parties—or park somewhere and make out with their dates—I was indifferent about the prospect of getting my license. I lived less than a mile from school, and even closer to my friends’ houses. With everywhere I went already within walking distance, a driver’s license seemed like an unnecessary goal that could only be reached through an unbearably taxing process.

Nevertheless, at my parents’ insistence, I looked up driving schools in the Yellow Pages and signed up for a course near my house that consisted of one two-hour lesson a week, for six weeks. My instructor was a skinny guy in his midtwenties who had a shaved head that was always peeling from sunburns and who could only have smelled more like marijuana if he’d been made of it. The training vehicle was a mid-’80s tan Nissan that had working brakes on the passenger side; he often got his jollies slamming them on for no reason and then between wheezing laughs saying, “You were all like ‘I’m in control of the car’ and then I hit the brakes and shit and you were all like ‘Whaaaat?’” During one lesson, he had me drive him to “a buddy’s house,” then disappeared inside for half an hour; when he emerged he was so high he couldn’t remember the way back to the driving school. We ended up driving around aimlessly for forty minutes while he told me about his life’s goal, which was to prove that humans and sea lions could coexist on the beach. His plan centered on “eating a bunch of fish in front of them, so that, you know, they can see that we like fish, too.”

Still, I managed to glean some driving knowledge from the course. So, one overcast Saturday morning in early October, I hopped into the passenger seat of my dad’s silver 1986 Oldsmobile Brougham and we headed for the Clairemont Mesa DMV to take my driver’s test.

“You excited?” my dad asked.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You guess? This is your independence right here. You get a license, you can take this car and never come back if you wanted.”

“I could do that without a license,” I said.

“No you couldn’t, because it’d be illegal.”

“Well, technically, so would taking your car and never coming back. That’s grand theft auto,” I said.

“Okay, let’s just both shut up until we get to the DMV.”

A few minutes later we pulled up to the tan one-story government building, which looked like the place where happiness went to die. Like most sensible Americans, my dad hates the DMV, and when we entered the lobby to find it packed to the gills with sweaty, tired, impatient people, he started nervously shifting his weight from foot to foot and biting his fingernails.

“Look at this fucking place. Everyone smells like dog shit, standing around like they’re in Russia waiting for a loaf of fucking bread. Why the fuck am I here? You’re the one taking the test.” A minute later: “That’s it. I can’t do this. You’re on your own,” and just like that he took off for the exit. Before I could even respond he was sitting on a bench outside, reading the paper.

After a few minutes in line, I was handed a number by a morbidly obese receptionist. I sat down in the waiting area, which was filled with teenagers and the oldest people I had ever seen in my life. Thirty minutes later my number was called.

When I returned to the administration desk, I was greeted by a tan Korean man in his late forties wearing a white lab coat.

“Halpern, Justin?” he said, reading off a chart.

“I prefer to go by Justin Halpern,” I joked.

He stared at me silently for a couple seconds. “This way,” he said, then walked out a set of double doors and into the parking lot.

When we got into the car I tensed up. I hadn’t been nervous before, but sitting in the driver’s seat of my dad’s Oldsmobile, without him in it, made me think for the first time about how exciting it would be if I were actually able to drive somewhere on my own. I could drive to movies, or school, or even on a date… and dates were where hand jobs happened. The array of opportunities flooded my mind, and I couldn’t focus on the DMV examiner’s nasal voice as he barked directions at me. I was gripping the steering wheel so tight my knuckles cramped, and every time he’d give me a direction, I repeated it back to him like we were doing an Abbott and Costello routine.

“Left here,” he said.

“Left here?”

“Yes. Left here.”

“Left here.”

“Stop that,” he snapped.

The low point of the test came when I tried to merge onto the freeway. In a panic, I drifted onto the shoulder, doing twenty-five miles an hour. “SPEED UP AND MERGE!” the examiner shouted. “OH MY GOD, SPEED UP AND MERGE.” I had a feeling I’d failed—a feeling confirmed when I pulled back into the DMV parking lot and my administrator could only manage to spit, “YOU ARE… FAIL.”

He got out of the car and slammed the door. I was mortified; any excitement I had about getting my driver’s license evaporated immediately, and I decided once again that getting my license didn’t really mean anything. After all, you don’t need a license to eat pizza and watch old movies.

“It’s not a big deal,” I told my dad in the parking lot. “Honestly, I don’t really even care. I’ll just take it again sometime.”

“Son, you’re the only sixteen-year-old I’ve ever met who doesn’t give a shit that he failed his driver’s test. What do you think that says about you?”

“I’m levelheaded.”

“That ain’t what it says,” he said, shaking his head.

In the days that followed, I didn’t tell any of my friends that I’d failed my test; it was still too sore a subject.

That Friday, as I sat next to Aaron while we copied each other’s answers before our first-period English class, a shadow fell on my desk. I looked up to see a classmate named Eduardo standing over me. I could count on one hand the number of times Eduardo had spoken to me in my life, but he’d made quite an impression. He was tall and thick, with slicked-back black hair that always looked like he’d just gotten out of a pool. He was also the only kid in our entire eleventh grade who had a real mustache. Those of us who were developed enough to even have facial hair grew thin, wispy mustaches generally associated with child molesters. But Eduardo’s looked like a push broom, and it was terrifying. I only could assume he was there for one thing.

“Do you want to copy my homework?” I asked, handing him a piece of paper.

“What? Fuck nah. I do my homework on time. That’s racist, fool,” he said.

“Sorry, I was just trying to—”

“You know my cousin Jenny?” Eduardo interrupted.

“Jenny who?” I asked. There were lots of Jennys at our school, and I wanted to make sure I committed no further missteps in this conversation.

“Jenny Jiminez. She’s in your public speaking class, fool.”

“Jenny Jiminez is your cousin?” I was surprised. Jenny was sweet, and she had absolutely no facial hair.

“I’m Mexican. Everyone is my cousin.”

“Ha! Look who’s racist now…” I trailed off when Eduardo didn’t even crack a smile. “Yeah, I know her. She’s cool,” I added.

“She likes your gumpy ass,” he said.

And, with that, Eduardo retrieved from his pocket a small comb with a tiny wooden handle, ran it through his mustache exactly twice, then returned it to his pocket as he walked back to his seat.

“You should ask Jenny to homecoming,” Aaron said, once Eduardo was a safe distance away.

“Yeah, right. I’m not going to homecoming,” I said.

I hadn’t gone to one dance in my entire high school career. I was six foot tall and a hundred and twenty pounds. When I danced, I looked like a praying mantis on fire. And besides, I already had plans for the Friday night of homecoming weekend: I was going to have Aaron over to watch Predator and Predator 2.

“Well, if you ask her, you guys can come with me and my date,” Aaron said.

“What?” I said in disbelief. “You have a date for homecoming? When did you do that?”

“I asked Michelle Porter a couple days ago in math class. She said okay.”

“I didn’t even know you liked Michelle Porter.”

“I’ve told you before that I thought she was nice and she has big titties,” he said.

“Dude. There is a huge difference between saying someone is nice and that they have big titties, and asking them to a dance without telling me, okay?” I snapped back.

“What is your problem? Why aren’t you happy for me?” he asked.

Aaron was right. I should have been happy for him and I knew it, but I felt angry and betrayed. His burgeoning social life was putting me to shame. Now, the thought of staying home and watching movies on the night of the homecoming dance made me feel like a total loser. I had to make a move.

“Fine. Then I’ll ask Jenny to the dance,” I said, in maybe the least confident way I have ever said anything.

“Well, if she says yes, then you guys can ride with us,” Aaron replied.

“I don’t want to ride in the back of your mom’s minivan with my date, dude.”

“Two seconds ago you didn’t even want to go! I was just trying to be nice ’cause you don’t have a license, asshole.”

“I’ll get my license. Also, I failed my first driver’s test last week, and I’m telling you that now because I tell you things because we’re friends and I don’t just spring stuff on you,” I spluttered.

As I walked home from school later that day, I realized I’d set myself two intimidating goals to accomplish in the next three weeks: asking a girl to a dance for the first time ever and passing my driver’s test. I decided to start with the less daunting of the two: getting my license. Unbeknownst to me, my dad had already put a lot of thought into the problem.

Around 3:30 that day, I walked in the door to find him home from work early, and in his “action” sweatpants, which he usually only breaks out when he’s trying to kill an animal in the backyard or perform some feat of strength around the house. They were grey, like most of his others, but they sported blue and yellow stripes down the sides and elastic around the ankles, presumably for aerodynamic purposes. As soon as I entered the living room, he stared me down.

“You, my friend, are going to learn how to drive because I am going to teach you how to drive,” he said, the veins in his neck already starting to bulge.

My dad approaches teaching like it’s a fight. He sees his students as opponents, and he pummels them with one piece of information after another until they’re thoroughly disoriented and confused. Once the fight starts, no tapping out is allowed. He ordered me to drop my backpack and follow him to my brother’s old GMC truck, parked in our driveway. He opened the passenger door for me like a very angry chauffeur, got behind the wheel himself, and nanoseconds later we were screeching up the street.

As he put the car into second gear, I made a troubling observation. “This is a stick shift,” I said.

“Well done.”

“But I don’t know how to drive a stick. I learned on an automatic,” I said, as he aggressively shifted gears.

“You remember when you were six or seven and we went to visit Aunt Naomi? We went to that pool with all the diving boards and you wanted to jump off of it, but you were too scared?”

“Yes.”

“You remember what I did?”

“Yes. You carried me to the highest diving board in the entire place, grabbed me by the back of my swim trunks, and hurled me into the water.”

“I tossed you off that thing like a sack of fuckin’ potatoes,” he chuckled as he stared out his window, reminiscing.

“What’s your point?” I said.

“After that you went apeshit, jumping off every board in the place. You learn stick shift with me, you won’t give two shits when you take the test in an automatic with some asshole in a lab coat. Make sense?”

“No.”

“Too fucking bad,” he said.

We drove to the parking lot of a nearby Circuit City, where he pulled the keys from the ignition and we switched seats. He gave me a quick overview of the gears and then spent the next hour screaming numbers at me, trying to train me to shift gears. “Three! Four! Six! There is no fucking six! Pay attention! Back to three!” I never even turned the car on.

Every day for the next two weeks, my dad went to work at six in the morning so he could leave early, come home, and give me a driving lesson before sunset. He began each lesson by announcing a theme for the day. Among them were “A car is a murder weapon,” “Announce your presence with fucking authority,” and my personal favorite: “Your mother is bleeding to death.”

He said this late one afternoon as I pulled the truck out of the driveway. “If the shit goes down and you need to be across town in ten minutes without breaking the law, can… you… do it?” he added, lifting his eyebrows.

“I would just call 911 if that happened.”

“Right. That’s a fair point. But just bear with me, okay?”

“Okay, but that’s not the kind of driving I’m going to have to do for the test.”

“No. But I’m not teaching you to pass the test. I’m teaching you how to drive. Driving is not always a stroll through the woods with your pants down. Now, I want you to get from here to Clairemont in less than ten minutes. No illegal shit.”

“Clairemont’s ten miles away. I don’t—”

“Clock starts in three, two, one!” he yelled, looking at his watch.

“Dad. This is not a helpful driving lesson.”

“Nine fifty-nine, nine fifty-eight, nine fifty-seven, CLOCK IS RUNNING GO GO GO GO GO GO GO GO!” He kept screaming until finally I jammed the car into reverse, then back into first gear, and gave the gas pedal everything I had as we headed up the street.

I raced through the suburban streets of our neighborhood and toward the 5-North freeway that led to Clairemont. With the exactitude of the clown-faced, wheelchaired psychopath in the Saw movies, my dad explained the rules of the game: I wasn’t allowed to exceed the speed limit, so in order to reach our destination in time, whenever I encountered a yellow light I should gun it, and whenever I approached a red I should decide quickly whether to wait it out or turn and take another route. Periodically my dad would scream how much time I had left, along with a new imaginary scenario that might be responsible for my rush.

“Six-thirty mark! Your buddy has kidney stones and he’s in incredible pain!” he yelled as I hit the gas to make it through a yellow light.

I could feel sweat beginning to build on my forehead and my heart was racing.

“Three minutes! Your wife’s car broke down in a bad neighborhood and she’s afraid she’s going to be sexually assaulted!”

“Stop! You’re not helping,” I yelled back as I weaved in and out of traffic toward the freeway exit for Clairemont. I gunned it past a semi in the exit lane and whizzed down the on-ramp. I just had to drive up hilly Balboa Avenue and I’d be in Clairemont. I figured I had about a minute left. There was one light halfway up the hill that stood between me and victory, and at the moment it was green, but I was still three hundred yards away. I kept waiting for it to turn yellow, but even a hundred yards away it remained green. Afraid it would turn yellow before I got close enough to race through, I started slowing down.

“What are you doing? It’s green,” my dad said, pointing at the light.

“I know, but I think it’s going to turn yellow,” I said, brushing sweat from my eyes.

“But it ain’t. You’re almost there. Come on now.”

I hit the gas, but just as I did the light finally turned yellow. I panicked, convinced I was still too far away to get through it safely, but driving too fast to stop in time. Paralyzed by indecision, I froze, my foot leaden on the gas pedal. As the light turned red, our truck raced into the intersection and toward an oncoming Nissan hatchback. My dad reached over, grabbed the wheel, and pulled it hard toward him, causing the truck to jerk right and narrowly miss a collision.

“I can’t believe you grabbed the wheel. I can’t believe you grabbed the wheel,” I said, mumbling like an insane person, once I’d hit the brakes and pulled over.

“You weren’t doing anything. I had to do something,” he said.

I wiped my face dry with my T-shirt. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry,” I said, feeling embarrassed at my incompetence.

“It’s all right,” he said.

By the end of the second week of my dad’s driving school, I felt prepared to retake the state test, even if he wasn’t convinced that I’d be able to get my future four-year-old son to the emergency room before he hemorrhaged to death. I had scheduled a second test, and felt like I had a real shot at getting my license this time, but my dad had been working me so hard I’d mostly forgotten that the end goal was being able to drive to homecoming. With the dance now only a week away, I realized I had to start working on the second part of my plan: landing a date.

Eduardo had said his cousin Jenny liked me, but then Eduardo had also told me once that he was taking woodshop so that he could “build a wooden knife and stab you, fool.” I thought Jenny was cute, but I’d never asked a girl out before, and the thought of getting rejected—coupled with the threat of being stabbed with a shoddily made wooden knife for disrespecting Eduardo’s cousin—was concerning. I decided to talk it over with Aaron at lunch the Monday before the dance.

“He never ended up making that knife. He made a bird feeder for his abuela,” Aaron said as he wolfed down an avocado sandwich.

“Still, it doesn’t make me trust him,” I said.

“Just talk to Jenny. Wait for the right time, then ask.”

“But I don’t want to ask her if she doesn’t like me. What do you think I should look for? Just eye contact and stuff like that?”

“Dude. I eat lunch with you every day and masturbate like ten times a week. I have no fucking clue. Just ask her.”

Later that afternoon, I walked into my public speaking classroom, sat down behind Jenny, and waited for the right moment. I’m not sure how I thought the right moment would make itself known, but apparently it never did. In fact, I was so nervous at the prospect of asking her out that I couldn’t even talk to her about class-related things. At one point, we had to break into small groups to formulate our arguments for and against legalizing drugs. When Jenny asked me to contribute, I said, “I like drugs, but also I don’t like them,” then immediately got up and walked out of class to the bathroom, where I paced around for a couple minutes to make it seem like I’d actually left the room for a purpose.

After three straight days of staring at the back of Jenny’s head, trying to figure out what I should say, I finally worked up the nerve to attempt a conversation with her. I was confident that I’d come up with a pretty solid opener

“Have you ever taken Flaming Hot Cheetos and dumped nacho cheese on them?”

“Yeah. It’s good,” she said.

“Yeah.”

I said nothing else to her for the remaining fifty-four minutes of class.

On the walk home from school that day, I started to panic. There were two days left until the dance, and if I didn’t get a date fast I was going to be sitting at home watching movies on my own when Friday rolled around. Aaron’s move had spurred all of our other friends to take the plunge and get dates of their own and the thought of me watching Predator by myself made me ill.

I was so preoccupied with anxiety over homecoming that it wasn’t until I walked into my house, and saw my dad holding his car keys with a big smile on his face, that I remembered that today was the day of my second driver’s test.

“Let’s shove this test up the DMV’s ass,” he shouted. He tossed me the keys to the Oldsmobile and led me out of the house. He grabbed the newspaper on our front lawn, opened the door to the backseat, and got in.

“Why aren’t you sitting in the front seat?” I asked.

“I’ve always wanted to be chauffeured. Two birds, one stone,” he said, reaching out and pulling the door shut.

I climbed into the driver’s seat, started up the big silver sedan, and began my drive to the DMV. My dad opened up his newspaper and read in silence for a few moments before flipping down the top half of the paper and catching my eye in the rearview mirror.

“Hey, real quick. I don’t want to flood your brain with a bunch of shit, but can I give you one piece of advice?” he said.

“Sure.”

“Don’t trust your instincts.”

“What?”

“Your instincts are dog shit,” he said, then went back to his newspaper.

“You’re just gonna say something like that and then start reading the paper?!”

“Well, it’s not really getting chauffeured if you don’t get to do something like read the paper,” he said.

“That is a messed-up thing to say to me right before the test!” I yelled.

He flipped the newspaper back down, revealing a quizzical expression.

“What crawled up your ass?”

“You did,” I said, starting to get flustered.

“Look, calm down. It wasn’t a dig. I just mean that every time you’re uncomfortable and you get the option to sit something out, you sit it out. So all I was saying to you was: when your asshole gets tight, don’t listen to your gut, ’cause you’ve filled it with shit.”

He flipped the newspaper up once more and we rode the rest of the way to the DMV in silence. I was seething with anger the whole way there, thinking about what my dad had said. “I don’t always sit things out. He doesn’t even know what I do. He’s only around me an hour a day,” I told myself, getting angrier by the minute.

My father’s voice reverberated in my head for the next hour, as I left him outside, checked in at the DMV, and sat in the waiting room alone. It followed me as my name was called, I led my lab coat-wearing test administrator to my car, and my test began. The truth is, I had no answer for my dad’s accusation, and it infuriated me. With the DMV employee in the passenger seat next to me, I merged onto the freeway, but this time I was so preoccupied that I did so seamlessly. I was hell-bent on trying to find an example of when I had been confronted with something tough and not sat it out. Eventually, my thoughts led to asking Jenny to the homecoming dance. “That was something tough, and I didn’t sit that out,” I thought, as I turned onto the freeway exit and made a complete stop at the stop sign. Then I remembered that I hadn’t actually asked Jenny out yet. I’d only decided to ask her out. Deflated, I made a left and pulled back into the DMV’s parking lot. I felt like a total loser.

“You passed. Congratulations,” the test administrator said as I put the car in park.

At first I didn’t even hear him. Then he said it again and it sunk in. I had passed my driver’s test. I had accomplished one of my two goals. My dad was wrong. I got out of the car and slammed my door in triumph.

“I passed my test,” I announced to my dad as I met him outside in the DMV parking lot.

“Hot damn! Well done,” he said.

“So take that!” I said, pointing at him.

“Take what?” he said, his eyebrows wrinkled in confusion.

“You didn’t think I could do it. And I did it. Because guess what? I can do a lot of things that you don’t think I can do,” I said triumphantly.

“Uh, okay. I got no idea what in the fuck you’re talking about, but whatever floats your boat, son.”

I felt empowered, like one of those women in a Lifetime Channel movie who stands up to her husband. Now I just had to ask Jenny to the dance.

The next day, I strode into my public speaking class and sat in front of Jenny with a sense of purpose. There would be no more pussyfooting about; I was going to straight up ask her to the dance. I swiveled in my seat to face her.

“Hey, uh, Jenny, do you… like where you live?”

“Um, yeah,” she said.

“Cool,” I said, turning back around to face forward.

I took a deep breath and swiveled once more.

“So, uh, I don’t know if you know the dance, or if not that’s cool too?”

“Do I know the dance?”

“I was thinking… I didn’t know if you had a date to the dance, or if someone asked you or not, but if they didn’t or if they did and you said no, or whatever, I was wondering if you wanted… or if I could take you to the dance tomorrow.”

That was the best she was going to get from me. I sat back and awaited her answer.

“Yeah, okay,” she said.

“Awesome,” I said.

I turned back around to find our teacher looking at me. I was so exhilarated I gave her a thumbs-up and spent the rest of the period replaying my victory in my head over and over, enjoying every minute of it.

“Dad, I have a date for homecoming, so I’m going to need the car,” I said proudly when he got home that evening.

“Good for you! Congratulations, son. But tough shit. My car’s not a fuck palace. I’ll give you some money to take a taxi.”

The next night, on the way home from the dance, in the back of a taxi cab driven by a guy who looked like Ernest Hemingway with a meth addiction, with Snow’s “Informer” playing on the radio, I leaned in and kissed Jenny on the lips. It was my first kiss.