I Suck at Girls (7 page)

“You remember when you were six or seven and we went to visit Aunt Naomi? We went to that pool with 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 back of 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 out his window, reminiscing.

“What’s your point?” I said.

“After that you went apeshit, jumping off every board in the place. You learn stick shift with me, you won’t give two shits when you take the test in an automatic with some asshole in a lab coat. 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 the ignition and we switched seats. He gave me a quick overview of the gears and then spent the next hour screaming numbers at me, trying to train me to shift gears. “Three! Four! Six! There is 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 leave early, come home, and give me a driving lesson before sunset. He began each lesson by announcing a theme for the day. Among them were “A car is a murder weapon,” “Announce your presence with fucking authority,” and my personal favorite: “Your mother is bleeding to death.”

He said this late one afternoon as I pulled the truck out of the driveway. “If the shit goes down 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 is not always a stroll through the woods with your pants down. Now, I want you to get from here to Clairemont 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 GO GO!” 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 that led 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, so in order to reach our destination in time, whenever I encountered a yellow light I should gun it, and whenever I approached a red I should decide quickly whether to wait it out or turn and take another route. Periodically my dad would scream how much time I had left, along with a new imaginary 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 I hit 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’s going to be sexually assaulted!”

“Stop! You’re not helping,” I yelled back as I weaved in and out of traffic toward the freeway 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 had about 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 it to turn yellow, but even a hundred yards away it remained green. Afraid it would turn yellow before 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 was still too far away to get through it safely, but driving too fast to stop in time. Paralyzed by indecision, I froze, my foot leaden on the gas pedal. As the light turned red, our truck raced into the intersection and toward an oncoming Nissan hatchback. My dad reached over, grabbed the wheel, and pulled it hard toward him, causing the truck to jerk right and narrowly miss a collision.

“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, feeling embarrassed 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 state test, even if he wasn’t convinced that I’d be able to get my future four-year-old son to the emergency room before he hemorrhaged to death. I had scheduled a second test, and felt like I had a real shot at getting my license this time, but my dad had been working me so hard I’d mostly forgotten that the end goal was being able to drive to homecoming. With the dance now only a week away, I realized I had to start working on the second part of my plan: landing a date.

Eduardo had said his cousin Jenny liked me, but then Eduardo had also told me once that he was taking woodshop so that he could “build a wooden knife and stab you, fool.” I thought Jenny was cute, but I’d never asked a girl out before, and the thought of getting rejected—coupled with the threat of being stabbed with a shoddily made wooden knife for disrespecting Eduardo’s cousin—was concerning. I decided to talk it over with Aaron at lunch the Monday before the dance.

“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 fucking clue. Just ask her.”

Later that afternoon, I walked into my public speaking classroom, sat down behind Jenny, and waited for the right moment. I’m not sure how I thought the right moment would make itself known, but apparently it never did. In fact, I was so nervous at the prospect of asking her out that I couldn’t even talk to her about class-related things. At one point, we had to break into small groups to formulate our arguments for and against legalizing drugs. When Jenny asked me to contribute, I said, “I like drugs, but also I don’t like them,” then immediately got up and walked out of class to the bathroom, where I paced around for a couple minutes to make it 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 I should say, I finally worked up the nerve to attempt a conversation with her. I was confident that 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 the dance, and if I didn’t get a date fast I was going to be sitting at home watching movies on my own when Friday rolled around. Aaron’s move had spurred all of our other friends to take the plunge 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 today was 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 the Oldsmobile and led me out of the house. He grabbed the newspaper on our front lawn, opened the door 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 and pulling the door shut.

I climbed into the driver’s seat, started up the big silver sedan, and began my drive to the DMV. My dad opened up his newspaper and read in silence for a few moments before flipping down the 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 you one 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 the paper,” 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 you get the option to sit something out, you sit it out. So all I was saying to you was: when your asshole 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. I was seething with anger the whole way there, thinking about what my dad had said. “I don’t always sit things out. He doesn’t even know what I do. He’s only around me an hour a day,” I told myself, getting angrier by the minute.

My father’s voice reverberated in my head for the next hour, as I left him outside, checked in at the DMV, and sat in the waiting room alone. It followed me as my name was called, I led my lab coat–wearing test administrator to my car, and my test began. The truth is, I had no answer for my dad’s accusation, and it infuriated me. With the DMV employee in the passenger seat next to me, I merged onto the freeway, but this time I was so preoccupied that I did so seamlessly. I was hell-bent on trying to find an example of when I had been confronted with something tough and not sat it out. Eventually, my thoughts led to asking Jenny to the homecoming 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 that I 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 my driver’s test. I had accomplished one of my two goals. My dad was wrong. I got out of the car and 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 things that 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 your boat, son.”

I felt empowered, like one of those women in a Lifetime Channel movie who stands up to her husband. 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 of purpose. There would be no more pussyfooting about; I was going to straight up ask her to the dance. 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 you or not, but if they didn’t or if they did and you said no, or whatever, I was wondering if you wanted … 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 a thumbs-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 he got home that evening.

“Good for you! Congratulations, son. But tough shit. My car’s not a fuck palace. I’ll give you 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 who looked like Ernest Hemingway with a meth addiction, with Snow’s “Informer” playing on the radio, 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 was where awesome stuff happened. It was where virginities would be lost, scores with bullies would be settled, a hugely popular band could show up unannounced and perform, and a nerdy guy could get the prom queen. As the end of my senior year of high school approached, while some classmates focused on summer plans or leaving the state to go to college, I was hell-bent on having the most awesome prom imaginable.