by Ned Vizzini
Ike is also a vampire enthusiast. He owns a huge collection of vampire books; he has dark robes, teeth, and vampire figurines strewn all over his room. He once told me he really was a vampire—he claimed he’d been abducted as a baby and taught “the ways of the night” in Costa Rica.
To complement his vampire fixation, Ike has a large collection of knives, which he buys from catalogs and keeps in his “Weapons Locker.” He also collects more exotic weapons: bolas, sai, and nun-chucks.* I started hanging out with him because he was just too weird to pass up. But as I came to know him, I discovered a genuinely kind person with a twisted sense of humor. We’ve had some fun times.
Once, in eighth grade, Ike and I cut school to protest something called Take Our Daughters to Work Day. We were irked—how come the girls got to visit their parents at work while we toiled over algebra? We made our own signs (mine: “Stop Reverse Sexism!” Ike’s: “Help! U R Oppressing Me!”) and walked down to Seventh Avenue—the main street of our neighborhood, Park Slope.**
We positioned ourselves in front of a coffee shop and paced in circles, yelling, “Equal rights now! Hey, hey, hey!” Not many people were sympathetic to our cause. In fact, almost everyone ignored us, although some women rolled their eyes, and one said, “Yeah, like you guys know jack about sexism.”
One guy was supportive—he drove by in a pickup truck, leaned out his window, yelled, “All right, fellas! Keep on truckin’,” pumped his fist, and drove off. Just when I was starting to think the whole Take Our Daughters to Work Day protest was a big success, our school principal, Mary, showed up. She had come down to Seventh Avenue in her own car. She personally drove Ike and me back to school, and then gave us detention for the next six weeks, until graduation.
In detention, we had to compile a report on the mental health of adolescent girls. I read Reviving Ophelia, and after sifting through accounts of bulimia, anorexia, and sexual abuse, I decided that teenage girls have it plenty rough; if they wanted to spend a day hanging out at their parents’ jobs, more power to them.*
But back to Wormwhole. We recorded two songs in Ike’s bedroom, “Pants in the Mail” and “Lumber.” They were both instrumentals, because there was no way I was banging the drumsticks together and singing at the same time. Ike was a terrific guitarist. For one thing, he actually had a guitar. For another, he had an instructional video, How to Play Guitar with Dean Hamill, which I borrowed and later lost. He could even tune. He couldn’t play chords, but who needs them?
As for percussion, I was solid on those drumsticks. Never missed a beat. I could even solo with them. Each of the songs had a good hook, a development, a solo, and a concluding section. I figured we could make a single, send it to radio stations, and be famous in a few weeks.
For some reason, though, nobody liked our music. I played it for my parents, and they hated it. I played it for my music teacher, and she said, “Don’t quit your day job.” I played it for other kids, and they gave me a look.* Eventually (i.e., after a couple days), we had to face facts: Wormwhole was a failure.
A few weeks later, though, while watching a music video and feeling misunderstood, I realized something: Wormwhole may have been a failure, but it wasn’t bad. And it isn’t bad, to this day. It’s just alternative. There’s a fine line between the two, and nobody knows where it is. Wormwhole was an alternative to alternative—our music was so alternative it would blow your mind.
First, we had no amps. Only conformists use amps. Second, we had no vocalist. Everyone’s got a vocalist; our lyrics were telepathic. Third, we had only two songs. Why write more? Fourth, parents, teachers, and (conformist) youth hated us—so we must have been good. Fifth, look at the name! Who knows what it means?
For all these reasons, and many more that I’ll think up later, you need our demo tape, Crap (and Lots of It). It features “Pants in the Mail” and “Lumber,” with five extra-special bonus tracks of me playing bass guitar and singing. The first five people who contact me by any means possible will be allowed to buy a copy. Just think: your parents won’t understand your music, your friends won’t understand your music—you’ll be the most alternative person ever.*
*See? I had to do a little research. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s easy writing a book.
*A bola is a piece of rope with a heavy ball on each end; you throw it, and it wraps around your target’s leg or neck. A sai is a three-pronged Japanese dagger. A nunchuck is two pieces of wood connected by a short chain. (You may know those last two from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.)
**I grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn. When we first moved there, it was a lesbian neighborhood—I saw more lesbian couples than straight ones. But after a couple of years, the lesbians moved out and the yuppies moved in. By the time I was in eighth grade, it was all coffee shops, video stores, and liberal ideals.
*Although I shouldn’t have been so wimpy. A few years later, Take Our Daughters to Work Day became Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day! Coincidence? Well. Probably.
*I saw this look a lot in junior high, elementary school, and all the way back to kindergarten. It was the “Ugh, Ned’s talking” look people gave me when they wanted me to shut up.
*As it happens, several people contacted me about this after the book was originally published. I had to tell them that I lost the demo (it was on cassette). But years later, I popped a blank tape into my tape player to see if it had music on it—and heard some medieval-type chanting, followed by the Wormwhole demo! It was put there by God! I transferred it to a computer and now it is available at nedvizzini.com/fun/#music.
FRESHMAN YEAR
STUY HIGH
When I arrived at Stuyvesant High School on September 9, I was already terrified. I was terrified of high school girls; I was terrified of high school cliques; I was terrified because I’d been told that if you stood near Stuyvesant at 8:00 A.M., the wave of teenagers going to class would trample you. You’d be ground into the ground. I’d heard that some people died that way.
Turned out I didn’t need to be so terrified. True, I didn’t do too well with those high school girls. And the cliques got on my nerves. But the wave of teenagers going to class became my friends, and I became one of them: head lowered, hood raised, sleepwalking into school with my heavy backpack, like everybody else.
Stuyvesant High School has been called “the crown jewel of the New York City public school system” and “the best high school in America.” It’s a big, beige, brick place: 3,000 kids, ten stories high, with its own bridge. New York politicians decided they didn’t need students getting run over on their way to the crown jewel, so they built a bridge over a highway to ensure us safe access. And that’s just for starters.
Stuy has a marble lobby with chandeliers straight out of the Plaza Hotel and the school’s motto carved in stone: Pro scienta atque sapienta.* There are three elevators and seven escalators, the computer rooms have new computers, the halls are fresh and clean, and even the bathrooms sparkle. It’s like going to school at Club Med. My dad has a theory that the whole place was financed by the Mafia as a scheme to jack up surrounding property values. It cost one hundred twenty million bucks to build.
THE STUDENTS
I came to school that first day with a sci-fi paperback tucked under my arm. I wasn’t the only one. Stuy was full of kids with books; every other person seemed to have one, to defend against social interaction. I saw people going to school reading books, and walking through the halls with their faces buried in books. As the year progressed, the paperbacks gave way to fat textbooks, but the result was the same—everybody had a book.
Besides that, the only common thread among Stuy students was that we’d all passed “The Stuy Test.”* Admission to the school was based solely on a special test called the SSHSAT, given in eighth grade. The test was supposed to keep Stuy chock-full of smart, industrious kids, but somehow that didn’t work with my class. We were a random collection of nerds, jocks, geniuses, potheads, drunks, tortured poets, young Republican
s, shifty-eyed loners, and just plain idiots. That first day, I met a freshman who was taking calculus and a twenty-two-year-old who still hadn’t graduated. I saw girls who looked like they spent all their free time on their hair, and guys who looked like they spent all their free time down at the acne farm. I saw young men who’d stop in the middle of the hall to do one-armed push-ups, and young men who’d scrawled “God Is Gay” in Whiteout on their backpacks.
But beneath all that, everyone at Stuy was nice. Even if they snarled and huffed, the seniors didn’t beat you up. People mumbled “Sorry” if they bumped into you in the halls; they said “Excuse me” before charging past you on the stairs. Nobody went out of their way to bother you because everyone was incredibly self-motivated. The kids at Stuy cared about their grades, their problems. I fell quickly into that pattern.
Only a week into my freshman year, my train of thought was acting hyperactive. I’d be sprinting to class thinking, “Math, math, did you do it? Yeah, okay, what about English? Are you sure? Oh, wait: lab! No, lab’s tomorrow, it’s okay.…” I didn’t have time to bother anyone else.
And no one else had time to bother me. I would’ve had to run through the halls naked, covered in chocolate sauce, for any seniors to acknowledge my presence. I came to view that as an advantage. I never had to worry about what others thought of me because they didn’t think of me at all. They were concentrating on grades.
GRADES
Stuy gave number grades—84, 92, 100—instead of As and Bs. Every year, the administration talked about switching to a “nicer” grading system: letter grades of E, S, N, U (Excellent, Satisfactory, Needs Improvement, Unsatisfactory) or Pass/Fail. That never happened. Number grades made us work harder, and when we worked harder, we went to Good Colleges, and when we went to Good Colleges, the school’s record looked great.
Grades were a touchy subject at Stuy. There was an etiquette about them. As they were handed out, you didn’t turn to your friend and ask, “What are your grades?” You asked, “What’d you get?”—putting the blame for a potentially bad grade on the teacher. If you asked someone what they “got,” you had to be ready to answer the same question yourself. If you saw someone visibly distraught over their grades, you didn’t bug them—it was taboo. And you never, never bragged about what you got.
It was like a ballet, the intricate dance of the grades. Kids didn’t bellow “Seventy-five! You suck!” or “Yes! I got a ninety-eight!” But we were all thinking those things. We hid our celebration, gloating, and anguish, only revealing ourselves with subtle gestures: a slight smile, a clenched fist.
CLIQUES
The constructive part of the Stuy grade obsession was that it distracted us from our social lives. When you’re worrying about physics labs and David Copperfield,* you don’t have time to torture your peers. Stuy’s student body wasn’t vicious; it was simply separated into distinct groups that hoarded goods, traveled as one, and ostracized others.
First, we had the preppies. The preppies were okay; they had nice clothes, and they didn’t smell bad. They all seemed to come from the same junior high school, and they recognized each other instantly on the first day. The girls were small and pretty, the guys well-built with great hair. The preppies always seemed busy, but you never really knew what they were up to. They would go off in little groups—to eat? hang out? do drugs? have orgies? They’d come back from weekends with amazing stories (so-and-so got arrested, so-and-so performed this act upon so-and-so) that you could neither confirm nor deny. Generally, each preppy did one nonpreppy thing to gain credibility, such as playing in a band or being a graffiti artist.
Speaking of artists, there were those, too: red-eyed, purple-haired poets, guys in turtlenecks, girls with hemp bracelets. These people loved seeing their names in obscure school magazines, and I was jealous of them because they were jaded. I wanted so badly to be jaded at Stuy. I wanted to walk around slumped over, mumbling cynically to myself, proving that even at age fourteen, I’d been there, done that.
There were the wanna-be slackers, too. Preppies with stubble, they had as much money as the rich kids but spent it on skateboards, cigarettes, Rollerblades, punk clothes, and hair dye. One of them wore a name tag that read, “Hello, My Name Is … Satan.” Like the preppies, who congregated around a Snapple machine by the lobby, the wanna-be slackers had their own hangout: a small concrete ledge called “The Wall.” They stayed out on The Wall during school, playing chess and exchanging snotty small talk.
Stuyvesant also had some great sports teams—in particular our swimming squad, the Penguins, won the city championships almost every year—so we had jocks. I didn’t have much contact with them; they were quiet when they weren’t hooting, and they generally kept to themselves. I had friends who became jocks, though. They would start the transformation over a period of weeks, spending more and more time after school with the team; then all of a sudden they’d be getting girlfriends and snazzy logo sweatshirts and talking to me in only the most cursory way.
Behind the jocks, artists, nerds, preppies, chess nuts, heavy-metal guys, folksy guitar players, scary kids with black trench coats, neo-Nazis, and what’s-his/her-names was the general collection of bozos and rejects that I hung out with. Most of them were Magic players—guys who spent their free time at Stuy playing a fantasy card game called Magic: The Gathering.* We took over a corner of the sixth floor, where we sat on the ground with our cards. We came and went in shifts, playing during our lunch periods, running off to class as the bells rang. We couldn’t really remember each other’s names so we just yelled, “Hey you, you wanna play?” It was a desperate frenzy, kids playing Magic all the time, thinking about the cards so they wouldn’t have to think about anything else.
I didn’t only play Magic; between games, I befriended some computer people, some druggies, some music nuts, and some loners. The loners were interesting; they just walked around. No one teased them. No one really noticed them. They just … walked around.
THE GRIND
After a week at Stuy, I started hearing about how hard it was to get up in the morning and how “the daily grind is getting to me, man.” Once-enthusiastic kids were complaining like whiny forty-year-olds in dead-end jobs.
The workload was hard. Freshman year, we had up to three hours of homework each night, and that worsened as time went on. A biology teacher once put it to me this way: “Getting through Stuy is easy. You have three options: good grades, social success, and sleep. You can only have two out of three.” I chose grades and sleep. The people who chose grades and social success (getting drunk on the weekends when they should’ve been studying and whatnot) ended up with some problems. They’d come to school bleary-eyed and sleep in the hallways. But missing sleep was cool—it gave them something to brag about. They’d meet each other and say, “Man, I am so tired. I got, like, twenty hours of sleep this whole week, and I partied all weekend.” Response: “Yeah … I’m not kidding, man, I have three tests today. I was up studying for bio until four.” A war of antisleep bragging rights.
Some days, I went to school on no sleep, but adrenaline got me through. When I took tests, I always got a palpable high—my brain buzzed with endorphins as I stared at those questions. Stuyvesant was a big, exciting place, and just being in the building was a rush for me. I’d walk through the door, no longer a powerless little kid. I was a ninja, prowling the halls in search of good grades.
THAT LEARNING STUFF
Stuyvesant had an interesting take on education. The plan, it seemed, was to cram a student’s head full of information, test the student repeatedly, and then move on to an unrelated subject with frightening speed. It was a shock, after studying digestion for a month, to hear your biology teacher announce, “Okay, this unit is over. Forget about the human digestive system. On to locomotion in the paramecium.”
But I did forget about the human digestive system, and quickly, because it was no longer on the test. Everything at Stuy was either meaningless or on the test. “It’s not
on the test? Dude, are you serious, she’s not testing us on this?” Smack. That would be the sound of a textbook closing. If something wasn’t on the test, you just closed your book and smiled.
Problem was, even things that weren’t on the test could show up on the final. Stuy finals tended to be standardized, so every biology class took an exam written collectively by the biology department. That meant every final included at least one question you couldn’t possibly answer because your teacher had screwed up and not taught it. The final exams at Stuy were everything: the products of your labor, the causes of your anxiety, the details that kept you up at night, the challenges that, once met, oh boy. School’s … out … for … summer! All you had now was a vague sense of dread that you’d messed up and wouldn’t get into a Good College.
I went into Stuyvesant High School terrified; I came to think of the place not as a terror, but as a manageable form of pain. Not a sharp, wincing pain that went away quickly—a chronic, dull, four-year ache that, if pressed on the right way, felt kind of good.
*Pro scienta atque sapienta means “For science and wisdom.” There’s a reason I took Latin for four years, man, and it wasn’t just to keep me from learning a language that might immerse me in the real world!
*“The Test” is on this page–this page.
*A book by Charles Dickens. Chapter 1 is “I Am Born.”
*Details of my Magic obsession are on this page–this page.
FIFTEEN MINUTES