“Jesus Christ, you’re fucking obtuse. 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. That’s how they’ll treat you—in fact, that will be the first thing they associate you with. And not only that, now the only way you know how to get rid of wolves is blowing them the fuck up. You get what I’m saying now?”
He sat back in his chair, and a few moments of silence passed as the two of us stared at each other.
“Dad, I’m taking the pills.”
“Goddamn it! The hell you are!”
He shot up out of his chair and stormed into my room. I heard him rooting around furiously, opening and closing drawers, unzipping and rummaging through my backpack. When he returned to the dining room, he was holding my bottle of Zoloft. He marched over to the sink, poured the $20 worth of pills down the drain, and turned on the garbage disposal for good measure.
“You’ll thank me later,” he said as he returned to the table and resumed eating.
“What in the hell do I tell the doctor?” I asked.
“I don’t give a shit. Go back to your doctor and tell him to kiss my ass.”
A few weeks later, my dad came home early from work and popped his head into my bedroom, where I was doing homework.
“Grab a snack to take with you. We’re gonna go down to the hospital,” he said.
“Why? Please don’t harass my doctor.”
“Give me a fucking break. I’m not a maniac.”
I got in his car, and we drove to UCSD Medical Center. We walked into the waiting area, where my dad approached the reception desk and checked us in. Two minutes later, the nurse called my name and led my dad and me back to a room where an older, gray-haired doctor was waiting.
“Sam, good to see you,” the older doc said, extending his hand to shake my dad’s.
They chatted for a couple minutes, making incomprehensible doctor jokes that ended with punch lines like, “and then it turned out it wasn’t even a goddamned myocardial infarction!” followed by hysterical laughter. I sat atop the doctor’s table, stone-faced and trying to minimize the rustling noises emanating from the thin white paper that coated it, while I waited to be acknowledged.
“So, what can I do you for, Sam?” the doctor said.
“The kid’s got some uneasiness in his joints. I was hoping you could help him, because it’s really a pain in his ass. Tell him, son.”
“Well, it sort of feels like I’m being tickled from the inside of me—”
“Goddamn it, use medical terms, he’s a doctor,” my dad barked.
The old doctor performed the same tests my other doctor had and then turned to my dad, as if I wasn’t in the room.
“I think the culprit here is your boy had quite a growth spurt, and it put a lot of strain on his joints. Now he’s feeling the effects of it.”
“So you’re saying he grew funny, huh?” my dad replied.
“Well, more or less, yes.”
At last I had an answer.
We left the doctor’s office and, as we were walking down the hospital hallway, my dad turned to me and whispered, “Shit. I could’ve told you that. Fucking doctors, huh?”
On the Proper Technique for Growing a Garden
“It’s watering plants, Justin. You just take a goddamned hose and you put it over the plant. You don’t even pay rent, just do it. Shit.”
On Moving Out of My Parents’ House for the First Time
“I’d say I was gonna miss you, but you’re moving ten minutes away, so instead I’ll just say don’t come over and do your fucking laundry here.”
On Furnishing One’s Home
“Pick your furniture like you pick a wife; it should make you feel comfortable and look nice, but not so nice that if someone walks past it they want to steal it.”
On Coming Over to My New Apartment Unannounced and Seeing My Room for the First Time
“Why is there a mural of two people fucking on your wall? . . . Son, let me be the first to tell you that you’re not Andy fucking Kaufman. When you get famous maybe shit like this will be funny, but right now all it says to me is this kid never gets laid. Ever.”
On My Response to Having My Tires Slashed
“Oh, don’t go to the goddamned cops. They’re busy with real shit. I don’t want my tax dollars going to figuring out who thinks you’re an asshole.”
On Living on a Budget
“Why are you going over your monthly expenses?
. . . No, let me shorten this process for you:
You make dog shit, so don’t spend any money.”
On My Friend’s Response to Getting a Minor-in-Possession Ticket
“He cried? Jesus, don’t ever have that happen to you. . . . Well, no, try not to get a ticket, sure, but if you do, don’t cry like a fucking baby.”
On Getting an Internship at Quentin Tarantino’s Production Company
