“Justy, you look terrible! What’s the matter?” she said, patting the space on the bed next to her, ushering me to sit down.
I told her what my dad had said, and she tried to calm me down by telling me that obviously he had no idea what happens after we die.
“He’s never been dead, and that’s the only way you can know, right?” she murmured soothingly.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I replied, not fully convinced.
My dad entered the room at that moment, and my mom looked him sternly in the eye and said, “Sam, tell Justin that you have no idea what happens when you die. He knows it, but just admit it.”
“I will not. I know exactly what happens, and that’s what happens.” And he left the room.
I slept very little that night. I kept trying to wrap my head around the idea of infinite nothingness. The last time I had had that much difficulty sleeping was when I was fifteen years old and stayed awake half the night overanalyzing
After tossing and turning most of the night, I finally gave up on sleep and dragged myself out of bed at 5:30 A.M. I strolled out of my bedroom to find my dad back at the kitchen table, eating Grape-Nuts. He asked me to sit down, so I did.
“Do you know the great part about infinity?” he said.
“No.”
“It’s never over. You, your body, the energy inside it, it all goes somewhere, even after you die. You’re never gone.”
Clearly, my mom had had a word with him.
“So you’re saying you think we live forever? Like, ghosts and all that stuff?” I implored.
“No. Jesus Christ. You need to take a fucking science course or something. What I’m trying to say is that what makes you up, it’s always been around, and it always will be around. So really the only thing you should worry about is the part you’re at right now. Where you got a body and a head and all that bullshit. Just worry about living, dying is the easy part.”
Then he put down his spoon, looked at me, and stood up.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to do one of the best things about being alive: take a shit.”
On Telemarketer Phone Calls
“Hello? . . . Fuck you.”
On My Interest in Smoking Cigars
“You’re not a cigar guy. . . . Well, the first reason that jumps out at me is that you hold it like you’re jerking off a mouse.”
On Entertaining the Notion of Getting a Tattoo
“You can do what you want. But I can also do what I want. And what I’ll be doing is telling everyone how fucking stupid your tattoo is.”
On House-Sitting
“Call me if something’s on fire, and don’t screw in my bed.”
On the Television Show
“So, the woman and the dopey-looking guy screw, and then they look for aliens—or they just screw and sometimes aliens follow them?”
On Deciding to Use His Senior Discount for the First Time
“Fuck it, I’m old. Gimme free stuff.”
On Whether to Vote for George W. Bush or Al Gore
“Gore seems kind of like a pompous prick, but every time I see Bush I feel like he’s probably shit his pants in the last year, and it’s something he worries about.”
On My Trip to Europe
“I know you think you’re going to get all kinds of laid. It’s not a magic place, it’s the same as here. Don’t be stupid.”
On Baseball Cards
“If you sell them over the age of twenty, it means you either never get laid or you have a drug problem.”
“What I’m saying is: You might have taken care of your wolf problem, but everyone around town is going to think of you as the crazy son of a bitch who bought land mines to get rid of wolves.”
At about nine years old, I started developing a strange, uneasy feeling in my joints. It felt kind of like a little tiny person was inside them, tickling me. I wasn’t in pain, but I was uncomfortable a lot of the time, and the sensation had an unfortunate side effect: it caused frequent muscle spasms. My mom encouraged me to see a doctor, but the physician I went to couldn’t find anything wrong with me. “He’s growing fast, and it’s taking a toll. It’s natural. It will pass,” he said.
My brother Dan offered a different diagnosis: “Maybe it’s because you’re a gay,” he suggested one night, after I had complained to my dad for the umpteenth time at dinner.
“Quiet,” my dad barked at my brother. “Does it hurt?” he asked me.
“No. It’s just, I don’t know. Weird.”
