Нед Виззини: It's Kind of a Funny Story

“I was going to say that I don’t think the stuttering is like, a real problem. I just think it’s one of my symptoms.”

“Like sweating.”

“Right.” The sweating is awful. It’s not as bad as the not eating, but it’s weird —cold sweat, all over my forehead, having to be wiped off every two minutes, smelling like skin concentrate. People notice. It’s one of the few things people notice.

“You’re not stuttering now.”

“This is being paid for. I don’t want to waste time.”

Pause. Now we have one of our silent battles; I look at Dr. Minerva and she looks at me. It’s a contest as to who will crack first. She puts on her poker face; I don’t have any extra faces to put on, just the normal Craig face.

We lock eyes. I’m waiting for her to say something profound—I always am, even though it’ll never happen. I’m waiting for her to say “Craig, what you need to do is X” and for the Shift to occur. I want there to be a Shift so bad. I want to feel my brain slide back into the slot it was meant to be in, rest there the way it did before the fall of last year, back when I was young, and witty, and my teachers said I had incredible promise, and I had incredible promise, and I spoke up in class because I was excited and smart about the world. I want the Shift so bad. I’m waiting for the phrase that will invoke it. It’ll be like a miracle within my life. But is Dr. Minerva a miracle worker? No. She’s a thin, tan lady from Greece with red lipstick.

She breaks first.

“About your bike riding, you said you wanted to be a messenger.”

“Yes.”

“You already have a bike, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And you ride it a lot?”

“Not that much. Mom won’t let me ride it to school. But I ride around Brooklyn on weekends.”

“What does it feel like when you ride your bike, Craig?”

I pause. “. . . Geometric.”

“Geometric.”

“Yeah. Like, You have to avoid this truck. Don’t get hit in the head by these metal pipes. Make a right. The rules are defined and you follow them.”

“Like a video game.”

“Sure. I love video games. Even just to watch. Since I was a kid.”

“Which you often refer to as ‘back when you were happy.’“

“Right.” I smooth my shirt out. I get dressed up for these little meetings too. Good khakis and a white dress shirt. We’re dressing up for each other. We should really go get some coffee and make a scandal—the Greek therapist and her high school boyfriend. We could be famous. That would get me money. That might make me happy.

“Do you remember some of the things that made you happy?”

“The video games.” I laugh.

“What’s funny?”

“I was walking down my block the other day, and behind me was a mother with her kid, and the mother was saying, ‘Now, Timmy, I don’t want you to complain about it. You can’t play video games twenty-four hours a day.’ And Timmy goes, ‘But I want to!’ And I turned around and told him, ‘Me too.’”

“You want to play video games twenty-four hours a day?”

“Or watch. I just want to not be me. Whether it’s sleeping or playing video games or riding my bike or studying. Giving my brain up. That’s what’s important.”

“You’re very clear about what you want.”

“Yeah.”

“What did you want when you were a kid? Back when you were happy? What did you want to be when you grew up?”

Dr. Minerva is a good shrink, I think. That isn’t the answer. But it is a damn good question. What did I want to be when I grew up?

When I was four, this is how things were:

Our family lived in a crappy apartment in Manhattan. I didn’t know it was crappy at the time, because I didn’t have our better apartment to compare it to yet. But there was exposed piping. That’s no good. You don’t want to raise your child in a house with exposed piping. I remember there was a green pipe and a red pipe and a white pipe, gathered near the corner of the hallway just before the bathroom, and as soon as I could walk I investigated them all, walked up to them and put my palm about two millimeters away from each one to test if it was hot or cold. One was cold, one was hot, and the red one was really hot. Two millimeters wasn’t enough. I burned myself on it and Dad, who hadn’t realized ("It must only get hot in the afternoon"), encased it in dark gray foam with duct tape, but duct tape never stopped me and I thought the foam was fun to pick at and chew so I picked it off and chewed it and then when other kids came over to my house I dared them to touch the re-exposed pipe; I told them anyone who came in had to touch it, otherwise they were a pussy, which was a word I learned from Dad watching TV, which I thought was great because it was a word with two meanings: the cat that girls liked and the thing you called people to make them do stuff. Just like chicken had two meanings: the bird that walked around and the white stuff you ate. Some people touched the hot pipe if you called them chicken as well.

I had my own room but I didn’t like to be alone in it; the only room I liked to be in was the living room, under the table that held all the encyclopedias. I made it my little fort; I put a blanket over me and worked in there, with a light that Dad rigged up. I worked on maps. I loved maps. I knew that we lived in Manhattan and I had a map of it, a Hagstrom Five Borough Atlas with all the streets laid out. I knew exactly where we lived, on the comer of 53rd Street and 3rd Avenue. Third Avenue was a yellow street because it was an avenue, big and long and important. Fifty-third Street was a little white street that went across Manhattan. The streets went sideways and the avenues went up-and-down; that was all you had to remember. (Dad helped me remember, too, when we went out for pancakes. He would ask, “Do you want them cut in streets and avenues, Craig?” And I’d go “Yes!” and he’d cut the stack of pancakes in a grid, and we’d name each street and avenue as we went along, making sure to get 3rd Ave. and 53rd Street.) It was so simple. If you were really advanced (like I was, duh), you knew that traffic on the even streets went east (East for Even) and the odd streets went west (West is Odd). Then, every bunch of streets, there were fat yellow streets, like the avenues, that went both ways. These were the famous streets: 42nd St., 34th St. The complete list from the bottom up was Chambers St., Canal St., Houston St., 14th St., 23rd St., 34th St., 42nd St., 57th St., 72nd St. (there wasn’t any big street in the 60s; they got shafted), 79th St., 86th St., 96th St., and then you were in Harlem, where Manhattan effectively ended for little white boys who made forts under encyclopedias and studied maps.

As soon as I saw the Manhattan map, I wanted to draw it. I should be able to draw the place where I lived. So I asked Mom for tracing paper and she got it for me and I brought it into my fort and I pointed the light right down on the first map in the Hagstrom Atlas—downtown, where Wall Street was and the stock market worked. The streets were crazy down there; they didn’t have any kind of streets and avenues; they just had names and they looked like a game of Pick-Up Sticks. But before I could even worry about the streets, I had to get the land right. Manhattan was actually built on land. Sometimes when they were digging up the streets you saw it down there—real dirt! And the land had a certain curve to it at the bottom of the island, like a dinosaur head, bumpy on the right and straight on the left, a swooping majestic bottom.

I held my tracing paper down and tried to trace the line of lower Manhattan.