Sh*t My Dad Says

Always Put Your Best Foot Forward

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.”

Now, a few months later, at this family gathering, I was seeing Joey for the first time since his birthday. The instant he saw me, his face broke out in a huge grin, and he ran up to me and screamed, “JOEY’S HAPPY BIRTHDAY, OH YEAH!” I laughed and told him it was nice to see him, but he didn’t acknowledge my greeting in the slightest. He just kept saying his catch phrase over and over. For the first ten minutes or so, my relatives thought it was cute and smiled at him or affectionately tousled his hair. My dad had been in the bathroom the whole time Joey had been carrying on like a parrot on speed, and when he walked out, he simply said, “Hey there, Joey.”

“JOEY’S HAPPY BIRTHDAY, OH YEAH!” Joey screamed before running off.

My dad turned to me. “It’s Joey’s birthday?”

I explained the situation, and in the midst of my explaining, Joey interrupted.

“JOEY’S HAPPY BIRTHDAY!”

“He and I need to have a talk,” my dad said matter-of-factly as Joey dashed into another room.

My dad talks to everyone, no matter his or her age, as he would to a forty-five-year-old physicist, so I had a pretty good idea how this was going to go.

“Just let him tire himself out, Dad.”

“He doesn’t want people thinking he’s an idiot, right?” my dad replied.

“He doesn’t even know other people think anything. He’s three.”

“A three-year-old doesn’t have a license to act like an asshole.”

On cue, Joey once again ran full speed into the room and screamed, “JOEY’S HAPPY BIRTH—”

“No,” my dad said, cutting him off.

Joey paused for a moment. “Joey’s happy birthday?” he said, totally devoid of conviction.

“No, Joey, it’s not your happy birthday. You need to stop saying to people it’s your birthday.”

Joey looked confused and horrified, like a stripper bursting out of a cake only to realize she’s been accidentally delivered to a baby shower.

My dad knelt down to Joey’s level and added, “It is not. Your. Birthday.”

The next sound I heard was a high-pitched squeal coming from Joey’s mouth. Then tears began streaming down his face and he ran away, arms at his sides, dangling like two limp strands of overcooked spaghetti.

Completely ignoring the disapproving glances from nearby family members, my dad got up from his crouch and turned to me. “Hey, it’s a tough realization it ain’t your birthday, but he’s a better man for it,” he said with satisfaction.

“What happened? Did somebody punch you in the face?!… The what? The air is dry? Do me a favor and tell people you got punched in the face.”

“We’re having fish for dinner…. Fine, let’s take a vote. Who wants fish for dinner?… Yeah, democracy ain’t so fun when it fucks you, huh?”

“I personally would never go to a prostitute, but if you’ve paid money for some strange, that doesn’t mean you can act like an idiot once you get it.”

“You want your independence, huh?… Every time you tell me about your independence, I just replace that word with the word money. Then it’s easy to say no.”

“Pretty great, right?… Really? Well, we differ in opinion then. Don’t tell your mom I said that, though. Tell her I yelled at you and called you a moron. Actually, don’t tell her anything. See, now I’m paranoid, and I didn’t even smoke any.”

“Jesus. That wasn’t even a home run, that was a fucking space experiment that should be written about in science journals or something.”

“I enjoyed it thoroughly…. I know which one was yours goddamn it, it was the one with the car…. Well shit, I thought that one was yours, so I left after. Don’t bust my balls, that festival was like sitting through a three-hour prostate exam.”

“You’re a grown man in college, but you still live in my goddamned house. Huh. That sounds way shittier for you when I say it out loud.”

“You, my good man, are not as dumb as I first fucking suspected.”

“I thought she’d have bigger breasts. I’m just being honest. That’s not a bad thing or a good thing, that’s just a thing I thought.”