by Ned Vizzini
*This is my only complaint about TV. I don’t think it causes violence; I don’t think it promotes low morals; and truthfully, I don’t care about low morals. I just hate TV for making me feel like I have to have sex with hundreds of interesting people to have a normal life.
*I got a lot of sympathetic looks from Cool Club Guys as I puked. “It’ll be okay,” one dude with slick black hair told me. If only he knew the cause.
**Led Zeppelin is pretty much acknowledged as being the best hard rock band of all time. Also, they had a jet.
*Ninety minutes to get there? That’s right; when you’re in traffic in New York, and people are periodically jumping out of your limo to urinate, it can take some time to reach your destination. It didn’t help that Metropolis was way out in Queens.
HOOTERS
In the summer after senior year, I took my last cheap East Coast vacation with my family. This time, we had a van with three backseats (two just wasn’t enough for Daniel, Nora, and me), and we found ourselves in Charleston, West Virginia.
“Here we go, folks, ‘Entering Charleston,’ ” Dad said, reading the road sign. He already loved West Virginia because the posted speed limit was seventy miles per hour, which meant he could do his usual ninety with less anxiety.
“You kids should know some things about West Virginia,” Mom proclaimed from the passenger seat, twisting around to face us.
“What should we know about West Virginia, dear?” my father asked sarcastically as he zoomed past a truck.
“You shush,” Mom said. “I’m talking to the kids.”
“Yes, well, I guess I’ll just keep on driving silently. Sorry, dear.”
My mother sighed. “You see what he does to me? He’s the king of patronizing, your father.”
Dad began reciting a poem very loudly, gesturing wildly with both hands as he hit the gas.
“Ignore him,” Mom said. “Now, West Virginia is the poorest state in the country; I mean, it has the lowest average income. The main industry is still coal—”
“Whoa!” My fourteen-year-old brother saw it first.
At the side of the road was a billboard for Hooters.
“Hooters!” Daniel yelled. “Oh my gosh! Look, it’s only fifteen miles away! Dad, can we go to Hooters? Can we? Can we?”
The billboard showed a blonde with immense breasts.* It said simply: “Hooters—The Cure for the Common Restaurant.”
Now, I’ve always admired Hooters. Some backwoods mountain kid probably started it on a bet, and it’s become a multimillion-dollar franchise, with restaurants in New York, L.A., Fargo, Albuquerque. Plus, it advertises young, buxom, pretty waitresses in short shorts and tight shirts. I chimed in with Daniel: “Yeah, Dad, can we go to Hooters?”
“Uh,” Dad slowed down for a turn; the speedometer dipped under seventy. “I don’t think your mother would approve …”
“Oh please, Jim,” she waved a hand at him. “It’s local color. Of course you can go. I don’t care one whit.”
Two hours later, after checking into our hotel, Dad, Daniel, and I rolled into Hooters. Mom and Nora stayed behind to watch a romantic comedy on Pay-Per-View.
“Dad, you cannot wear that,” I pleaded for the twentieth time as we entered the Hooters parking lot. My father had on his best blazer and tie.
“When I eat dinner, I get properly dressed for it,” he retorted. “Just because we’re going to this particular establishment doesn’t mean we have to dress badly.”
“Please,” I begged, looking into Hooters from the van. The patrons were wearing jeans and lumberjack shirts. “Dad, c’mon. You look like a pretentious idiot. Just drop the blazer.”
Reluctantly, he draped it over the driver’s seat.
We hopped out of the van and strolled into the restaurant. It was like a gigantic log cabin. The ceiling was about twenty feet high, holding industrial-strength lights* and fans. The walls were wood grain, with pictures of bikini-clad girls and humorous posters. (“Caution: Blondes Thinking!” Ha ha.)
A blonde came up to us. She was pretty in a scary, done-up way. She wore about a half-inch of makeup, and I wondered how she kept it from melting under the Hooters glare. Carrying that steamy, greasy food must be murder on eyeliner. Her name tag said, “Crystal H.” I wondered if there was a “Crystal G.”
“Three?” Crystal H. asked us with a tight Southern twang.
“Yes,” Dad answered. His voice was about three octaves below hers.
“Okay!” She led us to our table. We were surrounded by TVs; Hooters had eleven or twelve of the largest televisions I’d ever seen, blaring baseball on ESPN and football on ESPN2.
Crystal took our drink orders. “Hello and welcome to Hooters. You should know we have a very large selection of beers: Amstel, Budweiser …” She listed brands alphabetically for nearly a minute. I thought it was a real feat of memory until I noticed she was reading from a list.
“Do you have Rolling Rock?” Dad asked.
“Ooh, no, sorry!”
“Becks?”
“Oh, sir, you keep naming beers we don’t have!”
“Heineken?”
“Yes, we have that. And for you two?”
“Coke,” Daniel and I said in unison.
Crystal folded up her pad. “Y’all aren’t from around here, are you?”
“No, we’re from Brooklyn, actually,” I said.
“Oh, wow! I thought so. Are you Italian? You look Italian.”
“Yes,” Dad said.
“And how old are you?” Crystal asked Daniel and me, cocking her head.
“Eighteen,” I answered.
“Fourteen,” Daniel mumbled. He was watching “Thirty Years of the Detroit Lions” on ESPN2.
“Eighteen?” Crystal gasped at me. “My gosh, I thought you were fifteen. You look so young. Do you Italians always look that young?”
“Uh …” I didn’t know what to say.
“I mean, I’m nineteen,”* Crystal continued. “You really don’t look eighteen. I thought you were about fifteen, really.”
“Well, sorry,” I shrugged.
“Okay, I’ll be back with y’all’s drinks.” She walked away.
“Geez,” I grabbed my head. People always think I look young, or act young. I’m going to be that idiot who has to show his I.D. when he’s thirty, not because he looks young and virile but because he’s so doofy no one will believe he’s an adult.
Crystal returned with our drinks and took our food orders, tapping her pen impatiently on her pad. There was a burly man dressed in black leather seated at a table in the back whom she was eager to talk to. Whenever she stopped dealing with us, she went right to him. Throughout the night, I tried to figure out whether he was a paying customer, her boss, or just some guy she liked.
“I’d like the buffalo wings—Three-Mile Island, please?” I said. The wings came in medium, hot, and Three-Mile Island.
“Ooh, honey, are you sure that won’t be too hot for you?” Crystal asked, alarmed.
“I like hot stuff,” I seethed. “I’ll be fine.”
“Oookay.” She tiddled off to get the food, after making a pit stop at the burly guy.
I was beginning to see how Hooters worked. It wasn’t that the waitresses were pretty: some were, but some looked like plastic surgery gone wrong. It was that they talked to you; they were paid to talk to you; they did so enthusiastically, with smiles. Hooters taps into the deep-down loneliness of the American male.
And the place was almost 100 percent men. We did see one couple* and one mother-son pairing. Dad and I discussed what kind of kid would go to Hooters with his mom, and what his nickname would be when the murders began.
The conversation cheered me up, and as the night wore on, I forgot about Crystal’s remarks and got into the Hooters atmosphere: the laid-back, TV-watching, oh-wow-there’s-some-cleavage, bright, safe sleaze of the place. I ate some Three-Mile wings and polished off a cheeseburger. I watched ESPN, talked with my brother, and almost convinced Dad t
o buy me a beer. Toward the end of the night, I even connected with Crystal on a subject: Conan O’Brien, the late-night TV host.
“Yeah, I met him once,” I told her as she refilled my Coke. “I saw him on the street and shook his hand. He’s actually very tall.”
She stopped dead: “No. Conan O’Brien is tall?”
“Oh, sure, he’s about six feet four.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I’m dead serious. The other guy on the show, his sidekick, is six feet, and Conan makes him look small. He’s a very tall man.”
“My gosh, I never knew that. I’m gonna tell all my friends, and none of them are gonna believe me.” She walked away shaking her head, “Conan O’Brien is tall!”
Around 11:00 P.M., two hours after our arrival, we were still staring at a lot of food. I couldn’t finish my wings; Daniel had hardly touched his; and Dad, who could’ve eaten everything on our table plus a milk shake, was holding back as part of a diet. Crystal noticed our leftovers and came over with Styrofoam containers, which she loaded with notable grace. “I know you think you’re never going to be hungry again, because you ate so much,” she chided, “but believe me, later on, you will be hungry again and you’ll want to eat this!”
Minutes later she gave us the check. Actually, she gave me the check and glanced at me appreciatively. I looked down at it. She had written, “Very nice meeting you and I hope that you enjoyed wild and wonderful WV. Crystal.” With a smiley face. I guess that’s something they make all the Hooters girls write.
Dad, Daniel, and I made our way to the van; as soon as we were out of Hooters, we felt comfortable rating it.
“I liked that,” Daniel said. “It was, like, TV and girls. Together.”
“I don’t know,” said Dad. “You can get tired of places like that.”
“Yeah,” I mumbled. “You can.”
But that wasn’t what I was thinking. I was thinking about Crystal—how awful it was to be near her when it was her job to talk to me, and how much nicer it would’ve been if she had wanted to talk to me. I was thinking how fake it all felt.
I was thinking about loneliness, adulthood, my girlfriend situation, college, and how final this all was—the last family vacation, maybe the last nighttime parking-lot walk with my father and brother, for a while anyway. When I got in the van, I convinced Dad to play my live AC/DC tape, and we drove back to the hotel, rocking out.
*Of course, they were immense on the billboard, but even if this woman were shrunk to scale and paraded down the street, they’d still be immense.
*Keeping the place well lit probably cut down on the number of “incidents” with waitresses, and it helped distinguish Hooters from the common strip club.
*I thought she was twenty-five. I’m horrible with ages, just like I’m horrible with names. If they’re past the age of twelve, I can’t tell whether people are thirteen or thirty.
*The girl looked happy, the guy, thrilled; I guess when you find someone who’ll go to Hooters with you, it’s true love.
POST–HIGH SCHOOL
When Teen Angst? Naaah … was published, some of my friends questioned the ending. “It just … ends,” they told me. I responded, “It’s life! Life doesn’t have tidy endings,” but I understood their frustration. Now, years later, I have the chance to tack on a tidy ending, and it’s tempting to say that our class lived happily ever after.
But the truth is, I haven’t kept in touch with the vast majority of people from my high school. I think that’s a good thing, as I didn’t like the vast majority of the people from my high school: the ones from the student union, the self-righteous computer nerds, the women … Only the most important ones have stuck around, and they were the ones who had already made it into this book anyway.
Ike, my self-declared vampiric Mayan friend, traveled for a while. The last time I saw him was in his house in Brooklyn. Ike had become involved with “perfect black.” Black dyes, see, are not truly black. They reflect light to an infinitesimal degree. And a small but dedicated group of chemists and fashion researchers are attempting to eliminate this, to achieve perfect, total black. A noble quest, and one I wish him well on.*
I still keep in touch with James, my soft-spoken, trench-coat-wearing friend. (He has stopped wearing trench coats.) Among other things, he managed to get a professional electronic drum set rigged up to Rock Band, the rock music video game that has made all of my youthful musical ventures obsolete. He started playing the game with the real drum set and within a few months taught himself how to play drums using Rock Band. Then he took his guitar, bass, and vocal abilities and recorded a demo. Here’s hoping someone reads this and offers him a record deal. Maybe we can tour together!
Poppy, who gave me my summer of dominoes and beer, is long gone from East Fourth Street. For better and worse, New York has become so safe and so expensive since this book was written that the unconquerable downtrodden people who taught me so much about life—Poppy, Old Franky/Old Tony, Aeneas, Husky and Lanky, Major—were priced out, forced into other lifestyles, or (I somehow know) sucked into death.
I haven’t talked to Judith in a decade.
My family is wonderful, all alive, and, as Dad says, none of us duds. I do my thing, which although sometimes dudlike can’t be entirely written off. Danny got into applied math, aka math that is completely crazy; my sister grew into the most practical, implacable person I know.
My mother is happy. When we children left the house, she got dogs, and even though she’s a vegetarian, she loves the dogs so much that she rips up roast chicken into bite-sized strips to feed them. But I know that the dogs are just a stopgap until I give her grandchildren. Then I’m going to see some real coddling.
Regarding my father: a friend of his told him that Teen Angst? Naaah … is really a love story about him. I can see why. He appears in this book as a guide, a friend, a leader, a sage. He’s still truckin’. He’s still hilarious. He still likes rock music, although he likes jazz better. But most of all, he still tells stories better than anyone I know. The only thing is, he can’t write them. That’s a big reason I write them.
As for me, I’ve been through lots of dramatic flare-ups since this book was written but ultimately had an incredible, ridiculous life. After Teen Angst? Naaah … was published, I went to college and got an idea for a novel about a guy who takes a pill that makes him cool. That book was published a few years later; it’s called Be More Chill.
When I signed the contract to write Be More Chill, though, it wasn’t just for one book—it was for two. I proceeded to go (certifiably) crazy trying to write book number two. The thing about writing is that sometimes the stories don’t come; sometimes you sit there wondering how they ever came. That’s when you realize why it made sense to the Greeks to just think that there were Muses, and they came or went based on their own schedules, and if they didn’t come, you couldn’t write. When I look back at this book and see tales about a street punk named Aeneas singing “I got no money today / Because I run-ied away,” I can’t do anything but believe that a Muse was watching out for me.
In any case, the Muses weren’t coming after Be More Chill. I wrote half a book but watched it die on the vine. I can explain exactly what that’s like. Have you ever had a bad haircut? And you know as you’re getting the haircut that it’s no good, but you keep hoping, “Maybe there’s some master plan here. Maybe this person really knows what they’re doing.” And you want to speak up, but that would be embarrassing, and then, all of a sudden … it’s over. And you’ve got a bad haircut.
That’s what it’s like to write a bad book.
So one night, I just couldn’t deal with this whole failed writing thing. I got up and called the Suicide Hotline. They told me to go to the nearest psych hospital.
For the next week or so, I had the most intense and amazing experience of my life, with people who changed my perspective on everything. After I got out, I wrote about it. That turned into my third book, It’s Kind of a
Funny Story.
And that book satisfied the contract!
• • •
I had a lot of jobs after college—silly jobs like bike messenger and computer programmer—and part of me always worried that the money from writing would dry up and I’d never escape my parents.* Now, however, anything else is not an option. My resume is all over the place; it looks like the resume of a seagull. I’m a writer from now on, for better or worse, and so far it’s mostly all better.
Do I have days where I wake up and no Muses are there and I don’t even want to deal with my life anymore? Sure. Do I have days where I learn that something—some speaking engagement, some meeting, some project—has been canceled, or I’ve missed some opportunity, and I want to hit myself in the head for being such a dope? Sure. But above and beyond that are the days when the words come together and I sit back in my chair and go, “Man, this is fun.” And there are the days where I get an e-mail or a letter from someone who read my writing and liked it and I just slap myself in the head for an entirely different reason, because I’m blessed.
Thank you. Thank you, Mom, Dad, Daniel, Nora, readers, Muses, Margaret. Thank you, all the people who published this stuff, every teacher and librarian who’s ever asked me to speak; thank you to the U.S. Post Office for allowing me to send my books cheaply. Thank you, you reading this, you.
Thank you, Hostess Cupcakes and coffee yogurt.
*Also, after having misplaced it for a number of years, I found the Wormwhole demo Ike and I made! It’s available for free at www.nedvizzini.com/fun/#music.
*I have gotten out of my mother’s ZIP code! (Though I do still reside within her area code.)