Нед Виззини - It's Kind of a Funny Story

Aaron called me that Friday night.

“Want to come over and watch movies?”

“Sure.” I was done with my practice test for the day.

Aaron lived in a small apartment in a big building in downtown Manhattan by City Hall. I took the subway in (my mom had to okay it with Aaron’s mom, which was horrifying), identified myself to Aaron’s paunchy doorman, and took the elevator up to his floor. Aaron’s mom greeted me and brought me into his ventilated chamber (past his dad, who wrote in a room that resembled a prison cell, occasionally beating his head against his desk, while Aaron’s mom brought him tea) and flopped on his bed, which wasn’t yet covered with the sort of stains that would define it in the future. I’m good at flopping on things.

“Hey,” Aaron was like. “You want to smoke some pot?”

Oh. So this was what watching movies meant. Quick recap of what I knew about drugs: my mom told me never to do them; my dad told me not to do them until after the SATs. Mom trumped Dad, so I vowed to never do them—but what if someone made me? I thought drugs might be something people did to you, like jabbing you with a needle while you were trying to mind your business.

“What if someone makes me, Mom?” I had asked her; we were having the drug conversation in a playground. I was ten. “What if they hold a gun to my head and force me to take the drugs?”

“That’s not really how it works, honey,” she answered. “People take drugs because they want to. You just have to not want to.”

And now here I was with Aaron, wanting to. His room smelled like certain areas of Central Park, down by the lake, where white guys with dreadlocks played bongos.

My mom hovered in my head.

“Nah,” I was like.

“No problem.” He opened a pungent bag and put a chunk of the contents of the bag in a very fascinating little device that looked like a cigarette but was made of metal. He lit it up with a butane lighter that made a flame approximately as large as my middle finger. He puffed right up against his wall.

“Don’t you have to open a window?”

“Nah, it’s my room; I can do what I want.”

“Doesn’t your mom care?”

“She has her hands full with Dad.”

The section of wall he smoked against would get discolored over the next two years. Eventually, like the rest of the room, it would get covered up with posters of rappers with gold teeth.

Aaron took three or four breaths of his metal cigarette and made the room smell musty and hot, then announced:

“Let’s motivate, son! What do you want to get?”

“Action.” Duh. I was in seventh grade.

“All right! You know what I want?” Aaron’s eyes lit up. “I want a movie with a cliff.”

“A mountain-climbing one?”

“Doesn’t have to be about mountain climbing. Just needs at least one scene where some dudes are fighting and somebody gets thrown off a cliff.”

“Did you hear about Paul Stojanovich?”

“Who’s that?”

“He’s the producer who invented World’s Scariest Police Chases and Cops.”

“No kidding? The host?”

“No, the producer. The host kicks ass, though.”

Aaron led the way out of his room and past his father—typing away, wiping sweat, for all intents and purposes a part of the computer—to his front door, where his mom, who had long dirty-blond hair and wore overalls, stopped us and gave us cookies and our coats.

“I love my life,” Aaron said. “Bye, Mom.” We entered the elevator with our mouths full of cookies.

“Okay, so what were you saying? I love World’s Scariest Police Chases.” Aaron swallowed. “I love it when the guy is like”—Aaron put on a stern over-annunciated brogue—“These two-bit bandits thought they could turn a blind eye to the law, but the Broward County Sherrif’s office showed them the light—and it led them straight to jail.’”

I cracked up, spitting cookie bits everywhere.

“I’m good at voices. You want to hear Jay Leno blowing the devil? I got it from this comedian Bill Hicks.”

“You never let me finish about Paul Stojanovich!” I said.

“Who?”

The elevator arrived in Aaron’s lobby. “The pro ducer of World’s Scariest Police Chases.”

“Oh, right.” Aaron threw open the glass lobby door. I followed him into the street, tossed up my hood, and bundled myself in it.

“He was posing with his fiancée, for like a wedding picture? And they were doing it in Oregon, right next to this big cliff. And the photographer was like ‘Move back, move a little to the left.’ And they moved, and he fell off the cliff.”

“Oh my God!” Aaron shook his head. “How do you learn this stuff?”

“The Internet.” I smiled.

“That is too good. What happened to the girl?”

“She was fine.”

“She should sue the photographer. Did they sue him?”

“I don’t know.”

“They better. I would sue. You know, Craig”—Aaron looked at me steadily, his eyes red but so alive and bright—“I’m going to be a lawyer.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. Screw my dad. He doesn’t make any money. He’s miserable. The only reason we even live where we do is because my mom’s brother is a lawyer and they got the apartment way back when. It used to be my uncle’s apartment. Now he does work for the building, so they cut Mom a deal. Everything good I have is due to lawyers.”

“I think I might want to be one too,” I said.

“Why not? You make money!”

“Yeah.” I looked up. We were on a bright, cold, gray Manhattan sidewalk. Everything cost so much money. I looked at the hot dog man, the cheapest thing around—you wouldn’t get away from him without forking over three or four bucks.

“We should be lawyers together,” Aaron said. “Pardis and . . . what’s your last name?”

“Gilner.”

“Pardis and Gilner.”

Okay.”

We shook hands, maintaining our stride, nearly clothesline-ing a frilled-up little girl walking in the other direction. Then we turned up Church Street and rented this reality DVD, Life Against Death, which had a lot of cliffs, as well as fires, animal attacks, and skydiving accidents. I sat propped in Aaron’s bed, him smoking pot and me refusing, feeding off him, telling him that I thought I was getting a contact high when really I was just feeling like I had stepped into a new groove. At cool parts of Life Against Death we paused and zoomed in: on the hearts of explosions, spinning wheels after truck crashes, and one guy freaking out in a gorilla cage and getting a rock thrown at him. We talked about making our own movie someday.

I didn’t go to sleep until four, but I was in some one else’s house, so I woke up early—at eight—with that crazy sleeping-at-someone-else’s-house energy. I passed Aaron’s father at his computer and grabbed a book off their shelf in the living room— Latin Roots. I studied Latin Roots all morning, for the test.

We kept doing it. It became a regular thing. We never formalized it, never named it . . . but on Fridays Aaron would call and ask me to watch movies. I think he was lonely. Whatever he was, he became the one person I wanted to stay in touch with after junior high. And now, a year later, I was in my kitchen holding my acceptance letter and wondering if he had one too.

“I’ll call Aaron,” I told Mom.

“What up, son? Did you get in?!”

“Yeah.”

“Allriiiiiiiight! ”

“Hoooooooo — ee !”

“Biyatch!”

“That’s right!”