Pat looks at me a little funny. He’s only fourteen, but he’s already cooler than I will ever be in my entire life. So when he looks at me like that, I always pay attention. Pat tells me that guys don’t buy Christmas presents for other guys. Especially surprise Christmas presents. He tells me that he’s had girlfriends for six months and never bought them a thing. So for me to buy Bengi a Christmas present is a little odd.
I’m suddenly feeling very self-conscious about the betta fish in the backseat of my car — the one that I bought at the pet store for Pat an hour ago — and the comic books for Coog, and the sweatshirt for Tom, and all the presents I bought for my friends on this day. I know that Pat is right. It’s strange that I’ve done this, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had a good Christmas, and I want this one to be special.
The combination of my unending childhood poverty, my absentee mother and my evil stepfather, and their now failing marriage, has made every Christmas for years a misery. But for the first time in my life, I have money in my pocket. I’m a manager at McDonald’s making $5.75 an hour. I’m working full-time while I’m in high school, and I am the richest person I know. I am going to use this money to buy myself a great Christmas.
I’m heading home now. I need to get my uniform, because I have a shift at McDonald’s later and I need to get these presents into the house. I need to get the betta fish out of the cold. It’s starting to snow out. It’s kind of lovely. I’m driving my mother’s 1976 Datsun B210, a car about the size of a box of Pop-Tarts, through the town of Mendon, Massachusetts. The lawns of each home are turning white. It’s the first snowfall of the year. As I drive by each house, it’s as if I’m passing a picture postcard of Christmas. I feel this might be a good Christmas after all.
I’m coming around a corner and I’m heading down a hill when my car starts sliding to the opposite lane on the snowy road. I look up, and I see a white Mercedes-Benz coming right at me.
They say that in moments like this, time will slow down or even freeze, and it is absolutely true. In the three seconds it takes before our two cars hit head-on, I have exactly three thoughts.
The first is: I’m not wearing my seat belt. I always wear my seat belt, but in the excitement of buying Christmas presents and the rush to get home, I’ve forgotten to put it on, on the worst day of my life to forget.
My second thought is: in moments like this, I’ve been told to steer into the skid, but it occurs to me now that I don’t know what the hell that really means. (I still don’t know to this day.)
My third thought is just one sentence, it’s five words long, and I say it aloud: “This is going to suck.”
And it does. When our cars collide, I’m thrown forward, and my head crashes through the windshield. My chin catches the steering wheel on the way, and the entire bottom row of my teeth comes flying out and into the back of my mouth in one large chunk. At the same moment, my legs come forward, and my right leg becomes embedded down to the bone in the air-conditioning unit. My left leg hits the emergency release brake, knocking the handle off and skewering my left leg. My chest crashes into the steering wheel, breaking ribs and knocking all the air from my lungs. It’s all over in a second. Then shock descends upon me, and I feel no pain or fear.
I climb out of the car. I’m sort of crumpled next to the car, half standing, half crouching, when I see the woman in the Mercedes get out. She’s completely unharmed. Her seat belt and the size of her car have protected her completely. Then she sees me, vomits, and passes out.
The first to arrive at the scene is a pickup truck full of teenagers. A kid about my age gets to me first. He lies me down in the mud and the snow on the side of the road. He gives me a look over, and then he crouches close to my ear and whispers, “Dude, you’re fucked.”
It is the most accurate medical assessment that I will receive that day.
A police officer arrives and puts a coat on me to keep me warm. I’ve got broken ribs, so it feels like a thousand pounds. I’m looking up at a white sky, and the snow is really starting to fall now, so I close my eyes.
When I open my eyes again, I’m in an ambulance. A young woman is straddling my hips and she is pounding on my chest, which is now on fire. There’s a man trying to shove a clear tube down my throat, and the woman starts screaming, “He’s back! He’s back!” And I’m wondering, “Who the hell is back?”
It’s me. I’m back. I’ll find out later that my heart stopped beating and I stopped breathing for about a minute.
No white light.
Now I’m in the emergency room, and the doctors get to work on me right away. They’re picking out glass from my forehead with tweezers. They’re getting my legs ready for surgery. Dental surgeons wire that chunk of teeth back down into my jaw. It’s the most painful thing I’ve ever felt.
A nurse comes over and asks me for my phone number. My clothes were cut off at the scene, so I have no ID. I give her my parents’ number, and then I give her the number for McDonald’s because I’m supposed to be working that night. She sort of scoffs at this and looks at me as if I’m crazy, which I kind of am. I was dead twenty minutes ago and now I’m worried about work, but that drive-through does not run well without me, and they’re going to have to get someone in.
Bless her heart. She makes the call.
As the doctors and nurses work on me, I notice that their expressions begin to change. I see it, because I am thinking the same thing they are: Where the hell are my parents?
I’ll find out later that when they heard I was in stable condition, they went to check the car out first. I won’t see them before surgery.
I’m waiting for a surgeon, because it’s December 23, and they’re hard to find. I’m waiting and waiting and waiting, and I’m feeling as alone as I’ve ever felt.
But I’m not alone, because when the nurse called McDonald’s to tell them about the accident, the manager on duty told my friends, and those friends started calling other friends. An old-fashioned phone tree begins, with friends calling friends calling friends, and the waiting room is now filling up with sixteen- and seventeen- and eighteen-year-old kids in ripped jeans and concert T-shirts, and one fourteen-year-old boy who is cooler than all of them. And my friend Bengi is the first one to arrive.
They can’t come into the emergency room to see me, because they’re not family, but when the nurses realize that my parents won’t be arriving in time, they roll my gurney to the other side of the emergency room, and they open a door. One by one, each of my friends stands in the doorway. And they wave. And they give me the thumbs-up. The boys say incredibly inappropriate things to make me laugh, and the girls tell me that they love me, and I can hear them chanting my name as I am rolled into the operating room.
None of the presents ever make it into my friend’s hands. Bengi never gets his concert T-shirt and Coog never gets his comic books, and the betta fish is the only fatality in the accident that day.
But it turns out that Pat is wrong. You can give your friends surprise Christmas presents, because they give me the best one I’ve ever received. They give me family, and until I meet my wife fifteen years later, they are the only family that I have. And it turns out they’re the only family that I need.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Secret to the Big Story: Make It Little
“This Is Going to Suck” is what I call a big story. When you are brought back to life in the back of an ambulance, that’s big.
Here’s the surprising thing: despite what most people think, these are the hardest stories to tell. You’d think that a head-on collision, dying, and coming back to life would be easy to tell about, full of high stakes, drama, and excitement, but remember:
The goal of storytelling is to connect with your audience, whether it’s one person at the dinner table or two thousand people in a theater. Storytelling is not about a roller-coaster ride of excitement. It’s about bridging the gap between you and another person by creating a space of authenticity, vulnerability, and unive
rsal truth.
If this is the goal (and it should be), then the big stories can get in the way of connecting. I cannot connect with most people on the level of a near-death experience. Audiences don’t listen to me describe my head crashing through a windshield and think, “Yes, I remember the time my head went through a windshield, and yes, I also subsequently died on the side of the road. I feel for you, Matt.”
Big stories are hard stories to tell, because the big parts of these stories are often singular in nature. Unusual. Unique. Hardly relatable. This holds true for all my big stories.
When I’m twelve years old, I’m stung by a bee. When the paramedics find me in my dining room, my heart is not beating, and I’m not breathing.
When I’m fourteen years old, firefighters awaken me in the middle of the night and carry me from our burning home.
When I’m twenty-two years old, I’m interrogated, arrested, jailed, and tried for a crime I did not commit.
That same year, a gun is pressed to my head and the trigger is pulled multiple times in order to get me to open a safe in the back of a McDonald’s.
When I’m thirty-six years old, an anonymous person or persons excerpts ten years of my blog posts, using out-of-context and seemingly inflammatory comments to create a thirty-seven-page packet that argues that I am not fit to teach children and compares me to the Virginia Tech killer. It’s sent to the mayor, town council, school board, and more than three hundred families in my school district, demanding my immediate termination, as well as the termination of my wife and my principal, and threatens that the packet will go to the press if action is not taken.
These experiences sound like amazing (and unfortunate) stories, and yet each story took a long time for me to finally tell. Ultimately none of them are about what they appear to be.
The story of my beesting is really the story of the death of my mother, and of my hope that we might still be connected, even though she is no longer alive.
The story of firefighters rescuing me from my home is really about the greatest “I told you so” of my life.
The story of my arrest is really the story of my struggle with faith and of an unexpected plea to the Almighty, and the story of my subsequent jailing is really about missing a second date with a girl I liked a lot.
The story of the robbery is really the story of my ongoing, persistent existential crisis and its impact on my relationship to my children.
The story of the attempt to destroy my reputation and get me fired is really the story of the power of the anonymous assailant but the greater power of public support.
And the story of my car accident and near-death experience, as I’m sure you know by now, is not about the accident or my experience at all. I’ve received hundreds of emails from people all over the country about that story, which The Moth has aired on their Radio Hour more than once. Never has a person written, “I love the story of your car accident” or “I love the story of your near-death experience.”
Instead it’s always “I loved the story of the emergency room” or “I love the story of your friends in the waiting room.”
I die in my story, and yet that momentary brush with death is neither the most important nor the most interesting thing that happens. It’s almost forgotten by the end. The accident is simply the means by which I get my audience into the emergency room. It’s the equivalent of the disintegrated tire in “Charity Thief.” It’s the thing that happens that gets me to where the story really takes place.
In fact, now that you know how stories work, you should realize that “This Is Going to Suck” could never be about my near-death experience, because I never experienced it. I closed my eyes on the side of a road because the snow was falling, and sometime after that I became unconscious and died.
But I had no idea that I was going to stop breathing. I had no idea that my heart would stop beating. How could I possibly experience a five-second moment of transformation or realization if I didn’t know it was happening?
The same thing had happened five years earlier, when I stopped breathing and my heart stopped beating on my dining-room floor following the beesting. I closed my eyes, drifted into unconsciousness, and died. But I never saw it coming.
Even if I had seen them coming, I still wouldn’t have made either story about my near-death experience, because it’s incredibly hard to connect to people through death. Most of us have never experienced it before. Most of us have never awakened in the midst of someone administering CPR on us.
This is the trick to telling a big story: it cannot be about anything big. Instead we must find the small, relatable, comprehensible moments in our larger stories. We must find the piece of the story that people can connect to, relate to, and understand.
You need to find the story of the man who learns to love children among the man-eating dinosaurs so he can be with the woman he loves.
You need to find the story of the scientist who finds faith in a higher power among the Nazis and snakes and enormous rolling boulders.
You may never understand what it’s like to crash your head through a windshield, but you’ve probably been let down or ignored or forgotten by a loved one, as I was in that emergency room.
You probably understand what it feels like to be alone at a moment of need.
You’ve probably experienced the fear of hospitals and surgery.
You probably know what it’s like to be picked up off the ground and saved at the most unlikely moment by the most unexpected figure.
My story isn’t about a car accident or a near-death experience. It’s about my friends standing in the place of my family when I need them most. That’s it.
When I tell “This Is Going to Suck” in theaters or workshops or even at the dinner table, audience members cry almost every time, but no one has ever cried at my description of the accident. Despite the brutality and horror of that collision, audience members have never shed tears at the pain and violence that I suffered. They wince. They groan. They shake their heads in pity. But never tears.
They cry, of course, when they hear that my friends are filling the waiting room outside the emergency room, and when those doors open and my friends are standing there, cheering me on, even I have a hard time not crying.
Honestly, there are tears in my eyes as I write these words.
Little moments hidden inside big moments. That’s what we need to find to tell a big story well.
Big stories need not contain as much violence, death, or drama as mine do. Hopefully they don’t. Remember: my friends told me that I’ve lived the worst life ever. Not true, of course, but I hope your life hasn’t been as chaotic or violent as mine.
Your big stories could be about a vacation to exotic locales or the birth of a child or your wedding day or the untimely death of a loved one. Any of these could be told well if you find a way to make the story smaller than it seems. This is hard to do. Rarely are stories of birth or death or weddings or vacations good. They are more often ordinary, expected, and boring. Cliché. But this need not be the case.
I tell a story about the birth of my son, Charlie. It’s a humorous story about how the supposed beauty of childbirth is anything but beautiful. It’s ugly, harrowing, bloody, and in the case of Charlie’s birth, dangerous. A placental abruption had raised the stakes considerably.
Still, that’s not what the story was about, because few people can connect with a potentially life-threatening birth. Most people (including me) don’t really know what a placental abruption is.
Instead it’s a story about expectations. It’s about what parents and doctors and society tell you to expect from childbirth (beauty and light and joy) versus the reality.
It’s also a story about how this belief — that childbirth is not pretty — was upended by my daughter. Clara, who was three years old at the time and was convinced that we were having a girl. For nine months, she made plans for tea parties, dance recitals, and dress-up parties. She wanted a sister so badly. Despite our con
stant reminders that the baby might be a boy, she refused to accept this possibility.
When I told Clara that Charlie was a boy shortly after his birth, she collapsed in wails of genuine agony and sadness. Just as it was for me, this birth was anything but expected for her. But I scooped her up, carried her over to the bed where Elysha was holding Charlie, and I introduced her to her brother. Clara looked down on Charlie, and without warning, this ball of rage and anger melted in my arms, and she fell instantly in love with him.
It was the first and only time in my life that I witnessed love at first sight. I will never forget it. It was the beauty of childbirth that I never expected to see.
That is what the story is about. Not a step-by-step accounting of Charlie’s birth or the harrowing potential of a placental abruption, but a look into the horror and the beauty of the unexpected. A little moment hiding within a big event.
A friend and fellow storyteller named Monica Cleveland tells the story about a plane crash that she experienced a few years ago. She was in a seaplane that landed exceedingly hard on water, damaging the plane, rapidly flooding it, and sending it to the bottom of the lake. Even after they escape the plane, they are in the mountains, swimming through an exceptionally cold lake, wondering how long it will be before anyone realizes that they are missing and mounts a search and rescue.
It’s a plane crash, on water no less, but it’s really a story about Monica’s anxiety-plagued daughter. Monica realized that if she told her daughter the truth about the crash, her daughter might never fly again. So instead of a harrowing tale of near death in the air and on the water, Monica tells the story of a mother trying to frame her own near-death experience into something less frightening for the benefit of her child. She turns it into an adventure story so that her daughter isn’t paralyzed by fear for the rest of her life.
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