It's Kind of a Funny Story (7 page)

eleven

Depression starts slow. After howling off the Brooklyn Bridge, I walked home and felt great. Aaron split and took a late-night subway back to Manhattan, where he had a hell of a time cleaning up his apartment and returning Nia to her parents; I went to a diner and got some eggs and wheat toast and came home at ten in the morning, telling Mom I had slept over at Aaron’s, and pouring myself into bed. When I got up in the afternoon there were some forms to sign about accepting my admission to Executive Pre-Professional and a physical to schedule—how glorious. For once I was looking forward to the doctor holding my balls and telling me to cough, which I still don’t understand why they do.

The rest of junior high was a joke. I didn’t need to do anything except make sure I didn’t fail a class and get “rescinded” from Executive Pre-Professional, so I started hanging out with Aaron every day. Now that we had the pot barrier broken, it became a magnificent haze of yelling back at the TV; we stopped calling it “watching movies"; we started calling it “chilling.”

“Want to chill?” Aaron would ask, and I would pop on over.

Ronny was never far behind. His insults never stopped, although they became more lovable, but that didn’t matter, because he grew into a reliable dealer. He wasn’t going to high school with us—for all we knew, he wasn’t going at all—but he was going to set up a jewelry shop, sell drugs, and make beats,
that
was for sure.

Nia was always around, too. She and Aaron spent about as much time apart as me and my right hand. I thought I was cool with it, but as I saw them—sitting with each other, sitting
on
each other, hugging each other, touching each other’s butt, smiling and kissing, in Aaron’s room or in public—I started to get more and more pissed off. It was like they were throwing it in my face, although I knew neither of them meant that, the way I had thrown my studying in people’s faces and not meant it. Why else would they tell each other how much they wanted each other in whispers in front of me? Why else would Aaron tell me, in great detail, about the first time they had sex? One day Aaron announced to me and Ronny as we watched MTV, “You know what, since I got with Nia, I’ve forgotten how to masturbate.”

“Me too, since I found your mom,” Ronny said.

“Huh,” I said. My stomach hitched.

“I’m serious, I don’t even know, anymore!” Aaron grinned.

Great, man. Wonderful. I learned
how
to masturbate the last few months of junior high, when I went on AOL and started talking to girls with names like “Little Luscious Lolita42.” I don’t know if they were really girls. I just knew that I was lonely, and I wanted to make it so that when I got with someone, I’d have some idea what to do.

Problem was, no matter what girl I was talking to online, when I came to the end of the whole process, I would run to the bathroom. And as I knelt down in front of the toilet, in the final few milliseconds, I would think about Nia.

I had homework for school even before school started. They gave me this insane reading list for the summer that included
Under the Volcano
and
David Copperfield.
I tried to read them; I really did, but it wasn’t like flash cards. It took
days.
Mom actually read the letters that the school sent and told me that part of their mission was to make us
well-rounded, liberally educated bearers of tomorrow’s vision,
so I had better be ready to do English as well as math; but I found myself jealous of the people who wrote the books. They were dead and they were still taking up my time. Who did they think they were? I would much rather chill at Aaron’s, sit in my room, run to the Internet and then to the bathroom, rinse, cycle, repeat. I ended up not finishing any of the summer-reading-list books.

That wasn’t good when it came time to start school. The first day, I was quizzed on what I was supposed to have read over the summer. I got a 70, something I’d never seen on a sheet of paper in my life. Where do you see the number 70? There are no $70 bills; there’s no reason to get a $70 check. I looked at the 70 as if it had stolen from me.

Aaron, who ended up in eight out of my nine classes, got a 100 on the start-of-school reading quiz. He had read the books in Europe, where he got to go over the summer because
his
dad’s books were popular there. He came back not just tan and full of knowledge and pictures, but ripe with stories of the European girls he had hooked up with. He said he and Nia had talked and she was totally cool with the other girls; he said he was busy turning her into a
freak,
someone who would be down for
anything.
When we hung out now, I didn’t say half as much as I did that first night; I just listened and stayed impressed, tried to control my lower half while Nia was there, pictured her in different freeze-frames for later in the evening.

Executive Pre-Professional High School was
hard.

The teachers all told me I was going to have four hours of homework a night, but I didn’t believe it— plus I believed I could handle it. I had gotten into the school; I’d definitely be able to take anything it could dish out, right?

The first semester, in addition to the book list, I had this class called Intro to Wall Street that required me to pick up the
New York Times
and
Wall Street Journal
every day. It turned out I was supposed to have been picking them up over the summer as well—some kind of handout that I didn’t get in the mail. I needed to create a portfolio of current events articles and show how they related to stock prices, and to get the back issues. I couldn’t use the Internet; the teacher made me go to the
library
and use microfiche, which is like trying to read the U.S. Constitution off a postage stamp, and when I got two weeks behind on that, I had two more weeks of newspapers to pick up. The papers were so
long;
it was unbelievable how much news there was every day. And I was supposed to scan it all? How did anyone do it? The papers piled up in my room, and every day when I came home I looked at them and knew that I could handle them, that if I just opened that first one I’d be able to get through them all and get the assignment done.

Instead I lay in bed and waited for Aaron to call.

It was about this time that I started labeling things Tentacles. I had a lot of Tentacles. I needed to cut some of them. But I couldn’t; they were all too strong and they had me wrapped too tight; and to cut them I’d have to do something crazy like admit that I wasn’t equipped for school.

The other kids were geniuses. I thought I was a big deal for getting an 800 on the exam—like the entire entering class had gotten 800. It turned out the test had been “broken” in my year; they were tweaking it to make it less formulaic—i.e., less likely to let in people like me. There were kids from Uruguay and Korea who had just learned English but were doing extra credit for the current events stuff in Intro to Wall Street, reading
Barron’s
and
Crain’s Business Daily.
There were freshmen taking calculus, while I was stuck in the math that came after algebra, which the teacher announced on the first day was “ding-dong” math and there was no reason for us not to get a 100 in everything. I got an 85 on my first test and a small frowny face.

Plus there were extracurriculars. Other kids did
everything:
they were on student government; they played sports; they volunteered; they worked for the school newspaper; they had a film club; they had a literature club; they had a chess club; they entered nationwide competitions for building robots out of tongue depressors; they helped teachers out after school; they took classes at local colleges; they assisted on “orientation days.” I didn’t do anything but school and Tae Bo, where I hit a plateau. They humored me in class, letting me fake-fight and do my not-that-form-fitting pushups, but the teacher knew it was something that I didn’t really enjoy. I quit. That was the only Tentacle I ever cut.

Why were the other kids doing better than me? Because they were
better,
that’s why. That’s what I knew every time I sat down online or got on the subway to Aaron’s house. Other people weren’t smoking and jerking off, and those that
were
were gifted—able to live and compete at the same time. I wasn’t gifted. Mom was wrong. I was just smart and I worked hard. I had fooled myself into thinking that was something important to the rest of the world. Other people were complicit in this ruse. Nobody had told me I was common.

That’s not to say I did terrible in high school—I got 93’s. That looked good to my parents. Problem is, in the real world, 93 is the crap grade; colleges know what it means—you do just well enough to stay in the 90’s. You’re average. There are a lot of you. You aren’t going over the top; if you’re not doing any extracurriculars you’re
done.
You can change things in later years, but with 93’s your freshman year, you’re going to have a lot of dead weight.

In December, three months into Executive Pre-Professional, I had stress vomiting for the first time. It happened with my parents at a restaurant; I was eating tuna steak with spinach. They had brought me out to celebrate the holidays and talk with me. They had no idea. I sat there looking at the food and thinking about the Tentacles waiting for me at home, and for the first time the man in my stomach appeared and said I wasn’t getting any of it; I had better back down, buddy, because otherwise this was going to get ugly.

“How’s biology class?” Mom asked.

Biology class was hell. I had to memorize these hormones and what they did and I hadn’t been able to make flash cards because I was too busy clipping newspaper articles.

“Fine.”

“How’s Intro to Wall Street?” Dad asked.

A guy from Bear Stearns had visited our class, thin and bald with a gold watch. He told us that if we were interested in getting into finance, we had better work
hard
and
smart
because a lot of machines were able to make investment decisions now, and in the future, computer programs would run everything. He asked the class how many of us were taking computer science, and everybody but me and this one girl who didn’t speak English raised their hands.

“Great, excellent,” the guy had said. “You other people are out of a job! Heh heh. Learn comp sci.”

Please die right now,
I mumbled in my head, where more and more activity was taking place. The Cycling had begun to develop, although it hadn’t hit hard, and I didn’t know quite what it was yet.

“Wall Street is fine,” I told Dad across the table. The restaurant we were at was one of the ones in Brooklyn that was featured in a
Times
article I had yet to read for current events. I didn’t think we could really afford it, so I didn’t get an appetizer.

The spinach and tuna mulled in my stomach. My whole body was tight. Why was I here? Why wasn’t I off somewhere studying?

Soldier, what is the problem?

I can’t eat this. I know I
should be able to.

Get over it. Eat it.

I can’t.

You know why that is?

Why?

Because you’re wasting your time, soldier! There’s a reason the U.S. Army isn’t made up of potheads! You’re spending all your time at your little horn-dog friend’s house and when you get home you can’t do what you have to do!

I know. I don’t know how I can be so ambitious and so lazy at the same time.

I’ll tell you how, soldier. It’s because you’re not ambitious. You’re just lazy.

“I’ve got to be excused,” I told my parents, and I walked through the restaurant with that fast-walking gonna-throw-up gait—a run aching to get out—that I learned to perfect over the next year. I came to the chrome bathroom and let it go in the toilet. Afterward I sat, turned the light off, and pissed. I didn’t want to get up. What was wrong with me? Where did I lose it? I had to stop smoking pot. I had to stop hanging out with Aaron. I had to be a machine.

I didn’t get out of the bathroom until someone came and knocked.

When I went back to my parents, I told them: “I think I might be, y’know, depressed.”