This story was told on April 6, 2018, at the Majestic Theatre in San Antonio, Texas. The theme of the evening was Standoff. Director: Catherine Burns.
My wife and I left New York for several years. We lived abroad, in France. We decided we would come home in the year 2000, for a lot of reasons but essentially because we wanted to see our children grow up in New York City.
We didn’t want them to have the experience that kids have growing up in Paris, where every child, at four thirty, when school is finished, looks like a Democrat—they look completely depressed and kind of dog-eared, with enormous circles under their eyes. They’ve been beaten and abused for the last nine hours, and they have no idea how to respond to the force of unappeasable authority at every moment.
We wanted them to have the kind of light-footed, spring-hearted sense of ownership that New York children seemed to us to have. We came back to be in New York so that they would have a childhood in New York and be able to be part of New York.
We had just come back when the greatest tragedy in the city’s history happened, and a long shadow spread out over every life and I think particularly over the lives of parents with small children. We wondered if we should stay in New York, if New York was the right place for us to bring up our children.
We were all full of doubt, and my wife, Martha, would put on my pillow, night after night, brochures for real estate in Connecticut and houses in New Jersey and even things clipped from the paper about the farthest reaches of Brooklyn.
And it was just around that time that my daughter, Olivia, who was then three, told us that she had an imaginary friend and that this imaginary friend’s name was Charlie Ravioli.
At first Charlie Ravioli seemed like a terrifically attractive, Manhattan kind of character. His apartment was at the corner of Lexington and Madison, which seemed like a great neighborhood. He lived, Olivia explained, on grilled chicken and water, sort of like a fashion model, and it was a great New York diet—we knew a lot of people who lived on exactly that.
But then something a little disturbing began to happen. Olivia would be talking on her cell phone—we gave her one of those toy cell phones that they had then.
We would hear her say, “Hello, Ravioli, Ravioli? Okay, call me when you get in.”
She would hang it up, and she would turn to us and say, “I always get his machine.”
And we realized that she had invented an imaginary friend who was always too busy to play with her. She had an invisible playmate whose salient characteristic was that he was too busy to play.
She would come to the dinner table every night and everyone would recite the things that had happened throughout the day.
We’d turn to Olivia, and she’d say, “Oh, I bumped into Charlie Ravioli today. We grabbed a cappuccino, but then he had to run.”
Or she’d say, “I bumped into Charlie Ravioli today. We got into a taxi, but then he had a meeting, so he had to go.”
It turned out Charlie was working in television in those years. That’s how Olivia explained it.
What she actually would say was “He’s working on a television,” and we could never figure out if he was a talk-show host, sort of like Charlie Rose, or if he was a guy in the electronics business with a little repair shop someplace in Queens.
But that was what Ravioli did. And he was always too busy to play with her.
Now, I should explain, of course, that Olivia at that moment had no life where she was bumping into people or grabbing cappuccinos. She was simply expressing and imitating the world that she heard all around her, and particularly that she heard from her mother every night when we would come to the table.
I would say to her mother, “How was your day?”
And her mother would say, “Oh, you know, it was one of those days. I bumped into Meg downtown, and we grabbed a coffee. But then I had a cell-phone message from Emily, but we couldn’t connect, so we came back uptown,” and on and on and on, a whole history of miscommunication that had enveloped eight hours.
Olivia was taking that in. She had one person in her life who was out there in the world. Her older brother, Luke, is exactly five years older than she is (to the day, which tells you more than you really want to know). Every day, at the end of the day, they would sit down together for cookies and milk when Luke came back from school, after Olivia had spent a day at the Central Park Zoo, taking naps, doing the things that three-year-olds do.
She would say, “Luke, how was your day?”
And he would say, “Okay.”
“Luke, did the teacher like your essay?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Luke, what did you have for lunch?”
“A sandwich, I guess.”
“Luke, how was my day?”
The basic rhythm of men and women. It gets started about the ages of seven and two and never alters throughout a lifetime.
Well, Charlie Ravioli seemed to us like such a strange character that I decided I would call my sister. I have five sisters. They all have PhDs. They all teach in universities somewhere or other. Growing up, when the moths would come onto our porch, they would dissect them and figure out exactly what genus they belonged to.
One of my sisters is a developmental psychologist out in Berkeley. I called her up because it seemed a little strange to me to have an imaginary friend who was always too busy to play with you. I wondered if this was something that came up a lot in the psychological literature.
I said, “Listen, Olivia has got this imaginary friend, but she’s always trying to connect with him and never can. He’s always too busy to play with her.”
And she said, “Oh, that’s completely normal. Children make their imaginary friends out of whatever experience they have at hand. If they’re living on mountaintops, they have imaginary friends who are made of clouds. If they live by the seashore, their imaginary friends are waves. So what could be more normal than that her imaginary friend, growing up in Manhattan, would be always too busy, would be a creature of interrupted occasions, of constantly occluded connections? It makes perfect sense. The kids understand that these imaginary friends are fictional. You have absolutely nothing to worry about.”
So I told my wife, “We have nothing to worry about. Completely normal. Every child in New York has a busy imaginary friend.”
It would seem that this was going to be okay. But then a new character arrived in the story. We would listen to Olivia talking on her little toy cell phone, and we heard her talking to someone called Lori.
She would say, “Hello, Lori. Hello. Is Ravioli there? No? Okay.”
And at first we thought that Lori was sort of the Linda Tripp of the whole Ravioli operation. She was the person you spoke to when Ravioli was ignoring you, the big creep that he obviously was, and you confided in Lori, as she was recording your conversations and so on.
But then we listened more carefully, and we realized who Lori really was: Lori was Charlie Ravioli’s assistant.
She was the person on the phone who tells you, “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Ravioli is in a meeting. He’ll try and get back to you as soon as he can.”
Martha turned to me and said, “This is wrong. This is really wrong. I’m not a child psychologist, but I know that imaginary friends should not have assistants.
“They should not have agents. They should not have personal trainers.
“Imaginary friends should not have people.
“They should play with the child who imagined them.”
So I called my sister again and said, “Ravioli has an assistant who’s answering his phone now. Would you describe this as normal?”
She said, “This never occurs in the psychological literature.”
I said, “Oh, so you think we should look into it?”
And she said, “No, I think you should move.”
But then something very interesting began to happen. Olivia didn’
t seem to get any closer to Charlie Ravioli. She didn’t come any nearer to actually having the play dates and the good times with him that it seemed to us she deserved. But she would report to us at the end of the day that she had gone out into the world in search of Charlie Ravioli and something amazing had happened to her.
She had gone out looking for Charlie Ravioli and ended up in the zoo, and she had released all the animals from the zoo, and they had had a dance.
She came home and told us about a day (which she of course spent entirely inside, watching Caillou on television and taking a nap) when she had gone out in search of Charlie Ravioli on the streets of Manhattan, and the taxi driver had a heart attack, and she’d gotten into the front seat of the taxi, and driven through the city.
She had gone looking for Charlie Ravioli downtown somewhere, and she had ended up telling jokes in a nightclub with a microphone.
And we realized that Charlie Ravioli, for her, was truly the prince of the city. He was the prince of our disorder. He was the representative of the spirit of New York, which is always the spirit of attainment. It’s the spirit of the thing that lies before us. It’s always the place that we haven’t quite got to yet but that we’ll get to someday.
Ravioli wasn’t, we realized, just an incarnation of the insane busyness and missed connections she saw around us. He was also her hero, her demigod, her fictional version of the endless possibilities in New York, which always lay just around the corner and on the other side of a cappuccino.
And so I knew that we could stay in New York.
Because I understood that all we really wanted from this city was to go on bumping into Charlie Ravioli for as long and as often as we possibly could.
* * *
ADAM GOPNIK has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1987. During his three decades at the magazine, he has written fiction, humor, memoirs, critical essays, and has reported pieces from at home and abroad. His many books include The Table Comes First, Paris to the Moon, Through the Children’s Gate, and, most recently, At the Strangers’ Gate. A musical, written in collaboration with the composer David Shire, The Most Beautiful Room in New York, opened in May of 2017 at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, and his one-man show, The Gates, based on material developed with The Moth, played for a sold-out week at New York’s Public Theater in January 2018.
This story was told on November 16, 2010, at The Moth Ball at Capitale in New York City. Director: Catherine Burns.
It was an early spring day in 1975, and my two younger brothers and I were waiting in a cargo airplane to go to America. We were with about fifty other orphans, mostly babies and young children.
This was in Saigon, South Vietnam, and near the end of the war. I was fourteen at the time, old enough to understand the grim situation that South Vietnam was facing: South Vietnam was collapsing rapidly under the advancing North Vietnamese army. I could sense the panic in the air and the urgency in the people, and the airport was buzzing with military vehicles, airplanes, personnel.
But for my brothers and me, the only thing that was on our minds at that time was that we were going to America. It was a lifelong dream that was coming true for us. It was something I had waited for most of my life.
Nine years earlier our dad died fighting in the war. A year later our mom passed away in a traffic accident. So the neighbors brought the three of us to an orphanage.
It was after living in the orphanage for a while that I came to understand the situation my brothers and I were facing: that we were not normal, that we didn’t have parents to provide for us, to support us as we were growing up. We didn’t have parents to prepare us for life, to give us a future—we were on our own.
And as the oldest child, I took over the parental responsibilities, following the Vietnamese tradition. I had to be parents to my brothers, to take care of them. So as a seven-year-old parent, I worried a lot. I worried constantly.
I always worried about how I was going to take care of my brothers, how we were going to survive in a country where ordinary people were having a tough time, struggling with life because of the war.
So now I was sitting in this airplane, waiting with my brothers, just moments before taking off for America. We were ecstatic.
About a year before, we had met Cherie Clark, an American lady who was head of a charity organization called Friends of Children of Vietnam that was helping orphans. Now she was helping us leave Vietnam as part of their Babylift operation that was trying to bring orphans out of Vietnam before South Vietnam fell completely.
I was so lost in my own thoughts and excitement that I didn’t see a South Vietnamese police officer approaching me until he was just right in front of me.
The officer looked me over, asked me a couple of questions, and said, “You cannot go. You’re too old. The country may need you.”
I can only imagine that he wanted me to stay back and fight when South Vietnam amassed all its resources in a last ditch to defend the capital against the North.
I was stunned. The thought of not being able to leave for America with my brothers never crossed my mind. The police officer proceeded to take me and another boy about the same age off the airplane. I felt like I was being dragged into a deep, dark tunnel. I was devastated.
I looked over to my brothers, and they were shocked and confused. I could see the fear in their eyes of now not having their parent. What were they going to do? I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to tell them to take care of themselves and take care of each other in the new land, but I couldn’t say anything. So I just left, silently.
The pilot was the president of World Airways at the time and was spearheading Operation Babylift—I learned later that he tried to bribe the police officer with a hundred-dollar bill to let me and the other boy go. But the police officer refused and ripped the hundred-dollar bill in half.
Shortly after the plane took off, I went back to the shelter.
That was a long night for me. I tried to come to terms with what had just happened—my lifelong dream that was so close had just slipped away, maybe forever. I was filled with hopelessness, disappointment, and despair.
At the same time, I felt a sense of relief knowing that my brothers were now in a good place, that I didn’t have to worry for them anymore.
So I convinced myself that now, not having to worry about taking care of my brothers, just me, I could survive anything. I could find a way to handle anything that may come my way.
But a few days later, Cherie came by and showed me a newspaper. Since my brothers had left on one of the earlier flights of the Babylift operation, they’d made big news when they landed.
The newspaper had a photo of my two brothers playing in the snow, and as soon as I saw this photo, it hit me like a freight train: I had now lost all my family. We’d lost our parents, and after that my brothers were my only family. Now I had lost them, too.
All of a sudden, I was overwhelmed with emotion and the desire to be with my brothers again—and this notion of trying to find ways to survive alone, facing what may come to me in Vietnam, dissipated.
I begged Cherie, I asked her, “Anything you can do, help me. I want to get out.”
I was facing the distinct possibility of North Vietnamese communists overrunning the South, which would mean that all communications and ties would be cut off.
This did not sit well with me. The idea of being left behind, of perhaps never seeing or hearing from my brothers again, was too much for me to bear.
Shortly thereafter Cherie came to me and said, “Get in the van to go to the airport, there may be a plane that you will be able to get on.”
I jumped into the van with pretty much the clothes I had on at the time. But this trip was much different from the first trip. I was filled with fears and anxiety.
I knew that I was defying the government order. I felt like I was on an escape mission. At the airport they rushed me onto a
military airplane. I took my seat next to an American who was also trying to get out. I tried to lie low, to be invisible, hoping for a quick departure.
I looked up, and I saw another police officer coming on board.
My heart stopped. I was frozen.
The officer made his way toward me and asked me a couple of questions, and then, again, he told me I could not go.
My world crashed down on me, and I knew my fate was sealed.
But instead of taking me off the airplane right away like the first officer did, he told me to wait for him there. He proceeded to talk to the pilot and then went inside the building. I waited there, expecting him to come back anytime with maybe more police officers or soldiers to haul me away.
Time passed very slowly.
Minutes seemed like days.
After what seemed to me like an eternity, I started hearing the engine roaring and the doors closing. I pinched myself. I thought maybe I was imagining it, maybe my mind was overworking, but no, sure enough the plane started moving.
I was thinking, Is the pilot gunning for it? Is he going to defy the order? Is he going to leave without authorization?
I could only hope.
And then the plane started moving a little faster. My heart was racing, pumping. I could feel my heart in my chest, expecting that at any time the government, seeing the plane moving, would send troops, guns, and vehicles to stop us in our tracks because we weren’t supposed to leave.
But the plane kept moving.
I found myself holding my breath, watching the plane rolling down the runway, ever in slow motion. Finally the plane went off into the air, and I found myself breathing again, a sigh of relief. But even after the plane took off I was still full of fear that they would send military jets to intercept us and force us down.
The Moth Presents Occasional Magic Page 24