I Suck at Girls (3 page)

“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 the atmosphere 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, my ass,” then sat silently. I listened as Mrs. Vanguard chronicled my behavior toward Kerry over the past two weeks, behavior she felt bordered on harassment. Without proper discipline, she told my parents, she feared I might turn dangerous. I wasn’t sure what my feelings about Kerry meant, but as I listened to Mrs. Vanguard and recalled how I’d made Kerry cry, I suddenly felt terrible.

“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 of stuff all the time. Look, trust me, I know the kid can be dopey as all hell. I caught him eating a sandwich on the shitter just a month ago. But he’s a sweet kid. He’s not goddamn Manson.”

My teacher sat there speechless until my mom broke the silence by assuring her that they would take 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 to keep 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 a chair, 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?” she started.

“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 their names on them, like everybody works at a goddamn auto shop. All I’m saying is, there’s multiple 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, even if 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 and then getting up to leave. “For today, though, you need to sit in your room and think about what we talked about.”

My mom left the room, and a moment later my dad stood up to do the same. Just as he was about to 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 used to 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,” he said, 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 new words. I was obsessed with expanding my vocabulary. Every time I heard a word I didn’t recognize, I’d ask the nearest adult what it meant. No one had a more extensive vocabulary than my father, who spent a lot of time reading with me each night to indulge my thirst for language.

“My teacher says someday I’m going to know as many words as you do,” I told him one night as we 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 hundred goddamn ways to talk about blood vessels,” he said, grabbing a bowl full of green beans and spooning 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 useless shit. 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, nuclear medicine, 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 do it? So you’d have to coach the team instead of being able to play, and then you’d have to sit and 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 of his, 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 practice medicine and help people. Now I gotta sit in an office and do paperwork. Not your problem, it just 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 9:00
P.M
. He worked a full day most Saturdays, too. Sunday was his only day off, but even then he often went in to the office. Nevertheless, no matter how late it was when he walked through our front 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 right next to me, where he’d read to me or I’d read to him. Whenever I encountered a word I didn’t understand, I’d stop and ask him what it meant. One night, while I was reading to him, he started 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 Rhode Island.”

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 think you 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 long time,” 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 on your 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 the relationship between the two. A slender kid with shaggy brown hair and pasty white skin, Aaron grew up a few blocks from me. He had HBO, which instantly made him an expert about sex as far as I was concerned. He put down his Cheetos and wiped his hands on his University of Michigan Fab 5 basketball shirt.

“I can’t believe you don’t know this,” Aaron said. “On the night you get married, you have to have sex, otherwise it doesn’t count as getting married. It has nothing to do with babies,” 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 in her, 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 it unless 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 our house in the nude like a
Playboy
playmate in Hefner’s mansion, or if I was just self-conscious about 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 up ridiculous answers to my questions in an effort to make me look stupid, I still went back to the well time after time. One Sunday morning, over breakfast, I asked them about the wedding night ritual. My brother Dan, who was well acquainted with my fear of nudity, was the first to weigh in.

“There’s a little more to it than that,” he said. “Basically, you stand in one corner of the room, and she stands in the other. You each take off one piece of clothing at a time. Pants and 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,” he said, biting into a chocolate glazed donut.

This was troubling information. As soon as breakfast was over, I got up from the kitchen table and 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 everything from the waist up. Then I looked in the mirror. Of all the disturbing images I’d encountered to 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 run over the head of my neighbor’s cat.”

I couldn’t stand the idea of someone else seeing me in this compromising position, laughing uncontrollably. But before I took a vow to be a bachelor for life, there was one thing left to do: ask the only person I knew who was married, always honest with me, and never mocked my fears—my mom. I changed out of my suit, threw on my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pajamas, and ran 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. I went back into the kitchen where my brother Dan was now working on a big bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

“Do you know if Mom is here? Her door is locked and nobody said anything when I knocked,” I said.

“Their bedroom door is locked?”

“Yeah.”

“Just get a screwdriver and pop it open and see if they’re in there. If they’re sleeping they’ll probably want to be woken up so they won’t sleep in too late. You know how Dad hates that,” 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 that reminder, and still panicked at the prospect of my future wife seeing me in half a tuxedo, I ran 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 a tiny 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 of middle-aged limbs and hair. Until that moment I didn’t know what sex looked like, but I knew immediately 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 minutes later, my dad opened my door, wearing a black terrycloth robe, his face contorted in the expression 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 the mood to give a shit, due to being thrown out of bed because my eight-year-old suddenly turned into 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 well tell 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 the humiliation 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’re not 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.