Justin Halpern - More Shit My Dad Says (epub)

Justin Halpern - More Shit My Dad Says (epub) For Amanda Contents You Could Probably Be Happily Married to a Hundred and Fifty Million Different Women I Like It When You’re Married, Your Wife Sees Your Penis You Will Never Screw a Woman Who Looks Like That Sometimes You Have to Be Hurled off a Diving Board Against Your Will Could You Please Hand Me that Bottle of Peppermint Schnapps? You Are Good at Sit Down A Man Takes His Shots and Then He Scrubs the Shit out of Some Dishes Give the Rabbit Its Pain Medication I’d Rather Not See You Sitting Next to Me on a Friday Night Don’t Make Me Take Up Residence in Your Fantasy Land Do You Know What Makes a Shitty Scientist? Acknowledgments You Could Probably Be Happily Married to a Hundred and Fifty Million Different Women In May 2008, after being dumped by my girlfriend of almost three years, I moved back home withmy parents. After patting me on the back and telling me not to “leave my bedroom looking likeit was used for a gang bang,” my retired seventy-three-year-old father soon started treatingme as his full-time conversation partner, the proverbial wall against which he’d fling all hiscomments to see what stuck. One day I decided to start chronicling the absurd things that came out of his mouth in aTwitter feed called Shit My Dad Says. What began as an attempt to take my mind off myheartache, and make a couple friends laugh, exploded: within two months I had more than half amillion followers, a book deal with a major publisher, and a TV deal, which is all the moreridiculous when you take into account that it was solely because I was just writing down thingsmy dad said. They weren’t even my words. To say I was “lucky” would be inaccurate. Findingyour wallet after you’ve left it in a crowded bar is lucky. Getting a book deal and a TV showbased on less than five hundred total words is a level of luck reserved for people who surviveplane crashes or find out they’re Oprah’s long-lost sister. But none of the events of the past year and a half would have occurred if my girlfriend,Amanda, hadn’t broken up with me. If she’d never dumped me, I would never have moved home. IfI hadn’t moved home, I would never have started chronicling the shit my dad says. And if Ihadn’t started doing that, I would probably still be sitting in the public library next to ahomeless man, just as I am right now, but I wouldn’t be writing a book. I’d be stealing rollsof toilet paper since I couldn’t afford to buy them. A couple months after I moved home, before I even started the Twitter feed, Amanda called andsaid she wanted to meet for lunch to talk. It was the first time we’d spoken since thebreakup, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about seeing her again. We had dated for almost threeyears, and though calling someone “The One” makes her sound like she was chosen to lead arebellion against an evil ruler of the galaxy, I genuinely thought Amanda was the person Iwanted to spend my life with. It had taken me the two months we hadn’t spoken just to startfeeling normal again. So the thought of seeing her now was frightening. Seeing someone you usedto date is a lot like watching highlights of your favorite team losing in the Super Bowl: justthe sight of it hits you like a punch in the gut and makes you remember how upset you were whenit all went down in flames. After I got off the phone with Amanda, I hopped up off the air mattress on my bedroom floor andwalked into my dad’s office. I told him that Amanda wanted to talk with me and I wasn’t surewhat to do. “You’re not fucking perfect,” he said as he swiveled his chair away from me and back to hisdesk where he was writing. “What? I didn’t say anything about being perfect. I just wanted to know what you thought,” Isaid, shifting my weight from foot to foot in his doorway. He swiveled back toward me. “That’s what I think. I think you’re not perfect.” I explained to him as patiently as I could that I had absolutely no idea what question he wasanswering, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t the one I asked. “Human beings do dumb shit. You do dumb shit. She does dumb shit. Everyone does dumb shit.Then, every once in a while, we have a moment where we don’t do dumb shit, and then we throw agoddamned parade and we forget all the dumb shit we did. So what I’m saying to you is, don’tdo something, or not do something, to punish someone because you think they did something dumb.Do what you want to do, because it’s what you want to do. Also, bring me a grapefruit from thekitchen and some salt and pepper.” I decided to have lunch with Amanda. A year later, I sat across from my father in a booth at Pizza Nova, a small restaurant on theSan Diego harbor. “I have big news,” I said, barely containing my smile. “You’re in trouble. Is it money? It’s money,” he said. “What? No. Why would I say ‘I have big news’ if it was something bad?” “ ‘I have big news; I shot and killed a man.’ See, that would be big news to tell someone,”he said. “People don’t use that phrase that way,” I said. “Oh, I forgot, you’re a writer. You know how everyone in the world fucking talks,” heresponded. You can’t drive a conversation with my dad. You have to let him drive it, yell directions tohim when you can, and hold on until, God willing, you arrive safely at the destination you werehoping to reach. And it’s even worse when he’s hungry, which he was just then. “Okay, well, I don’t have bad big news, then. I have good big news,” I said, treading more carefully. “Hit me with it,” he said, as he perused the menu. “I’m going to propose to Amanda,” I declared. I had finally said the words out loud toanother human being. A giant weight had been lifted off my shoulders. “Good for you. I think I’m going to get the romaine and watercress salad. I know I always getit, but it’s tasty, and what the hell, right?” he said. My dad’s not a real excitable guy, but I’d been hoping for a better response than you’d getby telling someone, “I just won tickets to a Depeche Mode concert.” I waited a few moremoments, hoping maybe he had something more to add. “You know what? I should get a pizza,” he said, picking the menu backup again. I fiddled with the straw in my iced tea, trying to figure out how to get back on track. He wasthe first person I’d told about my plan, and I was determined to get a response that matchedhow I was feeling. “So, yep. I’m gonna propose. And then we’re going to get married. I’m really excited,” Isaid, staring at the menu in front of his face. “Good stuff,” he said from behind it. “Dad. I’m telling you I’m getting married. I thought you’d be more excited about this.It’s a big deal for me.” My dad pulled the menu down, revealing the same deadpan look he had as he sat through theAshton Kutcher movie What Happens in Vegas after my mother rented it. “Son, this is me excited. I don’t know what you want from me. I’m happy for you and Amanda,and I like you both very much, but it’s not a surprise. You’ve been dating her for fouryears. It ain’t like you found a parallel fucking universe,” he said before flagging down ourwaitress, who came over and took our orders. He was right. It wasn’t a surprise. And I should have known better anyway. I love my fatherdearly, but if I was looking for someone to jump up and down with excitement, why did I choosethe man who called my sixth-grade graduation “boring as dog shit”? “I think you have what we in the medical profession call a ‘taut sphincter,’ ” my dad said. “What?” “A tight asshole. You’re nervous, that’s why you’re trying to fill dead air with garbage.I’m old and I’m hungry, so cut through the bullshit and just say what you want to say, son,”he said. The day before, I had purchased an engagement ring from a little jewelry shop in La Jolla,California, and up until that moment, I hadn’t felt the least bit squeamish about gettingmarried. But then, after I handed my down payment to the eighty-year-old behind the counter andhad the ring in my hand, a memory came to me: I was nine years old and crouching in the corner of the bathroom with my pants around my ankles, trying to pee into a water balloon. The ideawas to throw the pee-filled balloon at my brothers in revenge for their merciless bouts ofpicking on me. Then, suddenly, the door opened, revealing my father. I froze in fear, the waterballoon attached to my privates. My dad stared in silence for a moment, then said, “First ofall, you can’t fill up a water balloon like that, dumbshit. Secondly, life is fucking long,especially if you’re stupid.” That phrase became a regular for him, one I’ve heard manytimes throughout my life. Holding that engagement ring in my hand made me think about just howlong my life had already felt, and how many stupid things I had done. For the first time, itoccurred to me that maybe I didn’t know what I was doing. Which is why, all these years later, I was looking to him for advice. “You really like Amanda,” I said to my dad, unsure if I was making a statement or asking aquestion. “I mean, we haven’t sat in a foxhole shooting at fucking Germans, but from what I know ofher, yes, I like her a whole lot. But who gives a shit if I like her?” he said. “I do.” “Bullshit. You don’t give a rat’s ass, and you know why?” he said, cocking his head andraising an eyebrow. “Why?” “Because no one in the history of relationships has ever given a flying fuck about what other people think about their relationships—until they’re over,” he said. “Now that’s a pizza!Thank you kindly, ma’am,” he chirped as the waitress dropped off our orders. “Well, it’s a big decision,” I said, “so I’m trying to get some perspective. I just wantto make sure I’m not making a mistake—that I’m not going to end up screwing her over, or me,you know? I think that’s a pretty normal feeling most people have,” I explained, suddenlyfeeling defensive and embarrassed. “Most people are stupid. Nothing seems like a mistake until it’s a mistake. You stand infront of an electric fence and whip your dick out to take a piss on it, it’s pretty clearyou’re about to make a mistake. Other than that, you pretty much have no way of knowing.” I leaned back in the booth, quietly gratified that my dad still reached back twenty-five years,to the time when my brother urinated on our neighbor’s electric fence, as his template for amistake. Between voracious bites of pizza, my dad noticed that I wasn’t satisfied by his response, sohe wiped his mouth and said, “All right. I’m gonna tell you two things. But neither of themis advice, okay? Advice is bullshit. It’s just one asshole’s opinion.” “Fair enough,” I replied. “First and foremost, I’m a scientist,” he said, clearing his throat. “I agree.” “I don’t give a shit if you agree. It’s not up for debate. I’m telling you: First and foremost, I’m a scientist. And as a scientist, I can’t help but think about thingscritically. Sometimes it can be a curse. What I wouldn’t give every once in a while to be ablithering idiot skipping through life with shit in my pants like it’s a goddamned party.” I sprinkled red chili flakes on my barbecue chicken pizza and sat back to listen. “So, scientifically speaking, marriage breaks down like this: There are six billion people onthe planet. Say half are women. Now, taking into account age ranges and all that, even if youwere picky—” “I’m picky,” I interrupted. “I’m speaking universally, not about you specifically. The world doesn’t constantly revolvearound you. Just eat your fucking pizza and listen.” He waited silently until I grabbed a slice of pizza and shoved it in my mouth. “Okay, so even if you were picky, you could probably be happily married to any one of ahundred and fifty million different women,” he said. This was surprising. My parents had been married thirty-two years, and my dad worshipped mymother. He was never shy about telling us that she came first. Once, when I was six, my dad putdown a science journal he was reading over breakfast. It had a giant asteroid on the cover. Helooked at me and my brothers and said, “If an asteroid hit the earth and it was a nuclearholocaust and the air was breathable, which it wouldn’t be, I could be okay with your motherand I being the last two people alive.” “What about us?” my brother Evan asked. “Well, I wouldn’t just move on. There’d be a grieving period, obviously. I’m not anasshole,” my dad replied before letting out a big belly laugh. My dad loves my mother as if he has a biological need to be with her. So hearing him tell mecasually that any one of us could be happily married to one hundred and fifty million differentpeople seemed inconsistent with his own example. “You don’t buy that. I know you don’t think you could have what you have with Mom withsomeone else,” I said. “I said I had two things to tell you. Now, scientifically, that’s how it breaks down. But we’re complex animals, and we’re constantly changing. Things I thought ten years ago seemlike absolute bullshit now. So there’s no scientific formula to predict how things are goingto work out with a marriage, because a marriage in year one is completely different from thesame marriage ten years later. So when you’re dealing with something incredibly unpredictable,like human beings, numbers and formulas don’t mean shit. The best you can do is take all theinformation you have and, scientifically speaking, do what?” he asked, staring at me, awaitingan answer. “Uh . . . I don’t know,” I said, unsure if this was a rhetorical question. “I should buy you a fucking sign that says ‘I don’t know’ to save you time. The best youcan do is make an educated guess, son. “So I’ll tell you what I did right before I asked your mother to marry me: I took a day and Isat and I thought about all the things I had learned about myself, and about women, up to thatpoint in my life. Just sat and thought. I may have smoked marijuana as well. Anyway, at the endof the day, I took stock of everything I’d gone through in my head, and I asked myself if Istill wanted to propose to your mother. And I did. So that’s what I humbly suggest you do,unless you think you’re somehow smarter than I am, which, considering you share my genetics,is unlikely,” he said, laughing as he sat back and took a big sip of Diet Coke. I paid the tab and I dropped off my dad back at home. The next day was the day I’d planned to propose to Amanda. I had booked a flight to San Francisco, and arranged for her best friend to bring her to arestaurant for brunch, where I’d be waiting to surprise her and pop the question. From thetime I dropped my dad off, I had exactly twenty-four hours until I was due to meet Amanda. I got in my Honda Accord and drove to Balboa Park in downtown San Diego. When I got to theparking lot, I got out of my car and started walking in no particular direction. There, in theshadows of the large Spanish buildings that housed most of San Diego’s museums, I spent theentire day doing just as my dad suggested: thinking as far back as I could remember andreplaying every moment that had ever taught me anything about women and myself, from theawkwardness of childhood to the tribulations of adolescence and early manhood, in hopes that,before the day was done, I would know that the decision I was about to make was, at the veryleast, an educated guess. I Like It In elementary school, the first day of school is a big one for many reasons—mostly becauseit’s when students find out where they’ll be sitting for seven hours a day for the next ninemonths. One poor choice can doom a youngster’s social life for the year. Three weeks before Ientered second grade, my teacher, Mrs. Vanguard, a slender woman in her fifties with a haircutthat made her look like George Washington, sent her students’ parents a letter announcing thatseats would be determined on a first-come, first-served basis. If ever there would be a Black-Friday-at-Walmart stampede of marauding seven-year-olds, this was surely it. “I want to be there at six in the morning,” I announced to my parents in our kitchen theevening before school started. “Six A.M.? You running a fuckin’ dairy farm? No. Not happening,” my dad said. I remembered what my friend Jeremy had told me that afternoon—that he was planning to be firstin line outside the school doors at sunrise, to make sure he got the best possible seat—andstarted to work myself into a panic. My mom looked at me sympathetically. “We’ll get you there as early as we can, but not if youdon’t put some pants on before you come to dinner.” My evening wear that night was a pair ofTransformers tighty-whiteys and a T-shirt featuring Walter Mondale’s silk-screened face overthe slogan MONDALE’S GOT THE BEEF. The next morning, when my dad woke me up the way he did every weekday morning—by ripping thecovers off me and hurling them to the floor while loudly humming “The Ride of theValkryies”—I burst out of my bed and looked at the clock. 7:30 A.M.! School started at 8:00! “Dad, you said you’d wake me up really early!” I yelled in outrage. “Bullshit. I distinctly remember saying I would do the exact opposite of that.” I got ready as fast as I could, but by the time my mom dropped me off at school and I sprintedto my classroom, clutching my backpack to my chest to maximize my speed, I was horrified todiscover that there were only three empty seats left. I stood behind the thirty or so desksthat faced the long green chalkboard at the front of the class and carefully considered my nextmove. The first empty seat was in the front row, directly facing Mrs. Vanguard’s desk. Thatwould be social suicide. No one wanted to come near her desk. It’d be like buying a houseunderneath a freeway overpass in Detroit. The second was next to a chubby kid who’d had twoaccidents in his pants the year before, both of which required the chair he was sitting in tobe hosed off and disposed of in the Dumpster by a janitor wearing surgical gloves and a mask. The third seat was next to a red-haired girl I’d never seen before. She had a smattering offreckles across her face and a button nose that made her look like she’d been created by aDisney animator. I didn’t like girls—not because I thought they were gross or had cooties,but for the same reason I didn’t like underwear: they seemed unnecessary and mildly annoying.But this seat appeared to be the least of the three evils, so I headed in that direction andslung my backpack over the chair. My red-haired classmate turned and smiled at me, and for somereason, I was taken aback. I tried to greet her, but my brain couldn’t decide whether to say“hi” or “hello.” “Halo,” I spluttered. “Hi. I’m Kerry Thomason,” she replied brightly. That was all she said to me that day, but it was enough to make my stomach feel a littlequeasy. I didn’t know why, but I wanted Kerry to pay attention to me. And, as the weeks wenton, it seemed like antagonizing her was the best and most fun way to get her to do so. I spentthat first week poking her sides with my pencil eraser, stealing her My Little Pony–themedTrapper Keeper, and generally doing anything I could to get her to notice me, except foractually speaking to her. The only words she said to me that week were “please stop,” andthat only made me want to keep doing whatever I was doing. About two weeks into the school year, I finally pushed my luck too far. I brought into school adrawing I had spent half the night and a full carton of crayons creating and plopped it down onKerry’s desk before the first bell rang. She took one look at it and burst into tears. At thefirst sound of crying, Mrs. Vanguard popped her head up from her prepackaged weight-loss mealand rushed over to Kerry. She was asking Kerry what was wrong when she saw the drawing—andgasped in horror. She turned to me and asked, “Did you do this?” “Yes?” I responded hesitantly as I began to realize that my plot to impress Kerry might notcome off as planned. “That is disgusting,” Mrs. Vanguard said. She grabbed my arm above the elbow, her fingerscutting off my circulation, and walked me straight down the hall to the principal’s office. I had never seen the inside of the principal’s office before, but I’d always imagined itwould be like a king’s chamber in a palace, complete with fresh bowls of fruit, a throne, anda small disfigured man who did all the principal’s bidding. Instead, the waiting room wasdisappointing: a drab ten-by-ten room featuring a framed poster of a bodybuilder struggling todeadlift a huge weight bar, captioned with the slogan BELIEVE IN YOURSELF AND ANYTHING ISPOSSIBLE. Mrs. Vanguard dumped me in a metal folding chair next to a desk, behind which sat theprincipal’s secretary, a short, squat woman in her sixties with a huge nose and ears like afifty-year-old prizefighter. She looked at me and shook her head, and it was at that momentthat I realized I was in pretty big trouble. I managed to keep my composure until Mrs. Vanguardsaid, “We’re going to call your parents, Justin.” “No! Please, no,” I said, starting to cry and shaking my head in fear like someone pleadingwith a killer for his life. She stepped out of the office, and when the door shut behind her itwas so quiet that I could hear my heart pounding in unison with the ticking of the wall clock.The secretary consulted her ledger, picked up the phone, punched a few numbers, and said, “CanI speak to Mr. Halpern, please? It’s about his son.” The hours that followed were some of the longest of my life. Every time I heard approachingfootsteps, I was sure they belonged to my parents, and my muscles tensed in fear. As frightenedas I was, though, I also found myself thinking about Kerry. I didn’t want her to see I’d beencrying, so I dried my tears with the backs of my hands and used my shirt cuffs to wipe the snotthat was running down my nose. I thought about how she smiled at me on the first day of class.I thought about how I liked the way she dotted her I’s with hearts, and the way she sneered atme every time she came back from the bathroom and I asked her if she had taken a poo. I thoughtabout Kerry so intently during those two hours that I almost forgot how terrified I was that myparents were coming. And then the door opened, and my dad entered. I had prayed my mom would arrive first, but shewas never as punctual as my dad. He was carrying his brown leather briefcase, and his eyebrowswere like two tiny arrows pointing almost straight down toward his nose. He was not happy. “Okay, I’m here. What in hell is going on?” he asked, looking at me and then theprincipal’s secretary. I sat quietly, staring at the ground, avoiding eye contact with my father. “Hi, Mr. Halpern. Thank you for coming,” the secretary said. “Yeah, no problem. Just a thirty-five-mile drive in the middle of my workday. Goddamnpleasure.” The secretary shot me a look, a silent cry for help. I glanced back at the floor; she was onher own. “Uh . . . well . . . Justin acted incredibly inappropriately in class, and his teacher had nochoice but to remove him,” she said. “Ah, hell. What’d he do? He pull out his pecker and show it to somebody?” my dad asked. “Uh, no,” the secretary said, between deep breaths. “His teacher will be with you shortly.She can explain,” she added quickly. My dad plopped himself down in a chair directly across from mine, so that he could focus hisintense stare on me without any obstruction, and silently mouthed the words “You’re in deepshit, chief.” I don’t think I saw him blink or look away once. A few minutes later, when mymom entered the small office, the secretary stood up from behind her desk, reopened the door,and walked us back down the hallway to my classroom. With every step my throat tightened. Itwas recess, so my classmates were playing outside; at least Kerry wouldn’t be privy to myhumiliation. When we got to the classroom Mrs. Vanguard was sitting behind her big wooden desk,and she motioned for us to sit down in front of her. As my mom and I quietly took our seats, mydad wrestled to squeeze himself into one of the tiny chairs. Finally he just said “Screw it”and sat on top of the desk. “Mr. and Mrs. Halpern, this morning Justin gave this drawing he made to a girl he sits next toin class,” my teacher said, sliding a piece of lined paper across the table to my mom and dad. My parents both leaned in to examine it. My mom took one look and let out a sigh indisappointment. My dad leaned in for a closer look. “Jesus, what the hell kind of drawing is this?” he said. It was a crude drawing of a smiling, female stick figure with red hair and a T-shirt that read“Kerry.” Above Kerry’s head was a yellow dog. Those two elements alone, of course, would nothave caused a problem. Unfortunately, there was a third element to the drawing: a shower oflarge brown clumps raining down from the yellow dog’s rear onto Kerry’s face. And just incase the viewer wasn’t sure how Kerry felt about that, a thought bubble protruding from herhead read, “I like it.” “It’s very upsetting,” my teacher said. “Why is the dog above her head? That doesn’t even make sense. How’d he get above her head?”he asked, turning to me. “I don’t know,” I said. “You have to draw a hill or something under the dog. A dog can’t just float up into theatmosphere and take a shit on someone’s head. I mean, I know you’re six or seven or whatever,but that’s pretty basic physics right there,” he said. “Mr. Halpern, that’s really not the issue,” my teacher said. “I dunno, seems like a pretty big issue to me. At least we know we can cross artist off the list,” he said. “Sam, let her talk,” my mom said, sternly. My dad leaned back, mumbled, “Not the issue, myass,” then sat silently. I listened as Mrs. Vanguard chronicled my behavior toward Kerry overthe past two weeks, behavior she felt bordered on harassment. Without proper discipline, shetold my parents, she feared I might turn dangerous. I wasn’t sure what my feelings about Kerrymeant, but as I listened to Mrs. Vanguard and recalled how I’d made Kerry cry, I suddenly feltterrible. “Excuse me for saying this,” my mom interrupted, “but I think you may have the wrong idea.It seems pretty clear what this is.” “And what would that be?” my teacher asked. “He’s sweet on her,” my dad responded. “Jesus H. I woulda figured you see this kind ofstuff all the time. Look, trust me, I know the kid can be dopey as all hell. I caught himeating a sandwich on the shitter just a month ago. But he’s a sweet kid. He’s not goddamnManson.” My teacher sat there speechless until my mom broke the silence by assuring her that they wouldtake me home at once and talk to me about my inappropriate behavior. “We’ll make sure this stops,” she said. I rode home with my mom, since my dad announced he’d just had his car cleaned and wished tokeep it “booger-free for as long as fucking possible.” As she pulled into our driveway, my mom told me to go to my room and wait for her and my dad.About ten minutes later they both appeared. My mom sat next to me on my bed. My dad grabbed achair, shook the Legos off it onto the ground, and sat down. “Justy, do you know why you can’t draw pictures like the one your teacher showed us?” shestarted. “Yes. Dogs can’t fly above people’s heads,” I said. “No, honey, that’s not why,” my mom said. “Well, that’s part of the reason why,” my dad said. “No, Sam, you’re confusing him.” “He’s confusing me. He’s got dogs flying around, people wearing fuckin’ T-shirts with theirnames on them, like everybody works at a goddamn auto shop. All I’m saying is, there’smultiple problems at work here. Let’s not condone some fantasyland where—” “Sam!” My dad went silent and nodded. “Do you like sitting next to Kerry?” my mom asked. I nodded yes. “All right. Well, from now on, if you like somebody, you don’t do mean things to them, evenif they seem like they don’t like you back,” she said. “Okay.” “Lots of people will like you back in your life, Justy,” my mom said, giving me a hug andthen getting up to leave. “For today, though, you need to sit in your room and think aboutwhat we talked about.” My mom left the room, and a moment later my dad stood up to do the same. Just as he was aboutto close the door, though, I felt the need to apologize. “I’m sorry I made Kerry cry,” I said. He turned around and looked me in the eye. “I know you are. When you’re sweet on a woman, you do crazy shit. It happens. You ain’t usedto feeling that way about somebody.” “I feel that way sometimes about Mom,” I said. “What? No you don’t. Jesus, that’s the creepiest goddamn thing you’ve ever said to me,” hesaid, as he started to close the door. “Wait,” I said. My dad stopped once again. “Yeah?” “What do I do now?” I said. “What do you do with what?” he said. “With Kerry.” “Jack shit. You’re seven.” When You’re Married, Your Wife Sees Your Penis When I was little, my two favorite things were Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal and learning newwords. I was obsessed with expanding my vocabulary. Every time I heard a word I didn’trecognize, I’d ask the nearest adult what it meant. No one had a more extensive vocabularythan my father, who spent a lot of time reading with me each night to indulge my thirst forlanguage. “My teacher says someday I’m going to know as many words as you do,” I told him one night aswe sat at the dinner table after I aced an oral test in my third-grade English class. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but your teacher is full of dog shit. I practice medicine,which opens up my vocabulary to thousands of words you will never encounter. I know a hundredgoddamn ways to talk about blood vessels,” he said, grabbing a bowl full of green beans andspooning a few onto his plate. “That’s really cool,” I said. “It’s not cool. It makes my head want to explode. It’s like a garage filled with uselessshit. It ain’t how many words you know, it’s how you use them.” A couple days after that conversation, my dad was appointed head of his department, nuclearmedicine, at the University of California, San Diego. “So now you’re the boss!” I said when he told my family the news over a spaghetti dinner. I looked at my mom, expecting her to be excited, but she just looked tense and unhappy. “Being the boss ain’t always a good thing,” my dad said as he took a sip of red wine. “Why not?” I asked. “You like playing baseball, right?” “Yeah.” “Well, what if the coach quit one day and they made you coach because no one else wanted to doit? So you’d have to coach the team instead of being able to play, and then you’d have to sitand do all the bullshit that comes with coaching.” “Coach likes being the coach.” “That’s because he’s an asshole who’s trying to live out his dreams through that kid ofhis, who’s five years away from a fucking heroin addiction because his dad’s a psycho.” “Sam, you know he’s going to repeat that,” my mom said. “Don’t repeat that,” he said to me. “Anyway, my point is, I became a doctor to practicemedicine and help people. Now I gotta sit in an office and do paperwork. Not your problem, itjust means you’re not going to see a lot of me.” After that, my dad started leaving for work before I woke and arriving back home after 9:00p.m. He worked a full day most Saturdays, too. Sunday was his only day off, but even then heoften went in to the office. Nevertheless, no matter how late it was when he walked through ourfront door or how tired he was, he would grab my favorite book, J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit, and call me into the living room, flip on a lamp next to our brown fabric couch, sit down rightnext to me, where he’d read to me or I’d read to him. Whenever I encountered a word I didn’tunderstand, I’d stop and ask him what it meant. One night, while I was reading to him, hestarted laughing. “This might just be because I’m tired as hell, but you know what I just realized?” he asked. “What?” “Nobody ever gets laid in these Hobbit books. This thing spans Bilbo’s whole goddamn life,but the guy never gets laid. Not once. No sex,” he said. “Bilbo doesn’t have any kids,” I said. “What does that have to do with anything?” he asked. “Well, if he had sex, then he’d have kids.” My dad let out a huge, long belly laugh. “Jesus Christ. Thank God it doesn’t work like that. I’d have populated fucking RhodeIsland.” I didn’t understand why my dad was laughing, and I was insulted by his mockery. “You get married and then, if you want, you have sex and have kids,” I said, firmly. “If you want? Ha. Shit, don’t tell your mother that or I’d never get laid. I don’t thinkyou know what marriage means,” he said, laughing again. “I know what it means. That’s, like, a first-grade word. I’ve known what it means for a longtime,” I scoffed. “I’m fairly certain you haven’t the faintest goddamn clue, trust me,” he replied. “Fine. Then tell me what it means,” I demanded. “Son, I just worked fifteen hours, and I’m dog tired, and you don’t have a single hair onyour balls. I think that conversation can wait until one of those things changes.” The next day at school, as I sat in the cafeteria unpacking my lunch, I told my best friend,Aaron, what my dad had said about sex and marriage and asked him what he knew about therelationship between the two. A slender kid with shaggy brown hair and pasty white skin, Aarongrew up a few blocks from me. He had HBO, which instantly made him an expert about sex as faras I was concerned. He put down his Cheetos and wiped his hands on his University of MichiganFab 5 basketball shirt. “I can’t believe you don’t know this,” Aaron said. “On the night you get married, you haveto have sex, otherwise it doesn’t count as getting married. It has nothing to do withbabies,” he added. “I already knew that it didn’t count unless you had sex. I already knew that,” I lied. “You’re supposed to start kissing your wife, then she takes your penis and she puts it inher, and you have sex,” he said. “Does she see your penis?” I asked, panic creeping into my chest. “No. They just put their hand down there and grab it, but they can’t look at it and see itunless you tell them they can,” Aaron answered. I’m not sure if it was an adverse reaction to the fact that my dad often walked around ourhouse in the nude like a Playboy playmate in Hefner’s mansion, or if I was just self-consciousabout my body, but there was nothing I hated more than the thought of someone seeing me naked.Not skinning my knees. Not pooping in public restrooms. Nothing. My brothers were usually my go-to for information, and even though they almost always made upridiculous answers to my questions in an effort to make me look stupid, I still went back tothe well time after time. One Sunday morning, over breakfast, I asked them about the weddingnight ritual. My brother Dan, who was well acquainted with my fear of nudity, was the first toweigh in. “There’s a little more to it than that,” he said. “Basically, you stand in one corner ofthe room, and she stands in the other. You each take off one piece of clothing at a time. Pantsand underwear go first,” he said. “Before shoes and socks?” I asked. “Yep. You still have your wedding tuxedo on, you’re just not wearing pants or underwear,” hesaid, biting into a chocolate glazed donut. This was troubling information. As soon as breakfast was over, I got up from the kitchen tableand went into my bedroom and closed the door behind me. Then I put on the only suit I owned,and proceeded to remove my pants and underwear, keeping on my shoes and socks and everythingfrom the waist up. Then I looked in the mirror. Of all the disturbing images I’d encounteredto that point in my life, that image of my skinny, half-naked body landed somewhere between “when this weird kid Andre in my class turned his eyelids inside out” and “seeing a car runover the head of my neighbor’s cat.” I couldn’t stand the idea of someone else seeing me in this compromising position, laughinguncontrollably. But before I took a vow to be a bachelor for life, there was one thing left todo: ask the only person I knew who was married, always honest with me, and never mocked myfears—my mom. I changed out of my suit, threw on my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pajamas, andran to my parents’ room and knocked on the door. There was no answer and the door was locked.I was fairly sure they were in there, but then again they could have left before I woke up. Iwent back into the kitchen where my brother Dan was now working on a big bowl of Cinnamon ToastCrunch. “Do you know if Mom is here? Her door is locked and nobody said anything when I knocked,” Isaid. “Their bedroom door is locked?” “Yeah.” “Just get a screwdriver and pop it open and see if they’re in there. If they’re sleepingthey’ll probably want to be woken up so they won’t sleep in too late. You know how Dad hatesthat,” he replied. I should have sensed something was wrong, given my brother’s surprisingly helpful response,but he had a point. My dad did hate sleeping in, and rarely if ever did it. Armed with thatreminder, and still panicked at the prospect of my future wife seeing me in half a tuxedo, Iran to the garage and grabbed a screwdriver from my dad’s toolbox. The locks in our house were pop locks, easily opened by shoving a flathead screwdriver inside atiny hole and turning. And so I did. When I opened the door, I saw my mom and dad naked in bed together, one big entangled mess ofmiddle-aged limbs and hair. Until that moment I didn’t know what sex looked like, but I knewimmediately that this was it. They both turned and looked at me and froze. “I’m sorry!” I screamed. I slammed the door, ran down the hall, and sought refuge in my bedroom. About five minuteslater, my dad opened my door, wearing a black terrycloth robe, his face contorted in theexpression you make between the moment when you stub your toe and the moment you say “ow.” “Your mom wants me to sit down and tell you what you just saw, but I’m currently not in themood to give a shit, due to being thrown out of bed because my eight-year-old suddenly turnedinto Harry fucking Houdini.” We stared at each other blankly, each waiting for me to say something. I was still in shock. “Well, I’m up, and my morning just took a left turn into a pile of shit, so you might as welltell me what has you picking my lock,” he finally said. I hurriedly explained to him my fears about wedding nights and sex and nakedness and thehumiliation of having to wear socks and shoes but no pants or underwear. “You do realize the irony in this situation, right?” he asked. “What’s irony mean?” “You wanting to know about married people screwing and then walking in when . . . No. You’renot back-dooring me into a conversation about this shit.” He ran his fingers through his hair,and blew a deep breath out through his nose. “All right. Here’s the deal. You’re eight,” he said. “I’m nine,” I said. “Do I look like I carry an abacus with your name on it? Cut me some slack here, son.” He tookanother deep breath and started over. “What I’m trying to say is, you’re just a little kid.I’m going to make you a promise. On your wedding night, you are not going to be able to waituntil your wife sees your penis. Half a tuxedo on, no tuxedo on, socks, shoes, you won’t fucking care.” “How can you be sure?” I asked. “Trust me. You’re going to be staring at your watch, wondering when this wedding is going tobe over, so all these people will go on their merry fucking way so that your wife can see yourpenis.” “I will?” I asked, starting to feel comforted. “Yep. And if you’re still afraid that your wife is going to see your penis, that means sheisn’t the one for you. It also means you got a bunch of fucked-up issues and I totally screwedup, and then I’ll pay for therapy if I have the money. But I probably won’t. Anyway, for now,here’s what the word marriage means: Don’t pick the lock on my bedroom door on Sundays.” He got up, padded back down the hallway, and locked his bedroom door behind him. You Will Never Screw a Woman Who Looks Like That If you discount countless, forgettable chunks of time spent at school, home, and 7-Eleven, Ipassed most of my waking hours from ages ten through twelve playing baseball and goofing offwith friends at the Point Loma Little League fields. Those two adjacent baseball fields wereabout a mile from my house, and twice a week my team, the San Diego Credit Union Padres, wouldgather there to practice. “You should just be called the Padres, not all that bullshit about credit unions,” my dadsaid, as he drove me to the field on the opening day of the season when I was eleven years old. “But the credit union pays for us to have a team,” I said. “Yeah, well, I pay for you to do everything, and you don’t see me making you wear a shirt with my giant goddamned face on it.” “That would be a weird shirt,” I said. “Please. You wear all kinds of dopey shirts, and—what the fuck am I talking about right here?The shirt’s not real, I’m just making a point. You got your gear?” he asked, pulling up tothe field. Saturdays were filled with a full lineup of games, all of which the league’s players wererequired to attend, so my parents could drop me off bright and early and then do whatever theywanted all day until my game. The prospect of a morning to himself was very exciting for mydad. “There’s a lot of good teams this year, I think,” I said, continuing our conversation as wearrived at the fields. He reached over me and popped open my door. “Fascinating. Now out of the car. Vamoose. Out! Out! Have fun and don’t screw with anyonebigger than you. I’ll be in the stands when your game starts,” he said. I put my hand up for a high five, and he used that hand to push me out of the car. Then hisOldsmobile screeched away up the street, like he was fleeing the scene of a double homicide. When we weren’t playing in a game, most of the Little Leaguers would keep busy playing tag inbetween the two fields or eating a spicy linguiça sausage made by the local Portuguese familythat ran the snack shack above the field. Every once in a while, someone would raise talk of venturing into the canyon that sat aboutfifty yards beyond the outfield fences. We were all scared of the canyon. It was packed withtrees that grew so close together their branches became intertwined like a bundle of snakes.The canyon’s ground was muddy, and it emitted an odor that registered somewhere between“maple syrup” and “rest-stop bathroom.” It was a group of cannibals short of being theperfect setting for an Indiana Jones film. Every kid you ran into had a different theory about what lurked inside the canyon walls. “Mybrother found a pile of poo there that he said was too big to be dog poo or cat poo, but notbig enough to be human poo. He said it’s probably wolf poo,” said my friend Steven as wewaited for the game ahead of us to finish so we could take the field. “Your brother’s an idiot,” said Michael, the chubby catcher on my team, who always wore hishat backward, so that the back of it came down right above his dark-green eyes. “A bunch ofgays live in there. That’s where they butt-fuck each other.” “What? Why wouldn’t they do that at their house?” I asked. “I don’t know, I’m not a homo. But if you want to get butt-fucked, go into that canyon,” heresponded, inhaling a bite of sausage that would have killed a lesser twelve-year-old. At that point in my life, the only two things that scared me were the movie Arachnophobia and that canyon. I tried to never get too close to it, for fear that something might reach out ofthe forest and pull me in. If I absolutely had to go near to chase an errant throw, my neckwould stiffen and my breath would quicken as my body prepared to flee. I decided to run the theories about its inhabitants past my father to see if he had a scientific opinion on thematter. “Why would gay people screw each other in a canyon filled with wolves?” my dad asked me as hedrove us home after my game, my mom sitting beside him in the passenger seat. “No, that’s not what I said. One kid said there were wolves. It was a different kid who saidthe thing—” “Hey, look at me, I’m screwing. My pants are off. Oh shit, there’s an angry fucking wolf.Does that make any goddamn sense to you?” “No. But that’s not—” “Plus,” my dad interrupted again, “I don’t even think wolves are indigenous to this area.Your school takes field trips. You ever heard them say shit to you about wolves? You gottathink about these things critically, son.” “No, I do. I didn’t think that the wolves were—” My mom turned to face me in the backseat. “Also, Justy, you know that homosexuals have sexjust like heterosexuals do: in the privacy of their homes. Not in the woods.” “Although sometimes straight people do screw each other in the woods. Mostly when you’re inhigh school, though,” my dad added. I decided to drop the conversation. But that week, on two consecutive nights, I had nightmaresabout the canyon. Each involved me finding something terrifying in a clearing at the center. Inthe first dream, I stumbled upon an aquarium that had a screaming Patrick Swayze trapped insideof it, begging me for help, but I was too scared to approach him. In the second, I wasconfronted by a large squid that had two or three sets of human legs. After that last dream Ishot up out of bed, wide awake. I tried falling back to sleep, but every time I closed my eyesI pictured the canyon, then Swayze, then Squidman. Hoping it would relax me, I tiptoed out of my bedroom to grab some water from the kitchen. Iwas still shaken from the dream, and the shapes of the shadows on the hallway wall lookedominous. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw something move, and I froze in place.It’s just a shadow that looks like a person, I told myself. It’s not a person. “What in the hell are you doing?” I shrieked like a frightened monkey and jumped back, crashing into the bookcase behind me. Asmy eyes adjusted I realized that the shadow was my dad, sitting in total darkness in the La-Z-Boy chair that faced the windows to our backyard. “Jesus H. Christ. Calm down, son. What the hell is wrong with you?” “I had a freaky dream,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “What are you doing?” “I’m sitting in the dark drinking a hot toddy. What the hell does it look like?” “Why are you doing that right now? It’s the middle of the night.” “Well, contrary to popular fucking belief, I enjoy a little time to myself, so I wake up earlyso I can have it. Clearly I’m going to have to start waking up earlier.” “Oh. Well, sorry. Didn’t mean to bother you,” I said, turning to head back to bed, glass ofwater forgotten. “No apologies necessary,” he said. Maybe it was the bourbon in the hot toddy, or the serenity of the darkness all around him, butat that moment my dad seemed uncharacteristically at ease. “Can I ask you a question?” I said, turning to face him again. “Fire away.” “If something’s freaking you out, what do you do to not freak out about it?” “Is this about that Arachnophobia movie, again? I told you, a spider that large couldn’t sustain itself in an urban environment. The ecosystem is too delicate. Not fucking plausible.” “It’s not about Arachnophobia. It’s just—if something’s freaking you out, how do you get it to not freak you out?” He raised his mug of hot toddy to his lips and took a big slurp. “Well, scientifically speaking, human beings fear the unknown. So, whatever’s freaking youout, grab it by the balls and say hello,” he said. I had no idea what that meant, and even in the dimly lit living room he could tell. “I’m saying, if something’s scaring you out, don’t run from it. Find out everything you canabout it. Then it ain’t the unknown anymore and it ain’t scary.” He paused. “Or I guess itcould be a shitload scarier. Mostly the former, though.” As I padded down the hallway back to my room, I knew what had to be done: I had to enter thecanyon. There was just no way I was going it alone. The next day I sat in my sixth-grade class watching the clock as the hour hand inched closer to3:00. Michael was also in my class. He sat at the desk in front of mine, which meant that everyday I spent eight hours face-to-face with whatever slogan was on the No Fear T-shirt he choseto wear that day. The inspirational messages printed on the backs of No Fear T-shirts allsounded like they’d been written by the president of a fraternity moments after he pounded hissixth beer. And the message on Michael’s shirt that day was no exception: THERE’S NO SUCHTHING AS UNNECESSARY ROUGHNESS. NO FEAR. I tapped him on the shoulder. “Michael,” I whispered. Without looking behind him, he reached up with his left hand and grabbed my index and middlefingers, twisting them till I winced in pain. “I just learned that in karate,” he said, turning around, then letting go of my fingers.“I’m probably a year away from black belt.” I opened and closed my hand to get the feeling back in my fingertips. “What’s up?” he asked. “You’re going to baseball practice after school today, right?” “Duh. I just got a new bat. It’s part ceramic. It’s awesome. You can touch it if you want,”he said, pulling a bag from under his desk and unzipping it to show the blue-and-white batinside. He stared at me, then at the bat, then back at me, and I realized that his offer to let metouch it was more of a demand. We stared at each other for a moment, then I quickly poked itwith my index finger. He put the bat away. “Fucking awesome, right?” he asked. “Yeah. It’s cool. So anyway, I was thinking, since we both just go straight to practice afterschool, we could get there early today and go into the canyon.” Michael and I weren’t friends, not exactly. He was a tough kid, the kind who spent most of hisfree time with older kids who had mustaches and were always throwing things at cars afterschool. But Michael was always willing to share with us what he’d learned from the older kids,and that was a real benefit to all of us. I owed pretty much everything I knew about women at that point to Michael. During recess oneday he pulled us into a corner of the yard behind the library and took out a folded-up picture.It was a page from a medical journal, featuring a photo of a forty-five-year-old naked woman,with possible postmenopausal cancerous areas highlighted on her body. Except for my mother, itwas the first naked woman I’d ever seen. Michael pointed at the woman’s crotch with hisstubby finger. “That’s where you stick your dick. They also pee out of that, and sometimesshit out of it if their butt’s clogged.” It was this very wisdom and worldliness that inspired me to ask Michael to explore the canyonwith me. I was, admittedly, a kid who was easily shaken. I wished I could be as fearless as mydad, but I seemed to have a different biological makeup when it came to courage. Michael was the only kid I knew who wasn’t afraid of that canyon. “So are you cool with going into the canyon with me?” I asked. “I guess. If you buy me a Slurpee. Don’t try and touch my dick, though.” One seventy-nine-cent stop at 7-Eleven later and we were walking toward the Little Leaguefield. The closer we got, the more I could feel the pit of nerves in my stomach tightening. “So you’ve never gone really far into the canyon before?” I asked, trying to calm myself. “Why are you so gay for the canyon?” Michael asked. “I’m not. I just want to go in, look around, then come back out before practice.” “Are you retarded? You can’t just go into the canyon and not know where the coach is,” hesaid. “What if he gets to practice early, then sees us coming out of the canyon?” “So what do we do?” Michael quickly laid out a plan that seemed foolproof and tossed his thirty-two-ounce Slurpeecontainer into a bush as we arrived at the empty field. Sure enough, he was right about Coach. He’d arrived early for practice, and would surely havecaught us sneaking out of the canyon if we’d opted for my plan. The rest of the team straggledin soon after. My friend Steven, who I always warmed up with, grabbed a ball and walked up tome. “Ready to warm up?” he asked, popping a ball in and out of his glove. “Not today. Go warm up with a big dick,” Michael said to Steven, grabbing my arm and draggingme to the far end of the field. I glanced back at Steven and winked, assuming he’d understandthat something was up and he shouldn’t take it personally. Michael and I started playing catch in the outfield. At any moment, Michael was going to saythe code words and it would be go time. The anticipation was unbearable. I could barely hold onto the ball, my hands were trembling so badly with excitement. Suddenly, Michael’s facehardened. He looked at the coach who was helping another kid about fifty feet away, then lookedback at me and uttered the code words: “My dog peed in the house yesterday.” I took a deep breath, reached my arm back, and hurled the ball at least ten feet aboveMichael’s head. It shot well past him and deep into the darkness of the canyon behind him. “Coach!” Michael yelled. Coach looked up from the lesson he was giving to another kid. “Our ball went into the canyon. We’re gonna go look for it, okay?” “Fine. But if you can’t find it quickly, come back up,” Coach replied. We nodded and jogged through the outfield and down the twenty-foot grass embankment that led tothe canyon. At the bottom of the embankment we looked up. It was impossible for anyone on thefield above to see us. “Okay,” said Michael. “Okay,” I replied. “Okay what? This is your thing, shithead. What do you want to do?” he asked impatiently. “Oh. Right.” I looked into the canyon, now just ten feet or so away. I could see past the first layer or twoof tree branches and bushes, but beyond that it dropped off into darkness. I took a deepbreath. There is no Patrick Swayze in an aquarium, I thought to myself. There s no Squidman. “Okay. Let’s go in through that part right there,” I said, pointing to a small path thatcrawled through two trees. Michael took the lead, and within twenty seconds we were deep enough into the canyon that whenI turned to look back in the direction we had come from, all I could see were trees. The floorof the canyon was covered with dead leaves and some garbage: a few candy wrappers, a few empty 7-Eleven cups, which I strongly suspected had been hurled there by my comrade. My nerves wereslowly subsiding. The farther we went, the less there was to look at. Just more trees, deadbranches, and bushes. The unknown was quickly becoming known. Michael was about ten feet to my right when he waved me over. “Whoa. Check this out,” hesaid. I hopped over a fallen tree and made my way over to him. Michael moved aside, pulled back a couple branches, and pointed to what lay behind them. As hestood there holding it open for me, my mind started racing. I do not want to look inside that I thought. Yes, I do. I should look inside the hole. There’s nothing there.hole, “Hey. I’m not your branch-pulling guy, asshole. You gonna check this out or not?” Michaelsniped, still holding back the brush as he waited for me to make a move. I leaned forward and stuck my face into the opening Michael had created for me. Just past thosebranches lay a clearing, much like the ones I had seen in my dreams. Except this time there wasno Patrick Swayze. In his place was a dirty sleeping bag and several blankets surrounded bygarbage. “I think somebody lives here,” Michael said. I could hear myself breathing in and out as my hands began to tremble once again, this time infear. “We should go back to practice. Coach is probably wondering—” “Coach can suck a dick,” Michael snapped. He nudged me out of the way, pulled the branches farther open, stepped on the trunk of a fallentree below him, and in one motion hopped through the small hole he’d created for himself. Thebranches snapped closed as I stood on the other side of the clearing. I could hear Michaelwalking around but couldn’t see him. I stood motionless, hating myself for being frightened.Then the small window of branches reopened and Michael popped his head back through. “Are youseriously going to be a bitch?” He grabbed my shirt and yanked me into the clearing. As I stumbled onto the other side of thebranches, I realized that more than one person might be living here. There were piles ofclothes caked with dirt, and empty cans of beer were strewn everywhere. Michael approached thesleeping bag surrounded by the trash pile. “I think this is a bum cave,” he said, nudging a couple of empty cans with his foot. Thensomething in the pile of trash next to the sleeping bag caught his attention. He knelt downbeside it. Suddenly his head whipped. “HOLY FUCKING SHIT.” “What?” “It’s the mother lode! Look at all this porno!” he shouted, shoving his hands into the pilelike a pirate who’d found a trunk full of gold doubloons. With a look of pure ecstasy, he heldup two handfuls of the dirtiest porn I could have imagined. There must have been a hundred morepages at his feet. I picked a few up and fanned them out in my hand. I had never seen so manypictures of beautiful women, let alone naked ones. I pumped my fist in the air like I’d justhit the game winning shot in the NBA Finals. This was my greatest accomplishment. Theadolescent equivalent of landing on the moon. At the time, porn magazines were like Lamborghinis: You knew they existed, and though you’dnever seen one in person, you were sure you’d have one when you got older. “I can’t believe this. I just—man, we did it. We did it!” he screamed. There was only one problem: What were we going to do with it all? Leaving it behind was not anoption. After a few minutes of brainstorming, the best option we came up with was shoving thepages into our pants and keeping them there till we were through with practice. Michael shoveda trial page in his pants, then took a step forward and backward, as if he was trying out a new pair of sneakers. “It’s too itchy,” he declared. “New plan.” Eventually we decided the only option was to carry as much of the porn as we could out of thecanyon and hide it beneath some leaves at the bottom of the embankment next to the field. Afterpractice we could come back and get it. We started sorting through the loot, trying to decidewhich pages were must-takes. Suddenly I heard a crack of a branch, as if caused by the weight of a foot. I jumped back,ready to run. We both looked around, but saw nothing. The silence was eerie. “What if we just came back and got it later, or tomorrow, or next practice or something?” Isaid, fear creeping into my voice. “Man, I like you pretty okay, but you’re sort of a pussy. Just go wait outside the canyon andyell the code words if you see Coach. You remember the words, right?” “My dog peed in the house yesterday,” I muttered. “Yeah.” As I walked out of the clearing, I was overwhelmed with shame. I had gone into the canyon todefeat my fears, but here I was, leaving the canyon because I was too afraid to stay. I stoodthere thinking, eyes downcast, till I heard Coach’s voice. “Justin. What are you doing?” I looked up and saw him standing at the top of the embankment. “I told you guys: Don’t spend all day down there.” I froze for a split second, but then recovered. “MY DOG PEED IN THE HOUSE!” I yelled. “What?” Coach said. Then, from behind me, I heard the rustle of bushes and the sound of heavy breathing. Oh no, I thought.it’s Michael, “MY DOG PEED IN THE HOUSE!” I yelled in that direction, terrified that Michael was about towalk out carrying a huge stack of pornography. “What are you talking—” Coach never got the chance to finish his sentence. In a flash, Michael burst through thebushes, running full speed ahead and clutching the porn to his chest like a woman holding herinfant as she fled an explosion. “RUNNNNNNN!!!!” he screamed in terror. He ran right past me, and without giving it another thought I sprang into a full sprint, hot onhis heels. “What in the heck is going on?!” Coach yelled as we rushed up the embankment toward him. I turned to look behind me. There, hightailing it out of the canyon, came two bearded homeless men, each of whom lookedlike Nick Nolte rendered in beef jerky. I had never seen homeless guys move so fast and withsuch a sense of purpose. The last thing I saw on Coach’s face as we blew past him was the lookof a man who had no idea how the next fifteen seconds of his life were going to transpire. The other players on the field turned to watch, mouths agape, as Michael and I sprinted bythem, followed by Coach and the two homeless guys. Michael slowed down just a touch so that Icould catch up. “Take some!” he shouted, shoving a handful of pages at my chest. “Go right! I’ll go left.They can’t catch both of us,” he said between breaths, gearing back up to a full sprint. I could hear a chorus of shouts behind us. I’m guessing it was one of the homeless guys andnot Coach who hollered “Gimmie back my titties!” but I was too scared to look back and confirm. When I reached third base, I took a hard right turn and ran off the field and acrossthe street. I didn’t look back until one mile later, when I rounded the corner of my streetand headed down the hill to my house. My legs were on fire and sweat poured down my face. There were no cars in the driveway, so I made my way to the side of the house, unlocked thegate to our backyard, entered, then slammed it behind me, and for the first time in about tenminutes I stopped moving. I took the stack of porn, some of it now stuck to my chest withsweat, and placed it on the ground. I leaned over, put my hands on my knees, and gasped forair. I looked down at the bounty that lay at my feet, but my joy was soon displaced by fear. I thought.What the heck am I going to do with all this? Then it hit me: like thousands of thieves before me, I would bury my loot. I ducked into myhouse, grabbed some newspaper, grabbed a shovel from our shed, and started digging in thecorner of our backyard. After I’d dug a hole about a foot deep, I gathered every scrap of pornand placed the pile gently in the ground, as if I were planting a seed whose fruits I needed tofeed my family. I placed newspaper over the pages and then filled in the hole. Hours later I sat in front of the TV, wondering what had happened at practice, whether Coachhad called my dad, and, most of all, what awaited me in those buried pages. I had gotten aquick look, but I wanted to pore over those pictures like they were evidence in a crime I wasinvestigating. Eventually my dad got home from work and set his briefcase down. “So. How was practice?” he asked. “It was good. Why? Did you hear it wasn’t?” I said, trying to keep my cool. “Son, no offense, but you play Little League. It’s not the Yankees. I don’t get dailyreports about who’s hitting the shit out of the ball.” When I went to bed that night, all I could think about was those buried pages. I had workedhard for them, and I was determined to enjoy the fruits of my labor. I woke up in the middle ofthe night, and before I even opened my eyes, I thought, The porno! I hopped out of my bed, still in my underwear, and snuck out into the living room, through the back door, and into thebackyard. I went to the shed, grabbed the shovel, found the spot with the freshly turned earth,jammed the nose of the shovel’s blade into the ground, and started digging in the moonlight.My shoulders burned, but I kept digging. “Son. What in the fuck are you doing?” I shrieked, dropped the shovel, and turned to see my dad standing behind me in his robe,holding a hot toddy. “Oh my God, you scared me,” I said, completely forgetting that I should offer up some kind ofexcuse for what I was doing. He clicked on the flashlight he was holding and shined it in my eyes, then down over the restof my body. “Please explain to me right now why you’re in your underwear digging a fucking hole in mybackyard at three-thirty in the goddamn morning.” There was no way out of this. I exhaled in defeat, then told him everything: about going intothe canyon, finding the porn, running away from the homeless guys, then burying my loot. He waited for a moment, processing everything, then quietly said, “All right, here’s thedeal.” Calmly but firmly, he instructed me to take all that porn out of his backyard and fill in thehole pronto. The next day, he explained, I would carry the magazine pages back to the entranceof the canyon and leave them there. “Why can’t I just throw them out? I don’t want to go back to the canyon,” I said. “Bullshit. Someone spent time collecting this shit. What if I threw out your baseball cardcollection? That wouldn’t be right.” I nodded. His analogy made sense to me, and suddenly I felt a twinge of remorse, havingdeprived those men of one of their few—and probably most prized—worldly possessions. I bentdown and lifted the big wad of dirt-covered porno out of the hole. “Are you mad?” I asked, as I picked up the shovel. “Nah. I don’t think this even cracks your greatest hits of stupid. But there’s one importantthing I need you to know.” I stopped shoveling and looked at him. He pointed at the pile of loose, grimy magazine pages onthe ground. “You will never screw a woman who looks like that. Understand?” I nodded. “Okay, good,” he said. He turned back and walked toward the house, then quickly turned backaround. “And women aren’t going to screw you in all those crazy ways, either. You got it? They don’tlook like that and they don’t screw crazy. That’s what you’re taking away from this, okay?” “Okay.” “Come inside and fill in that hole tomorrow. I don’t want the neighbors thinking you’rebatshit.” I put down the shovel and followed him inside. He sat down in his chair and turned on the small lamp next to him. “The canyon was what I was freaked out about. That’s why I went down there, so I wouldn’t befreaked out about it,” I confessed after a moment of silence. “Son, you’re a little on the jittery side. It’s okay. Don’t beat yourself up about it. Itdon’t mean you don’t have a pair of balls, it just means you’re more choosy when you usethem. That’s not always a bad thing.” He took a big sip from his hot toddy. “Are you going to bed now?” I asked. “No, but you are,” he said, turning off the lamp and filling the room with darkness. “I’mtrying to get a damned minute to myself here.” 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 cast members who never seems to be inadolescent equivalent of one of those Saturday Night Live 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. ButI realized that wouldn’t be easy at a party early in freshman year. When my best friend Aaronand I walked into the party, the first guy we ran into took one look at us, removed the BudLight 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 uponseeing 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, “everybodyelse” started to sound really good. Sure, maybe the popular kids were going to parties andgetting hand jobs, but at least I wasn’t being tormented. The key to becoming “everybodyelse” was to draw as little attention to myself as possible. I ate lunch with a small group offriends every day in the lobby of the English building, while the cool kids ate in the quad andthe 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 asideand asked me if I was fluent in English in that loud, deliberate way people speak toforeigners. Although I excelled as a pitcher on the baseball team, few of my classmates caredabout high school baseball or attended the games. And when the weekend rolled around, insteadof going to parties, I would get together with Aaron and a couple of our friends, order inpizza, and watch ’80s movies. By the start of my junior year, I had yet to go on a date, oreven kiss a girl. But the older, popular kids had left me alone, and that was a tradeoff I waswilling to accept. The one person who wasn’t so satisfied with my pathetic social life was my father. “You twoare staring at that TV like you want to screw it,” he said to me and Aaron one Friday nightwhen 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 nextto the TV and poured himself a couple fingers’ worth of bourbon. “I don’t personally givetwo shits, but all I’m saying is, going out and drinking a beer and feeling a tit ain’t theworst 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 pullingbroken 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 volumeup. We’d had this argument many times before. Aaron and I were now in our junior year and neitherof us had been to a party since that very first embarrassment in ninth grade. Every so oftenAaron would push me to go to a party or a dance, but it was as if there was a little sign in mybrain reading, “It’s been this many days since the last time you were humiliated,” and I wasdetermined to keep that number moving in the right direction. I had seen what had happened tosome of my nerdier classmates when they dared to venture into social situations where theyweren’t welcome. One had been pinned down while someone drew penises all over his face inpermanent marker. Another had been pantsed in front of the entire P.E. class. And since nothinglike that had ever happened to me, I had talked myself into thinking that I was perfectly happywith the way things were. In fact, I had done such a good job of it that when I turned sixteen, making me eligible for adriver’s license, my parents had to force me to make an appointment to take the test. Unlikemost 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 theprospect of getting my license. I lived less than a mile from school, and even closer to myfriends’ houses. With everywhere I went already within walking distance, a driver’s licenseseemed like an unnecessary goal that could only be reached through an unbearably taxingprocess. Nevertheless, at my parents’ insistence, I looked up driving schools in the Yellow Pages andsigned up for a course near my house that consisted of one two-hour lesson a week, for sixweeks. My instructor was a skinny guy in his midtwenties who had a shaved head that was alwayspeeling from sunburns and who could only have smelled more like marijuana if he’d been made ofit. The training vehicle was a mid-’80s tan Nissan that had working brakes on the passengerside; he often got his jollies slamming them on for no reason and then between wheezing laughssaying, “You were all like ‘I’m in control of the car’ and then I hit the brakes and shitand you were all like ‘Whaaaat?’ ” During one lesson, he had me drive him to “a buddy’shouse,” then disappeared inside for half an hour; when he emerged he was so high he couldn’tremember the way back to the driving school. We ended up driving around aimlessly for fortyminutes while he told me about his life’s goal, which was to prove that humans and sea lionscould coexist on the beach. His plan centered on “eating a bunch of fish in front of them, sothat, you know, they can see that we like fish, too.” Still, I managed to glean some driving knowledge from the course. So, one overcast Saturdaymorning in early October, I hopped into the passenger seat of my dad’s silver 1986 OldsmobileBrougham 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 andnever 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 theftauto,” 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 likethe place where happiness went to die. Like most sensible Americans, my dad hates the DMV, andwhen 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 inRussia waiting for a loaf of fucking bread. Why the fuck am I here? You’re the one taking thetest.” A minute later: “That’s it. I can’t do this. You’re on your own,” and just likethat 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 downin the waiting area, which was filled with teenagers and the oldest people I had ever seen inmy 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 lateforties 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 ofdouble doors and into the parking lot. When we got into the car I tensed up. I hadn’t been nervous before, but sitting in thedriver’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 coulddrive 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 nasalvoice as he barked directions at me. I was gripping the steering wheel so tight my knucklescramped, and every time he’d give me a direction, I repeated it back to him like we were doingan 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 driftedonto the shoulder, doing twenty-five miles an hour. “SPEED UP AND MERGE!” the examinershouted. “OH MY GOD, SPEED UP AND MERGE.” I had a feeling I’d failed—a feeling confirmedwhen 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 gettingmy driver’s license evaporated immediately, and I decided once again that getting my licensedidn’t really mean anything. After all, you don’t need a license to eat pizza and watch oldmovies. “It’s not a big deal,” I told my dad in the parking lot. “Honestly, I don’t really evencare. 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 failedhis 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 wasstill 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 Eduardostanding over me. I could count on one hand the number of times Eduardo had spoken to me in mylife, but he’d made quite an impression. He was tall and thick, with slicked-back black hairthat always looked like he’d just gotten out of a pool. He was also the only kid in our entireeleventh grade who had a real mustache. Those of us who were developed enough to even havefacial hair grew thin, wispy mustaches generally associated with child molesters. ButEduardo’s looked like a push broom, and it was terrifying. I only could assume he was therefor 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 Icommitted 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 nofacial 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, ranit through his mustache exactly twice, then returned it to his pocket as he walked back to hisseat. “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 hundredand twenty pounds. When I danced, I looked like a praying mantis on fire. And besides, Ialready had plans for the Friday night of homecoming weekend: I was going to have Aaron over towatch 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 bigtitties, 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 andwatching movies on the night of the homecoming dance made me feel like a total loser. I had tomake a move. “Fine. Then I’ll ask Jenny to the dance,” I said, in maybe the least confident way I haveever 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’thave a license, asshole.” “I’ll get my license. Also, I failed my first driver’s test last week, and I’m telling youthat now because I tell you things because we’re friends and I don’t just spring stuff onyou,” I spluttered. As I walked home from school later that day, I realized I’d set myself two intimidating goalsto accomplish in the next three weeks: asking a girl to a dance for the first time ever andpassing my driver’s test. I decided to start with the less daunting of the two: getting mylicense. 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 inthe backyard or perform some feat of strength around the house. They were grey, like most ofhis others, but they sported blue and yellow stripes down the sides and elastic around theankles, presumably for aerodynamic purposes. As soon as I entered the living room, he stared medown. “You, my friend, are going to learn how to drive because I am going to teach you how todrive,” 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 hepummels them with one piece of information after another until they’re thoroughly disorientedand 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 thepassenger door for me like a very angry chauffeur, got behind the wheel himself, andnanoseconds 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 heaggressively shifted gears. “You remember when you were six or seven and we went to visit Aunt Naomi? We went to that poolwith 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 backof 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 outhis window, reminiscing. “What’s your point?” I said. “After that you went apeshit, jumping off every board in the place. You learn stick shift withme, you won’t give two shits when you take the test in an automatic with some asshole in a labcoat. 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 theignition and we switched seats. He gave me a quick overview of the gears and then spent thenext hour screaming numbers at me, trying to train me to shift gears. “Three! Four! Six! Thereis 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 leaveearly, come home, and give me a driving lesson before sunset. He began each lesson byannouncing a theme for the day. Among them were “A car is a murder weapon,” “Announce yourpresence with fucking authority,” and my personal favorite: “Your mother is bleeding todeath.” He said this late one afternoon as I pulled the truck out of the driveway. “If the shit goesdown 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 isnot always a stroll through the woods with your pants down. Now, I want you to get from here toClairemont 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 GOGO!” 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 thatled 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, soin order to reach our destination in time, whenever I encountered a yellow light I should gunit, and whenever I approached a red I should decide quickly whether to wait it out or turn andtake another route. Periodically my dad would scream how much time I had left, along with a newimaginary 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 Ihit 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’sgoing to be sexually assaulted!” “Stop! You’re not helping,” I yelled back as I weaved in and out of traffic toward thefreeway 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 hadabout 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 itto turn yellow, but even a hundred yards away it remained green. Afraid it would turn yellowbefore 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 wasstill too far away to get through it safely, but driving too fast to stop in time. Paralyzed byindecision, I froze, my foot leaden on the gas pedal. As the light turned red, our truck racedinto the intersection and toward an oncoming Nissan hatchback. My dad reached over, grabbed thewheel, and pulled it hard toward him, causing the truck to jerk right and narrowly miss acollision. “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, feelingembarrassed 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 statetest, even if he wasn’t convinced that I’d be able to get my future four-year-old son to theemergency room before he hemorrhaged to death. I had scheduled a second test, and felt like Ihad a real shot at getting my license this time, but my dad had been working me so hard I’dmostly forgotten that the end goal was being able to drive to homecoming. With the dance nowonly a week away, I realized I had to start working on the second part of my plan: landing adate. Eduardo had said his cousin Jenny liked me, but then Eduardo had also told me once that he wastaking woodshop so that he could “build a wooden knife and stab you, fool.” I thought Jennywas cute, but I’d never asked a girl out before, and the thought of getting rejected—coupledwith the threat of being stabbed with a shoddily made wooden knife for disrespecting Eduardo’scousin—was concerning. I decided to talk it over with Aaron at lunch the Monday before thedance. “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 fuckingclue. Just ask her.” Later that afternoon, I walked into my public speaking classroom, sat down behind Jenny, andwaited for the right moment. I’m not sure how I thought the right moment would make itselfknown, but apparently it never did. In fact, I was so nervous at the prospect of asking her outthat I couldn’t even talk to her about class-related things. At one point, we had to breakinto small groups to formulate our arguments for and against legalizing drugs. When Jenny askedme to contribute, I said, “I like drugs, but also I don’t like them,” then immediately gotup and walked out of class to the bathroom, where I paced around for a couple minutes to makeit 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 Ishould say, I finally worked up the nerve to attempt a conversation with her. I was confidentthat 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 thedance, and if I didn’t get a date fast I was going to be sitting at home watching movies on myown when Friday rolled around. Aaron’s move had spurred all of our other friends to take theplunge 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 todaywas 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 theOldsmobile and led me out of the house. He grabbed the newspaper on our front lawn, opened thedoor 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 andpulling the door shut. I climbed into the driver’s seat, started up the big silver sedan, and began my drive to theDMV. My dad opened up his newspaper and read in silence for a few moments before flipping downthe 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 youone 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 thepaper,” 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 youget the option to sit something out, you sit it out. So all I was saying to you was: when yourasshole 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. Iwas seething with anger the whole way there, thinking about what my dad had said. “I don’talways sit things out. He doesn’t even know what I do. He’s only around me an hour a day,” Itold myself, getting angrier by the minute. My father’s voice reverberated in my head for the next hour, as I left him outside, checked inat the DMV, and sat in the waiting room alone. It followed me as my name was called, I led mylab coat-wearing test administrator to my car, and my test began. The truth is, I had no answerfor my dad’s accusation, and it infuriated me. With the DMV employee in the passenger seatnext to me, I merged onto the freeway, but this time I was so preoccupied that I did soseamlessly. I was hell-bent on trying to find an example of when I had been confronted withsomething tough and not sat it out. Eventually, my thoughts led to asking Jenny to thehomecoming 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 thatI 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 mydriver’s test. I had accomplished one of my two goals. My dad was wrong. I got out of the carand 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 thingsthat 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 yourboat, son.” I felt empowered, like one of those women in a Lifetime Channel movie who stands up to herhusband. 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 ofpurpose. There would be no more pussyfooting about; I was going to straight up ask her to thedance. 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 youor not, but if they didn’t or if they did and you said no, or whatever, I was wondering if youwanted . . . 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 athumbs-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 hegot home that evening. “Good for you! Congratulations, son. But tough shit. My car’s not a fuck palace. I’ll giveyou 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 wholooked like Ernest Hemingway with a meth addiction, with Snow’s “Informer” playing on theradio, I leaned in and kissed Jenny on the lips. It was my first kiss. Could You Please Hand Me that Bottle of Peppermint Schnapps? If there was anything that thousands of hours of movies had taught me, it was that prom waswhere awesome stuff happened. It was where virginities would be lost, scores with bullies wouldbe settled, a hugely popular band could show up unannounced and perform, and a nerdy guy couldget the prom queen. As the end of my senior year of high school approached, while someclassmates focused on summer plans or leaving the state to go to college, I was hell-bent onhaving the most awesome prom imaginable. The first and most important item on the checklist was finding the right date. I didn’tusually shoot for the stars when scouting women; normally I’d only ask a girl out if I foundout she liked me. I’d hone in on the characteristic I liked—or, at least, didn’t findobjectionable—about her and use it to talk myself into how great our chemistry was. It waslike deciding that the Olive Garden is the greatest restaurant in the world because it alwayshas plenty of parking. But prom was the Super Bowl of high school, and I was determined to landa date who would help make it the night I’d been dreaming about for years. My target was Nicole D’Amina, who sat a few seats away from me in my first-period A.P. Englishclass. She was smart, mature, and composed, but not above my friends’ brand of sophomorichumor. She had won me over on a Monday morning earlier in the year when she let out a blast oflaughter after our English teacher said, “Sorry for the smell. Construction workers came inover the weekend and lined the walls with caulk.” With dark brown hair down to her shoulders,sparkly green eyes, and olive skin, she was also incredibly hot. “She has a ridiculous ass, man. It’s crazy. It is a crazy ass,” my friend Dan said to me aswe walked out of class one morning during our senior spring. “It is. She’s super cool, too. I was thinking of asking her to prom.” “I’m not trying to be a dick, but she’s not going to prom with you. She fucks collegedudes.” “You know that for sure?” I asked. “Not really. I just made that up. But she seems like she fucks college dudes. Like, I could picture a college dude fucking her, but I can’t picture you fucking her.” I couldn’t picture me having sex with her either. Then again, I couldn’t really picture mehaving sex with anyone. I had never even touched a bare boob. Since my first kiss, I’d gone ona few dates, had a couple make-out sessions, and done enough dry humping to cause a rash on mythigh. But I was ready to move forward. “I’m just gonna ask her. If she says no, she says no. No big deal,” I persisted. “Yeah, but if she says no, then all the girls will find out, ’cause that’s the kind of stuffthey talk about. Then, when you try and ask another one of them, they’ll know they’re sloppyseconds and say no.” I resented Dan’s pronouncement that he had “dropped a fuckin’ logic bomb” on me, but he hada point. I didn’t want to risk missing what could be the greatest night of my life byovershooting and asking someone out of my league. Within minutes, I’d scrapped my originalplan to ask Nicole, and decided to ask someone I knew would say yes. That not-so-special someone was a classmate named Samantha, who was small and thin, with darksunken eyes that made her look like a creature out of a Tim Burton movie. She and I wereusually the first people to arrive at our English class, and she often came over to my desk andasked me how I was doing and whether I needed any help with my homework. She rarely talked toanyone else, so I was pretty sure she had a crush on me. The next day, I waited until our first-period class was over and caught up with her as she waswalking out of the room. “Hey, Samantha,” I said, following her through the doorway. “Hey. What’s up?” she replied brightly as we strolled out into the quad. “I was wondering if you wanted to go to the prom with me,” I said confidently. “Uh, I . . .” As her voice trailed off, she started picking up speed. I tried to keep pace. “Did you hear what I said?” I asked between breaths. But then her walk turned into a jog, and then into a full sprint, zigzagging through the crowdlike she was returning a punt in the NFL. Within ten seconds she was fifty feet ahead of me. Isprinted after her for a while, but she kept running, and ten seconds later she faked left,then made a hard right, and was gone. A few hours later, in sixth-period P.E., I sat in the bleachers of the football field with Danand our friend Robbie, lacing up our running shoes for a jog, and explained what had happened. “What in the fuck?” Robbie said. “Yeah, she just took off running,” I said. “Why did you chase after her like a rapist?” Dan asked. “I just chased her. I didn’t do it like a rapist,” I snapped. Privately, I was surprised and hurt that Samantha wasn’t the shoo-in I’d taken her for. Andwith only nine days till prom, I was still dateless and starting to worry. Still stinging fromthe rejection the next day, I tried commiserating with a classmate who, I’d heard, was theonly other guy in our class who didn’t have a date, a tough, stocky Filipino guy named Angel.Before fifth period, I turned to him and said, “Girls are so picky with this prom crap, huh?” “Maybe with your skinny ass. I got a date last week, homey. She’s from my neighborhood. Mybrother says she likes to fuck without rubbers,” he said proudly. I was officially the last man standing. “I’ll go with you,” said a quiet voice. I turned around to see Robbie’s ex-girlfriend, Vanessa, who sat behind me. Robbie had brokenup with her a few months back because, as he said, “I think each of us thought the other onewas dumb.” Her offer seemed a little strange to me, and maybe she wasn’t Nicole, but she wascute and Robbie had always said, “She gets crazy.” In light of her offer, I entertained abrief fantasy in which “getting crazy” involved drinking, dancing, boob touching, and maybeeven virginity taking. I smiled at Vanessa and said I’d need to talk with Robbie but wouldlove to go to prom with her. As we were walking to baseball practice after school, I asked Robbie if he was okay with metaking his ex. “You can do her in the butt for all I care. I’m totally fine with it,” he said. And so I accepted Vanessa’s gracious offer the next day in class. “I just don’t want to go in a limo with Robbie and your friends,” she said, picking at theeraser on her pencil. “It has nothing to do with Robbie, though. You can tell him that,” sheadded. I was disappointed that I couldn’t ride to prom with all my buddies and their dates, but I wasgoing with a cute girl and optimistic that it still might be the best night of my life. The following Friday evening, I drove the two miles to Vanessa’s house and picked her up in mymom’s 1992 Oldsmobile Achieva. I was wide-eyed with excitement. And also really sweaty, to thepoint that I pulled the car over right before I got to her house, unbuttoned my shirt, andtoweled off my armpits with an old T-shirt. Vanessa looked fantastic. She was wearing smokyblack eyeliner, and her hair looked like a thousand golden curly fries. I was wearing a blackand white tuxedo I’d rented from the mall; it was two sizes too big, but I chose it becausethe teenage salesman told me I looked “like a straight-up pimp with a degree in pimping” whenI tried it on. My dad thought I looked like “a penguin with AIDS.” Before we took off, Vanessa’s mom asked to take a picture. “Put your arm around her,” shebarked from behind her camera while the two of us posed awkwardly in their driveway. My palms were sweating from excitement, and when I removed my arm from around Vanessa’s shoulder, I sawa dark spot on her dress where my hand had been. On the ride to the prom Vanessa was strangely silent. I fiddled with the A.C. for a while andthen finally tried to break the ice. “Everything okay?” I asked cheerfully. “What did Robbie say when you told him you were going to prom with me?” she asked. “He said he was fine with it,” I responded tentatively. “That’s it? He said he was fine with it?” “Yeah.” “What did he say exactly?” she asked again, the muscles in her jaws clenching. I recalled the butt-sex comment and gulped. “That was the only thing he said. That he was finewith it,” I repeated. “All he said was ‘I’m fine with it?’ He must have said something else.” “That’s it. That’s all he said. I swear.” “FUCK HIM! He’s fine with it? He’s not fine with it! He’s a fucking lying piece of shit!” We sat quietly in the car as she stared out the window looking like a convict being hauled offto prison. When we arrived at the glass-walled downtown San Diego hotel where our prom wasbeing held, I parked my mom’s car in the underground lot and reached under the seat to grabthe bottle of peppermint Schnapps I’d bribed a homeless man to buy for me earlier that day. Ioffered Vanessa the first drink and she grabbed the handle and pounded it like she was tryingto forget a memory from the Vietnam War. We traded swigs in complete silence for the next fiveminutes until I couldn’t feel my face. Then I tucked the near-empty bottle back under my seatand we got out and started walking toward the elevator. As the Schnapps started kicking in, I began feeling a little confrontational. “You didn’t really want to go with me, huh?” Vanessa turned to me with a look of disbelief. “Are you a retard? My ex-boyfriend is in there with some other girl,” she said, starting tocry. “I need to sit down or I’m gonna puke,” she added. We wobbled across the dirty red carpet through the hotel lobby, decorated with tacky brasslamps, green polyester chairs, and a few women I assumed were prostitutes. As we walked pastthem, one raised her hand to her nostril, covered it with her thumb, and blew a snot rocketonto the ground by her feet. We pushed through two double doors at the far end of the lobby and entered a huge dark ballroomthat contained three hundred or so of our classmates swaying to the chorus of “End of theRoad” by Boyz II Men. Our class had voted for a Rastafarian prom theme, so the room was strewnwith pictures of Bob Marley and stickers that said “One Love,” most of which had been defacedso that “one” was crossed out and “Butt” was written in its place. Vanessa and I sat on the opposite side of the room from the dance floor, near a spread of stalechips and crackers, curdled dips, and cheese cubes from Safeway. That was where we remained forthe rest of the night, mostly in silence, watching our classmates laughing, dancing, andchatting it up while Puff Daddy’s “I’ll Be Missing You” and “Return of the Mack” playedon continuous loop. The scowl on Vanessa’s face made sure none of my friends came near us,which, I’m pretty sure, was her goal. Nicole passed us a few times on the way to the bathroom,and though I wanted to say something to her, all I could muster was a smile. The dream of adancing, boob-touching, bully-punching, virginity-losing prom was now dead, and there was noother way to spin it. I was disappointed and felt stupid for letting myself get so excitedabout one dumb night and for thinking it might be any different than the rest of high school. Islumped down in my chair and shoved a handful of nacho cheese Doritos into my mouth. By the time the DJ announced the next song would be the last, most people had been sweatingthrough their tuxedos and dresses for hours, and the whole place smelled like a bathroom stallin a public library. As Dave Matthews’s “Crash” began to play, all my classmates grabbedtheir partners and made their way to the dance floor—but one look from Vanessa told me Ishould follow her to the nearest exit and take her home. “I’m drunk,” she hiccupped after a few minutes of driving in silence. “I’m sorry I calledyou a retard. I hope I didn’t ruin your night,” she added. When we arrived at her house, shegot out of my mom’s car and walked up her steps without looking back. As I sat there in the car watching her front door close behind her, I took a deep breath. Itwas ten p.m. and my senior prom was the exact opposite of everything I’d hoped. Even in theworst-case scenarios I’d dreamt up, it had all gone wrong because I’d punched out somebody Ihated and gotten dragged away by the cops. This was a total letdown. I couldn’t let the night end this way. I decided to turn my car around and head back towardthe San Diego harbor, where the school-sanctioned, casino-themed after-party was being held ata restaurant called the Bali Hai. When I got there, my sophomore history teacher, Mr. Bartess, was standing at the door with aclipboard. He glanced at me, scanned the clipboard, and shook his head. “I have you marked as being here already. I’m sorry, no ins and outs. It says so on yourticket. We can’t have people leaving to go do cocaine or something and then coming back inhere, on cocaine,” he said. “But I haven’t been here. And I don’t do cocaine.” “Listen, you might be right, but that also sounds like something someone who left the after-prom to do cocaine would say. That’s why we have no ins and outs, so I don’t have to be thejudge.” I didn’t have the energy to keep arguing. The muffled sounds of music and laughter inside theBali Hai drifted away as I walked along the boardwalk, which hovered just ten feet above theglassy ocean surface, back toward the lot where I’d parked. It was pitch-black out, save forthe lights of the skyline glowing across the bay. As I neared my parking spot, I noticed someone about twenty feet away, struggling to heave alarge rock into the water below. When I looked closer, I realized who it was: Michael, thetoughest kid on my Little League team, my partner in the greatest homeless man’s porn heistour little suburb had ever seen, and the most fearless person I had ever known. I hadn’tstayed in touch with Michael since those days; all I knew was that he’d been expelled from ourhigh school in tenth grade after he’d gotten into an argument with a classmate, then grabbedthe kid’s bicycle, rode it two miles down to the cliffs above the Pacific, and hurled it intothe sea. “Hey,” I yelled, walking toward him. “Fuck you! I’m allowed to throw rocks, dickhead,” he hollered back. “No, it’s Justin Halpern,” I said. “I know.” He set the large rock down onto the concrete and walked toward me. He was wearing a wife-beaterand slacks, and had a collared shirt tied around his head like a bandana. His body had leanedout since our Little League days, but his face had hardened, and he looked as intimidating asever. “Is there still a magician in there?” he asked, pointing at the Bali Hai. “I don’t know. I couldn’t get in. They said I’d already shown up and wouldn’t let me backin.” “Ah, fuck, sorry. I used your name to get in.” He grabbed a joint out of his pocket and lit it up. I decided I should probably head out beforethe combination of Michael and drugs landed me in jail. “All right, man. Well, good seeing you,” I said, turning to walk back to my car. “Can you find out if that magician is still in there?” he asked. “Why?” “He was doing some fucking dumb magic trick, trying to make this deck of cards disappear. Sohe’s like, ‘Does anybody know where my gay deck of cards are?’ and I raised my hand andsaid, ‘In your pussy.’ Fuckin’ guy had me thrown out.” Finding out whether the magician was still at the party seemed easy enough, and I felt a bitproud that Michael was asking me a favor, so I walked back to Mr. Bartess, who confirmed thatthe magician was still inside. Then I went back and told Michael, who was lying on the jaggedrocks between the boardwalk and the ocean, polishing off his joint. “I’m going back in there,” Michael said, sitting up quickly. “If you come with me, I’llsneak you in.” “Uh . . . I don’t know, dude. If they catch us, it wouldn’t be good. I think I’m just gonnago home.” “Fine. I’ll go by myself,” he said without hesitation. “What if they arrest you or something?” I asked, genuinely wondering whether Michael everthought things through before he acted. “Look. All I know is, that magician thinks I’m his bitch. And I’m not leaving tonight untilI tell him he can eat a dick.” My gut told me just to leave; I didn’t need this night to get any worse. But I thought aboutwhat leaving meant. I’d drive home, crawl into bed, turn off the lights, and that would be theend of prom—and, really, the end of high school. Maybe I hadn’t had the kind of prom theymade movies about, but sneaking into the after-party with Michael felt like giving myself onemore chance. “Okay. Let’s do it,” I said. We approached the restaurant, walked around to the back, and waited for one of the kitchenstaff to open the service door. When a heavy-set cook in a white smock came out carrying a hugebag of trash, we snuck past him into the kitchen, which was dark and empty. Beyond the diningroom door, I could hear the sounds of a crowd. “When we get in, we should just hang out in a corner or something for a bit, so no one noticesus,” I said. “That sounds fuckin’ dumb,” Michael said. With that, he pushed through the kitchen doorsinto a room filled with makeshift blackjack tables and fake palm fronds. Michael headedstraight toward the balding forty-year-old magician, who was surrounded by a dozen of myclassmates, all staring at him like they were either on drugs or really into disappearing birds. Michael pushed aside a skinny kid and planted himself in front of the magician. “Hey, you fucking piece of shit!” Michael yelled. The magician and all of the students surrounding him froze, staring at Michael, wondering whatwould come next. “Eat my dick!” Michael yelled. The magician’s face turned bright red. He whirled to his right and, before his cape couldcatch up with his body, screamed for security. Within seconds, two large men with black, puffy EVENT STAFF jackets stormed Michael from behindand grabbed him by the arms. Michael immediately went limp, forcing the guards to drag hislifeless body out of the restaurant as he shouted obscenities. Just as they pulled him throughthe doorway, he threw both his arms up in triumph and yelled, “Fuck everyone!” I glanced around the room and saw that none of my friends were there. They’d probably alreadychecked into hotel rooms somewhere. I was about to leave when I spotted Nicole by the ice-creambar. She was wearing a long cream-colored dress that perfectly accented her olive skin. As Iwatched her shake sprinkles onto her soft serve, I realized that my prom night had reallystarted going wrong two weeks before, when I’d wussed out on asking her. Here was my chance toredeem myself. Still reeling from Michael’s scene, I suddenly realized: this could be my Eat a moment. I strode up to Nicole with a sense of purpose I hadn’t felt all night.dick! “Hi,” I said, gently tapping her on the shoulder. “Oh, hey!” she said, beaming and giving me a hug. “How was your night?” I asked. “Awesome. How was yours?” “Pretty awesome. So, this is going to sound really weird, but I wanted to ask you to prom,” I said. As soon as I said it, I felt as if my stomach had dropped out of my pants. “You did?” “Yeah,” I said, a bit more sheepishly “Why didn’t you?” “Because I thought you’d say no and then nobody else would want to go with me because they’dthink they were my second choice. But I really should have just asked you, right?” It felt good to tell her. Even more than that, my mind filled with fantasies about what herresponse might be. Even though she wasn’t my official prom date, maybe we could hang out therest of the night. Maybe we could even start dating. I had my mom’s Oldsmobile Achieva for atleast another hour, and it still had a half tank of gas. Maybe Nicole and I could actually getcrazy after all. “Awwww,” she said sweetly, my heart rate picking up as she smiled at me. “I would have saidno, though,” she added. “What?” “I’m sorry. I’m just being honest. You’re not really my type. I wouldn’t have gone to promwith you.” Just then, a thin, handsome guy with a goatee came up behind her and wrapped his arms aroundher waist. He looked old enough to be in college. “Ready?” he said softly into her ear. Nicole nodded, then gave me another quick hug and left, her fingers entwined in her date’s. Nicole’s rejection didn’t sting quite as much as I expected, and the only reason I couldfigure was because for the first time that night, I had done exactly what I wanted to do. You Are Good at Sit Down In the fall of 1998 I began my freshman year at San Diego State University, which my dadcommonly referred to as “Harvard, without all the smart people.” Even though the campus wasonly eight miles from my parents’ house and about a fifth of my high school graduating classwas also heading to SDSU, I felt like it would be a new adventure and I was excited to begin. “I’m pretty sure no one knew who I was in high school,” I said to my best friend Dan, whowas also going on to SDSU, as we drove to freshman orientation a few weeks before classesstarted. “I dunno. I think people knew who you were,” Dan said as he merged onto the 8 freeway. “Iwas telling this guy on my volleyball team that we were both going to State and he was like,‘Isn’t he that guy who wears sweatpants to school sometimes?’ ” “Ideally I’d like to be known as something other than that.” “Who gives a shit about high school? We’re going to be in college now. Nobody knows us here.Girls want to party with crazy dudes. You could be the crazy party guy. Or I could be, and youcould be that guy’s friend.” The idea that I could entirely change all the things I didn’t like about myself and wipe myslate clean was enticing. Unfortunately, I was going to have to try to do so while living athome, because, despite working all summer, I had less than five hundred dollars to my name whenthe fall rolled around. My mom understood my plight and tried her best to offer up a solution. “If you want to make love to a woman in the house, I promise we won’t bother you,” she saidone night during dinner when I was a couple weeks into my first semester. “Let me add an addendum to that. You find a woman that’ll screw you with your mom next door,you run the fuck the other way,” my dad said. Despite my hopes of reinventing myself as a fearless social animal, I spent the first year ofcollege the same way I had spent high school—hanging out with my high school friends andmeeting practically no one new. When it came to partying, San Diego State seemed like the majorleagues: it was as if every high school had sent its craziest party animals to compete in atournament. When I did make it to a party, I usually found myself standing to the side, movingonly when some incredibly drunk person stumbled toward me and said something like, “I’m gonnapee here. Could you stand in front of me?” Whenever I was given the chance to melt into thewalls, I did. My friend Ryan, who also attended San Diego State, was similarly frustrated with his freshmanyear experience, so I was not entirely surprised when, midway through our second semester, hesuggested that the two of us get out of Dodge for the summer. Ryan suggested we should take themoney we had saved from our job cleaning boats all year and backpack through Europe. “Everyone I know who’s gone over there has partied with girls and had a bunch of sex,” Ryansaid as we drove home from class one day. “How many people do you know that’ve gone over there?” I asked. “Hmm. I guess I only know one guy. But that’s what he said.” That was good enough for me. And I could think of no better travel companion than Ryan, whomI’d been friends with since I was five years old. He was a grade above me, so it wasn’t untilI started college, and found myself in a lot of classes with him, that we became really close.Lean and sinewy, with a mop of so-blonde-it’s-white hair on top of his head, Ryan looks like across between a mad scientist and the winner of a surfing competition. He is easily the mostpositive human being I’ve ever met but also one of the strangest, as evidenced by the time hesat me down in high school and informed me, “There’s a fifty-fifty chance the moon isactually an alien spaceship that’s observing us.” But he could be convincing—at least whenit came to more earthly pleasures—and together we booked plane tickets for Europe, leaving inJuly and returning in early August, along with an unlimited EuroRail pass. The night before we left, I excitedly stuffed my suitcase with as many pairs of underwear andcondoms as possible. I was still a virgin, but I was pretty sure Europe would put an end tothat. I hadn’t been to another country since I was three years old, and I’d spent the wholesecond semester of my freshman year waiting for this trip. It was going to be the first realadventure of my life, although I stopped referring to it as an “adventure” after my brothertold me that was “the pussiest thing I’ve ever heard someone say.” Regardless, I couldbarely contain my enthusiasm when my parents came into my bedroom as I was cramming atoothbrush into the tiny front pouch of my oversized Jansport backpack. “All right, real quick, couple things,” my dad said, sitting down on my desk chair. “Youknow how I get pissed off when we’re driving around San Diego and some asshole in a rental cardoesn’t know where the hell he’s going?” “Yeah,” I said. “Well, over there, you’re the asshole in the rental. Be respectful of people and theirculture, okay? I don’t want to pull you out of a secret prison because you pissed on somesacred monument when you were drunk.” “I’ll have Ryan with me,” I said. “That guy’s a minor head injury away from eating his own shit. Not much of a case you’remaking.” “Call us every couple of weeks to let us know you’re okay,” my mom said. “I don’t know if there’s always going to be a phone around.” “You’re not leading a fucking expedition to Antarctica. Find a phone. Call,” my dadinsisted. The next day Ryan and I flew from San Diego to London, via New York. After eighteen hours oftraveling, just after sunrise, we dropped our packs in our crammed room in a dingy hostel nearTrafalgar Square. We grabbed breakfast at a nearby pub, where Ryan studied his copy of Let’s like he was going to have to recite it for his Bar Mitzvah.Go Europe “Ibiza!” he said, looking up from the book like he’d uncovered a clue in a murder case. “What’s that?” I asked in between forkfuls of overcooked eggs. “It’s an island near Spain where I guess people just party twenty-four hours a day,” heexplained, as he scanned the book. “Whoa. It says there’s a club on the island where twopeople just have sex in the middle of the dance floor the whole night,” he added, continuingto read. The whole reason I had come to Europe was to go to places like Ibiza, places where lettingloose and getting crazy were my only option and I would be forced into the ring. I was in. The next few days we toured London, seeing Buckingham Palace, the Tower Bridge, and finallygetting into a heated argument with a Londoner after Ryan suggested that Big Ben should becalled Medium Sized Ben, because “it’s not even that big.” After packing in as muchsightseeing as we could, we took the Chunnel from London to Paris, where we spent a couple daysrushing through museums and eating anything that had butter on it, and from Paris we headed toSwitzerland for several days and then Florence. When we arrived in Florence, it was a hundred and ten degrees. We checked into our hostel,which consisted of two large rooms packed with twenty bunk beds each, and two bathrooms total.Ryan and I walked through the narrow passageway between the beds, all the way to the back ofthe room, where the top bunks of two beds were open. On the bottom of Ryan’s bunk lay a verythin Vietnamese man in his early twenties. Despite the oppressive heat, he was wearing a denimjacket, denim jeans, a blue T-shirt with Michael Jordan’s face on it, and a pair of matchingblue Chuck Taylor Converse shoes. Beads of sweat covered his forehead, dripping down his faceas he lay there. Ryan reached his hand out and introduced himself. “Hey, I’m Ry.” “Vietnam Joe,” the man said, in a thick accent. “Aren’t you kinda hot in all that stuff, Joe?” Ryan asked. “Large hot,” Joe said, grabbing a tissue out of his jacket pocket and wiping his forehead. “If you’re worried about your jacket getting stolen, I have a lock on my bag—you can put itin there and it’ll be fine,” I said. Joe had no reaction, so I pointed at his jacket, then at my bag and my lock. “No,” Joe said. “I like Joe’s style. Fuck it, it’s hot, but he likes how he looks in his jacket. Iunderstand that,” Ryan said. When we left the hostel a few minutes later to go to dinner, Joe walked out with us. Heproceeded to follow us, two steps behind, all the way to a nearby restaurant whose menu wecouldn’t decipher but whose prices looked affordable. “Do you want to have dinner with us, Joe?” I asked. “Yes.” The three of us sat down at a table in the restaurant’s air-conditioned interior, and Ryan andI learned quickly that Joe’s English vocabulary was limited to about fifty words. Food waseither “large delicious,” “delicious,” or “not delicious.” Temperatures were either“large hot” or “not hot.” Oddly, there was one full English sentence he could manage:“Second-year guard Ray Allen has a silky-smooth, NBA-ready game.” When Joe saw howentertained we were by this, he showed us the Ray Allen basketball card that he kept in hiswallet, which bore this very sentence. Since Ryan and I knew not one word of Vietnamese, wetried to communicate with Joe using the English words he knew, so he wouldn’t feel left out. After dinner, and over the next couple days, Joe joined me and Ryan as we explored Florence. Hewas up for any activity, especially if it involved going somewhere near to a leather goodsshop. He loved leather, insisted on browsing through any store that sold it, and at one pointpurchased a pair of burgundy leather shorts, which he later tried on for us at the hostelbefore pronouncing them “unstoppable” (another word he’d found on the Ray Allen card). Joewas good-natured, a fun guy to have around, and he seemed to have traveled to Europe for thesame reasons we had. A couple days after meeting him, the three of us sat down for lunch at asmall café near our hostel and Ryan broke down our plan. “Ibiza,” Ryan said, pointing at a picture of one of the island’s many nightclubs in aSpanish travel guidebook he’d bought that day. “You, me, Ryan, Ibiza?” I said to Joe. “Large hot?” Joe said, looking at the picture. “Everywhere is large hot, Joe. There’s a heat wave in Europe,” Ryan responded. Joe sat back for a moment thinking as he picked up his glass of ice water and ran it againsthis forehead. “Large girls?” Joe asked. “Oh, dude. Tons of large girls. This is why we’re here, Joe. We’ve waited the whole trip tomeet girls in Ibiza and start partying,” Ryan said. “Hmmmm,” Joe said. “Joe. You will like Ibiza. Silky-smooth guard Ray Allen and his NBA-ready game would likeIbiza.” Joe laughed. “Second-year guard Ray Allen has a silky-smooth, NBA-ready game.” “I think that’s a yes,” Ryan said to me. The three of us walked to the train station and bought tickets for the following day toBarcelona, where we’d catch the ferry to Ibiza. We must have looked like one of those movieswhere three animals that would never get along in the wild join forces to find their way back home. I figured the next couple days were going to be a total blackout, so I decided to give myparents a call that evening. After I chatted with my mom for a few minutes, she put my dad onthe line. “So, how’s it going? You seeing some art and history or you too busy trying to slap yourpecker against anything with a wet spot?” “No, I saw some art. We spent like two hours in the Louvre.” “Nice. Two thousand years of priceless works of art and you bust through it in two hours. Eatshit, da Vinci,” he said. “Where you heading next?” “An island called Ibiza,” I said. “It’s pronounced Ibitha,” he replied. “You’ve heard of it?” “I hate to shit on your preconceived notions of me, but I’m pretty goddamn worldly.” “Well, that’s where we’re going,” I said, looking at my watch to make sure I hadn’t usedup too much of my prepaid calling card. “Feel free to tell me to piss off, but why in the hell are you going to some shit stain in themiddle of the ocean?” “It’s supposed to be one big party, twenty-four hours a day.” “Sounds like the worst place on earth. Woulda thought you hated shit like that.” “Well, I don’t,” I said. “Whatever floats your boat. Well, anyway, have fun and don’t screw a woman if she’s ondrugs.” It’s not often that a sane human being thinks, “I’ll show my dad I can party,” but thatphrase reverberated in my head for the next couple hours. The next day, Ryan, Joe, and I boarded a train to Barcelona. Our train car looked and smelledlike it had once been used to transport slaughtered livestock. There was no air-conditioning onboard, and each train car was filled with sweaty travelers. By the time we found seats, Joe hadalready broken into a full body sweat that was threatening to seep through his denim jacket. Just before the train took off, a group of three girls in their late teens wearing summerydresses and carrying backpacks embroidered with the Mexican flag sat down in the row ahead ofus. Joe looked at us, then the girls, then back at us. Then he gave us a thumbs-up. “It’s a super-long train ride. We should talk to these girls. Try and get them to go to Ibizawith us,” Ry whispered. “Totally,” I whispered back. “Maybe we wait until they get up to go to the bathroom or something, then start up aconversation. Ask them what the weirdest house they’ve ever seen is, or something,” Ry said. “I don’t think that’s a good opener,” I whispered. “What? Yes it is. It’s not a yes-or-no question. They have to talk about the house and whyit’s weird, and that starts a conversation.” Before we could argue, Joe was tapping the girl in front of him on the shoulder. She turnedaround. “Train large hot, yes?” Joe said to her. “It is really hot. Our whole trip, everywhere has been hot,” the girl said with a thickSpanish accent. “Vietnam Joe,” he said, sticking his hand out to shake. “Abelena,” she said, shaking his hand. “Where are you going to?” “Hey, we’re Joe’s friends. You guys are from Mexico, huh? What’s the weirdest house you’veever seen there?” Ryan interrupted. “We’re going to Ibiza,” I quickly added. “Fiesta,” Joe said, smiling and nodding his head, causing all the girls to laugh. “That’s funny,” Abelena said to Joe. Within twenty minutes the three girls had turned around in their seats and were focusingintensely on Joe, who was showing them detailed pencil drawings of motorcycles he had sketchedin a journal. “For Joe,” he said, pointing at one specific drawing of an aerodynamic-looking motorcycle. “That is definitely the best one. I can see why you like it,” Abelena said to him. “Which one is for me?” her friend asked, smiling at Joe like he was a celebrity she hadwaited in line to meet. Ryan turned to me in disbelief. “Dude. I don’t even know what’s going on right now, but it is super awesome,” Ryan said. By the time we reached Barcelona, not only had Joe invited Abelena to sit next to him, whereshe now slept with her head on his shoulder, but he had gotten her travel companions warmed upto us. Ryan and I spent most of the ten-hour ride chatting with Eloisa and Anetta, who, welearned, were freshmen in college and lived in Mexico City. The weirdest house they’d everseen, they told us, was a house in Tijuana that looked like a giant naked woman. At about fourin the morning, when almost everyone else on the train was sleeping, I asked Eloisa if she andher friends wanted to come to Ibiza with us. She said yes. The next morning, my eyes opened just as we were pulling into the Barcelona train station.Ryan, Joe, the three girls, and I grabbed our packs and walked down to the ferry building inthe Barcelona harbor to purchase our tickets for a ship leaving that night. Just as we wereabout to get in line, Joe pulled Ryan and me aside. “I no Ibiza,” Joe said. “What? Do you need to borrow money?” I asked, grabbing my wallet and showing him a few Eurosto make my point. “No. Money I own.” “Then what’s the problem?” Ryan asked. Abelena approached with her bag. “Joe and I are going to go to San Sebastián together. It was very nice meeting you guys,” shesaid. Then she walked back to her friends, exchanged a few sentences in Spanish with them, andhugged them good-bye. “Wow,” Ryan said. “Yes,” Joe said. “Well, it was really great meeting you, Joe,” I said. “Yes. I want fun time for Justin. Fun time for Ryan,” he replied. “Thanks, man.” “I own sad,” he added. “We own it, too, man,” I said. I gave Joe my e-mail address. Then Ryan and I watched as he and Abelena walked out of the ferrystation together. After bumming around on the beach all day, Ryan, Eloisa, Anetta, and I boarded a dilapidatedship whose rusted exterior and cracked floorboards made it look like it should have beensetting sail for Ellis Island in the summer of 1925. As we pulled away from the harbor, Ryanand I stood out on the bow. “This is it, dude. We’re going to the party capital of the world. We have girls with us.Stuff is going to get crazy, and we have to get crazy with it. No excuses,” Ryan said. “Totally,” I agreed. We didn’t have enough money for a room on board, so the four of us slept in lounge chairs onthe observation deck. Thirteen hours later, the sun smacked us across the face, waking us upjust as we were approaching the island. Ibiza looked to be a series of hills, covered in smallwhite Mediterranean homes, plunging down to a sandy beach lined with grand resorts and theturquoise ocean below. When we disembarked from the boat, we realized we had no idea where togo. All the other tourists grabbed taxis and drove off toward the resorts, but we couldn’tafford those rates, and we weren’t about to waste money on a cab. The streets were desertedand it was horror-movie quiet. We shrugged our shoulders, chose a direction almost at random,and started walking down a narrow street when suddenly a voice from behind us said, “You guyslost?” Standing behind us was a bronzed American man in his late twenties, wearing baggy white pants,a pair of bright red shoes covered in sparkles, an electric-blue short-sleeve T-shirt thatseemed to be made of Lycra, and a pair of Oakley-style sunglasses with fluorescent yellowlenses. He reminded me of an animal you’d see in a nature special about how the most dangerousspecies in the Amazon use their colorful markings as a warning to other animals. “I can show you around. I need to walk off this E. I’m rolling balls so fucking hard rightnow,” he said, running his hands through his spiked hair, then popping his pinkie in his mouthand tugging on his cheek like a fish that’d been hooked. With no real idea where we were going, we took him up on his offer, and headed off in the exactopposite direction from the one we’d chosen. As we walked, he explained that he lived on theisland and worked as a promoter for a few different clubs. “It’s my job to make sure the party is super-hot. If it’s not hot enough, I make ithotter,” he said as we walked down the boardwalk. “So what’s the hottest party to go to in Ibiza?” Ryan asked. “You can’t handle that party. If you touched that party, it would burn you.” “Okay. Well, what about the second hottest party?” I asked. “Still too hot for you,” he said. “Just tell us a party that’s appropriately hot for us,” Ryan snapped. He looked us up and down. “Club Pacha,” he said. He led us to a hostel that sat at the end of a small alley, above an auto shop, and was on hisway. As soon as we got into our tiny single room, Eloisa and Anetta went into the bathroom togetherand threw on skirts and bikini tops. Then the four of us headed down to the beach. We spent theday lounging on the sand in front of a hotel and swigging from a small bottle of vodka we’dbrought with us from Barcelona. Everything was going just as I’d hoped; even things I wasnormally self-conscious about seemed unimportant. “So, I kinda have weird chest hair,” I said, as I removed my shirt. “I like it. It looks like an eagle that’s grabbing another eagle,” Anetta said. “Fuck yeah. It totally looks like a crazy eagle fight,” Ryan chimed in. We knew we weren’t going to be able to afford drinks at the club, so that evening Ryan and Iwalked to a nearby liquor store, bought a couple dozen airplane-sized bottles of Skyy Vodka,Captain Morgan’s, and Jack Daniels, and stuffed them in our pants pockets so that it lookedlike we were wearing football pads. By the time our taxi arrived at Pacha, the four of us haddowned several bottles each and my tongue was starting to feel numb. Before us was a big whitebuilding, with two large palm trees flanking the entrance and a wash of purple floodlights overthe whole facade. As other people gathered in front of the club, though, we started feeling out of place. Ryanand I were both wearing khaki slacks and I was wearing New Balance sneakers, whereas almosteveryone around us was dressed in all-white clothing so skin-tight it looked like they wereheading to a speed-skating competition. Standing next to them, I looked like an old man on theway to his grandson’s third-grade play. “Man. Everyone looks like they’re from the future,” Ryan said. We pushed past the front door and into a cavernous open room where the techno music’s pulsingbass smacked me in the face and vibrated through my body. The walls were twenty feet high anddraped in white fabric; all around us, purple and white spotlights chased each other fastenough to give you motion sickness. In the middle of the room was a concrete dance floor packedwith hundreds of sweaty bodies writhing around like they were going through heroin withdrawal.Sitting above the dancers in the DJ booth was a middle-aged bald man wearing a cape whoperiodically grabbed a strobe light and flashed it over the crowd. Even though we were standingon the outskirts of the dance floor, arms and legs flailed wildly and knocked into us every fewseconds. “Man, people dance really weird here,” I shouted as loud as I could, so that Ryan could hearme over the music. “Come outside for a sec,” Ryan yelled back at me, then held his hand up to Eloisa’s ear andsaid something to her. We walked away from the dance floor and up some stairs to a rooftop lounge where the music wasquieter. A group of young people were smoking cigarettes in a huddle; in a booth nearby sat anobese man with a hairline that started at his eyebrows, with one incredibly attractive woman onhis lap and two others on either side of him. “We can’t start making excuses not to party,” Ryan said, insistently. “What are you talking about? I’m here. I’m ready to party.” “No. You just said, ‘People dance really weird here,’ ” he replied. “They do. I’m just making an observation. Here’s another one: That fat guy has a lot of hotgirls around him. Just an observation,” I said. “That fat guy is partying. You stand around talking about how weird people are, and you’llend up doing that the whole night. I do it, too. But we can’t do that shit,” Ryan said, hiseyes growing wilder as he talked. “What are you, my coach? I don’t need you to give me a speech, dude.” “Yes, you do! Because I spent all my money to come to this place, dude. Did you know I was saving up to buy a dune buggy? But I didn’t buy one. Instead I came here. To party.” “Why were you saving up to buy a dune buggy? Where would you even ride that?” “I was gonna ride it to school or something. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter because Ican’t buy one now. But what I can do is fucking party in the partiest party place in the world. Vietnam Joe is off somewhere in Spain and he speaks like two words of English and he’smaking sweet love to women and shit.” Ryan removed three minibottles of vodka from his pockets and unscrewed their caps. “Let’s dothis,” he said, then tilted his head back and poured all three down his throat one after theother. I took out three bottles of Captain Morgan’s and did the same, fighting the urge tothrow them back up. “Also, everyone here seems like they’re into rich guys. So, if anyone asks you, I’m tellingpeople my dad invented the calculator watch, and my name is Brian Waters,” he said as hetossed the empty bottles into a trash can. “Who are you?” he asked. “Hmm. I don’t know.” “I like the name Robert C. Manufas. I mean, it’s your call, but I’m just saying I like thatone.” “How about this: I’m Robert C. Manufas and I own an Internet company that helps people findtax loopholes?” “Hell, yeah,” he said giving me a high five. We each downed one more tiny bottle of liquor and strode confidently back into the club. Ryangrabbed Eloisa, who was standing where we’d left her, and walked out onto the dance floor. Ispotted Anetta out on the floor, making out with a tall guy in a white jumpsuit with the zipperopened down to his belly button, revealing his shaved chest. I stood on the periphery of thedance floor for a few moments. I have never been what you would call “a good dancer.” I haveone move: reaching my arms out wide, leaning back, and lurching my chest forward to the rhythmof the music, like a guy being shot repeatedly in the back. But that night, I pushed that moveto its absolute limits. The only way I could even keep track of time passing was that every so often a giant cloud offreezing vapor would blast from the corner of the room, making it impossible to see your handin front of your face for a few seconds. Ryan drank all of his tiny bottles of liquor, and mostof mine, and spent what felt like several hours carrying Eloisa on his shoulders andchallenging other couples to chicken fights until security insisted he stop. I danced tillseven in the morning with anyone who made the mistake of making eye contact with me. Toward the end of the night, I was dancing with a tall, rangy blond woman who looked like shewas in her late twenties. After an extended grinding session, she pulled me outside onto theupstairs balcony, where I noticed that the sky was becoming light. “You’re fucking intense,” she said, then pounded an entire bottle of water, most of whichran down her chin and chest and onto her white tank top. “Just dancing,” I replied. “What’s your name?” she asked. “Robert C. Manufas,” I said, sticking to my script, then realizing no one ever says his fullname and middle initial when answering that question. “Do you have any E on you?” she asked. “Ecstasy? No.” “Shit. Let’s do shots of 151.” And that was the last thing I remembered. The next day, at five P.M., I woke up in abunk bed in our hostel. Ryan was sleeping facedown onthe floor in just his underwear, the rest of his clothes balled up beneath his head like apillow. Eloisa and Anetta were spooning each other in bed across the room. Ryan rolled over andlooked at me. “I think I blacked out,” I said with a hoarse voice. “Do you remember going out into the middle of the dance floor and challenging people to dancebattles?” he asked, rubbing his eyes slowly. “No. How did I do?” “Mostly people just yelled at you. Then you stole a knife from the bartender and cut yoursleeves off. Then the bartender asked for it back and you started making body builder poses andthen ran away. So that was pretty awesome.” I smiled in victory and then realized I felt worse than I’d ever felt in my life. I sat up—alittle too quickly, I guess, because I immediately projectile-vomited into an empty bag ofchips. I went to wipe my mouth on my missing shirtsleeves, and ended up rubbing my puke onto mybare biceps. “What do we do now?” I asked Ryan between sips of a water bottle I found next to me. Ryan handed me a rolled-up piece of toilet paper, then took a moment to recover from theeffort. Between deep breaths, he said, “We do it again.” And we did. The next night was almost identical. The only differences were, the club we went towas called Amnesia, which threw a “Purple Party” instead of a white one; my fake name wasPeter Schlesinger and I sold yachts; I made out with a strange woman who asked me for cocaineinstead of ecstasy; and I woke up the next morning feeling even worse than I had the morningbefore. Also, my underwear was on over my pants. With two full nights in Ibiza under our belts, the four of us checked out of our hostel andboarded a boat back to Barcelona. I felt a sense of accomplishment. I had gone to Europe inhopes of becoming someone I was never able to be back home, and I was sure that, if I could bemore like the guy I’d been for the past two days, my life would be infinitely better. I alsofelt really bloated. My stomach was hard to the touch; it looked like I was in my secondtrimester. I was exhausted, so I went inside the main cabin of the ship and plopped myself downin one of the couple hundred seats, shut my eyes, and fell asleep. About four hours later my eyes shot open. It felt like I’d swallowed a rat that was now tryingto claw its way up through my intestines to freedom. I tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t;instead I ended up just sitting awake, slumped over in my chair, until we finally arrived atBarcelona nine hours later, just as the sun came up. When I tried explaining my agony to Ryan,who is not a “believer” in traditional medicine, he offered a theory of his own: “I bet youit’s because of the frequencies in this ocean. Your cells probably aren’t used to thesefrequencies.” “I don’t think that’s it,” I replied, weakly. I tried ignoring the pain, and I made it to the train station, where we boarded our train forMadrid. By the time we reached our hostel there a few hours later, though, I could barely standup. The room we got for the night was windowless and felt at least fifteen degrees hotter thanthe temperature outside, which was well over a hundred. I collapsed on the bed closest to thedoor and curled into the fetal position in hopes I’d feel better, but as I moved my legstoward my chin I felt a stabbing pain shoot through my stomach and up into my chest. “Ry, I need to go to the emergency room,” I moaned. “I think you’re gonna be okay. You’re away from the ocean now and its weird frequencies,”he replied. “Ry. I need to go to the emergency room right now, man.” Ryan nodded and gingerly lifted me out of bed. I slung one arm around him as he helped medownstairs and out onto the street, where we hailed a cab. About ten minutes later I wassitting in the waiting area of an emergency room when a nurse approached us and said somethingin Spanish that neither Ryan or I could understand. “What is hurt?” she finally sputtered in broken English. “I think the frequencies of the ocean have messed with his cells,” Ryan said. “My stomach hurts,” I said. “Point where,” she said. I gestured toward my entire stomach area and she nodded. Five minutes later she led me to aprivate room, where she started an IV in my left arm. Twenty minutes later I was standing infront of an X-ray machine. The X-ray technician rattled off some directions in Spanish and I figured out from the keywords that he wanted me to take off my clothes. Then I realized from the look on his face thatat no point had he asked me to take off my underwear. I pulled them back up as quickly as Icould, which in my pathetic condition wasn’t very quickly at all. After he snapped a couple X-rays, I waited with Ryan until the nurse brought us into a small office where the doctor, ayoung woman in scrubs and a white lab coat, sat behind a desk, a set of X-rays spread out infront of her. “No hables espanol, si?” she said. “Not really,” I said. “Okay. I try explain in English,” she replied as she held up an X-ray in front of us. “Your stomach is very mad. It do not work. Here,” she said, pointing to two dark areas undermy ribcage. “This is, ah . . .” she added, then turned to the nurse and rattled off aquestion in Spanish. The nurse picked it up where the doctor had left off. “Ah, I know this is not most correct butfor understand—too much poo poo and fart,” she said, pointing at the dark spots on the X-ray. “That was the most awesome diagnosis I’ve ever heard in my life,” Ryan said. “Thank you,” the nurse said without a hint of humor. “What does that mean?” I asked. “You got too many poo poos and farts in your stomach, dude. That’s pretty clear,” Ryan said,laughing. “Have you eat drugs?” the doctor asked. “No. Not at all.” “Alcohol?” “Yes. A lot.” “We went to Ibiza,” Ryan interjected. The nurse and the doctor exchanged brief but satisfied smirks, as if they’d been placing betson Ibiza. “Okay, Justin,” the doctor continued. “Some people, they are very good at alcohol, and theygo to many discos, and it is okay. Some people, they are very bad at alcohol, and it is notgood for them discos, and they are good at sitting. You are good at sit down.” She went on to tell me that, because of the drastic change in my lifestyle over the past forty-eight hours, my stomach had reacted violently and basically stopped working. Constipation and abuildup of gas were causing all the pain. She said I wouldn’t really be able to walk aroundfor the next few days, then handed me a prescription to alleviate the blockage and pain. Ithanked her profusely and we left the emergency room and hobbled next door to the pharmacy. As I rifled around in my wallet, preparing to pay the bill, I noticed my prepaid calling cardand remembered that I owed my parents a call. After settling up, Ryan and I took a cab back toour hostel room where, exhausted, I sat down and dialed my parents’ number. The phone pickedup after one ring. “It’s four thirty in the fucking morning,” my dad said. “Oh, sorry, I forgot.” “Well who in the hell is this?” “It’s Justin, Dad.” “Justin? You sound like shit run over, son.” “Yeah, I’m not feeling well.” “Not feeling well how?” he said, his voice quickening with concern. “Okay, well, don’t tell Mom because she’ll freak out, and I’m gonna be fine, but I just hadto go to the emergency room.” “Aw, hell. For what?” I explained everything I’d done in the past couple days: Ibiza, the minibottles of booze, thestomach pains, the X-rays, right down to the prescription I’d just been given. He listenedquietly until I was finished. “Can I make a suggestion?” he asked. “Sure.” “Maybe next time you’re thinking about getting shithouse drunk all night, you don’t.” “Dad, I barely ever drink.” “Yeah, that’s my point. You can’t hold your liquor for shit. So maybe drinking a whole bunchof it and shaking your ass ain’t your thing.” “We were just having a good time and trying to meet people, you know?” “Well, you don’t need to get shithoused and go to Europe to do that. You’re over six feettall and your mom says you’re funny. I’d say run with those two things and see where it getsyou.” We said good-bye just as my calling card was about to run out of minutes. Then I sat down on mybed, and, for what felt like the first time in days, I fell asleep. A week later, Ryan and I were in Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, waiting to board ourflight back home. My stomach was feeling infinitely better, although I was still relativelyweak and couldn’t walk more than a few blocks without having to sit down. We had an hourbefore our flight took off, so I decided to check my e-mail at an Internet kiosk in theterminal. At the top of my inbox was an e-mail from Vietnam Joe: Justin, I hope you have a great trip. I am using Vietnamese to English translation, so I apologize if there is incorrect grammar. I had a great time and met many very attractive women. I am on a good streak that I want to say that meeting you and Ryan and I think you are very great man. You must know a lot of attractive women. I hope to go out with you all one day when I came to the United States. I want to meet the women you know. I will not steal from you. Oh no I can not promise! Joe 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 onethey fell, until finally, at the age of twenty, my friend Jeff and I were the only virginsleft. I was in my second year of college and lived in a run-down five-bedroom house in PacificBeach, San Diego, with Jeff and three other close friends. The morning after a party we threwcelebrating the end of the first semester, I stumbled out of my bedroom and found my roommateshanging 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 roomsipping a Gatorade with the swagger of someone who had won seven Super Bowls, and knew it wasno joke. I said, in disbelief.“Jeff had sex? Jeff?” “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 thelast five years. Then one day you wake up and saw your friend on a raft in the ocean, paddlingtoward a rescue ship. Then, as you scream, “Come back! Don’t leave me!,” your friend laughsand waves at you, then keeps paddling, without even looking back. That is exactly how I felt inthat moment. It didn’t seem that terrible to be a virgin when I wasn’t the only one. Now Iwas 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, andeven Dan, who probably had more sex than any of my other friends, rarely talked about it, for areason he put rather eloquently: “I play tennis every once in a while, but I don’t brag aboutit because I suck at it.” But now that Jeff had had sex, I couldn’t help but feel like theyhad 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 talkingto women and usually just avoided it. When I headed to college, I tried to relax and not obsessover 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 rolledaround, 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 ata stoplight near the beach. Directly in front of us, hanging from a blank storefront in a stripmall, was a giant banner: ? GRAND OPENING HOOTERS NOW HIRING ? “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 ascreeching 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, sothe inside was filled with construction workers and raw materials. In the corner were two mensitting at a desk: a big Korean man in his twenties, and a five-foot-tall, grizzled white guyin his midforties wearing a Hooters T-shirt and hat. He looked like the kind of guy who, if hehadn’t killed a man himself, at least must have buried a body somewhere along the way. Weapproached 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 aroundand talk to every dipshit that walks in here,” the little man said in a raspy voice thatsuggested 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’mBob. 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 SongSu. “You guys got the job. Tell your tall friend that’s pretty like a girl so I don’t have tomake 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 womeneight hours a day, five days a week. For the entire summer. I would literally be forced to talkto 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 roomat the back of the recently finished Hooters, covered in fake street signs and orange, as SongSu and Bob stood before us. Bob wore a mesh tank top and sported a mustache that would make any1970s baseball player proud. He slowly puffed at a cigarette as he addressed the male membersof his newly assembled staff. “I know what you’re all thinking. You’re going to get some stank on your dick with one ofthese 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, beforespitting 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.” Hefinished up the tour by handing us black T-shirts with the Hooters logo emblazoned on thefront. Then he welcomed us to the Hooters family, which transitioned into a bizarre tangentabout his time in the military, where he warned us about “the kind of scum that fuck a man’swife 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 hardto 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 haveto be able to.” I agreed. I could barely contain my excitement. Sex had seemed so elusive, but now I felt likeI was mere days away. Two days later, Dan and I walked into Hooters for our first shift wearing our tan aprons andHooters hats. We realized two things really quickly: 1) Song Su wasn’t lying: the jobdefinitely sucked; 2) the majority of the girls working there had major emotional problems. Andnot 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 totalk to women like that, or wanted to—neither of which I did—the work day was so jam-packedwith cleaning, scrubbing, wing-battering, and Dumpster-emptying that I didn’t even have achance. One day I was washing dishes in the back when Bob poked his head in. “Skippy,” he said. (Bobnever remembered anyone’s name. Nor did he bother to cover up this fact.) “Skippy, today isnot your day. I’m going to tell you a story. Guy walks into a Hooters, gets drunk, pukes hisfucking guts out up on the balcony. You clean it up, and afterward I buy you a beer and tellyou 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 thebalcony 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, withshort blond hair, and her breasts were tucked into her Hooters uniform in a way that created ashelf below her chin that she could probably set her car keys on if she needed free hands. Shehad been fairly quiet in the month that I had worked there; my only interaction with her hadbeen a week before, when she asked me if we were out of baked beans. But she did so politelyand with a pretty smile. “It’s no big deal,” I said, suddenly realizing how impossible it was to look cool whilecleaning up vomit. “I’ll buy you a beer afterward. Actually, I have a six-pack in my car. We can drink them atthe 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 howmuch? 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 chickenwing 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 thewings. “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 meclean 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 waydown to her Honda Civic and grabbed the six cans of warm Natty Ice she had rolling around inher backseat. We sat on the cement wall of the boardwalk looking out at the ocean and crackedthe beers open and began drinking. I smelled like raw chicken, flour, and vomit. After a fewmoments of silence, though, I began to panic: here I was again, sitting next to a woman, withno 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 Idid—until I realized she had a mouthful of beer, and my surprise kiss caused her to cough itup 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 acouple 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 beenhanging out and making out for about a month. I’d made out with a few girls before her, butI’d never had a consistent make-out partner. I felt like an athlete in the midst of a winningstreak; I wasn’t sure why everything was working, but it was and I didn’t want to screw itup. “You think she thinks you’re her boyfriend?” asked Dan one day at work while we cleaned thestainless-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’treally 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 ifshe’s your girlfriend, because if she is, you guys should be having sex, not making out,” Dansaid. “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 sametaste 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, wewere making out on her fake leather couch the way we usually did. At one point she got up toget 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 ofare,” 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 thenI’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 adolescencefantasizing 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. Thenwe’d turn off a couple lights, and go at it for forty-five minutes to an hour, and I’d giveher 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 boywho got older. And, while I didn’t know what the steps were to start to feel like a man, I wassure 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 thekitchen. “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 becauseshe’s on her period,” I said proudly. “That’s why God made the butthole, my friend. One door closes, the other one opens,” Bobchimed in from a few feet away. That Friday evening, a couple hours before my shift ended, Bob came into the kitchen to let meoff early for the night. “Before you go, though,” he said, “your skinny buddy said you’re about to get your cherrypopped.” 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 lostmy virginity when I was fourteen, on mushrooms, to a two-hundred-pound woman who ran theLaundromat 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 Sarah had never seen it, and it was one of my favorite movies.Good Men. 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 gameof my last year of Little League. That ended with me getting hit in the stomach with a fastballand 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 entirechocolate cake, which seemed like a good idea when I was in the drugstore checkout line, butimmediately 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 pausethe film. This time, though, I hesitated to make the first move, because for so long the firstmove 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 Istarted kissing Sarah’s neck, then lifted up her shirt. I couldn’t figure out how to unhookher 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 redon 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 codered. 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 herfeelings 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 watchthe 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 goingwell 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, thenwith my teeth, then, finally and frantically, with both teeth and hands, which provedsuccessful. Then I reached over and flipped off the lights, and for about a minute and thirtyseconds we had sex. In all the thousands of sexual fantasies I’d had, I only concerned myselfwith making exactly one person happy: me. But as I rolled around on top of her, like a zombietrying to maul a sleeping camper in a horror film, I fully realized all the pressures that comewith having sex with someone. I was supposed to try to make it as good for her as it was forme. I had responsibilities. And it soon became evident—as soon as I realized it would be oververy quickly—that I didn’t know what it would take to make things enjoyable for her. Beforethat night, when I’d heard someone say their first time was disappointing, it had alwaysrubbed me the wrong way, like hearing a millionaire tell you their life is too complicated. Butnow 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 wentto the bathroom, then got back in bed and hit the play button on the remote. I was asleepbefore 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 shehad already gone. I drove back to my apartment, unsure whether what had happened could beconsidered 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 andhanded 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, andit’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 youremember 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 Ihad 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 upstairsbalcony,” he said to me before walking upstairs. “Nothing imported. I got corporate on myass.” I grabbed a Bud Light and headed up to the balcony where Bob was sitting at an open table, withthe ocean behind him. In the minute I had taken to find a beer and head upstairs, he’d alreadyfinished 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, laughingloudly. “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 underagedrinking on the premises. You’re better than that, Bob,” he said to himself before chuggingthe 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 dickup the ass, and I know what that can do to a man. But you’re on a team here, and I need toknow 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 blowingsmoke up your ass. But I’m not going to sit by and watch your skills erode because some womanhas got you unfocused,” he said. Then he grabbed the beer he’d confiscated from me andpounded 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 thatdish pit and he scrubs the shit out of some dishes,” he said, standing up and patting me onthe 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 apair 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 nodifferent at all. I had no idea when I would feel like a man, or what it would take. All Icould safely say was that I was a boy who had had sex, and was really, really good at washingdishes, and that would have to be enough for now. Give the Rabbit Its Pain Medication After graduating from college in 2003, armed with a film degree, I moved from San Diego to LosAngeles to pursue a career in screen-writing. Unfortunately, in LA, everyone has a film degree.It’s like owning a toaster, if you had to take out a loan to buy the toaster, and then when itcomes time to use the toaster, it doesn’t work. But I was broke and had bills to pay, so whileI kept writing screenplays, hoping to break in, I took a job waiting tables at a giant, two-story Italian restaurant in Pasadena called Villa Sorriso, which was decorated with fake plantsand generic pictures of Frank Sinatra. I was one of about forty waiters and bartenders, allbetween the ages of eighteen and thirty, save for one guy in his fifties whom I would oftenspot standing motionless in the center of the dining hall, lost in thought, with a look on hisface that seemed to say, “Next time I need to remember to bring my gun to work so I can openfire on all these assholes.” Within a week of joining Villa Sorriso’s staff, I came to the conclusion that there arebasically three types of employee who work at restaurants in Los Angeles. There are people whowant to be actors, people who want to be writers, and people who want to sell drugs to peoplewho want to be actors and writers. And all three of these types usually end up having sex witheach other. I had been working at Villa Sorriso for a few months when the manager hired a new waitress: acute brunette named Melanie who’d just moved from Colorado to pursue a career in acting. I wasassigned to train her and spent a week teaching her the proper way to fold napkins, cut lemonsfor iced tea, and use the touch-screen computers. After we spent most of our final training daytrading our favorite quotes from The Simpsons, I realized I had a thing for her. She was exactly the kind of girl I usually liked: smart, funny, and a little offbeat. During a slow lunch shift the following week, I was chatting with the restaurant’s bartender,Nick, an aspiring male model who looked a bit like Colin Farrell if he were made of that shinyhard plastic they use to make action figures. “Melanie’s kinda hot, yeah?” I said. “Yeah, man. She’s totally cute.” “She seems cool,” I said, leaning on the bar as he dried some pint glasses. “Totally. She also sucks a mean dick.” “What?” I said, straightening up. “Yeah, she blew me a few nights ago,” he said casually. “She’s only worked here a week,” I replied, my voice cracking. “Yeah. I think it was her first day, actually. We got some drinks after work, blah blah, thenshe swallowed a load in my car.” “Wow.” “Oh, shit, do you have a thing for her?” “I just thought she seemed cool,” I said, slumping down on a bar-stool and trying to hide mydisappointment. “My bad, man. I totally would not have done that if I knew. Next chick you’re into, just letme know right away and I won’t hook up with her.” “No, no. That would be . . . really weird and kind of depressing. I don’t really know rightaway, anyway. It usually takes me a little while to see if I’m into them or if they’re intome, you know?” “Yeah, but what if you just want to bone down?” he asked. I smiled at Nick and changed the subject. The fact was, though, that I’d never had casual sexbefore. Oh, sure, I had always wanted to. In fact, I’d spent most of my late teens and earlytwenties trying to. Eventually, though, I came to the conclusion that I was the male equivalentof a Toyota Camry You know: No one ever says, “I have to have a Toyota Camry.” But most people who spend some time in a Camry start to like it. “It’s pretty reliable,” they think. “It doesn’t have a lot of problems, and it’s not bad to look at. You know what? I’dprobably prefer a nicer car. But I can live with a Camry.” I had been shot down countless times after hitting on women solely because I found themattractive, and the experience was usually deflating, labor-intensive, and expensive. By theage of twenty-three I was tired of chasing women who usually chose to sleep with guys wholooked like they weren’t even the same species as me. At this point I generally found myselfmotivated to pursue a girl only after I’d decided she was relationship material and that shemight also be looking for something long-term. I usually went after girls I really enjoyedtalking to, who were funny and often a little shy and awkward, and so far I’d had a fewgirlfriends, but none had lasted more than a year. I had my strategy, and I stuck to it—which meant I paid little attention to the cocktailwaitresses at our restaurant. Their job was to get people wasted, and to do that they had to beincredibly good-looking and, more important, able to pretend that every guy, if he boughtenough booze and tipped just enough, just might end up having sex with them. Because of theserequirements, a lot of them seemed to be pretty unstable. Every couple weeks one of thewaitresses would get fired for some minor infraction, like hurling a glass vase at a manager orsnorting cocaine in the walk-in fridge. Heeding all these warning signs, I rarely spoke to thewaitresses, and none of them expressed much interest in driving a Camry. So I was shocked when, a year and a half into my tenure at Villa Sorriso, a sultry SouthAmerican cocktail waitress named Simone approached me. Simone was in her early twenties, withstraight jet-black hair down to the middle of her back, full lips, and bright blue eyes thatgave off the kind of intense, unsettling stare I had previously seen only on Tom Cruise when hewas discussing Scientology. Simone’s butt protruded from the rest of her body as if it wereitself a sentient being, capable of complex thought. She was so attractive that once, when Itried to pleasure myself to thoughts of her, my imagination couldn’t conjure up a plausiblescenario in which she would agree to have sex with me, and I was forced to stop altogether. “Where do you live?” she said now, as I folded napkins on the bar in preparation for thatnight’s dinner rush. “Right outside Hollywood. Where do you live?” I asked. “How come you never talk to me?” she said, ignoring my question. “Um, I don’t know. You guys seem really busy over there.” “You should talk to me,” she said, then walked away toward two customers sitting in thelounge next to the bar. Nick had been listening in on the exchange from behind the bar. “That was weird,” I said when he came by. “That chick’s crazy. She’s trying to be a model, but she, like, also sells rabbitpainkillers or something.” “What?” “I think she has a rabbit, and the rabbit has, like, cancer or something, and she gets thepainkillers for the rabbit, but then she sells them to people. I guess it gets you fucked up.” “Does she give any of them to the rabbit?” I asked. “I don’t know, man. She’s smoking hot, though.” “That’s a weird thing to say—‘You should talk to me,’ ” I said, playing the conversationback in my head. “Maybe she’s into you.” “I don’t think so.” I went about the rest of my shift—and then the rest of the week—without speaking to Simone. Iassumed she was just another really attractive woman who wouldn’t in a million years hook upwith me, so I figured I’d spare myself the awkwardness that would inevitably come if I went for it. One night the following week, while we were in the middle of a dinner rush, I was pouring acouple Diet Cokes at the soda station when I turned to find Simone standing in front of me. “We should have dinner tonight,” she said, as if we’d been talking about it for the last tenminutes. “I’m working till close tonight,” I said, as I popped lemon wedges into the sodas. “I am too.” “So . . .” “I don’t have dinner when people say I should have dinner. I have dinner when my body tellsme to have dinner,” she said. “Well, I usually have dinner at around seven, so I kinda already ate,” I said. “You can watch me eat.” “Um, well, lemme just see what time I get out of here,” I said, then pushed past her with atray filled with drinks. I knew I wasn’t handling Simone’s advances well, but no woman hadever come on to me so strong, and I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t want to end up thelaughing stock of the restaurant, but I also didn’t want to pass up the chance to have sexwith one of the most attractive women I’d ever met. I dropped off the drinks, then made a beeline for Nick and told him what had happened. “I’m telling you, I think she likes you,” he said. “Why would she like me? I haven’t ever talked to her,” I replied. “Maybe that’s why. Everybody tries to fuck her. I’ve tried to fuck her, the managers,customers. Pretty much everybody. Maybe she’s just thinking, how come this guy isn’t tryingto fuck me? Or maybe she just likes you, man. I don’t know, but you should go to dinner withher.” It was a busy Friday night, and I didn’t get off work until one in the morning. I clocked outand took off my apron, which looked like I’d jumped on a grenade filled with Alfredo sauce.When I headed over to the cocktail waitresses’ side station, Simone was at the computer,closing out a tab with a credit card. “Hey. I’m not too beat so if you’re still interested—” “I made us a reservation at Wokano,” she said, referring to a popular late-night Chineserestaurant nearby. “We’re going to sit in a corner booth,” she added. “Oh. Okay. Well . . . okay.” Twenty minutes later we were sitting at a corner booth at Wokano, both of us still wearing ourblack work clothes. Simone looked amazing. She’d fashioned her work outfit, a black form-fitting tank top and wetsuit-tight black pants, to highlight all the appropriate areas. I wassweaty; with my silver tie loosened and my black dress shirt untucked, I looked like a used-carsalesman who’d just lost ten thousand dollars gambling. She positioned herself right next tome in the booth, close enough that I could smell her perfume over the pungent odor of pesto andParmesan cheese wafting up from stains on my shirt. That was not the most awkward part of our dinner. Normally, by the time I went out on a date with a girl, I’d already gotten to know her alittle, and we’d hit it off enough that I’d decided it was safe to ask her out. That made iteasier to hold a conversation over drinks or dinner. That night, however, Simone and I sat insilence until the waiter came to take our order. “So, you do modeling?” I asked after he left. “It’s just a job. It’s not my passion,” she replied. “What’s your passion?” “Life.” I waited for her to expand on that but was met only with silence. “Just like . . . living life? Or, like . . . you want to be a life coach? I’m not really surewhat you mean.” “Just everything. Every day.” Over her plate of vegetable tempura (I’d already eaten, so I stuck to a liquid second dinner),we struggled through twenty more minutes of stilted conversation. “Fish are weird,” she saidat one point. “Yeah,” I responded, followed by a solid minute of silence. It was thehighlight of the meal. In the unlikely event that she’d been into me before dinner, I thought, there was no way shecould be now. When the waiter walked by I lunged at him, shoving my credit card into hisstomach before we were even presented a check. When he returned with my receipt, I quicklysigned and suggested we leave. “Can you take me to my car? I’m parked pretty far away,” she said. “Oh, sure. No problem.” We walked over to the lot where I’d parked my Ford Ranger and let her into the passenger seat.She directed me a few blocks down dark Pasadena streets until we arrived at a white Lexus. Itwas around two A.M., so hers was the only car still parked on the block. The streets wereempty. “Just pull up behind it,” she said. I did as I was told. “Can you shut off the car and get out for a minute?” she asked. “Get out?” “Yes. I’ll knock when I want you to get back in the car. Please do that. Thank you.” The first thought that ran through my head was, “I’m about to get carjacked.” But my car wasa pile of junk, and I was more curious about what she was doing than I was worried about losingmy car. I got out and stood next to the car, rubbing my arms to keep warm. After about a minute I heard a knock at my window, and I opened the door to get back inside.Simone was completely naked, her body gleaming under the light of the streetlamp pouringthrough the windshield. I felt like I was living out a bad porn narrative. And though nothingthis kinky had ever happened to me before, I knew I needed to do something suave to keep usmoving in the right direction. “Whoa. You’re naked,” I blurted out. In retrospect, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered what I said. She leaned over from her seat,grabbed the back of my head, pulled me toward her, and started kissing me. Her lips tasted likea mixture of liquor and fried carrots. I tried to keep my eyes open as much as possible, takingas many mental snapshots as my brain could hold, as if I were seeing the Grand Canyon for thefirst and last time. Then I thought of something: If she was naked, I probably should be too. As I started unbuttoning my shirt, though, she pulled away. “I’m not going to fuck you in a car,” she said. “Oh. I totally wasn’t trying to do—” “I wanted you to see my nude body. You’re very attractive to me.” “Thanks. You’re very attractive to me, too,” I said, instantly wanting to punch myself inthe face. “Could you get out of the car again? I don’t like people seeing me change in and out ofclothes.” “You’re like Superman,” I joked. “Why?” she said, genuinely. “Oh, just, you know, nobody sees Superman change.” “Why doesn’t he let people see him change?” she asked. “Well, because he tries to keep his identity secret.” “I just don’t like people seeing me change in and out of clothes.” “Okay.” I got out of the car. A minute later Simone emerged, fully clothed, and gave me a really sloppykiss on the mouth. “We’ll go out again,” she said walking toward her car, my eyes trailing her. Then she got inand drove off. I went home that night completely bewildered as to why Simone was interested in me, butconfident this was my first chance at meaningless, no-strings-attached sex—and with someone Inormally would have considered completely out of my league. I was so excited when I got intobed that I couldn’t fall asleep for hours. If a burglar had tried to break into my house androb me that night, I probably would have tried to high-five him and tell him about Simone as Ihelped carry my belongings out to his getaway car. The next time I saw Simone was the following Friday at work. Toward the beginning of my dinnershift, as I was lighting the candles on the tables in my section, she came over and invited meback to her place when our shift was over. A few hours later, after midnight, I found myself inher studio apartment in South Pasadena, sitting on her black leather couch, next to a largewhite rabbit that lay motionless on the armrest, while she poured two glasses of red wine.Still in her work outfit, she sat down next to me and made small talk for all of fiveminutes—most of which I spent trying to find out whether the rabbit had cancer (it did) andwhether it was receiving its pain medication (unclear)—before we started making out. Tenminutes later, I was standing in her bathroom waiting for her to disrobe (still not allowed tosee her change). Five minutes after that, we were on her bed having sex. Having sex with someone is a lot like cooking a stew together; if you don’t know your partnerwell, you just have to kind of guess what she likes and throw it in the pot, and at some pointyou’re going to add something that’s going to make the other person say, “Whoa, whoa, Idon’t like that.” If the ingredient you toss is especially objectionable, your partner mightsay, “You know what? Maybe we should just stop and I’ll make something for myself later.” Ihad no idea what to throw into Simone’s pot, and I hadn’t exactly won Top Chef for my stew-making talents in the first place. At one point Simone stopped and said, “You should do lessstuff.” Then she shoved me on my back and crawled on top of me. After a couple minutes sherolled off. “Okay, now do whatever you want to me,” she said, out of breath. When we were finished, she walked into her bathroom and shut the door. I heard the shower turnon. She stayed in the bathroom for the next hour, while I sat on the bed, trying to kill timelike I was in the waiting lounge of a Jiffy Lube getting my oil changed. I knew I shouldn’tjust go in, in case I walked in on her changing, the consequences of which I couldn’t imaginebut feared nonetheless. Finally I got up and knocked on the bathroom door. “Hey, ah, I think I’m gonna take off. I had a really nice time, though,” I said. “Me too. See you later,” she yelled over the sound of a hair dryer. After work the next Friday, we did the same thing. As we did the following Friday, and the oneafter that, and the one after that. I got so used to having sex on Friday nights after workthat the smell of the Villa Sorriso’s Friday night bacon-wrapped scallop special began to turnme on. We never found what you might call a sexual rhythm. She mostly just wanted me to lie there anddo nothing while she took advantage of the opportunity to sit on top of me. When I tried to“join the show,” the results were usually horrible. This was never more evident than one time when she started yelling, “How do I get so wet? How do I get so wet?” Thinking she was asking me because she wanted an answer, I said, “I don’t know?” Which only caused her to stop whatshe was doing and let out a long, deflated sigh. I did my best to ignore things she did that made me really dislike hanging out with her, likehow she never actually listened to anything I said, or how she always said “disgusting” whenshe walked past a homeless person. But our lack of any sort of emotional or intellectualconnection eventually started to wear on me. One Friday night during the third month of our“relationship,” Simone failed to show up at work. While I was disappointed not to be havingsex that night, I was sort of relieved not to have to spend time with her. Toward the end ofthe night, after the dinner rush, I walked out the back door and into the alley to get somefresh air. The back door to the kitchen opened and the dishwasher, a young Hispanic guy namedRoberto, whom everyone called “Beto,” came out lugging a huge trash bag, a brown liquiddripping from its bottom. “Hey, guero,” he said, calling me the name all the Hispanic cooks called the white coworkers. “Hey, Beto. How’s it going?” “Hey, guero, I fuck your girlfriend.” “She’s not my girlfriend, but thanks for letting me know you think she’s fuckable,” I said,laughing. “No. Guero, I your girlfriend. Last month ago. I fuck her,” he said, setting down thefuck bag, then reaching his stubby arms out and thrusting his pelvis back and forth a few times in ahumping motion. “What? Really?” “Yeah. You have the AIDS now. I am just kidding,” he said, laughing. “Wait, so, you didn’t fuck her?” “No. I fuck her. But I don’t have the AIDS,” he said. Then he picked up the trash bag andwalked down the alley toward the Dumpster. I felt like I should be upset. In an attempt to drudge up some feelings of anger, I even stoodthere trying to picture Beto on top of Simone, doing his thrusting move and laughingmaniacally, in the bed where I’d planned on having sex that evening. But the most upsettingthing was, that after learning that the girl I was sleeping with was also sleeping with someoneelse, I discovered that I didn’t care. I’d spent thousands of hours of my adolescence wishingfor the scenario I’d been living for the past two months—having sex with a gorgeous woman whodemanded and expected nothing more than sex from me—and yet the vacuity of our relationshipwas depressing me. I considered going to her apartment to talk to her but decided it could wait a week. The nextFriday I came in to work early and walked over to the cocktail waitress station hoping to findSimone, but again she wasn’t there. “Hey, Nick, is Simone here yet?” I asked. “Uh, dude, she quit and moved to New Jersey or something,” he said, as he shook a martiniwith one hand. “What?” “Yeah, I think she told the managers a couple weeks ago. She didn’t say anything?” “No. I only see her on Fridays. I just thought she was off last Friday or sick or something,”I said. “Damn. Sorry, man.” “Eh, it’s okay. Just weird,” I replied. “Onto the next bone down. That’s what it’s all about,” he said. I was stunned. This was the second time I’d dated a waitress who’d broken up with me byskipping town altogether. I walked back to the napkin-folding station and tried to perform an autopsy on this newly deceased relationship. Normally, after a breakup, it would take me daysor weeks of feeling down in the dumps, mulling over all the things that went wrong, before Istarted making sense of it and feeling better. But this time around, I arrived at a conclusionalmost immediately: I was ready to be in a relationship that would evoke some kind of emotionalresponse from me if I ever found out that my girlfriend had slept with a guy I worked withand/or had moved across the country without telling me. I was looking for someone I could fallin love with, someone who would give her dying rabbit painkillers. I’d Rather Not See You Sitting Next to Me on a Friday Night I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday inside a tiny linen closet at the Villa Sorriso, with sixother waiters and an overweight line cook named Ramon who had a teardrop tattoo on his cheekthat may or may not have signaled that he killed a man in prison. “Happy birthday,” they whispered as Ramon handed me a tiramisu with a single candleflickering in the middle of it. They were whispering because management had implemented a new rule prohibiting more than twoemployees from congregating on the restaurant’s grounds during work hours, which made thisgathering feel more like an underground Communist meeting in the 1950s than a celebration of myfirst quarter-century of existence. Despite the unnatural volume of our voices and the smell ofcleaning supplies and dusty linens, it was a touching gesture by my friends. “I didn’t get you a present. But I shot a pig in the head on my cousin’s farm and I madecarnitas. I’ll save some for you,” Ramon said. As I blew out the candle and my colleagues very quietly applauded, it dawned on me that I’dalso spent my seventeenth birthday working at a restaurant, which meant I’d been working inrestaurants for the last eight years. I was no longer the fresh-faced kid chasing his dreams;instead I was in danger of becoming the bitter lifer who uses dated pop-culture references anddepresses younger employees. I had moved to LA to break into screenwriting, and while I’d solda script during my first year there, these days I was doing very little writing and workingseventy to eighty hours a week at the restaurant. I had upped my hours for the simple reasonthat I needed to save money to fix my truck, a 1999 Ford Ranger that started only half the timeand had a set of brakes that made a high-pitched shrieking noise my mechanic had eloquentlylikened to “the sound a girl makes when you fuck her good.” Coincidentally, that was a soundI’d become unfamiliar with in real life, as I’d also hit a huge dry spell with women. I had been single so long that, on the rare occasion when I had a sex dream, it tended not toinvolve actual women—only visions of me pleasuring myself to pornography, as if my brain hadforgotten what sex was. I was so desperate to be in a relationship that, when I did go out ondates, I usually scared off my companions by trying to lock them down for future dates rightaway, or asking them repeatedly, “Are you having fun?” There’s nothing less fun than someoneasking if you’re having it. My life had fallen into a rut so slowly that I didn’t even know it was happening, until Iwalked out of that linen closet to go take the orders of a dining room full of hungryseptuagenarians and realized I was anywhere but where I wanted to be. A few weeks after my birthday, I found myself with the first weekend I’d had off in months.All my friends were working at the restaurant and there was no way I was going to spend thatfree time alone in my dumpy ground-floor apartment in Hollywood—which had begun to stink morethan usual, thanks to my pothead neighbor’s new favorite hobby, which was catching rats with amousetrap, then hurling their corpses over the fence into my backyard when he thought I wasn’tlooking. When I caught him in the act, he pretended to be offended. “Maybe it jumped, andthought there was gonna be water on the other side, but then there wasn’t and it died orsomething?” So, with nowhere to go and in need of a break from LA, I tossed some clothes intoa trash bag and headed down to my parents’ house in San Diego. I pulled up to their house midday on Friday and knocked on the front door. My dad opened it andstood in front of me wearing a gray sweatsuit with royal-blue racer stripes. “Whoa. What in the fuck are you doing here?” he said. “Just thought I’d come down and see you guys for a couple days. Sort of spur of the moment,”I replied. “Oh. Well, all right. Good to see you, son. Come on in and quiet yourself. I’m watching ashow about dark matter.” After I set my things down I called my best friends Dan and Ryan, who still lived in San Diego,to see what they were up to. Unfortunately Dan was going out of town with his girlfriend to visit her parents, and Ryan was trying to track down a man with a goat so that he could talkthe guy into letting him milk it. He asked if I wanted to join him, but it seemed like therewere a lot of ways for that to end badly, so I declined. My mom came home from work a couple hours later and was thrilled to see me. She whipped up somepesto and the three of us took our seats around the dinner table in the living room. “It’s such a nice surprise to see you, Justy. What are you doing down here?” my mom asked,dumping a ladle full of pasta onto my plate. “He hates LA,” my dad said. “I don’t hate LA,” I replied. “Look, I’m on your side. All that traffic, people pissing and shitting on the street. No kindof place to live,” he said. “No one is going to the bathroom on the street, Sam,” my mom said. “Bullshit. There’s rivers of excrement. I could fucking raft down them. Trust me. I know.Connie and I had an apartment in Brent-wood for three years,” he said, referring to his firstwife. My dad didn’t talk about Connie very often. She had died of cancer when my brothers were oneand three years old. Connie’s death, and the seven years that followed before my dad met mymother, was a part of his life he didn’t revisit often, and one I knew almost nothing about.On the rare occasion when he mentioned Connie, I tried as gently as I could to ask about hislife with her. “Did Connie live in this house?” “I bought it for her. Then she passed and it was just me and your brothers. They were indiapers,” he said. “You should have seen this place when we started dating,” my mom chimed in. “Every room wasjust medical books and fishing poles, and the only thing in the cupboards was peanut butter,”she added, with a big smile on her face. “Guess what? I like medical books, fishing, and fucking peanut butter. And plus, I didn’tgive a shit. I had given up on women,” he added. “Oh, please. You drove an Alfa Romeo Spider convertible and wore a leather jacket,” my momsaid. “I said I gave up on women, not on getting laid,” he replied. “You wore a leather jacket?” I said, laughing. “Yeah, it’s a garment commonly worn by individuals who get laid.” “You’d be surprised. He’s very charming,” my mom said, getting up to retrieve somethingfrom the kitchen, leaving me and my dad alone. “How long after Connie died did you start dating?” I asked. “A while. Not sure exactly, but a while.” “Did you go out a lot?” “Oh, yeah. I went up and down this goddamn city. I was going out a couple times a week atleast.” “What’d you do about Dan and Evan?” I asked. “I took them with me and had my dates wipe their shitty asses. What do you think? I put themto bed, then hired a babysitter.” “Were any of them girlfriends, or just a few dates and that was it?” I asked. “Mostly that,” he said, taking a drink from his bourbon. “Why do you think none of them worked out?” “Son, my wife was dead and I was lonely. That’s a pretty shitty place to start from,” hesaid. I had never before heard my father confess to being lonely. This is a man who wakes up at 4:30in the morning for the sole purpose of spending a few extra minutes alone. He even takesvacations alone. “It doesn’t matter where I go, just as long as no one goes with me,” hesays. “I could vacation in my own home if everyone would leave me the fuck alone.” I alsocouldn’t imagine him dating. He hates small talk, which is exactly what most people sufferthrough on first dates. I wanted to know how he’d gone from a guy lonely enough to engage in aconversation he hated, with a woman he probably didn’t care about, to a guy comfortable enoughwith himself to walk into restaurants and ask for a “table for one . . . with no otherchairs.” With little else to do, I spent the next two days thinking about my dad’s transformation whilegoing to the beach and taking hikes with my family’s dog, Angus. On Sunday night, after arestful, rejuvenating couple days, I dumped my freshly laundered clothes into a new trash bag,threw it in the passenger seat of my truck, and said good-bye to my parents on the front porch.When I went to give my dad a hug, he handed me a check. It was for seven hundred dollars, andon the memo line he had written, “to fix your fucking car.” “Oh, wow, no, you don’t have to do that. I’ve been saving up,” I said. “Let’s not go through the fucking dog and pony show here. You’re broke, I got a littlemoney, your car is a piece of shit that needs to be fixed. Is any of that incorrect?” heasked. “No,” I said. “Okay then.” “Thank you.” “You’re welcome. I know you been working like crazy, so let me suggest something.” “Sure.” “Fix your car, cut back on some of your hours, and take a little time for yourself. Get yourshit right. I like seeing you, but I’d rather not on a Friday night. Catch my drift?” heasked. “Yeah,” I replied. “You are welcome here any time,” my mom interjected. “Well, of course he is. That’s not what I was saying,” he said. “I know that, but I wanted to make sure he knew that,” she replied. “He knew it. He’s not slow. Tell her you get fucking subtext,” he said to me. “I understand subtext, Mom.” “There you go. Now get the hell out of here. I’m taking your mom out to dinner,” he said. The next day, back in LA, I took my car to the shop. They spent a week fixing everything fromthe starter to the air-conditioning, which for years had been blowing warm, uriney air at myface. I cut my shifts at the restaurant back to five nights a week and suddenly found myselfwith more energy and two full days off on my hands. As soon as I had a moment to myself, I started thinking about what I was doing in LA. I calledmyself a writer, but so did my rat-hurling neighbor. In fact, when I’d run into him in theparking garage a few weeks before, he’d told me he was almost finished writing a comicscreenplay about “an alien that comes to earth but people just think he’s a gay.” If thisguy could finish Gaylien (his title, not mine), I told myself, I had to be able to finish thescripts I’d been working on. I was determined not to spend any more birthdays inside a closet,eating the same preservative-laden dessert that my restaurant gave away for free to childrenunder five who ordered the chicken fingers. I decided to pour myself into my writing. Over the next eight months, I spent any free time I had either working on a screenplay ortrying to figure out if I was going to go bald. Both endeavors proved productive: I finishedone script and concluded that my head hair would soon be a thing of the past. My dry spell withwomen continued, but I did my best not to obsess over it. I did develop a recurring dream inwhich a woman in a tree hurled oranges at me while repeatedly screaming, “I hate you, Jason!”Although that’s not my name, I was fairly confident that my penis was sending me a messagethat it was furious at me for rendering it useless. Nevertheless, with each passing day, I had an easier time focusing on writing and having fundoing it. By the end of those eight months, I went to bed at night excited to wake up the nextday and start writing again. I’m not sure if this is what my dad had meant when he told me to“get my shit right,” but at least I was no longer feeling the urge to toss my clothes in atrash bag and head to my parents’ house in San Diego on a Friday night. A few weeks after that, an artist friend of mine named Theresa invited me to a show of her workat a gallery on Wilshire Boulevard in LA. The gallery was inside a refurbished warehouse andheld a good-sized crowd, of which I was probably the only guy who didn’t have a mustache, atwenty-four-inch waist, and either a scarf or a porkpie hat. I felt like I’d walked into a WesAnderson movie. So, after saying hello to Theresa and looking at her work, I was ready to takeoff. But then, just before I left, I noticed a friend of Theresa’s standing by herself in themiddle of the show, looking as lost as I felt. Her name was Amanda. I’d met her once before when she had come to visit Theresa from SanFrancisco for a couple days, but had spoken to her only briefly. She had wavy brown hair thatfell just past her shoulders and a cherubic face that was lit up by two sparkly light-blue-green eyes. Unlike the rest of the girls in the party, she had actual curves that filled outthe navy-blue dress she was wearing. She flashed a nervous smile at me and gave one of thosequick waves you give someone when you’re not sure if he remembers you. I smiled and wavedback, and she walked over to where I was standing, near the exit. “I don’t know anyone here, and everyone is cooler than me,” she said. “So you picked the least cool guy in the place to come talk to,” I replied. “We can be uncool together,” she said. I stayed at the show for another hour talking to Amanda. She was quick and funny and a littleself-deprecating, but not in a way that seemed like a defense mechanism for a truckload ofself-loathing. I tried my best not to weird her out and largely succeeded, except perhaps forone point when I described myself as looking like “Jason Biggs with a terminal illness.” Itwas the first time in as long as I could remember that I’d enjoyed a relaxed conversation witha woman. “We should hang out sometime,” I said as I was leaving. “I’m flying back to San Francisco tomorrow,” she replied. “Maybe someone will call in a bomb threat and you’ll have to stay another night. Wow. Thatwas a really terrible joke. I don’t know why I said that.” “No, bomb jokes are always funny to people who are about to board a plane,” she said,laughing. “I wouldn’t worry, anyway. You’ve told way worse jokes within this last hour.”She gave me a hug good-bye. I thought about Amanda quite a bit over the next few days. The situation seemed kind ofhopeless, since she lived five hundred miles away, but my brain didn’t want to acknowledge thedistance. I tried to put her out of my mind, to buckle down and finish a second screenplay Iwas working on. Then, a couple days later, as I was working in my living room, I heard a loudclang on my barbecue. I walked out to my backyard to find a rat splattered on the top of mygrill. “Hey! Stop throwing rats in my yard!” I yelled over the fence. There was no answer so I grabbed an old newspaper from the recycling bin, used it to pick upthe rat corpse, and tossed it back over the fence. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I heard my neighbor yell from behind the fence. “Dude! Stop it! I’ve had enough of this crap!” I shouted. “Okay. Shit. Chill out, man. I’m sorry. You don’t need to Nolan Ryan that shit at me, man.” I went inside, washed my hands, and felt a huge sense of accomplishment. Sure, maybe getting aman to stop throwing dead rats into my yard wasn’t exactly on par with building schools forunderprivileged Iraqi children, but at the time it felt significant and invigorating. I satback down at my computer, opened up my Gmail, and sent Amanda an e-mail with the subject line,“I just threw a dead rat at my neighbor.” Don’t Make Me Take Up Residence in Your Fantasy Land When I was thirteen, my dad barged into my room after dinner one night while I was doinghomework. Before I could set my pencil down, he said: “You’ve been jerking off a lot.” “What? What are you talking about?” I shrieked. “Relax. I could give a shit. Good for you that you can find the time. I can’t get a second tomyself. But there’s two things I need you to know: one, I’m going to be doing the laundry forthe next few months because your mom’s studying for the bar exam; and two, I’ll be goddamnedif I’m gonna reach down into the laundry basket and pick up a towel that’s crunchy like afucking Dorito ’cause you did your business in it, okay?” He stared down at me. I was frozen in shock and humiliation. “Say okay. I need to hear verbal confirmation,” he said. “Okay,” my voice cracked. “Thank you. Now that we got that unfortunate business out of the way, I figured now’d be ahalfway decent time to bring up something else,” he continued. “Really, I don’t do that, though,” I interjected. “Are we going to talk like men or do I have to take up residence in your fantasy land?” “What were you going to say, Dad?” “Clearly your hormones are bouncing around like a puppy with two dicks. But I’m not here togive you some bullshit talk about women. There are three billion of them, and to generalizethat many people with some blanket statement is the definition of being an asshole. Women areall different, so I don’t have any advice on them. But I feel fairly qualified to give yousome advice about yourself.” “Okay,” I sighed. “Oh, I’m sorry, am I keeping you from a fucking appointment with the head of marketing orsomething?” I sat back in my chair and put my feet up on the bed to signify my surrender. “Someday you’re going to meet a fine woman. And hopefully, if I haven’t completely fuckedyou up, you’re going to recognize that. But I have never seen a human being drive himself morebatshit than you when it’s time to make a decision. Every time you order lunch it’s likeyou’re presiding over the fucking Cuban missile crisis.” “I’m a picky eater,” I said. “You’re a picky everything. Probably my fault. Did my best. Not gonna dwell on it, though.Which brings me to my point. Someday you’re gonna go stupid for a woman. And when you do, dome this one favor: don’t get all caught up in the bullshit that’s going on in your head. Ifit’s right, then you put on your fuckin’ big-boy pants and you go for it.” Twelve years later, I felt, for the first time in my life, like my dad’s prediction had cometrue: I was going stupid for a woman. Before meeting Amanda, I’d done plenty of stupid things women, like the time I lent my car to my first girlfriend’s little brother, who used it tofor mule a thousand dollars of Viagra he bought in Tijuana back across the border. But even when Iwas infatuated with a girl in the past, she never became the only thing I could think about.With Amanda, everything changed. In the month since I’d run into her at the gallery show, she and I had exchanged e-mails everyday. We e-mailed about everything from past relationships to major league baseball to whatscenario would make it okay to eat your family dog. (I said the apocalypse; she argued thatI’d never survive the apocalypse because of my allergies, so why eat my only companion just soI could live a few more dark days?) I became so enamored of our discourse that I would sit downat my wobbly forty-dollar Ikea desk in the corner of my bedroom and spend two hours drafting,rewriting, and polishing a five-thousand-word e-mail—only to wake up the next day and find onejust as long from her. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I thought about what she might be doing, what she was thinking, where she was right then. I thought about what it would be like to date her, or even be married to her. I had gone stupid. And we were just getting to knoweach other. I lay in bed one night, a month into our e-relationship, driving myself crazy wondering ifshe’d ever consider moving to Los Angeles and how it would work if she didn’t. I realized Ineeded to stop. My obsession was unhealthy; and I was setting myself up for potentialheartbreak. I needed to think critically. I took a deep breath, tried to clear my head of allmy hopes and fears, and focused on the most logical question I could ask myself: How could Ipossibly like her as much as I felt I did? The answer I came up with was that there was no wayI could. In twenty seconds I went from head over heels to completely cold feet. I didn’t e-mail her the next day. It was the first day I had missed in a month. If I backedoff and put a little distance between us, I figured, maybe I could control myself, get a betterhandle on the situation. Plus, I wasn’t even sure how Amanda felt about me, and I was alreadyhoping our kids would get her nose instead of mine. But I never got the chance to take abreather. The very next day, Amanda sent me this note: “I would love it if you would come seeme in San Francisco this weekend. I’m having a Halloween party. I’m going to be dressed asFergie from the Black Eyed Peas after she peed her pants on stage. Just in case you werethinking of going as that.” Flights from LA to San Francisco started at a hundred bucks. I currently had one hundred andthirty-three dollars in my bank account. I knew that because I checked it online every dayleading up to the end of the month. I lived in constant fear of my bank balance. I always got apaycheck around the first of the month, which usually gave me just enough money to pay my rentif I didn’t miss any shifts, but going to visit Amanda would definitely make me miss at leastone. Still, I couldn’t shake how much I wanted to see her. I decided to look online to see if I could find a sale on flights. I couldn’t. The cheapestwas a hundred and fifty bucks, which would put me seventeen dollars in the red. But way down onthe Google search results page was an ad for a company called Megabus, which was offering one-dollar round-trip rides from L.A. to San Francisco for the first ten people who bought tickets.There was one left for the upcoming weekend. I bought it and e-mailed Amanda to let her know Iwas coming. That Saturday morning I stuffed a weekend’s worth of clothes in a backpack and headed over toUnion Station in downtown Los Angeles, where I came upon a large blue bus emblazoned with agiant pig wearing a bus driver’s costume. I showed my ticket to the driver, who grunted andmotioned for me to take a seat. The bus was dark and cold, yet somehow humid, like the dank pitwhere Buffalo Bill keeps his victims in The Silence of the Lambs. The forty or so seats were mostly empty, save for about ten occupied by fellow travelers, all of whom looked like theywere fleeing LA rather than visiting San Francisco. As I walked down the center aisle to find a seat, a man with a sleeveless T-shirt and one eyeswollen shut looked at me, then put his feet up on the seat next to him. I headed all the wayto the back, three rows away from the nearest passenger, sat down, and cracked open a book.Then, just before we were about to head out, a man in a wool cap carrying only a single fishingpole got on the bus, walked all the way to the back, and sat down right next to me. I thoughtabout getting up to move, but then worried I’d insult him, and he didn’t look like the typeof guy who took insults well. For the next eight hours we sat in silence next to each other, save for a ten-minute break whenwe stopped off at a roadside Burger King. He stared straight ahead, motionless the entire time,with his hands in his pockets. I had planned to sleep, but I kept hearing the noise ofsomething he was fidgeting with in his pants and started worrying that I wouldn’t be able toprotect myself if it turned out to be some kind of weapon and he was in a stabbing mood, whichdidn’t look implausible. Finally, at around five P.M., San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid and surrounding skylineappeared on the horizon. The fisherman shifted his weight and turned to me for the first time. “Why are you here?” he said in a guttural voice. “Like, why am I going to San Francisco? Or why am I on this bus?” I asked, sliding away fromhim and preparing for a defensive maneuver. “San Francisco.” “I’m visiting someone.” “Do you enjoy this bus?” he asked. “Do I enjoy it? I mean, not really. Do you?” “I paid one dollar. For one dollar I would let them rape me on this bus,” he said, then brokeinto an uncomfortably boisterous laugh, as if he were in the audience of an episode of Cheers. Amanda had given me directions from the bus station to her house via subway, and after gettingon the wrong train twice in a row, I grog-gily walked up to an old Victorian apartment buildingnear the Castro district. Door-to-door, it had taken me eleven hours to get to her. I was in ahorrible mood, and I looked and smelled like a nineteenth-century miner who’d just traveled toSan Francisco by boat to mine for gold. My head was throbbing as I walked up the stairs to hersecond floor apartment and knocked on the door. The door flung open. Amanda grabbed me with both arms and squeezed. “You’re here!” she said, holding on to me in the doorway. “How was the trip?” “It was long,” I replied. She grabbed my bags from me and led me into her apartment. “Ugh. That sucks. Well, I’m really excited you’re here. I’m gonna put your stuff in myroom. We have to grab some booze for the party, and I figured we could stop at a thrift store,too, so you could buy some stuff for a costume. Did you think of any ideas on the way up?” “No. I sat next to a rapist.” “What?” “He might not have been a rapist. I shouldn’t say that. He just seemed like it. Anyway, Ididn’t think about a costume.” “Oh. Well, okay.” Amanda set my bags down in a small, plaster-walled room, which looked like a converted diningarea, now occupied by a neatly made bed that smelled like the opposite of me. I walked backdown the hall to the lone bathroom. As I washed my hands and ran water over my face, I startedthinking about having to make that bus trip several times a month. And then about how broke Iwas. And then it hit me that, last time I’d checked my bank account, I’d forgotten to accountfor my phone bill, which I had on auto-pay. I asked Amanda if I could jump on her computer, andwhen I did my online balance confirmed my anxiety. I now had fifty-four dollars in my accountto last me for the rest of the month, and I still needed a Halloween costume. I also realized I hadn’t really been putting on a good showing for Amanda. I had to buckup—especially because her costume was perfect, right down to the shape of the urine stain onthe crotch, which perfectly mirrored the one in the photo of the soiled rock star she’dclipped out of a celebrity magazine. I should have been excited to be there with Amanda, afterall those weeks of thinking of little else, but I was so consumed with worrying about moneythat all I could think about was that I’d never be able to afford the travel and the missedwork it would take to date her, even if I was willing to take the dollar bus filled withsuspected criminals. Determined to create the cheapest costume possible, when we got to thethrift store I ended up buying a three-dollar pair of brown slacks, a two-dollar shirt, and athirty-cent hand broom. Then I scooped some black grease from the inside of a tire on thesidewalk in front of her house, rubbed it on my face, and called myself a chimney sweep. Anhour later her tiny apartment filled with thirty or forty costumed partygoers. For the next couple of hours, I stood silently next to Amanda as she made her rounds, seeingall of her friends. I felt like it was my first day on the job and I was shadowing my trainer. The place was jammed; ’90s rap music was blasting out of the small living room, where atightly packed dance party had broken out. Despite the noise and crowd, Amanda was doing herbest to introduce me to her friends and make sure I had a good time. And, like a total self-consumed jerk, I was no help whatsoever. “People are liking your costume,” Amanda said as she poured vodka into two plastic red Solocups. “Really? Who told you that?” I replied. “You know, just people at the party.” “Nobody told you they liked my costume, did they?” “No. But it was a vibe I got.” Meeting your date’s friends for the first time is like playing poker; you have to read eachone of them, and then put forth just the right amount of conversation. If you go all in onsomeone who just wanted to say hi, you’ll risk seeming pushy and desperate. If you fold andstand there silent when you’re introduced to her chatty best friend, you might come off asweird and antisocial. And if you put on a face that says “Don’t come near me,” everyone elsewill fold—which is what was happening to me. I was tired and nervous, it was loud, and I wastalking myself out of every fantasy that had consumed me through those past couple weeks. I wasfailing miserably, and Amanda could see it. After a while, she grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the dance floor. But just as she did, Ifelt the Burger King Chicken Griller I’d eaten during the one middle-of-nowhere stop on thebus ride suddenly snap awake in my stomach. It wanted out, and it wanted out now.Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be headed out the way it came in. At least if I puked, Icould blame it on alcohol or bad food. It happens: people puke all the time at parties. No onegets explosive diarrhea. Amanda tried to pull me toward her, but I didn’t move. “Let’s dance,” she yelled over the music. “I, uh—I think I need to use your bathroom,” I said. “You know where it is, right?” “Yeah. I’ll be right back.” I quickly walked down the hall. With every step, my need to avail myself of her toilet grewexponentially, the way earthquakes get ten times more devastating with every tenth of a pointon the Richter scale. I opened the bathroom door, only to find a man dressed as Gandalf fromLord of the Rings with his back to me, peeing. I quickly closed the door and hurried back toAmanda, who was on the dance floor with a few friends, moving to the thumping bass of DigitalUnderground’s “Humpty Dance.” I pulled her aside. “Does your bathroom have a lock on the door?” I yelled. “No. But just close it. No one’s gonna come in, I promise.” “So there’s no way to lock it?” I said, starting to panic. “Well, no. Why, what’s wrong?” “I just. . . I’m not feeling well and I sort of need to spend a little while in there, and Ireally can’t have somebody coming in. Is there like a chair or something I can borrow to keepit closed?” “A chair? You want to barricade the door closed?” “I just don’t want anyone to come in.” “I don’t think anyone’s going to come in, but I guess if you’re worried I could stand nextto the door and guard it,” she said. “Is that weird?” I asked. “Yes. That’s really weird.” “I’m really sorry, but can you do that?” She nodded and I immediately turned, swam through a group of a half dozen girls dressed as asix-pack of Budweiser—planting my palms on their backs and shoving off them like I wasclimbing up a rocky hillside—and hustled toward the bathroom with Amanda close behind. Ireached the door and turned to find her right behind me. “Good luck. We’re all pulling for you,” she said, holding back a laugh. I feigned a smile, but I had no time to waste. I burst into the bathroom and onto the toilet.And that is where I sat for the next ten minutes as my body expressed its distaste for rest-stop Burger King. In no uncertain terms. As I sat there relieving myself, I started mulling over everything that had led me to thispoint. I was broke. I hated traveling. I barely knew Amanda. And yet for some reason I’dallowed myself to blow our relationship out of proportion in my mind and convinced myself thatI could make things work with her. Even by coming to see her, I was leading her on. To be fairto her, I had to end this. Just as I finished and was pulling up my pants, I heard the door handle jiggle. “No, no! There’s somebody in there,” I heard Amanda’s muffled voice insist. “So you’re next in line?” another voice asked her. “Uh—yeah.” She didn’t need to go to the bathroom. She probably decided it would be much more humiliatingto say, “No, I’m guarding the door for this guy I’m dating while he poops.” But now shewould have to come in after me—which would be much, much worse than a stranger walking induring my session. I quickly washed my hands, grabbed a pack of matches, and lit three of them in quick, desperatesuccession. I pried open the only window as far open as it would go with the force of someonetrying to rip it from its hinges. Then I opened the bathroom door, where Amanda—and threeothers—were waiting. As she walked in, I gave her a look that said, “I am so, so sorry.” Then I waited outside thebathroom. A minute later came a flush; then Amanda reappeared, with the stunned look of arookie cop leaving the scene of her first homicide. To make matters worse, as the next guy in line stepped into the bathroom, he let out aresounding “Whoa!” The two other people waiting looked accusingly at Amanda. We walked down the hall and back into the party. “Do you want to go outside for a second?” I shouted over the music. We went out onto a small balcony, overlooking a courtyard thirty feet below that was litteredwith cigarette butts. “You owe me. Like, a lot. There are now people walking around thinking I took, no offense, areally, really nasty poo in the middle of a party I was throwing. That is some above-and-beyondstuff I did right there,” she said. “I am really sorry. I can go tell them it was me.” “Yeah, that sounds like that would make things less weird,” she said, laughing. “Again, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. What can I do to make it up to you?” “How about you just loosen up a little bit and we have a good time?” That didn’t really seem possible, and although this didn’t seem like the best time to bringup my fear that a relationship between us could never work, it seemed worse to pretendeverything was fine. I had never been very good at doing that anyway. “I kinda wanted to talk to you about that,” I said. “About what?” she asked. “I know I’ve been a little weird since I got up here, and I mean, I’ve been thinking abouthow you live in San Francisco and I live in LA, and we’re both broke, and clearly I don’ttravel well, as you just witnessed, and I don’t know . . .” I trailed off in a cowardly fashion, hoping she would finish the thought for me. “So then it won’t work,” she said matter-of-factly. “Well, that’s what I’m saying I’m worried about.” “Right, but either it won’t work, or it will. I don’t know you super well, but what I know Ireally like, and that’s why I wanted you to come up here. Do you feel the same way about me,or no?” Not once in the past few hours had I asked myself that question. In fact, I had basically askedmyself every other question I could think of. I had focused on all the reasons why ourrelationship would be tough. But I’d avoided the one thing that had brought me here in thefirst place. Hearing her ask me point-blank how I felt about her shoved all my anxieties out ofthe way. The answer to her question popped into my head as if it had sprung from a cage. “Yeah, I do. I really like you, too. That’s why I wanted to come up here.” “All right. Well, why don’t we keep coming to see each other until we don’t like doing it,and if that other stuff is just too hard to get past, then I guess we’ll deal with it then.We’re not making any big decisions.” “I’m down with that. Sorry, I kinda freaked out. I’m pretty neurotic,” I said. “Yeah, I picked up on that when you asked me to guard the door while you pooped,” she said. I leaned in to kiss her and she backed away. “No, no. I taste like booze and Thai food. Super gross. We’ll make out later,” she said, andwe walked back inside and onto the dance floor. For the first time that night I felt unencumbered. I was simply happy to be around Amanda andeven happier that she wanted to be around me. The beginning of House of Pain’s “Jump Around”began to play and Amanda grabbed me. “It’s like a law that white people have to dance to this. FYI, I told people we’re dating,”she said, as she pulled me close to her. Four years later, I sat down across from my father at a restaurant on the San Diego Harbor andtold him I was going to put on my big-boy pants and propose to the first and only woman I’dgone stupid for. Do You Know What Makes a Shitty Scientist? In the four years since Amanda and I first got together at her Halloween party in SanFrancisco, we’d been through bus rides; plane flights; one breakup; one makeup; a Christmas atmy parents’ house where my dad told her a twenty-minute story about the “most diseasedpenis” he’d seen in forty-eight years of medicine; a Thanksgiving at her parents’ house that story, which proved to be just aswhere I told the story of my dad telling her inappropriate; two thousand-plus hours watching HGTV; a couple of funerals; way too manyweddings; and at least three more dire occasions when she had to guard a bathroom entrance forme. Now we were living together in a small apartment in a sleepy neighborhood of San Diego calledNorth Park. She was in a PhD program in San Diego, and I was between jobs writing for badtelevision shows. When you move in with someone, you can’t hide all the weird and annoyingthings you do, and while sometimes that unveiling ruins the relationship, often it seals thedeal. It’s like being a meat eater and having your vegetarian friend e-mail you one of thosevideos that shows you what goes on behind the scenes at a slaughterhouse; if you can make itpast that, you’ll probably be a meat eater for life. Amanda and I found that we were a great team. When I would get too neurotic, her blunt,confident, unflinching loyalty would smack me back to sanity, like when she’d tell me, “Justdo what you think is right, and I’ll always have your back. Unless what you think is right issome other girl. ’Cause then I’ll stab both of you and go to jail.” When she would getstressed out because she put so much pressure on herself to succeed, I’d be there to make herlaugh and tell her, “I’ll still love you if you’re a failure. Just not as much.” After a few months living together we started to talk about marriage, and as soon as we did, Irealized that marrying Amanda was something I wanted to do, not just the next logical move. Iconfidently conceived of a plan for how I would propose, and I bought a ring. When I finallyheld the ring in my hand, though, I was struck by the magnitude of what I was about to do, andmy anxiety wormed its way back into the equation. When I invited my dad to lunch at Pizza Nova,I hadn’t yet told anyone else about my plans; I was looking for affirmation from the onlyperson I could count on to give me a straight answer. And after our lunch I took my dad’sadvice and spent the afternoon in Balboa Park looking back over all my experiences with love,sex, and yearning, in hopes of gaining confidence in my decision. What jumped out at me, as I looked back, was that I’d spent most of my time in relationshipstrying not to screw them up. I was like a backup quarterback, just happy to be sitting thereholding the clipboard and wearing a headset, but much too scared to get in the game and play.And as I sat there in that park I realized just how much that had sucked. For years, I’d beenso busy worrying about whether I might do or say something stupid—like drawing a picture of adog crapping on a girl’s head—that I never had any fun. With Amanda, I was finally having fun. And it wasn’t as if I’d consciously decided to stopworrying. She put me at ease, and my desire to enjoy my time with her superseded all the fearsthat usually rattled around in my head. She was the only person I’d ever met who made me feelcalm and confident, like one of the guys in the Ocean s Eleven movies (and not just the little curly-haired guy who’s there because he’s good with numbers). And as I headed out of the parksix hours later, as the sun was setting, I knew I wanted to marry Amanda. I also knew I’dbetter go before the security guard in the park decided this guy roaming the park aimlessly wassome kind of schizophrenic or pedophile. Amanda was visiting San Francisco that weekend, and I’d arranged to surprise her on Sunday ata brunch spot in the Mission district called Foreign Cinema, where I would pop the question. Inorder to make my 10:30 A.M. reservation in San Francisco, I had booked a seven o’clock flightfrom San Diego, which meant I had to wake up at five. That night, I plugged in my cell phone tocharge it, then set two alarms on it, one for 5:00 and one for 5:10, just in case I sleptthrough the first one. Then I hit the sack. When I woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, I discovered that the power hadgone out. I scrambled around in the dark and grabbed my cell. It was shortly after 1 A.M. andmy phone only had one bar of battery left. I had to go someplace where I could charge my phoneand be sure my alarm would wake me up. I got out of bed, grabbed the ring box off my dresser,threw on the dress pants and pale blue button-down shirt I’d laid out the night before, andheaded out the door. Twenty minutes later, I pulled into my parents’ driveway. I walked up the narrow path to theirfront door as quietly as I could, slid my key into the lock, and gingerly opened the door. Itwas pitch-black inside. I made an immediate right into the living room with my hands in frontof me to avoid bumping into anything. “You better be fucking related to me,” I heard my dad say from somewhere in the room. “It’s me! It’s Justin!” I said, my heart leaping into my throat. Suddenly a lamp went on. My dad was sitting in his recliner, wearing his casual sweats (gray,no action stripes), holding a mug filled with a steaming hot toddy I could smell across theroom. “Sorry. I didn’t know anybody was awake,” I said. “Do you realize I’m a crazy son of a bitch who owns a shotgun and hates shadowy figureswalking around in his fucking home?” “I’m sorry. I figured everyone was sleeping. I was trying not to wake anybody up.” “Well, what the hell are you doing here, son?” I explained to him about the power going out, and needing to charge my cell phone so my alarmwould go off so I’d wake up in time for the flight to San Francisco so I could get to theMission and— “All right, all right, I don’t need you to perform a fucking monologue,” he said. “Crash onthe couch, charge your phone, set your alarm, and I’ll make sure you’re up in time and giveyou a lift to the airport.” He took a final sip of his hot toddy and sauntered down thehallway to his bedroom. I plugged my phone into the nearest outlet, removed my pants and shirtso as not to wrinkle them, lay down on the couch, shut my eyes, and fell asleep. I awoke to my father standing above me in the same clothes, drinking a mug that was now filledwith coffee, holding a thick book in his hand. “It’s go time,” he said, poking me in the face with the book. “Did I sleep through my alarm?” I said, still not totally awake. “No idea.” “What time is it?” I asked, rubbing my eyes. “Four A.M.” “Dad, I set my alarm for five thirty. I’m really tired,” I replied, closing my eyes andturning away from him. “Bullshit. It’s all in your head. In med school I used to sleep an hour a night and get upthe next day to deliver a fucking child.” “That sounds very irresponsible,” I said, pulling my T-shirt over my head in hopes he’dleave me alone. “Get up. I made breakfast,” he said, flipping on a switch that caused the light to blastthrough my eyelids. There was no chance I was going to be allowed to get back to sleep, so I sat up and groggilymade my way over to the breakfast table, where there were two plates, each filled with at leastten pieces of bacon and one piece of toasted multigrain bread. My dad handed me a mug ofsteaming coffee. Then he sat down across from me and opened up the book he had poked me with, alarge biography of Harry Truman. He sat silently reading as he periodically brought a slice ofbacon to his lips. After about a minute, I couldn’t stand it anymore. “You woke me up to eat breakfast and you don’t want to talk or anything? You just want to . .. eat here in silence?” I asked. “Sounds like a plan,” he said, not taking his eyes away from the book. “Well,” I continued. “I took your advice and spent all day in the park thinking aboutproposing.” “Must have gone well, since you’re going through with it,” he mumbled, as he flipped a pageand continued reading. “It did. I feel like I’m one hundred percent sure. She’s it. That’s it.” His head jerked up from his book and he stared at me, his eyebrows creasing together to formwhat looked like a caterpillar crawling across his forehead. “That is a load of horseshit,” he said, closing his book and setting it on the table. “What? No, it’s not.” “You’re a hundred percent sure this marriage will work out?” he asked. “What kind of question is that?” “You know what makes a shitty scientist?” “No. I don’t know. I don’t care. I don’t want to have this conversation right now,” Isnapped. “Kindly calm the fuck down and eat your bacon.” I pushed my plate in front of me an inch, sat back in my chair, and defiantly crossed my arms,as if refusing to eat any more bacon would register my displeasure. “A shitty scientist goes into an experiment determined to get a specific result.” “Don’t all scientists do that? Isn’t that what a hypothesis is?” I responded. “What? No. What the fuck? Jesus Christ. Fucking public schools. A hypothesis is when thescientist says, ‘This is what I think might happen.’ ” “Right.” “But when you go into an experiment and you’re abso-fucking-lutely sure you’re going to beright, the experiment inevitably goes to shit, because you’re not prepared for anythingunexpected. Then, when something fucked-up does happen—and it will—you either don’t see it,or you just pretend like it never happened because you refuse to believe you could have fuckedup. And you know what that does?” he asked. “Ruins your experiment?” “Bingo. So the only way to run an experiment successfully is to start by accepting the factthat your experiment might fail.” I sat quietly, digesting what I’d just heard. “I’m sayin’ marriage is the same thing,” he said. “Yeah, I gathered that.” “Well, shit, you didn’t know what the fuck a hypothesis was. Just trying to make sure yougrasp the analogy.” “So how do you make sure it doesn’t fail?” I asked. “Beats the dog shit out of me. I mostly just try to remember that I found someone who seems toenjoy all the bullshit that comes with being married to me, so I should probably be realfucking nice. Also I don’t go in the bathroom and shit when she’s taking a shower.” “I feel good about proposing,” I said. “Good, you should. She’s a fine woman,” he said. “I really hate it when you say that. It sounds like you’re talking about a horse.” He laughed. “Go shower so you don’t smell like hell when you propose to your wife.” Then hegrabbed his Harry Truman book and resumed reading. An hour and a half later, my dad pulled his Chevy Blazer up to the loading zone in front of SanDiego International Airport. It was still dark outside. “Thanks for the ride,” I said as I stepped out of the car. “Not a problem. Last thing I’ll say: Try not to be too sweaty when you ask. It’sdisconcerting—it’s an evolutionary sign of weakness. Hits her on the subconscious level.” “Um, okay.” I shut the passenger door and he drove off. I entered the airport and breezed through check-in since I had no carry-on luggage. When I gotto security, I put only two things in the plastic bin for scanning: my cell phone and thelittle black box containing my ring. The portly female security guard doing the pat-downsstopped and said, “Look. At. You. Boy!” then started clapping. Although I was a bit thrown by my dad’s insistence that the only way to make a marriage workwas to accept that it might not, my anxiety was taking a backseat to my growing excitement as Iwalked toward my terminal. Asking Amanda to marry me would be one of the biggest, boldest movesof my life—a huge leap for an awkward teen who spent Friday nights watching ’80s actionmovies instead of going to parties, for a Little Leaguer who buried armfuls of porno in hisbackyard in an insane quest to see his first naked woman. I sucked at girls. I had alwayssucked at girls. But now I was about to not suck, and it made all the pathetic moments of mypast feel like trifles I could laugh at, like bits in a blooper reel at the end of a movie. Icouldn’t wait to ask her to marry me and take that ring out of the box and slide it on herfinger. What didn’t occur to me until I sat down in my aisle seat and we started taxiing down therunway was that I had no idea how I was going to ask her. I’d seen the scene in a hundred movies where the guy gets down on one knee, looks his girlfriend in the eye, and proceeds toput into eloquent words all the reasons he loves her and wants her to be his wife. Then sheweeps, and they kiss, and her gay male friend says something witty, and her hard-edged sassyfemale friend who sleeps around breaks down and cries. I wanted to do something different. But my mind went blank. And stayed that way through theentire hour-and-twenty-minute flight up the California coast. And through the forty-minutesubway ride that followed. And after I disembarked and walked through the Mission District,which was bustling with pedestrians, taquerias, and small clothing outlets. And when I realizedI had only a few more blocks until I reached the restaurant. My excitement about proposing hadbecome just plain nerves, and all those irrational fears came flooding back. What if she says no in front of all these people at the restaurant? Why the hell did I want todo this in a crowded place? What if she says no and somebody takes a video of it and puts it onYouTube? Under some title like “Total loser blows proposal.” Maybe they wouldn’t put“total.” That seems egregious. But what if they put bald?! Why am I even worried? There aremillions of YouTube videos. No one would ever see it. Maybe I should speak quietly so they won’t be able to get good audio. I’ve become an insane person. I have to calm down . . . By the time I stumbled through the large black double doors of Foreign Cinema, sweat wasstarting to drip down my face, which must have looked particularly alarming since it was a coolfifty degrees outside. A young pale-faced hostess with long black bangs asked, “Can I helpyou?” the way you ask someone who you hope will turn around and leave. “Hi. I’m supposed to ask someone to marry me?” I said. “Uh, okay . . .” “Sorry—I mean, I have a reservation, I think. Or I should . . .” “Oh wait, are you Justin?” said a friendlier coworker from behind the bar. “Yes,” I said, wiping the sweat from my brow. “Come this way,” she said. She led me through a crowded outdoor dining area, packed withdozens of customers enjoying eggs benedict, waffles, and bloody marys, and into a plaster-walled room that looked like a miniature art gallery. It was empty, save for one corner wherethree waiters stood in front of a wooden counter folding napkins and chatting. She grabbed awooden chair and placed it in the exact center of the empty room, as if it were a piece of arton display. “Okay, good luck!” she said, then walked away. I sat down on the chair in the center of the room with the waiters staring at me and looked atmy phone. It was 10:20. I noticed that my phone hand was trembling. I knew I was beingirrational. This was Amanda, the girl who once told me, “You are my Brad Pitt. And not theweird Brad Pitt when he grew a long beard for some reason.” If I could just think of somethingto say to her, maybe I could calm myself down. “Okay,” I thought, “when she walks in, I’m definitely not gonna get down on one knee andsay a bunch of really clichéd things. Amanda hates that stuff as much as I do. I’m just goingto walk up to her and tell her exactly how I feel, and how much she means to me, and then askher if she’ll marry me. Then, if she says no, I’ll be standing on my own two feet, and I’llbe able to walk right out of the restaurant, head held high.” Then I heard voices. I looked up and saw Amanda’s friend Madeleine walk into the room,followed by Amanda, who was wearing a lime-green dress that clung to her body. She entered theroom, looked right at me, looked away as if she hadn’t seen me. “Why can’t we just wait forthe table by—oh my God!” she said, turning back to me. All my plans to stay standing were forgotten. I dropped onto one knee, wrestled the ring boxfrom my pocket, and spluttered, “Will you marry me I love you.” “Yes,” Amanda said, bursting into tears. She was still standing about four feet away from me. I got up, approached her, and gave her akiss. She hugged me and shoved her face into my chest. “You’re really sweaty,” she said, laughing as tears streamed down her face. All the insanity and neuroses that had engulfed my brain washed away. I had a smile so big itseemed impossible, as if I were the guy in an ad for the state lottery and I was holding thewinning ticket. After a minute she finally let go of me, stood up on her tiptoes, and kissed me again. Then Igave her friend Madeleine a hug, as well as the hostess who came to seat us, even though shelooked like she didn’t necessarily want one. Before we sat down, Amanda wanted to call her parents, and I decided to call mine as well. “Hello?” I heard my dad say. “It’s Justin,” I said. “Oh, hey, son. What’s happening?” “I did it,” I said. “You did what?” he asked. “I proposed to Amanda. She said yes,” I replied. “Well hot damn! Good for you, son. Congratulations. Glad it all worked out. You looked alittle nervous this morning. Thought your balls were gonna run up in your asshole for a minutethere,” he said. “They almost did.” “Well, good to hear. You now have someone else to drive batshit crazy besides me. Welcome tomarried life, son.” Acknowledgments This book would not be possible without the support of so many of my friends. For my friendswho appeared in the book, thank you for spending way too much time helping me remember exactlywhat happened. There’s no way I could have filled in all the details without the help of RyanWalter, Danny Phin, Aaron Estrada, and Jeff Cleator. Thank you to my father, who read every chapter before anyone else, and let me know when hefound things to be “fucking silly.” Thank you to my mom and my brothers, Dan, Evan, and Jose,for constantly supporting me throughout the process. Thanks also to a number of my friends who were always there for me, whether it was to read adraft or just talk through a problem: Cory Jones, Lindsay Goldenberg, Patrick Schumacker, BrianWarner, Brian Huntington, Robert Chafino, Mike Lisbe, Nate Reger, Katie Des Londes, LauraMoran, Brendan Darby, Zack Rosenblatt, Dan Rubin, Lon Zimmet, Robin Shorr, Heather Hicks, JasonErvin, Casey Phin, Greg Szalay, Scott Satenspiel, George Collins, Chris Von Goetz, andMadeleine Amodeo, and a super-special thank you to Byrd Leavell, who is amazing. Thank you tomy editor at HarperCollins, Calvert Morgan, who cleaned up all of my bad habits, and to therest of the HarperCollins team, Kevin Callahan, Michael Barrs, and Heidi Metcalfe. Thank you to Kate Hamill, who has been editing every word of this book for the last two years.She is unbelievably talented and tireless, and is responsible for making this book something Icould be proud of. I could not have gone through this process without her. Finally, thank you to my wife, Amanda. She’s the best partner I could ever have hoped for, andwithout her, I wouldn’t even have wanted to write this book. Amanda, thank you for letting medrive you insane while I wrote this. Just remember, even when I’m old and decrepit, I’llalways bring you a glass of water before bed. I love you. JUSTIN HALPERN is the founding editor of the comedy website HolyTaco.com and was a seniorwriter at Maxim.com. In 2009, Halpern created the Twitter page @sh*tmydadsays, which now boastsover three million followers. He co-created and produced a sitcom adaptation for CBS, and hasserved as a writer on other television series. He splits his time between Los Angeles and SanDiego, with his wife Amanda. ? Praise for Sh*t My Dad Says ? ‘Sam Halpern is an astonishing, forceful, no-nonsense armchair philosopher who, in spite of agreat education and a career as an esteemed oncologist, swears like a navvy . . . Funny, silly,honest, lively and fresh’ Sunday Times ‘Sh*t My Dad Says captures the awkward formative moments between father and son – thehangovers, the first break-up, sex education . . . In many ways Halpern Snr is the voice ofreason in a world where we spend too long pussy-footing around, fearful of creating offence’ Independent ‘You will roar with laughter’ Sun ‘Ridiculously hilarious’ CHELSEA HANDLER, New York Times bestselling author of Are you there, Vodka? It’s me, Chelsea ‘Justin Halpern tosses lightning bolts of laughter out of his pocket like he is shooting dicein a back alley. In one sweep of a paragraph, he ranges from hysterical to disgusting totouching – and does it all seamlessly. Sh*t My Dad Says is a really, really funny book’ LAURIE NOTARO, New York Times bestselling author of The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club Also by Justin Halpern ? Sh*t My Dad Says First published 2012 as I Suck at Girls by Macmillan Says by Pan BooksFirst published in paperback 2013 as More Sh*t My Dad This electronic edition published 2013 by Pan Books an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world www.panmacmillan.com ISBN 978-1-4472-4895-8 Copyright ? Justin Halpern 2012 The right of Justin Halpern to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted byhim in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available thispublication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical,mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of thepublisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may beliable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also findfeatures, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.