“All I ask is that you pick up your shit so you don’t leave your bedroom looking like it was used for a gang bang. Also, sorry that your girlfriend dumped you.”
When I was twenty-eight years old, I lived in Los Angeles and was in the third year of a long-distance relationship with my girlfriend, who lived in San Diego. Most Fridays I’d sit in traffic for three and a half hours as my 1999 Ford Ranger crawled 126 miles down the I-5 to San Diego. Every once in a while my car would decide to shut off its engine. Meanwhile, its radio was busted, so I only got one station, whose playlist seemed limited to songs from the burgeoning rapper Flo Rida. There’s nothing like merging onto a freeway only to have your engine stop, steering wheel lock, and a deejay scream, “And here’s MY MAN, Flo Rida, with his new hit ‘Right Round’! Let’s get this party started!”
In short, doing the long-distance thing was wearing on me. So when I received a job offer in May 2009 from Maxim.com that would allow me to work from anywhere, I jumped at the opportunity. I could move down to San Diego and live with my girlfriend. The only hitch in my plan was that my girlfriend was not as excited as I was. And by “not as excited,” I mean to say that when I showed up at her doorstep to deliver the good news in person, she broke up with me.
Driving away from her house, I realized that not only was I now single, I had no place to live since I had already told my landlord in Los Angeles that I was terminating my lease at the end of the month. Then my engine shut off. As I sat in my car vigorously trying to restart it, it dawned on me that the only people I knew in San Diego who might have room for me were my parents. My stomach started to tense up as I turned the key back and forth in the ignition. It also dawned on me that the family barbecuing on the deck of the house in front of which my car had stalled just might think I was a perv who’d pulled over to pleasure himself. Luckily my car started up within a minute and I sped off for my parents’ house.
The reason I had become so nervous so quickly was because asking my father for a favor is like arguing a case in front of the Supreme Court: You have to lay out the facts clearly, organize them into an argument, and cite precedents set in previous cases. Shortly after showing up unannounced at my parents’ modest three-bed room house in our San Diego suburb, Point Loma, I was pleading my case before my parents in the living room. I cited
“It’s fine. Jesus, you didn’t have to go through that whole bullshit song and dance. You know you can stay here. All I ask is that you pick up your shit so you don’t leave your bedroom looking like it was used for a gang bang,” he said. “Also, sorry that your girlfriend dumped you.”
The last time I had lived at home was ten years prior, During my sophomore year at San Diego State University. At the time, both my parents worked—my mother, as a lawyer for a nonprofit; and my father, in nuclear medicine at the University of California–San Diego—so I didn’t see them very often. Ten years later, my mom was still working full-time, but my seventy-three-year-old dad had retired and was around the house. All. Day. Long.
After my first night back home, I crawled out of bed at around 8:30 A.M. and set up my “office” (read: my laptop) in the living room, where my dad was watching TV, to begin writing my first column. Michael Jackson had just died, and I was working on a comic portraying Jesus overlooking the pedophile charges against Michael Jackson and letting him into Heaven anyway, because he was such a fan of the King of Pop. (My editor later pointed out that it should have been Saint Peter ushering M.J. through the gates of Heaven, but that’s beside the point.) My dad had a hard time understanding that someone sitting in his pajamas and searching through Google images for silly pictures of Jesus Christ was working. So he treated me like I wasn’t.
“Why the fuck is Wolf Blitzer talking to me about Michael Jackson?” he barked. “The president is in fucking Russia trying to get those sons of bitches to stop with the nukes, and he’s talking to me about Michael Jackson? Fuck you, Wolf Blitzer!”
