Teen Angst? Naaah ...

by Ned Vizzini

  *This was a strange scene, a kind of camp love-in. At one point, the counselors asked, “Who didn’t make a new friend this year? Raise your hand.” One girl raised her hand and said she had made no new friends, and she hated the place. I should’ve gone out with her.

  SOPHOMORE YEAR

  CABLE ACCESS SAYS NO

  A cheerful voice answered the phone. “Long Island University. Media department. This is Mike speaking.”

  “Hey, Mike,” I greeted in my business voice.* “I have this movie I want to put on cable access TV.”

  His voice became cold and critical. “Are you a student here?”

  “A student where?”

  “At LIU.”

  Of course, LIU. I felt stupid.

  “Well, no, but I am a student. High school.” I had learned to always mention that I was a student. Milk it for what it was worth.

  “Uh-huh.” Mike sounded like he was writing something down. “What’s your movie about?”

  “It’s about this killer turtle that eats people. I’ve seen other movies on cable access, and it’s on the same, you know, level.”

  “Well, come down to the studio on Monday, and we’ll have a viewing, okay?” A disclosure of directions followed. I wrote them on the back of my hand in green marker.

  Attack of the Killer Turtle is a thirteen-minute film about life, love, and preteen girls getting eaten by a giant rabid reptile. I had filmed it over the summer with my cousin Sam. We were both fifteen and visiting our grandmothers in Massachusetts. We were bored. Sam had a video camera and a pet turtle.

  We assembled some friends and shot the film in three days. Budget: zero dollars. For months afterward, Turtle lay dormant in one of my drawers. I showed it to my immediate family and friends but never hoped it would achieve greatness—not until I started watching Brooklyn Cable Access Television.

  BCAT has three main types of programming: simulcasts of college radio stations, leftist political rantings, and fanatical religious shows. I got addicted very fast. After school, I’d slump on the couch and watch The Fine Arts Show (a showcase for Navajo artifacts), followed by Penelope Pitstop’s* radio hour.

  Being a diligent, community-minded youth, I decided to see if I could get Attack of the Killer Turtle on BCAT. The closed-circuit LIU station seemed like a good place to start. So the Monday after talking to Mike, I stuffed my VHS tape in my ratty coat and headed to the university, convincing James to come along.

  James, a tall guy with glasses, has been my friend for a while. I envy him; he’s one of those naturally cool, quiet people with built-in mystique. If you say, “Hey man, how’s it going?” he’ll wait five seconds before answering, “Fine.” If you start a conversation that doesn’t interest him, he’ll be silent for a half hour. Plus he has a trench coat. Whenever we’re together, he’s the chill guy hovering in the background; I’m the manic nut talking a mile a minute.

  James and I caught a number sixty-seven bus and sat in the back among the roaches. We discussed (well, mostly I discussed and James nodded) how roaches get on buses. Do they migrate at bus terminals? Enter via grungy passengers?

  The sixty-seven stopped at Atlantic Avenue. We trudged past Kennedy Fried Chicken* to Long Island University. College kids were everywhere, with their slick hair, glitter makeup, and nose rings—as if I didn’t see enough bodywork in high school.

  James and I walked to the information desk. “Hi, I’m looking for Mike in the media department,” I announced.

  “Well,” said the wrinkled, androgynous attendant, “it’s near the library.”

  “Where’s that?”

  The attendant sighed and shuffled papers while it directed me. “Go left, then right down the stairs, then across the courtyard, then up the elevator, then ask somebody.”

  Yeah, okay. James and I quickly got lost in the maze of LIU. By trial and error, we reached the school library and questioned the librarian. “Oh, media department? In the basement.” We took the elevator and entered what appeared to be a lounge: circular table, women drinking coffee, a Mac Classic on top of a file cabinet. Sitting at the coffee table was a man with very small feet, a shrunken bald head, and a puffy blue jacket. A football was the first thing that came to mind.

  “Mike?”

  “Yes.” He shook my hand sharply.

  “We’re here to show you the movie,” I reminded him. “Remember? I’m Ned, and this is my friend James. He, uh, helped with editing,” I lied.

  “Let’s go see it,” said Mike. He led us into an oversized closet full of VCRs, monitors, and strange black boxes. I handed him Attack of the Killer Turtle; he slipped it into a VCR and hit play. Unexpectedly, I filled with pride as the blank monitor flushed with color. James mumbled, Beavis-like, “This is gonna be cool.”

  The film opens with a slow pan of the Atlantic Ocean. A cassette recording of the Violent Femmes’* “Color Me Once” provides eerie ambiance. The camera zooms into the waves and—cut—focuses on a gargantuan turtle.

  Now, offscreen, the turtle was a four-inch-long reptile that swam around in a grungy aquarium all day.** But when we shot the scene, we zoomed in on the turtle, shook the camera around, and played “x.y.u.” from Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness***—which added up to a fairly fierce-looking beast. I glanced at Mike. He looked impressed. Cut—two girls in swimsuits on a dock. Inspired dialogue:

  “What a beautiful day for a swim.”

  “Yeah. I have a funny feeling about this, though.”

  “Why? We go swimming every day.”

  “I just have a … premonition.”

  Nevertheless, they get in the water.

  The next scene was complex to shoot. We sprinkled some turtle food in the aquarium, so the reptile would swim to the surface and nibble. We cut to the girls, screaming and flailing their arms in the water. If you squinted real hard and remembered that a bunch of bored teens were in charge, it looked like the turtle was eating the girls.

  Cut—the police department (the interior of Sam’s grandmother’s house). Sam takes a phone call from Inspector Barzoni (me), detailing the horrific deaths of two adolescent girls at the hands of a crazed aquatic reptile.

  “I’ll come meet you at the docks,” he says with action-movie attitude.

  Cut—he jumps in a car. This scene was the most fun to film and the most stultifyingly boring to watch. We thought it would be cool to have fifteen-year-old Sam drive his grandmother’s car at thirty-five miles per hour on a deserted Massachusetts road. But the scene was shot from the backseat by Sam’s eleven-year-old brother, and it lasted almost five dialogue-free minutes.

  “This part’s too long,” Mike said.

  I looked over at James. He looked worried. I made the execution gesture with my finger and neck.

  The film goes downhill from there. Inspector Barzoni discovers that the only way to kill the turtle is to stab it in the eyeballs with a kitchen knife, which leads to the stunning climax: Sam and I swimming around in the Atlantic Ocean, slashing at the water with rusty knives, yelling, “Die, turtle!” The turtle dies.* The tape ends.

  “Well.” Mike turned to us with the adult-giving-bad-news-to-kids expression. “It’s good. I mean, I like what you boys are doing. But we need the original footage. We need to edit. Add sound and music. Make this look like a real movie.”

  “That hurts,” James mouthed.

  Mike handed me the cassette. “We can’t edit this VHS tape,” he said. “What we need is the original footage, y’know? Direct from the camera?”

  “Well, maybe I can get the originals,” I answered halfheartedly. There was no way I was getting the originals. I’d lost them months ago.

  “The important thing,” Mike said, “is that you keep in touch.”

  “Okay.” I smiled, pretending to be reassured. It was Mike’s job to reassure and my job to smile. Despite the pleasantries, I knew full well what had just happened. I had been rejected by LIU. There was no chance I was getting my movie on cable a
ccess—the medium that features women in purple robes ululating at all hours of the night.

  As we walked out of the place, James and I decided Attack of the Killer Turtle was simply too groundbreaking for cable access. What we needed to do was get it on the independent film circuit. But first things first. What we really needed to do was eat some Kennedy Fried Chicken.*

  *I have a great business voice. In every band I’ve played in, I’ve been the guy who makes all the phone calls because of my business voice.

  *I don’t know why Penelope didn’t become a national sensation. She was a rock DJ with a super-sexy voice who talked about which celebrities got her hot. All the callers were male.

  *Right. Kennedy Fried Chicken. For some reason, Brooklyn is full of imitation KFCs: Kennedy FC, Kansas FC—dumpy places that capitalize on the wholesome name of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  *A dirty folky rock band. I once saw the lead singer running through an airport, just like any other idiot trying to catch a plane.

  **Sam actually loved the turtle very much and kept it well fed, but he never named it. It didn’t need land like any other reptile I’ve ever seen; it just spent all day swimming around in its aquarium.

  ***A big, long rock album, the last one to be popular before hip-hop took over.

  *Let’s clear this up, before the animal-rights people hear about it. We did not stab the turtle in the eyes. We jumped into Massachusetts Bay and slashed at the water with kitchen knives. The turtle’s presence and subsequent death were sort of assumed. The only animal harmed during filming was me—I cut my foot open on a barnacle.

  *Guess what? The movie was found and is available at www.nedvizzini.com/fun/#turtle.

  ROLL WITH IT

  Since freshman year, I’ve been taking karate classes at True Power Martial Arts. I take these classes because Mom makes me. She thinks it’s necessary for growing boys to have regular physical activity. I used to play soccer,* and before that, I’m sure I did some other thing.

  The classes at True Power consist of stretching, punching, kicking, and performing complex self-defense techniques. I attend twice a week in the evenings. I could go in the afternoons, but the karate school has a very large window, and I’m afraid my friends will see me training as they walk home from school.

  See, I hate karate. It involves physical confrontation, and physical confrontation scares the hell out of me. I’ll pass a guy my age on the street and panic for no reason—clenching and unclenching my fists in my pockets and yawning to try to appear cool. Sometimes, I dream that I’m fighting people, endless opponents, but I punch too slowly, as if I’m underwater. It’s a stupid phobia; I live with it.

  Now, I’m not knocking my karate school. Jessica Green, who has been an Olympic competitor in martial arts, teaches the classes. “Sabunim” (her formal title) is constructive and patient with me, as she is with all of her students. Still, I just don’t get certain things, such as “rolling my hips.” In that stretching exercise, we sit on the floor, spread our legs, and lean forward—attempting to make our chests touch the ground. In every class, three or four people do this move perfectly. But my posture is so screwed up (all those hours hunched in front of the Nintendo) that I can barely get my hands on the floor.

  “Ned, roll your hips,” Sabunim tells me. She comes over and pushes on my back to make me stretch lower.

  My “focus” is also a problem. I tend to space out in class, humming some song or fretting over tomorrow’s test on cellular respiration; Sabunim has to jolt me out of deep thought.

  “Ned! Are you focused?”

  I nod, wiping sweat from my brow. “Yes, Sabunim.” Then I tune out ASAP until the next interruption.

  My uniform causes problems, too. Called a gi, it harbors a deep-seated hatred for me and humiliates me whenever possible. Actually, the top part of the uniform isn’t so bad. But the pants, through some loophole in physical law, manage to be too tight and to fall off. During jumping jacks, I have to fix them constantly, or they’ll expose my boxers. Then, in response, the pants tighten up, forming a noose around my abdomen. So while everybody else is working out, I’m in a corner adjusting my clothing.

  As if my own failings weren’t enough, every one of my karate classes includes seven- and eight-year-old Wonderkids. They started karate when they were, like, two. They’re always focused; their hips roll in directions that make me queasy. Their pants are perfectly ironed and don’t fall off.

  It gets better. My sister Nora is one of the Wonderkids. She’s seven years younger than me, but her kicks and push-ups are better than mine—and she knows it. Thankfully, we don’t attend the same class, but every Saturday, she comes home wearing her gi and shows me some new, sadistic contortion.

  Of course, Nora and the rest of the Wonderkids are around four feet tall, which gives me a fighting advantage. And they see me as a role model—they look at how I kick during class and give me high fives. So what? When I was eight, I looked up to all fifteen-year-olds, regardless of how spastic they were. Soon all the Wonderkids will be Wonderteens, and they’ll be smirking at my hip rolls like everybody else.

  On Wednesday nights, we have sparring* classes. Everyone fights in rounds for an hour. There’s a guy named Brendan who only comes on Wednesdays. He’s about six feet two and two hundred pounds, with tree trunks for legs. Sparring with him is like taking on a swinging girder—at any time, he can just kick a leg straight out and topple me. Once or twice each Wednesday, as we rotate partners, he knocks the wind out of me. Sabunim has to rub my back until I can breathe again before she encourages me to keep fighting.

  Jessica Green’s True Power Martial Arts is like my high school’s evil twin. Everything that I can do at Stuyvesant—concentrate, participate in class, keep my pants on—I can’t manage in karate. I’m pretty anonymous at Stuy, but in karate, everyone knows my name.

  Maybe the real reason that I go to karate class is because I need something to be bad at. I’ve always been good at school stuff: math, reading, tests, obedience. Until karate, my only problem was talking out of turn in class. Now I have something to be bad at twice a week, over and over, without hope of improvement. The humiliation is becoming addictive.

  *When I was eight, I played in a soccer league for a season. All the other teams had cool names (Tigers, Condors), but I got stuck on a team with an insane coach named Mr. Sack, who insisted on calling us “The Sack Attack.” The Sack Attack went 0–12 that season. I was the goalie.

  *Sparring means “controlled fighting.” It’s two people getting together and beating on each other for two minutes.

  HERE COMES TROUBLE

  “Are you a virgin?” she asked, speaking slowly and deliberately.

  “Of course,” I said, nodding several times. Perfectly reasonable question.

  “Well, I lost my virginity … ah … the summer between ninth and tenth grades. Don’t lose it too soon.”

  Oh, sure, that’s a big problem of mine. Losing it too soon.

  “How about, you know, getting to third base?* Have you ever done that?”

  “Uh, no,” I gulped.

  “Uh-huh.”

  She sipped her drink. There was silence. I saw what was coming: more questions.

  “So you never got laid? Have you ever felt a girl’s breasts?”

  After each of these, I shook my head, and she looked even more stunned.

  I stopped her with a speech. “Uh, I don’t think you understand. I’m a nerd. See, what we do is”—I counted on my fingers—“(1) go to school, (2) get good grades, (3) come home, (4) play Magic. I’m just not good with girls.”

  She didn’t give up. “Are your parents really overprotective or something?”

  “Nope. They’re great.”

  “And no girls like you?”

  “Maybe some do. I don’t talk to them much. It’s probably my crooked mouth.”

  “Your mouth? Noooo. I don’t think it’s crooked. I think it’s very sexy.”

  Whoa. I was talking with Amy
Sohn, New York Press columnist, at the paper’s annual “Best of Manhattan” party.* I had wanted to meet her all evening. She wrote some amazingly dirty things in a weekly newspaper read by a hundred thousand people.

  I liked her. She was shorter than me, wearing something black. Stylish red glasses. Perfectly arched eyebrows. A childlike face. She reminded me of a fifth-grade teacher—not my fifth-grade teacher, a brown-toothed psychotic who had throttled my friend Ben** during class—but a nice, normal teacher.

  “Well …,” she said, more casually than before, as I sipped my cola. “If you ever do want to lose your virginity, call me. I’ll loan you my body.”*

  My brain, which had churned out clever anecdotes just moments before, shut down. Was I being offered sexual favors by an older woman? Nah. Must have misheard.

  “I’m sorry?” I squeaked.

  “I said,” she moved in close, slowly mouthing each word, “I’ll loan you my body.”

  For a few moments, before cynicism kicked in, I was utterly thrilled. Blood rushed to my ears. I inhaled sharply.

  “That’s a kind offer, Amy,” was all I could say.

  Images raced through my mind. Lisa, last year, wearing a dark bra under a see-through shirt, licking her lips at me during class, and then telling me later she was just messing with me. Rebecca, in fifth grade, staring at me and mouthing the words, “I want a vacuum”** over and over. Girls liked to see me squirm. I guess Amy did, too.

  “Don’t forget,” she continued. “I’ll call you. We can have lunch. Or you call me.”

  “Okay,” I said dumbly before grabbing my backpack* and running outside. The cool air cleared my mind.

  She’d been joking, of course. Still, she’d told me to call her. I debated whether to do so for two days. It was nerve-racking to call a girl for anything but homework. Finally, I left a rambling message on her smarmy answering machine, asking when we could have lunch.