More Sh*t My Dad Says

A Man Takes His Shots and Then He Scrubs the Shit out of Some Dishes

Between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, each of my friends lost his virginity. One by one they fell, until finally, at the age of twenty, my friend Jeff and I were the only virgins left. I was in my second year of college and lived in a run-down five-bedroom house in Pacific Beach, San Diego, with Jeff and three other close friends. The morning after a party we threw celebrating the end of the first semester, I stumbled out of my bedroom and found my roommates hanging out in the grease-stained kitchen.

“Any milk left?” I asked, hoping to drown my hangover with Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

“Jeff had sex last night,” my friend Dan said.

I froze.

Maybe he’s joking, I thought. I looked at Jeff, who was standing in the corner of the room sipping a Gatorade with the swagger of someone who had won seven Super Bowls, and knew it was no joke.

“Jeff had sex? Jeff?” I said, in disbelief.

“Well, fuck you too, dude,” Jeff replied.

“Sorry, I’m just surprised. I’m happy for you,” I said.

I was not happy for him. Imagine if you and a friend were stranded on a desert island for the last five years. Then one day you wake up and saw your friend on a raft in the ocean, paddling toward a rescue ship. Then, as you scream, “Come back! Don’t leave me!,” your friend laughs and waves at you, then keeps paddling, without even looking back. That is exactly how I felt in that moment. It didn’t seem that terrible to be a virgin when I wasn’t the only one. Now I was the only member left in the club, and it was awful.

I never felt pressure from my friends to have sex. Nobody was getting laid that regularly, and even Dan, who probably had more sex than any of my other friends, rarely talked about it, for a reason he put rather eloquently: “I play tennis every once in a while, but I don’t brag about it because I suck at it.” But now that Jeff had had sex, I couldn’t help but feel like they had stepped into manhood and I was on the outside looking in.

It wasn’t like I hadn’t been trying. It’s not like I had some special being-awesome-with-the-ladies gear that I just hadn’t chosen to shift into. I’d always been terrified of talking to women and usually just avoided it. When I headed to college, I tried to relax and not obsess over having sex, hoping it would just happen.

It didn’t.

A couple months later, I finished my second year at San Diego State. During my sophomore year, I had played on the baseball team and spent fifty-plus hours a week practicing, playing, attending classes, and studying. That didn’t leave much time for a job, so when summer rolled around, I had to make all the money I’d need for the year. On the first day of summer break, Dan and I drove around in his Mazda putting in applications at every restaurant, retail store, and hotel we could find. As we drove home from the last hotel just before sunset, we stopped at a stoplight near the beach. Directly in front of us, hanging from a blank storefront in a strip mall, was a giant banner:

“That’d be funny, if we applied to a Hooters,” Dan said as the light turned green.

We drove along quietly for a few moments.

“We should apply there,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Dan said, suddenly turning the wheel hard and making a screeching U-turn in the middle of the street.

We parked out in front of the banner and went inside. The restaurant was still being built, so the inside was filled with construction workers and raw materials. In the corner were two men sitting at a desk: a big Korean man in his twenties, and a five-foot-tall, grizzled white guy in his midforties wearing a Hooters T-shirt and hat. He looked like the kind of guy who, if he hadn’t killed a man himself, at least must have buried a body somewhere along the way. We approached them tentatively.

“Hi, are you guys taking applications?” I said.

“No. We just like to put a big-ass sign out front for shits and giggles and then sit around and talk to every dipshit that walks in here,” the little man said in a raspy voice that suggested he’d been smoking since birth.

Dan and I stood silently for a moment, unsure if we were supposed to laugh.

“I’m busting your balls. Here’s an application. I assume you’re applying to be a cook. I’m Bob. This is Song Su,” he added, pointing to his colleague.

Dan and I introduced ourselves, filled out the applications, and left.

For the next few days we continued to hunt for jobs, but later that week I got a call from Song Su.

“You guys got the job. Tell your tall friend that’s pretty like a girl so I don’t have to make two calls. Orientation is Monday,” he said.

“That’s awesome! Thank you!” I said.

“Don’t get excited. The job sucks and you make minimum wage. I think. I can’t remember. Whatever it is, it’s terrible pay. See you Monday,” he replied.

I didn’t care how terrible the pay was going to be. I was going to be surrounded by women eight hours a day, five days a week. For the entire summer. I would literally be forced to talk to them. Maybe, just maybe, I was going to have sex.

A couple days later, I sat alongside Dan and eight other guys in two rows of chairs in a room at the back of the recently finished Hooters, covered in fake street signs and orange, as Song Su and Bob stood before us. Bob wore a mesh tank top and sported a mustache that would make any 1970s baseball player proud. He slowly puffed at a cigarette as he addressed the male members of his newly assembled staff.

“I know what you’re all thinking. You’re going to get some stank on your dick with one of these waitresses, that’s why you took the job.”

“’Cause the job sucks,” Song Su added.

“Yep. Job sucks,” Bob nodded.

“Well, let me be the first to tell you,” Bob continued. “That’s probably going to happen. You’re probably gonna nail one of them. I nailed one. Then I married her,” he said.

“Whoa, no way,” said a guy in the front row.

“Yes way, shithead. I took one down. Married her. She had my babies, the whole deal. Anyway, just do your work and don’t piss me off, and you’ll have a good time,” Bob said, before spitting on the ground.

After his speech, he gave us a tour of the kitchen and the walk-in freezer, which he said was “an awesome place to get a hand job if you’re not in the middle of a dinner rush.” He finished up the tour by handing us black T-shirts with the Hooters logo emblazoned on the front. Then he welcomed us to the Hooters family, which transitioned into a bizarre tangent about his time in the military, where he warned us about “the kind of scum that fuck a man’s wife when he’s overseas in the shit.”

As we drove out of the parking lot an hour and a half later, Dan made a comment that was hard to ignore: “Dude. I don’t want to put any extra pressure on you, ’cause I know you’re all weird about this virginity shit. But if that Bob guy can have sex with a Hooters girl, you have to be able to.”

I agreed. I could barely contain my excitement. Sex had seemed so elusive, but now I felt like I was mere days away.

Two days later, Dan and I walked into Hooters for our first shift wearing our tan aprons and Hooters hats. We realized two things really quickly: 1) Song Su wasn’t lying: the job definitely sucked; 2) the majority of the girls working there had major emotional problems. And not cries-too-much emotional problems; more like stabs-her-boyfriend-with-a-steak-knife-then-falls-into-a-corner-and-starts-whispering-to-herself emotional problems. Even if I knew how to talk to women like that, or wanted to—neither of which I did—the work day was so jam-packed with cleaning, scrubbing, wing-battering, and Dumpster-emptying that I didn’t even have a chance.

One day I was washing dishes in the back when Bob poked his head in. “Skippy,” he said. (Bob never remembered anyone’s name. Nor did he bother to cover up this fact.) “Skippy, today is not your day. I’m going to tell you a story. Guy walks into a Hooters, gets drunk, pukes his fucking guts out up on the balcony. You clean it up, and afterward I buy you a beer and tell you you’re a swell guy. The end. What do you think?”

“I hate that story, Bob,” I said.

“Maybe it was in the telling,” he said, handing me a mop and a bucket in tow. Even though the balcony stood fifty feet from the ocean, the stench of vomit overpowered the smell of the sea. I had found the mess and started scrubbing when I heard a woman’s voice.

“I am super sorry about that. I probably shouldn’t have kept serving him beers,” she said.

I turned and saw that the voice belonged to a waitress named Sarah. She was tall and thin, with short blond hair, and her breasts were tucked into her Hooters uniform in a way that created a shelf below her chin that she could probably set her car keys on if she needed free hands. She had been fairly quiet in the month that I had worked there; my only interaction with her had been a week before, when she asked me if we were out of baked beans. But she did so politely and with a pretty smile.

“It’s no big deal,” I said, suddenly realizing how impossible it was to look cool while cleaning up vomit.

“I’ll buy you a beer afterward. Actually, I have a six-pack in my car. We can drink them at the beach if you get off soon,” she said.

After Sarah went back to work, I ran downstairs to Dan, who was up to his elbows in batter, lathering up raw chicken wings.

“Guess who asked me to drink beers with her after work?” I asked.

“I don’t know. But Bob just handed me my paycheck. Eighty-three hours, after taxes, guess how much? Two hundred and forty-two dollars. For eighty-three fucking hours, dude. I almost cried. I seriously almost cried. I hate this fucking job. I blame you,” he said, pulling a chicken wing out of the batter and hurling it against the wall.

“Are you still mad, or can I talk now?” I asked.

“I’m done. So which girl asked you to have beers?”

“Guess.”

“I don’t know. Sarah?”

“How’d you know that?”

“’Cause they’re all named Sarah.”

I described which Sarah I meant, and how the conversation had gone down, as he battered the wings.

“Well, I’m actually not able to be happy right now, but if I were, I’d be happy for you,” he said.

I couldn’t wait for work to end. I was so excited that I didn’t even mind it when Bob made me clean the Dumpster outside filled with rancid chicken wings.

Around midnight, after I finished cleaning out the oil in the fryers, Sarah and I made our way down to her Honda Civic and grabbed the six cans of warm Natty Ice she had rolling around in her backseat. We sat on the cement wall of the boardwalk looking out at the ocean and cracked the beers open and began drinking. I smelled like raw chicken, flour, and vomit. After a few moments of silence, though, I began to panic: here I was again, sitting next to a woman, with no idea how to talk to her.

“That guy really threw up everywhere,” I said as an opener.

“Yeah, that was really gross. I’d rather not talk about it,” she replied.

“Totally,” I said.

I decided my only chance at this going well was to stop talking and just go in for a kiss. So I did—until I realized she had a mouthful of beer, and my surprise kiss caused her to cough it up in my face.

“Oh my God, I’m really, really sorry,” I said, patting her on the back as she coughed.

“Wrong pipe,” she said between coughs. Finally she caught her breath. “Let me finish a couple more beers and then we’ll make out, okay?”

She did, and we did. And then we did the same thing the next night, and the night after that. Then make-outs at night turned into hang-outs during the day, and before I knew it we’d been hanging out and making out for about a month. I’d made out with a few girls before her, but I’d never had a consistent make-out partner. I felt like an athlete in the midst of a winning streak; I wasn’t sure why everything was working, but it was and I didn’t want to screw it up.

“You think she thinks you’re her boyfriend?” asked Dan one day at work while we cleaned the stainless-steel prep station in the back of the kitchen.

“I’m not sure. We just kind of only make out, and rent movies and watch them and don’t really talk a bunch. I like her, though. She’s cool,” I said.

“You’ve been hanging out with her a lot, dude. If you like her, you should just ask her if she’s your girlfriend, because if she is, you guys should be having sex, not making out,” Dan said.

“Get some stank on your hang low,” Bob yelled out from the manager’s office, where, evidently, he’d been eavesdropping.

Dan was right. I did like Sarah. She was quiet but very sweet and cute, and we had the same taste in rental movies. And if I liked her, and she liked me, why weren’t we having sex?

That night, when I was at Sarah’s little one-bedroom stucco apartment in Rancho Bernardo, we were making out on her fake leather couch the way we usually did. At one point she got up to get a glass of water and I followed her to the kitchen.

“This is a super-weird question to ask, but do you tell people I’m your boyfriend?” I asked.

She lit up a cigarette and took a few puffs.

“No one has really asked me. But, I mean, I like hanging out with you, so I guess you kind of are,” she said. “We haven’t had sex, though,” she added.

“Yeah, that’s why I thought maybe we weren’t,” I said.

“Well, we can. I just hadn’t ’cause we’d just been hanging out for a couple weeks, and then I’ve been on my period. But why don’t you rent a movie and come over Friday night?”

I could barely sleep the next two nights, I was so excited. I’d spent most of my adolescence fantasizing about sex, and now it was about to happen. I thought about how it might go down. Maybe I’d take off her bra with one hand while saying something cool, but not douchey. Then we’d turn off a couple lights, and go at it for forty-five minutes to an hour, and I’d give her two to three orgasms. The anticipation was killing me. I had struggled with women my whole life; I’d never been comfortable in my own skin, never felt like a man. I just felt like a boy who got older. And, while I didn’t know what the steps were to start to feel like a man, I was sure that having sex must be one of them.

The next day I bounded into work, tossed on my apron, and found Dan cutting limes in the kitchen.

“You didn’t come home last night. You guys do it?” Dan asked.

“No. But she says I’m her boyfriend, and the only reason we haven’t done it is because she’s on her period,” I said proudly.

“That’s why God made the butthole, my friend. One door closes, the other one opens,” Bob chimed in from a few feet away.

That Friday evening, a couple hours before my shift ended, Bob came into the kitchen to let me off early for the night.

“Before you go, though,” he said, “your skinny buddy said you’re about to get your cherry popped.”

I looked angrily behind Bob and spotted Dan trying to hide a smile as he scrubbed the mop sink.

“Let me tell you something,” Bob said earnestly as he put his hand on my shoulder. “I lost my virginity when I was fourteen, on mushrooms, to a two-hundred-pound woman who ran the Laundromat by my dad’s house. Then I spent the next two hours taking a dump in her toilet.”

“Okay.”

“I’m glad I got a chance to tell you that,” he said, then patted me on the back.

I got in my car and drove to the Blockbuster near my apartment, where I rented a copy of A Few Good Men. Sarah had never seen it, and it was one of my favorite movies.

As I drove over to Sarah’s, I was filled with nerves, excitement, and a little bit of nausea. It was the same feeling I’d had when I got up with the bases loaded in the championship game of my last year of Little League. That ended with me getting hit in the stomach with a fastball and puking on home plate. I could only hope that this would end differently.

I got to her apartment shortly before midnight, with a DVD, twelve condoms, and an entire chocolate cake, which seemed like a good idea when I was in the drugstore checkout line, but immediately felt ridiculous as I carried it through Sarah’s front door.

We had a couple beers on her couch, then crawled into her double bed and put on A Few Good Men. Usually, about five minutes into a movie we would start making out and one of us would pause the film. This time, though, I hesitated to make the first move, because for so long the first move had been the only move. Now there was supposed to be a second move: doing it.

Twenty minutes of the movie went by, then forty, and I still hadn’t done anything. Finally I started kissing Sarah’s neck, then lifted up her shirt. I couldn’t figure out how to unhook her bra, so I pulled it down and awkwardly put my mouth on her boob.

“What are you doing?” Sarah asked.

I popped my head up.

“What?” I asked.

“What are you doing?” she asked again.

“Kissing your boob?”

“Well, it’s just—they’re talking about whether or not Jack Nicholson ordered the code red on that guy,” she said, pointing at the TV screen.

I grabbed the remote and pushed pause.

“There you go. You won’t miss it,” I said.

She grabbed the remote and unpaused the movie.

“I want to see if he ordered the code red,” she snapped.

“He ordered the code red.”

“I don’t think he did.”

“Of course he did. That’s what the whole movie is about. I’ve seen the movie.”

“Geez, well, thanks for ruining it for me!”

“Ruining it for you? They tell you forty-five minutes into the movie that he ordered the code red. The rest of the movie is just about whether or not Tom Cruise can get him to say he ordered the code red.”

“Don’t tell me what the movie’s about! I know what it’s about!”

By now, of course, I had absolutely destroyed any mood there was to begin with, and hurt her feelings in the process. I needed to think of something fast.

“I’m sorry. Do you want some cake?” I asked.

“What?”

“Let’s just watch the movie. I promise I didn’t ruin it for you,” I said.

“Sorry, I’m just into the movie. Why don’t we just have sex right now? That way we can watch the movie afterward and not have to worry about having sex,” she said.

Now that I’m older, it seems like a pretty obvious sign that your relationship isn’t going well if your partner asks you to get sex out of the way so she can finish a movie. At the time, though, it sounded like a perfectly reasonable request and I jumped at her offer.

I pressed pause again, pulled out a condom, and started to open it—first with my hands, then with my teeth, then, finally and frantically, with both teeth and hands, which proved successful. Then I reached over and flipped off the lights, and for about a minute and thirty seconds we had sex. In all the thousands of sexual fantasies I’d had, I only concerned myself with making exactly one person happy: me. But as I rolled around on top of her, like a zombie trying to maul a sleeping camper in a horror film, I fully realized all the pressures that come with having sex with someone. I was supposed to try to make it as good for her as it was for me. I had responsibilities. And it soon became evident—as soon as I realized it would be over very quickly—that I didn’t know what it would take to make things enjoyable for her. Before that night, when I’d heard someone say their first time was disappointing, it had always rubbed me the wrong way, like hearing a millionaire tell you their life is too complicated. But now that I’d had sex, I was disappointed—because I had sucked so badly at it. There was nothing romantic about it.

After I finished, I collapsed on top of her. She tilted her body and I slid off her. She went to the bathroom, then got back in bed and hit the play button on the remote. I was asleep before Jack Nicholson yelled “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!”

The next morning, Sarah left early to pick up her sister from the airport; when I woke up she had already gone. I drove back to my apartment, unsure whether what had happened could be considered a success. When I walked in, Dan was having breakfast.

“You do it?” he asked as soon as I walked in.

“I did it,” I said.

“Let me guess how long. Five minutes?”

“Divided by two… and then minus another minute, I think.”

“Look who just became a man!” he said, laughing.

A couple days later, Sarah called me while I was at work. Bob called me into his office and handed me the phone.

“I don’t like personal calls, Skippy,” he said.

“Sorry, I’ll make it quick,” I said, and picked up the phone.

“What’s up?” I said into the receiver.

What was up was, she thought we should break up.

“So, you’re really nice, but I just don’t think I’m going to work at Hooters anymore, and it’ll be hard for us to see each other and stuff,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, trying not to reveal my hurt feelings.

“Okay. Sorry. Could you put Bob back on? I want to tell him where to send my last check.”

I handed Bob the phone.

“She needs to talk to you,” I said.

I turned to walk away.

“Hey,” Bob said, stopping me. He held his hand over the receiver. “Just make sure you remember what she looked like naked so you can jerk off to her later, bud.”

I walked into the kitchen and told Dan the news, trying to hide my embarrassment.

“Well, at least you got to have sex, right?” he said.

I kept waiting for that to register with me, but the truth is, I felt no more like a man than I had felt before I’d had sex.

Bob came out of the office and grabbed a six-pack of Bud Lights.

“We need to have a quick chat. Grab yourself a brewski and come meet me on the upstairs balcony,” he said to me before walking upstairs. “Nothing imported. I got corporate on my ass.”

I grabbed a Bud Light and headed up to the balcony where Bob was sitting at an open table, with the ocean behind him. In the minute I had taken to find a beer and head upstairs, he’d already finished one beer and was halfway through another. I sat down and cracked one open.

“Nothing better on a sunny day than a beer and another dude’s hard-on,” he said.

“What?”

“Just messing with you. I’m not trying to pull any gay stuff on you,” he said, laughing loudly. “Wait, how old are you?” he asked, his laugh immediately ceasing.

“Twenty.”

He yanked the beer from my hands and set it down next to him. “Fuck me. I can’t have underage drinking on the premises. You’re better than that, Bob,” he said to himself before chugging the rest of his open beer.

“What’d you want to talk to me about?”

“Well, I consider the kitchen staff here to be my family…” he started.

“What about your wife and kid?”

“Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, the kid’s two. He’s not even a person. And the wife’s the wife. But you guys here, when one of you is cut, I bleed. And I know some girl just gave you a dick up the ass, and I know what that can do to a man. But you’re on a team here, and I need to know that you are still focused and it’s not going to affect your work,” he said.

“Bob, I wash dishes.”

“And you’re one of the three best I’ve ever seen at it. Swear to Jesus. I’m not blowing smoke up your ass. But I’m not going to sit by and watch your skills erode because some woman has got you unfocused,” he said. Then he grabbed the beer he’d confiscated from me and pounded half of it.

“I’ll be focused,” I said.

“Good. Because that’s what a man does. He takes his shots and then he goes back into that dish pit and he scrubs the shit out of some dishes,” he said, standing up and patting me on the back as he walked past me.

I went back to the kitchen, where a mountain of dishes had piled up in my absence. I put on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and turned on the hot water and got to work scrubbing. Bob was wrong: washing a lot of dishes did not make me feel like a man. Right that minute, though, neither did having sex. A rite of passage I’d expected to mean so much had left me feeling no different at all. I had no idea when I would feel like a man, or what it would take. All I could safely say was that I was a boy who had had sex, and was really, really good at washing dishes, and that would have to be enough for now.