Teen Angst? Naaah ...

by Ned Vizzini

  I got out of the wheelchair and hopped the last ten feet to my locker. I opened my lock, grabbed my backpack and my Magic cards, and hauled them over to the wheelchair, where I sat down and put my stuff on my lap. Then I got out of the room as fast as possible (which wasn’t very fast), because the whole scene was beginning to remind me of Event Horizon.*

  Outside, some girls were hanging out at their school lockers in the hall—the lockers near the guys’ changing room all belonged to attractive females. They glanced at me inquisitively before checking me off as someone they’d dismissed before. The wheelchair and a swollen, naked foot warranted second glances, but not thirds—and certainly not any help. I wheeled back to the nurse’s office.

  I needed to fill out some official papers: How did I injure myself? Where on my body? Where in the building? The point of the paperwork, I figured, was to prove that the school was in no way responsible for my falling down and that all the professionals involved had treated me properly.

  I asked Margie about her experiences as a high school nurse.

  “Been here twelve years,” she told me.

  “What’s the stupidest thing you ever saw?”

  Her eyes lit up. “Oh, definitely, when this girl came in holding three teeth in her hand. She’d been sliding down an escalator handrail, see, and she flew off the end, right into a wall. So I tell her, ‘I need to call your father—what’s his number?’ And she says, ‘I dunno.’ She has no idea what her father’s number is, doesn’t even know where he works. I have to call some friend who calls the uncle who calls the father.”

  “Good story.”

  “Stupid girl. Really. They took her away, gave her some new teeth. I see her around sometimes.”

  Eventually, a phone rang in the nurse’s office. My dad had arrived. I wheeled down to the chandelier-lit Stuyvesant lobby, kicked open the doors, and rolled across the sidewalk to the curb, where the family van awaited. Mom was in the front seat, looking distressed at my condition. Dad sat behind the wheel, wearing sunglasses against the glare.

  “My goodness, honey, are you okay?” Mom leapt from the van and grabbed the back of my chair.

  “Well, I’ve been stumbling around like an idiot for a while,” I said. “And I’ve been blown away by the support I’ve received from friends … and from my dear father.”

  Dad was still sitting in the driver’s seat, with his hands on the wheel.

  “Jim, you’re despicable,” Mom said. “Get out here and help your son.”

  “Hmmmm? Oh, yes.” Dad smiled. He was just messing around. He got out of the van and helped me into the backseat. “How you doing, son?” he asked. “This injury might be good for you; it’ll give you a chance to take a load off.”

  As I climbed into the van, I saw my math teacher, Mr. Pingeon, standing on the sidewalk taking a cigarette break. Apparently, he had no teachers’ lounge to smoke in. He waggled his finger at me, grinning. Everybody loves a wheelchair.

  *For some reason, the gym was on the third floor but the locker room was on the fifth floor—ask the people who built my high school.

  *Event Horizon is the scariest movie ever made. In it a ship travels through a black hole and comes back inherently evil. Sounds stupid, but when the ship starts killing people by depressurizing them, and Sam Neill is running around with his body all cut up, and Laurence Fishburne is on fire, and people are ripping their own eyes out, believe me, it’s not cool.

  THE VIEW

  I have a short and brutal history with television. When I was a baby, Mom somehow got me in a diaper commercial that ran on network TV for months. I never saw it—first, I was a baby; second, no one taped it because VCRs weren’t around yet (at least in my family). I never did any more diaper ads, either, because I was a “bad baby”—the kind who scream and cry like normal children, as opposed to the “good babies”* who sit still while being taped for television commercials.

  Then, when I was nine or ten, Nickelodeon came to my school and taped our fourth-grade class cleaning up a local park for a segment called “The Big Help.”** The idea was to show kids helping the environment. On one of the Big Help promos, I was featured in extreme close-up, screaming, “Heeeelp!” That appearance prompted calls from my cousins in Philadelphia (“Ned, you’re on TV! You’re on TV!”).

  My third chance came the June between junior and senior year. I was called by The View, a nationally syndicated talk show, where five female “personalities” sit on a couch for an hour, discussing current events and doling out advice. I was called because the producers of the show wanted me on as a guest—they had seen an article I’d written for The New York Times Magazine.

  Okay, full story. In the spring of that year, the editor of The New York Times Magazine, who had seen my essays in New York Press, decided I would be a good person to contribute to the magazine’s “Being Thirteen” issue—an in-depth survey of thirteen-year-olds in America. I was commissioned to write an advice column for a typical thirteen-year-old. I did the job. The article appeared that May, and the Times paid me one thousand dollars.* I thought that was the end of it. But then Ronnie, this guy from The View, called and asked if I was interested in being a guest on the show. He offered me two front-row seats at a live broadcast to see what it was like.

  I flipped. I’d always wanted to be on TV—real TV, not diaper commercials or “Big Help” ads—for all the typical reasons. Doesn’t everybody want to be on TV for the same stupid reasons? Fame, money, anonymous adoration that somehow fixes all your problems? Enough of writing silly little articles, dude—I was ready for the Big Time.

  There was just one problem. Ronnie was giving me two tickets.* I’d learned that any time adults give you two tickets to anything, they expect you to bring a girl, and I didn’t have a girl to bring. Not even a prospect. I could always bring some guy friend, but then the View people might think I was gay and book me as “gay teen voice, Ned Vizzini.” I didn’t want to misrepresent the gay community.

  So I convinced Ronnie to give me four tickets; that way, I could show up with three buddies, like the typical, normal, heterosexual male I was trying to become. With the tickets clinched, I started making phone calls.

  First, I phoned Hector, my drummer friend. I played in two bands in high school (neither was as good as Wormwhole),** and Hector drummed in both of them. He looked like a drummer: short, dirty, with a huge forehead. He walked like a caveman, and he was brutally honest and loyal.

  “Hey, Hector, you wanna crash a TV show?” I tried to sound cool.

  “Oh, wow! Yeah! Sure! What show?”

  “I got free tickets. VIP tickets.”

  “What show?”

  “We get to stay in the executive lounge.”

  “What show?”

  “Uh … The View.”

  “The View?” Pause. “I’ve never heard of The View.”

  “Yeah, I know. Sorry.”

  I got this reaction from Ike and Owen when I called them, too. It was tough to get them excited about a show that’s essentially a group of women chatting for an hour.

  Owen couldn’t go, so the next morning, it was just Hector, Ike, and me, meeting in the F station. I quickly assessed that we had a clothing problem. I had dressed up for The View, wearing a collared shirt, a belt, and Rockport shoes. Ike, who looked even buffer than the last time I’d seen him, was wearing all black, of course, with steel-toed boots. Hector had shaggy black hair, flannel-shirt-over-T-shirt, faded jeans, and sneakers. My friends weren’t presentable, and somehow, the contrast between them and me made me unpresentable, too.

  “Are we gonna be on TV?” Ike asked, breathless, as we piled into the F train.

  “No, we’re in the audience, remember?” I grabbed a strap. “We’re not guests. If everything goes right, I might be a guest someday.”

  “So, we’re not gonna be on TV?” Hector shrugged. “Figures.”

  “Maybe when they do pan shots of the audience, you’ll be on for, like, a tenth of a second.”

/>   “Yes!” Ike and Hector high-fived.

  As we pulled into Columbus Circle, I checked someone else’s watch. 10:10.

  Not good. I was supposed to be at the View studios at 10:00, and this wasn’t some appointment I could miss. This was TV. I punched Hector and Ike to get their attention, and we ran out of the subway toward the studio. As we passed a Barnes & Noble, I lost track of Hector. Turning around, I saw him conversing with some guy sitting on the sidewalk. “Hector!” I screamed. “Hurry!”

  “Hold on, Ned! I’m talking to Rocco!”

  “You’re—you’re talking to Rocco?!” This was too much. These people were ruining my chance for world fame. “Who the hell is Rocco?!”

  Hector walked up to me. “Look,” he whispered, “Rocco’s my friend, okay? I know he looks homeless, but he’s not. He just dropped out of school a few months ago—”

  “Oh that’s great.”

  “—and he doesn’t really have anything to do today, y’know? So I was wondering if maybe he could have the extra ticket, y’know? The extra ticket to the show? So he can come, too? How’s that sound?” Hector smiled.

  I looked at Rocco. He bore a striking resemblance to Hector. He waved at me. And I figured, what the hell, we were already a motley crew. Might as well go all out.

  “Okay, man,” I sighed. “He can have the extra ticket.”

  “Really? You da man, Ned.” Hector hugged me and brought Rocco over for introductions. We shook hands.

  “Nice to … meet you, Ned.” Rocco spoke slowly and openly, like he’d been shell-shocked or lobotomized, both of which seemed possible. He had rat-black hair, jeans ripped at the knee, and a decrepit backpack, which I guess he was living out of. “Where are we headed?”

  “To The View. We’re late.” With Rocco in tow, we ran the next two blocks to the studio.

  We entered the glass doors of ABC around 10:20. The place was packed with middle-aged women, waiting in line for their seats. Televisions were everywhere, playing the View-like talk show that preceded The View.

  I approached the reception desk. “Hi, I’m Ned Vizzini. I’m here as a guest of Ronnie.” I pulled out Ronnie’s business card. Ike, Hector, and Rocco seemed impressed.

  “Oh, Ned, we’ve been expecting you. Could you wait just a few minutes?”

  “Sure,” I turned back to my friends. “We have to wait a few minutes.”

  Hector was suspicious. “What happened to waiting in the executive lounge?”

  “Yeah,” Ike said. “Aren’t we vee-eye-pees?”

  “Uh, I guess not. Just calm down.”

  We stood there for fifteen minutes, talking; I got to know Rocco a little better. At some point, I noticed that Ike, who’d been very quiet, was standing in a pool of sweat. His entire face was dripping with it.

  “Ike, are you okay?”

  “Heh, heh,” he smiled at me. “Forgot to take my medication this morning.” He smiled again.

  “You forgot your pills?” I never knew exactly what Ike’s pills did. I just knew that the last time he hadn’t taken them, we got in a fight and he locked me in his bathroom.

  “Yeah,” he said, wiping himself with an already sweaty hand. “It’ll be fine.” Hector and Rocco were talking about trends in contemporary alternative metal music.

  Just then, Ronnie appeared, a young glasses-wearing guy with great hair. He strode from behind the reception desk and greeted me, the doofy white boy. I introduced him to Ike, the sweaty Mayan, and Hector and Rocco, the squatters. Ronnie grimaced but put on a game face and shook everyone’s hand.

  “Ike, Rocco, Hector, nice to meet you. Come this way.” Ronnie motioned us to follow him to the line of audience members. Then—this was my best power trip in months—he sidestepped the line and led us down the corridor like kings. The women stared and mumbled, “Who are they?” There was even a velvet rope between us and the common View viewers.

  “Wow, we’re da man,” Ike said.

  Ronnie showed us to our front-row seats. The studio looked like heaven’s living room: overstuffed couches, shiny coffee tables, and a fake New York City skyline under museum-bright lighting. The crew scurried around, putting this and that in position. But it was the audience that blew me away.

  All around, filling the VIP seats next to ours, were seventy- and eighty-year-old women with pastel leisurewear (went well with the lighting) and magically immobile hair. They wore oversized earrings and parked huge purses on their laps. I listened to them chitter at each other. They had come from Maryland, North Carolina, and Florida; they couldn’t wait to get back and tell their friends about the show. Some of them seemed to be in groups, like a View tour—all with matching shirts.

  I glanced over my shoulder and saw the younger women—the ones we had passed in line before—in the back rows. It was a hierarchy: the older you were, the closer you could sit to the stage. We’d broken all the rules by being young and male; the women eyed us with total contempt.

  “Okay,” I told Hector, Ike, and Rocco, as a female comedian came out to warm up the crowd. “You guys behave.”

  “Sure, sure,” they nodded. Ike was sweating. Hector and Rocco were talking about drugs. I was such an idiot for not sitting between my friends; from left to right, it was Rocco, Hector, Ike, me. I had no control. The show started.

  The stage manager had instructed the audience to get on its feet when the theme music began, so there we were clapping as the View stars came out: Meredith Vieira, Star Jones, Joy Behar, and Debbie Matenopoulos, The Goddess.* My mouth dropped as she entered, a young blonde in a tight striped shirt and stretch pants.

  We sat down; the hosts sat down. My friends were awestruck. They kept muttering about Debbie: how her shirt was too small, how they’d run up on stage and touch her if I dared them. I spent most of the next ten minutes leaning across my seat, shutting them up. Meanwhile, I tried to check out the show.

  For what it was—a female romp—The View was decent. The women knew their parts: Meredith delivered the news, Star dismissed it, Joy joked about it, and Debbie commiserated with it. The show was well orchestrated.

  After twenty minutes, my friends had settled down from the initial Debbie encounter and were behaving surprisingly well. They were quietly watching the interview with Valerie Harper—TV’s “Rhoda”—and I began to think it hadn’t been such a bad idea to bring them along. Then Joy announced, “Have you ever wondered what really turns your man on? After the commercial break, our lingerie models will demonstrate.”

  “Omigod!” Ike screamed. “Thank you, Ned!” Rocco’s and Hector’s faces lit up as if they’d seen the Holy Grail.

  “Listen, guys!” I scolded during the commercial break, when the audience was allowed to make noise. “I am trying to get myself on this show, not get kicked out of the audience. Sit down and control yourselves and don’t do anything stupid, okay? It’s just—they’re just gonna bring out some models, they’ll do their thing, they’ll leave, all right?”

  Hector saluted. I laughed in spite of myself.

  “Three, two, and we’re on!” the bald stage manager shouted.

  “Welcome back,” Joy said. “Now, you may think …”

  She kept talking, but I wasn’t paying attention anymore. The models were emerging.

  Except for the one who might have been a man, they were all totally stunning, with ridiculous pushup bras that made their breasts jiggle in the light. One seemed to be about fourteen; Ike, true to his vampire obsession, promised to go onstage and bite her.

  The models were stone-faced as they walked the runway, but when they stopped at the end, they knew that only their torsos were being filmed, so they smiled and laughed at Joy’s jokes. That was sweet; it reminded me that they were real people, not untouchable figures—that someday I might meet one and make her laugh. After they finished displaying themselves, they tightened up again, swished around, and walked back down the runway. In twenty seconds, they changed clothes behind a little curtain and repeated the process.

/>   “Look at their backs!” Ike said. “How do they curve ’em like that?”

  “Practice,” Rocco answered. “Lots … of practice.”

  Near the end, the hottest model, a brunette, came out in a red satin nightie. The left side of it was offcenter, revealing a little nipple.

  “Dude, dude, dude!” Hector whimpered, loud enough to be angrily shushed by a neighboring woman.

  Eventually, the models left, though it seemed to take forever to get their distracting bodies offstage. My friends were gibbering the whole time.

  “How old was she?”

  “Nah … dude … those were definitely real.”

  “Let’s try to find ’em after the show. After the show, man! After the show!”

  The next highlight was the musical segment. The band from Smoky Joe’s Café, some Broadway play, performed the oldies song, “Stand By Me.”

  “Stand By Me” has a distinctive beat: DUN DUN, da da, DUN DUN. Well, as soon as the band hit it, the audience started clapping, accenting the DUN DUNs. Hector and Rocco clapped, too, but they messed with the beat, clapping Queen’s “We Will Rock You” instead (dun dun DA, dun dun DA). I stole a look at the other side of the studio. Ronnie was glaring at me.

  Now I started thinking about The View. I didn’t see much of a future with the show; in fact, upon close inspection, I had screwed up damn near everything. I’d arrived late, brought a bunch of delinquents, and been very disruptive throughout the broadcast. I turned to Ike and choked, “Man, there’s no way I’m getting on this show.”

  “Oh, I thought that was clear from the beginning,” he said, speaking calmly as sweat dripped off him, reminding me why he’s one of my best friends. “We never even got shown on TV. Every time they filmed the audience, they cut us out.”

  “No kidding?” I glanced up at the cameras. “Well that’s just great.”

  Ike resumed clapping “We Will Rock You” with Hector and Rocco. I took one last look at Ronnie and clapped along. Dun dun DA. Dun dun DA.