I Suck at Girls (18 page)

“You better be fucking related to me,” I heard my dad say from somewhere in the room.

“It’s me! It’s Justin!” I said, my heart leaping into my throat.

Suddenly a lamp went on. My dad was sitting in his recliner, wearing his casual sweats (gray, no action stripes), holding a mug filled with a steaming hot toddy I could smell across the room.

“Sorry. I didn’t know anybody was awake,” I said.

“Do you realize I’m a crazy son of a bitch who owns a shotgun and hates shadowy figures walking around in his fucking home?”

“I’m sorry. I figured everyone was sleeping. I was trying not to wake anybody up.”

“Well, what the hell are you doing here, son?”

I explained to him about the power going out, and needing to charge my cell phone so my alarm would go off so I’d wake up in time for the flight to San Francisco so I could get to the Mission and—

“All right, all right, I don’t need you to perform a fucking monologue,” he said. “Crash on the couch, charge your phone, set your alarm, and I’ll make sure you’re up in time and give you a lift to the airport.” He took a final sip of his hot toddy and sauntered down the hallway to his bedroom. I plugged my phone into the nearest outlet, removed my pants and shirt so as not to wrinkle them, lay down on the couch, shut my eyes, and fell asleep.

I awoke to my father standing above me in the same clothes, drinking a mug that was now filled with coffee, holding a thick book in his hand.

“It’s go time,” he said, poking me in the face with the book.

“Did I sleep through my alarm?” I said, still not totally awake.

“No idea.”

“What time is it?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

“Four
A.M
.”

“Dad, I set my alarm for five thirty. I’m really tired,” I replied, closing my eyes and turning away from him.

“Bullshit. It’s all in your head. In med school I used to sleep an hour a night and get up the next day to deliver a fucking child.”

“That sounds very irresponsible,” I said, pulling my T-shirt over my head in hopes he’d leave me alone.

“Get up. I made breakfast,” he said, flipping on a switch that caused the light to blast through my eyelids.

There was no chance I was going to be allowed to get back to sleep, so I sat up and groggily made my way over to the breakfast table, where there were two plates, each filled with at least ten pieces of bacon and one piece of toasted multigrain bread. My dad handed me a mug of steaming coffee. Then he sat down across from me and opened up the book he had poked me with, a large biography of Harry Truman. He sat silently reading as he periodically brought a slice of bacon to his lips. After about a minute, I couldn’t stand it anymore.

“You woke me up to eat breakfast and you don’t want to talk or anything? You just want to … eat here in silence?” I asked.

“Sounds like a plan,” he said, not taking his eyes away from the book.

“Well,” I continued. “I took your advice and spent all day in the park thinking about proposing.”

“Must have gone well, since you’re going through with it,” he mumbled, as he flipped a page and continued reading.

“It did. I feel like I’m one hundred percent sure. She’s it. That’s it.”

His head jerked up from his book and he stared at me, his eyebrows creasing together to form what looked like a caterpillar crawling across his forehead.

“That is a load of horseshit,” he said, closing his book and setting it on the table.

“What? No, it’s not.”

“You’re a hundred percent sure this marriage will work out?” he asked.

“What kind of question is that?”

“You know what makes a shitty scientist?”

“No. I don’t know. I don’t care. I don’t want to have this conversation right now,” I snapped.

“Kindly calm the fuck down and eat your bacon.”

I pushed my plate in front of me an inch, sat back in my chair, and defiantly crossed my arms, as if refusing to eat any more bacon would register my displeasure.

“A shitty scientist goes into an experiment determined to get a specific result.”

“Don’t all scientists do that? Isn’t that what a hypothesis is?” I responded.

“What? No. What the fuck? Jesus Christ. Fucking public schools. A hypothesis is when the scientist says, ‘This is what I think
might
happen.’”

“Right.”

“But when you go into an experiment and you’re abso-fucking-lutely sure you’re going to be right, the experiment inevitably goes to shit, because you’re not prepared for anything unexpected. Then, when something fucked-up does happen—and it will—you either don’t see it, or you just pretend like it never happened because you refuse to believe you could have fucked up. And you know what that does?” he asked.

“Ruins your experiment?”

“Bingo. So the only way to run an experiment successfully is to start by accepting the fact that your experiment might fail.”

I sat quietly, digesting what I’d just heard.

“I’m sayin’ marriage is the same thing,” he said.

“Yeah, I gathered that.”

“Well, shit, you didn’t know what the fuck a hypothesis was. Just trying to make sure you grasp the analogy.”

“So how do you make sure it doesn’t fail?” I asked.

“Beats the dog shit out of me. I mostly just try to remember that I found someone who seems to enjoy all the bullshit that comes with being married to me, so I should probably be real fucking nice. Also I don’t go in the bathroom and shit when she’s taking a shower.”

“I feel good about proposing,” I said.

“Good, you should. She’s a fine woman,” he said.

“I really hate it when you say that. It sounds like you’re talking about a horse.”

He laughed. “Go shower so you don’t smell like hell when you propose to your wife.” Then he grabbed his Harry Truman book and resumed reading.

An hour and a half later, my dad pulled his Chevy Blazer up to the loading zone in front of San Diego International Airport. It was still dark outside.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said as I stepped out of the car.

“Not a problem. Last thing I’ll say: Try not to be too sweaty when you ask. It’s disconcerting—it’s an evolutionary sign of weakness. Hits her on the subconscious level.”

“Um, okay.”

I shut the passenger door and he drove off.

I entered the airport and breezed through check-in since I had no carry-on luggage. When I got to security, I put only two things in the plastic bin for scanning: my cell phone and the little black box containing my ring. The portly female security guard doing the pat-downs stopped and said, “Look. At. You. Boy!” then started clapping.

Although I was a bit thrown by my dad’s insistence that the only way to make a marriage work was to accept that it might not, my anxiety was taking a backseat to my growing excitement as I walked toward my terminal. Asking Amanda to marry me would be one of the biggest, boldest moves of my life—a huge leap for an awkward teen who spent Friday nights watching ’80s action movies instead of going to parties, for a Little Leaguer who buried armfuls of porno in his backyard in an insane quest to see his first naked woman. I sucked at girls. I had always sucked at girls. But now I was about to not suck, and it made all the pathetic moments of my past feel like trifles I could laugh at, like bits in a blooper reel at the end of a movie. I couldn’t wait to ask her to marry me and take that ring out of the box and slide it on her finger.

What didn’t occur to me until I sat down in my aisle seat and we started taxiing down the runway was that I had no idea
how
I was going to ask her. I’d seen the scene in a hundred movies where the guy gets down on one knee, looks his girlfriend in the eye, and proceeds to put into eloquent words all the reasons he loves her and wants her to be his wife. Then she weeps, and they kiss, and her gay male friend says something witty, and her hard-edged sassy female friend who sleeps around breaks down and cries.

I wanted to do something different. But my mind went blank. And stayed that way through the entire hour-and-twenty-minute flight up the California coast. And through the forty-minute subway ride that followed. And after I disembarked and walked through the Mission District, which was bustling with pedestrians, taquerias, and small clothing outlets. And when I realized I had only a few more blocks until I reached the restaurant. My excitement about proposing had become just plain nerves, and all those irrational fears came flooding back.

What if she says no in front of all these people at the restaurant? Why the hell did I want to do this in a crowded place? What if she says no and somebody takes a video of it and puts it on YouTube? Under some title like “Total loser blows proposal.” Maybe they wouldn’t put “total.” That seems egregious. But what if they put bald?! Why am I even worried? There are millions of YouTube videos. No one would ever see it. Maybe I should speak quietly, so they won’t be able to get good audio. I’ve become an insane person. I have to calm down…

By the time I stumbled through the large black double doors of Foreign Cinema, sweat was starting to drip down my face, which must have looked particularly alarming since it was a cool fifty degrees outside. A young pale-faced hostess with long black bangs asked, “Can I help you?” the way you ask someone who you hope will turn around and leave.

“Hi. I’m supposed to ask someone to marry me?” I said.

“Uh, okay…”

“Sorry—I mean, I have a reservation, I think. Or I should…”

“Oh wait, are you Justin?” said a friendlier coworker from behind the bar.

“Yes,” I said, wiping the sweat from my brow.

“Come this way,” she said. She led me through a crowded outdoor dining area, packed with dozens of customers enjoying eggs benedict, waffles, and bloody marys, and into a plaster-walled room that looked like a miniature art gallery. It was empty, save for one corner where three waiters stood in front of a wooden counter folding napkins and chatting. She grabbed a wooden chair and placed it in the exact center of the empty room, as if it were a piece of art on display.

“Okay, good luck!” she said, then walked away.

I sat down on the chair in the center of the room with the waiters staring at me and looked at my phone. It was 10:20. I noticed that my phone hand was trembling. I knew I was being irrational. This was Amanda, the girl who once told me, “You are my Brad Pitt. And not the weird Brad Pitt when he grew a long beard for some reason.” If I could just think of something to say to her, maybe I could calm myself down.

“Okay,” I thought, “when she walks in, I’m definitely not gonna get down on one knee and say a bunch of really clichéd things. Amanda hates that stuff as much as I do. I’m just going to walk up to her and tell her exactly how I feel, and how much she means to me, and then ask her if she’ll marry me. Then, if she says no, I’ll be standing on my own two feet, and I’ll be able to walk right out of the restaurant, head held high.”

Then I heard voices. I looked up and saw Amanda’s friend Madeleine walk into the room, followed by Amanda, who was wearing a lime-green dress that clung to her body. She entered the room, looked right at me, looked away as if she hadn’t seen me. “Why can’t we just wait for the table by—oh my God!” she said, turning back to me.

All my plans to stay standing were forgotten. I dropped onto one knee, wrestled the ring box from my pocket, and spluttered, “Will you marry me I love you.”

“Yes,” Amanda said, bursting into tears.

She was still standing about four feet away from me. I got up, approached her, and gave her a kiss. She hugged me and shoved her face into my chest.

“You’re really sweaty,” she said, laughing as tears streamed down her face.

All the insanity and neuroses that had engulfed my brain washed away. I had a smile so big it seemed impossible, as if I were the guy in an ad for the state lottery and I was holding the winning ticket.

After a minute she finally let go of me, stood up on her tiptoes, and kissed me again. Then I gave her friend Madeleine a hug, as well as the hostess who came to seat us, even though she looked like she didn’t necessarily want one.

Before we sat down, Amanda wanted to call her parents, and I decided to call mine as well.

“Hello?” I heard my dad say.

“It’s Justin,” I said.

“Oh, hey, son. What’s happening?”

“I did it,” I said.

“You did what?” he asked.

“I proposed to Amanda. She said yes,” I replied.

“Well hot damn! Good for you, son. Congratulations. Glad it all worked out. You looked a little nervous this morning. Thought your balls were gonna run up in your asshole for a minute there,” he said.

“They almost did.”

“Well, good to hear. You now have someone else to drive batshit crazy besides me. Welcome to married life, son.”

Acknowledgments

This book would not be possible without the support of so many of my friends. For my friends who appeared in the book, thank you for spending way too much time helping me remember exactly what happened. There’s no way I could have filled in all the details without the help of Ryan Walter, Danny Phin, Aaron Estrada, and Jeff Cleator.

Thank you to my father, who read every chapter before anyone else, and let me know when he found things to be “fucking silly.” Thank you to my mom and my brothers, Dan, Evan, and Jose, for constantly supporting me throughout the process.

Thanks also to a number of my friends who were always there for me, whether it was to read a draft or just talk through a problem: Cory Jones, Lindsay Goldenberg, Patrick Schumacker, Brian Warner, Brian Huntington, Robert Chafino, Mike Lisbe, Nate Reger, Katie Des Londes, Laura Moran, Brendan Darby, Zack Rosenblatt, Dan Rubin, Lon Zimmet, Robin Shorr, Heather Hicks, Jason Ervin, Casey Phin, Greg Szalay, Scott Satenspiel, George Collins, Chris Von Goetz, and Madeleine Amodeo, and a super-special thank you to Byrd Leavell, who is amazing. Thank you to my editor at HarperCollins, Calvert Morgan, who cleaned up all of my bad habits, and to the rest of the HarperCollins team, Kevin Callahan, Michael Barrs, and Heidi Metcalfe.

Thank you to Kate Hamill, who has been editing every word of this book for the last two years. She is unbelievably talented and tireless, and is responsible for making this book something I could be proud of. I could not have gone through this process without her.