You're Doing Great!

by Tom Papa

  I bought it for twelve hundred dollars that I made myself working as a busboy in a restaurant called the Orchards. My uniform was designed to make me look like a leaf, with green pants, apron, and bow tie. I would wake up in the dark, walk to work, and pour water for businessmen every day, all summer long. It was humiliating, but at the end I had my own car and I was free.

  Free to drive to the beach. Free to pick up my girlfriend from her work at the ice-cream shop. Free to enjoy my life with less money in the bank than I spend on lunch today.

  If you have a cheap car, enjoy it. You can do anything you want. If you like Star Wars and find a plastic Darth Vader head, glue it right to the hood. You can’t do that with a leased Mercedes. They won’t let you. You can with a used Datsun. You can throw on a Chewbacca mask, jump in the Vadermobile, and drive the wrong way down the freeway. Everyone will get out of your way because they know you’re poor and have nothing to lose.

  Those days are long gone for me. I don’t have that freedom anymore. I made a horrible business decision. I got married and had two children. I love them, but they just keep growing and getting bigger and asking for more and more money. At this point it’s like I’m living with two unemployed coke addicts.

  They come into my office every morning: “Hey, can we have some more money?”

  “What happened to the change from yesterday?”

  “I don’t know … the economy, am I right?”

  No, they’re not right, and now I have no freedom at all, because their lives depend on me. Every single day. And I can’t tell anyone about it. I just have to swallow the stress and slowly lose my hair. I can’t wake my daughter up at two o’clock in the morning, sit on the end of her bed, and say, “Hey, honey. It’s me. Didn’t mean to wake you, but do you ever feel like you’re not going to make it? Like you just can’t do it anymore? Ah, forget it, get some sleep, I’ll see you at breakfast. If I’m still here.”

  And I spoil them. I spoil the hell out of them. First off, they’re two girls so I don’t really have any control over it, they own me. Second, my father didn’t spoil us. He had money, but he didn’t want to spend it on children. His philosophy was, “I made it, I’m going to use it.” He didn’t do anything that kids wanted to do. Can you imagine living in a time when the children weren’t in charge? It sounds like a magical time to be alive. He took us to an amusement park once, saw the line, and said, “Just look at it through the fence, you get the idea.”

  My daughters make me take them out for ice cream three times a week and I do it, like an idiot. I’m not making great people, they’re pretty entitled. They walk into that ice-cream shop with their thirteen-year-old friends and demand samples with those little sample spoons as if they are ice-cream queens.

  “Let me try that one.… No. I think you can do better. Let me try that one.”

  My father took us out for ice cream once. “Everyone gets one scoop of vanilla, no cones, put out your hands.”

  We were near tears, like grateful characters out of Oliver Twist. “Thank you, Father. This is the most special of days.”

  You would think that if you made enough money, you could buy that freedom back that you had when you were young, but you’re wrong. The more money you make, the more you spend on stupid stuff and the more you grow your life into something bigger, and that bigger life needs even more money. Ultimately you end up more stressed than when you started out.

  The trick is to live a small, simple life, but for some reason we aren’t built that way. We always want more. And it’s stupid.

  If you see the word “luxury,” run for the hills. There is a whole economy designed to separate people from their money. And it’s a con job. Do you need a Mercedes? No. Do you need a thousand-dollar bottle of wine? Hell, no. A private jet? Okay, maybe.

  A private jet is worth it. It really is. They’re a gazillion dollars, but you never have to go through airport security again! What a dream. I’ve been on them. They’re amazing. They have movies and drawers filled with snacks. They even have a drawer underneath the seat that has even more snacks. And the seats are so comfortable and the planes are so fast. And the pilots are paid more so they’re happier and look like they really enjoy their jobs and don’t want to die.

  Yeah, if you can get enough money for a private jet, you should do it. Even if it means not having any money left over for anything else, it’s well worth it. You’ll live in a studio apartment, sleep on a futon, and eat Amy’s frozen burritos. You’ll wear clothes from Costco, the only jewelry you’ll own is a bracelet your daughter made you, and you won’t own a car. But who cares? You’ll have a jet!

  That would be a pretty great life.

  The rest is a joke. The luxury hotel, the designer clothes, the luxury gym, the expensive seats at the stadium, it’s all a lie. A watch for two hundred thousand dollars? You’re nuts. College tuition for half a million dollars? Get lost.

  And you know who you’re surrounded by when you pay for a hotel room that costs two thousand a night and eat in restaurants serving thousand-dollar caviar? A lot of rich duds. They’re no fun. No one plays music. No one has real conversations. They just walk around with labels on their goofy shirts and look at what labels you’re wearing and talk about interest rates and taxes.

  And they do annoying things, like they wear all-white outfits so they can go summer. I can’t wear all white. If I wear a white shirt, I sweat through it in twenty minutes. It looks like I’m smuggling turkey gravy under my armpits.

  And they summer. Do you summer? I don’t summer. Summer happens and I deal with it.

  Here’s a secret that no one tells you. After all the money, and all the wealth, do you know what a lot of super-rich people are? They’re bored. They are truly, undoubtedly bored. When you have so much money that you can do anything and you have already done everything, there’s nothing left to do.

  So why is this a goal? So you can make so much money that you end up isolated from everybody else? You go from your private helicopter to your private island to your mansion completely alone? What fun is that? We’re only here once, you have to mix it up and get out there.

  Look, I’m not Pollyannaish about it. Sometimes when I’m in a crowd of people I wish I had my own helicopter. Not just to escape: I fantasize about turning it upside down and chopping everybody’s head off. But for the most part, people are pretty great.

  We’re all the same, no matter how much money you have in the bank. If you have friends, family, and community, something creative to do, and you are kind to people and create a world that you are happy to live in, then money is not that important. It truly isn’t. If you have any of that, you are already rich.

  But man, if you can, get a private jet!

  HAVE YOU EVER GOTTEN TO THE END OF A WATERSLIDE AND HAD TO WAIT FOR YOUR SHORTS TO FLOAT TO THE SURFACE? I HAVE …

  DON’T GO TUBING

  We’ve all had those times when people make you feel like you’re supposed to do something despite everything in your body telling you that you shouldn’t do it. Things like jumping off the high dive, wearing Crocs, or slow dancing with your uncle at a wedding.

  Sometimes doing the things that we think are beyond us is how we grow and become better, happier people. When you come back to the surface after finally making that jump, you feel pretty damn good about yourself. But then there are those things that are just plain stupid. Dumb-ass things that you really shouldn’t do, despite everyone pressuring you into it.

  Like tubing.

  Have you ever gone tubing? It’s when you sit in a giant inner tube and float down a river. A big, fat, stupid car or truck tire that you have no way to steer, no way to stop, and no way to control. It’s really stupid.

  People also use these inner tubes to fly down snow-filled mountains. Do you know what happens when you do that? You bounce. You bounce around a lot. And eventually, through momentum, you bounce right out of the inner tube into a fence.

  That’s what happened to a friend of mine,
the great comedian Robert Kelly, while his young child looked on from down below and his wife filmed it on her phone. I saw my friend, my lovable, overweight friend, flying down the side of the mountain. He was going faster than anything else, scorching past snowboarders and skiers as if they were trees.

  “Look at Daddy go,” his wife said.

  “Is he going too fast?” asked his frightened six-year-old son.

  Yeah, that’s right, kid, way too fast. People were running for their lives. Hopping away in ski boots, trying to get out of the path of this human avalanche.

  Bobby should have slowed down or steered away from the children and old people going for hot cocoa. But he couldn’t do any of those things because his ass was stuck in an inner tube.

  There would be no slowing down. There would be no stopping. There would be only insane acceleration.

  “Uh-oh,” his wife said as he neared the bottom.

  “I think he’s going way too fast,” his son said.

  Bobby reached the end of the slope where the snow came to an end. The tube stopped. Time stopped. Bobby did not. He was launched like a rag doll in snow pants, up into the air, as if he’d been fired from a slingshot, smack into a fence.

  He could have really been hurt. He could have died. It’s one of the funniest things I have ever seen.

  But he never should have done it.

  I made a similar mistake in college, putting my own butt in an inner tube and heading out into roaring rapids in upstate New York. I didn’t want to do it. It seemed like a dumb thing to do. But I caved in to the peer pressure from my friends and my girlfriend and found myself sitting on a school bus in my bathing suit. If you’re in a bathing suit, you should be in a pool, the ocean, or maybe a lake. You shouldn’t be on a school bus, even if that school bus is filled only with adults.

  We were being driven deep into the woods by a man who looked like the kind of guy you don’t want driving you into the woods. He was barefoot and had facial hair that either grew in patches or was nibbled away by the pet rat that was perched on his shoulder. He didn’t say much, but when he did he punctuated it by spitting on the floor of the bus.

  We all had to sign a form that absolved this man and his organization of anything bad that might happen to us, including death. A good way to live your life is to not do anything that requires you signing one of those forms. Anytime someone hands you a pen when you don’t have time to read it or have a lawyer present, just put the pen down and walk away.

  I’ve signed a whole bunch of these forms, right before I stepped onto a helicopter, joined a questionable snorkeling trip in Mexico, and was handed rented ski equipment. Sometimes I’ve even signed these forms as they took my children away to be strapped into a harness for something stupid like zip-lining.

  I don’t know why you would need to sign anything when you are tubing. No judge in the world is going to hold the tubing place liable for your dumb choice to go flying over waterfalls in a tire.

  You also have to question how enjoyable an activity really is if you have to get drunk in the middle of it. Tubing is so stupid that you have to start drinking as soon as you agree to do it. I was in charge of getting the beer because in our weird-looking group I was the most normal-looking one and I wasn’t.

  I had long curly hair and a tie-dyed shirt, was pretty fat, and wore those Velcro sandals called Tevas that were popular for a couple of weeks in the 1990s. If I didn’t look like one of Jesus’s apostles, I did look like one of the apostles’ fat friends.

  We were drinking the entire way up, along treacherous country roads that the driver and his rat seemed to know pretty well. They really enjoyed going around turns as quickly as possible so that we would all fall off our seats, and be smooshed against the windows.

  “Hang on,” he’d say much too late.

  As we got off the bus, it looked like the county jail had decided to give some of the hippie inmates a day in the country. The driver climbed up to the metal roof rack and started throwing inner tubes at us with a little too much glee.

  As everyone was trying to pick up their tube while not spilling their beer, I asked our driver to direct us to a safe spot to enter the river. He just spit and started up the bus. His rat gave us the finger as they took off, leaving us in a cloud of parking lot dust.

  We made our way to the water and started off splashing each other and gently drifting downstream as we got settled in. We had so much beer that it got its own inner tube. I held the rope attached to the beer tube like I was walking a dog.

  The scenery was actually pleasant as the deep green summer trees were waving us on with their giant maple leaves and mighty oak branches. A friendly fish or two would swim up to say hello. I was with my girlfriend, surrounded by friends, and full of youth and sunshine. You might think that this sounds nice. That it sounds like a pretty good time. And it was. For about five minutes.

  The first sign of trouble was when we picked up speed. Just a little faster, but fast enough that some in the group started to hoot. Whenever someone from your group starts to hoot, there’s a good chance you’re in trouble.

  The only thing louder was the constant, growing roar we heard in the distance. This was the sound of a roaring river. This ancient body of water that has been cutting through the earth’s crust for millions of years was being hurled to greater depths and smacking against rocks.

  How did this group of college kids with brains swimming in beer think they were going to master this body of water? On inner tubes. No handles. No motors. Not even paddles. Even lame people in canoes have paddles. Maniacs in kayaks have a two-sided paddle. Retirees in leisure wear on paddleboats have paddles. We were dumber than all of them. We didn’t have paddles. We had beer attached to a rope.

  And the beer was now going faster than I was. Beer was apparently excited about the rapids. Beer was so excited that it was pulling me like a friend rushing to the stage at a concert.

  The first rapids were like the little dips on a roller coaster. My friends were screaming, but they were fun, exaggerated screams as the river pulled us in our silly little tire boats quickly into itself and down between the rocks.

  And it worked. Somehow we got through. Sure, we were spun around, and a couple of us ended up backward, but we made it. We all did. Even the beer seemed to be swimming up to everyone and trading a beer for a pat on its head. We felt invincible.

  But now another roar began and it was more constant and ferocious than it was before. We fell silent. We were worried. We were concerned. We were screwed.

  This was not cute anymore. We were about to find out why we signed that stupid form. Even the beer was turning around, trying to head back upstream.

  My friend Chris, who was way ahead of us, was now really screaming and it was no longer that cute “ain’t this fun” scream. This was a scream of horror. Something bad was happening to him up around the bend and he wanted us to know that we should be paddling in the other direction or at least steering ourselves into a better position. But again, we couldn’t do any of that, because we were floating at the mercy of the river on a piece of rubber.

  We were so deep in the canyon that there was no more sunlight. The temperature dropped, the roar was deafening, and this was no longer fun. This was a place that you went to only if you made a mistake or were on some kind of Lord of the Rings quest.

  We were gaining speed. As Robert’s child said in the video, we were now going “way too fast.”

  I don’t remember much of it. I do remember seeing a nearby horizon line ahead of me where there shouldn’t have been one. I wondered why that was and why I was suddenly even with the tops of giant pine trees. And then I realized that I had reached the edge and that I was about to drop to my death over the falls.

  I also remember my girlfriend flying past and reaching out for me as if she were being tossed off a skyscraper. I was her only hope, but unlike Tom Cruise, I didn’t even try and catch her. I just watched her go over the side.

  I let go of t
he beer rope and tried to hold on to my tube, but it bounced me out of it as if it, too, were scared and didn’t need me messing with its chances. And then I dropped over the side of the falls like a stone, like a drunk, tubeless, Teva-kicking, beer-filled stone. I was immediately underwater and, as if someone were spraying me with a fire hose, was pushed deeper and deeper below the surface by this angry waterfall.

  Have you ever been knocked over by a powerful wave and had no idea what your body was doing or which way was up or if there even was an up anymore? At a certain point you just surrender. You might come out of it. You might die. But you don’t really care anymore. That was me, but instead of being in a rock-free sandy ocean, I was in a rock-filled river. And that was exactly what I hit, a giant rock, at the bottom of the river, first with my head and then with my entire body.

  I was like a wet leaf folding over the shape of the rock. My arms and legs were spread-eagled and I was stuck, pinned by centuries of momentum, and I was losing breath and I was hurt and pretty sure I was going to die. Die from tubing. What a horrible thing for everybody to have to try and say, without laughing, at my funeral.

  For a split second it actually became very peaceful. But then nature took over, as nature always does, and it pushed me loose. I was off the rock and back into the frantic washing machine, but now I saw light. It was the sun and I was rising. But I didn’t feel like it was calling to me as much as laughing at me. Laughing at this chubby, curly-haired dude who thought the river was a joke.

  I burst to the surface like a man taking his first breath. My girlfriend, who had skittered across the top of the rapids like a dainty flower, unscathed, raised her hands in triumph because her fat boyfriend was alive. My other friends cheered and said things like “Man, that was awesome,” and “We thought you were dead.”

  It wasn’t awesome. Breaking a couple of ribs on a rock at the bottom of a waterfall is stupid. It was also stupid that I had no choice but to get back on my tube and continue on because there was no other way out.