Sh*t My Dad Says

Don’t Be So Quick to Buy into What Authority Prescribes

At about nine years old, I started developing a strange, uneasy feeling in my joints. It felt kind of like a little tiny person was inside them, tickling me. I wasn’t in pain, but I was uncomfortable a lot of the time, and the sensation had an unfortunate side effect: it caused frequent muscle spasms. My mom encouraged me to see a doctor, but the physician I went to couldn’t find anything wrong with me. “He’s growing fast, and it’s taking a toll. It’s natural. It will pass,” he said.

My brother Dan offered a different diagnosis: “Maybe it’s because you’re a gay,” he suggested one night, after I had complained to my dad for the umpteenth time at dinner.

“Quiet,” my dad barked at my brother. “Does it hurt?” he asked me.

“No. It’s just, I don’t know. Weird.”

“Thank you for that detailed description, Ernest fucking Hemingway. If you’re not feeling pain, then what’s the problem?”

“I don’t know, it makes me have to stretch and stuff,” I responded.

“He twitches all the time, Dad,” my brother chirped.

“Your mouth twitches all the time,” my dad snapped at him. Then he turned to me. “Okay, well, if it starts hurting, let me know.”

From that point forward, everyone in my family referred to the uneasiness in my joints as The Twitches, which sounds like some kind of eighteenth-century sexually transmitted disease British aristocrats got from prostitutes, but it was a catchy name, and it ended up sticking. When I was growing up, my dad personally selected my primary care doctor. For the most part, he picked doctors he had professional relationships with. The one time I expressed annoyance at having zero say in choosing my doctor, he snapped, “I’m sorry, did you go to medical school? Did you spend the last twenty-five fucking years of your life in medicine? No, you did jack shit. Let me handle picking your doc, and do me a favor and put a thumb in your ass and be quiet.”

But when I was twenty-one years old, my physician moved away, and when my insurance company gave my dad a list of doctors to choose from, it turned out that he was unfamiliar with all of them. So he let me review the list and pick out a doctor myself.

“Okay, listen, this is going to sound biased, but pick someone with a Jewish last name,” he instructed me.

“That’s racist, Dad.”

“Racist? Oh give me a fucking break. It’s not racist, I just know a lot of Jewish doctors and they’re good. And let me remind you that I’m a Jewish doctor and—you know what? Fuck you, pick whoever you want,” he said as he stormed out of the living room.

So I picked a doctor at my dad’s hospital, and a few months later I went in for a routine checkup. The doctor was a young guy, short, with dark hair. He was like a Jewish Tom Cruise… with a lisp. We went through all the normal checkup routines: breathe in and out, turn your head and cough, slam the minihammer on my knees, etc.

“Okay, you’re healthy,” he said, as we were wrapping up. “Is there anything else?”

I thought about it and was about to say no, but then remembered The Twitches and figured I might as well speak up. I described my symptoms, and he spent the next few minutes asking questions and doing a few more physical tests, moving my legs back and forth, pressing on my joints. He asked me to wait in his office and left the room for a couple minutes.

“Listen, there’s a drug called Zoloft,” he said as he entered his office with a prescription pad in hand. He launched into a description of Zoloft and its history, and told me that he thought it might help me.

“I don’t know that it will, but it might. You might be able to get rid of your joint problems entirely. I think we should take a shot,” he said.

I told him I’d love to, and he wrote me a prescription, which I took straight to the pharmacy and got filled.

That night, my dad and I sat down to dinner just the two of us, since my mom was working late. When he asked me how my doctor’s appointment went, I told him that I was given a clean bill of health.

“Oh, also, he prescribed some stuff for The Twitches,” I added.

“What kind of stuff?” he asked, his eyebrows furrowing into a steep mountain of hair.

“Well, you know, the doctor was talking about how he wasn’t sure what was causing my twitches so, you know….”

“No, I do not know. Enlighten me,” he said between clenched teeth.

I told him I’d filled a prescription for a drug called Zoloft.

“Bring me those fucking pills right now!” he shouted, holding out his hand as if I were going to make them magically appear.

“What? Why? What is your problem?”

“You have no idea what that shit is for. It’s an antidepressant. It’s for depressed people. Are you depressed?”

I told him that I didn’t think I was, but that I was tired of having The Twitches. They kept me up at night, and I always sounded ridiculous when I tried to explain to people why parts of my body would suddenly jerk.

My dad took a deep breath.

“You’re making that face like you gotta shit. Calm down for a moment,” he said. Then he sat back in his chair.

“Listen. Imagine you own a farm. On that farm, you got a bunch of sheep. And every night, wolves come and kill your sheep. It’s a problem, you want to fix it. Now, you could go and put a bunch of land mines around your farm, and every time one of the wolves comes near your farm, it steps on one of them land mines and blows it to fucking pieces. You think, ‘problem solved,’ right?”

He stared at me for a few moments, until I realized he wanted me to answer that question.

“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about right now,” I said.

“Jesus Christ, you’re fucking obtuse. What I’m saying is: You might have taken care of your wolf problem, but everyone around town is going to think of you as the crazy son of a bitch who bought land mines to get rid of wolves. That’s how they’ll treat you—in fact, that will be the first thing they associate you with. And not only that, now the only way you know how to get rid of wolves is blowing them the fuck up. You get what I’m saying now?”

He sat back in his chair, and a few moments of silence passed as the two of us stared at each other.

“Dad, I’m taking the pills.”

“Goddamn it! The hell you are!”

He shot up out of his chair and stormed into my room. I heard him rooting around furiously, opening and closing drawers, unzipping and rummaging through my backpack. When he returned to the dining room, he was holding my bottle of Zoloft. He marched over to the sink, poured the $20 worth of pills down the drain, and turned on the garbage disposal for good measure.

“You’ll thank me later,” he said as he returned to the table and resumed eating.

“What in the hell do I tell the doctor?” I asked.

“I don’t give a shit. Go back to your doctor and tell him to kiss my ass.”

A few weeks later, my dad came home early from work and popped his head into my bedroom, where I was doing homework.

“Grab a snack to take with you. We’re gonna go down to the hospital,” he said.

“Why? Please don’t harass my doctor.”

“Give me a fucking break. I’m not a maniac.”

I got in his car, and we drove to UCSD Medical Center. We walked into the waiting area, where my dad approached the reception desk and checked us in. Two minutes later, the nurse called my name and led my dad and me back to a room where an older, gray-haired doctor was waiting.

“Sam, good to see you,” the older doc said, extending his hand to shake my dad’s.

They chatted for a couple minutes, making incomprehensible doctor jokes that ended with punch lines like, “and then it turned out it wasn’t even a goddamned myocardial infarction!” followed by hysterical laughter. I sat atop the doctor’s table, stone-faced and trying to minimize the rustling noises emanating from the thin white paper that coated it, while I waited to be acknowledged.

“So, what can I do you for, Sam?” the doctor said.

“The kid’s got some uneasiness in his joints. I was hoping you could help him, because it’s really a pain in his ass. Tell him, son.”

“Well, it sort of feels like I’m being tickled from the inside of me—”

“Goddamn it, use medical terms, he’s a doctor,” my dad barked.

The old doctor performed the same tests my other doctor had and then turned to my dad, as if I wasn’t in the room.

“I think the culprit here is your boy had quite a growth spurt, and it put a lot of strain on his joints. Now he’s feeling the effects of it.”

“So you’re saying he grew funny, huh?” my dad replied.

“Well, more or less, yes.”

At last I had an answer.

We left the doctor’s office and, as we were walking down the hospital hallway, my dad turned to me and whispered, “Shit. I could’ve told you that. Fucking doctors, huh?”

“It’s watering plants, Justin. You just take a goddamned hose and you put it over the plant. You don’t even pay rent, just do it. Shit.”

“I’d say I was gonna miss you, but you’re moving ten minutes away, so instead I’ll just say don’t come over and do your fucking laundry here.”

“Pick your furniture like you pick a wife; it should make you feel comfortable and look nice, but not so nice that if someone walks past it they want to steal it.”

“Why is there a mural of two people fucking on your wall?… Son, let me be the first to tell you that you’re not Andy fucking Kaufman. When you get famous maybe shit like this will be funny, but right now all it says to me is this kid never gets laid. Ever.”

“Oh, don’t go to the goddamned cops. They’re busy with real shit. I don’t want my tax dollars going to figuring out who thinks you’re an asshole.”

“Why are you going over your monthly expenses?

…No, let me shorten this process for you:

You make dog shit, so don’t spend any money.”

“He cried? Jesus, don’t ever have that happen to you…. Well, no, try not to get a ticket, sure, but if you do, don’t cry like a fucking baby.”

“That is one ugly son of a bitch…. Oh, yeah, no, congratulations. If you see him, try not to stare at his face if you’ve eaten anything.”

“You won’t go do that, I know it…. Son, I used to wipe your ass, I know you better than you know you.

…Fine, Mom used to wipe it, but I was usually nearby.”

“I’m really sorry, son. If you’re pissed off and you need to blow off some steam, let me know. We’ll go smash some golf balls or something…. Oh right, the arm. Well, there’s other, nonphysical ways to blow off steam.”

“I’m not eating something called ‘pizzalicious.’ That’s not even a fucking adjective. You can’t just add ‘licious’ to nouns. That’s bullshit.”