Teen Angst? Naaah ... (5 page)

After a week at Stuy, I started hearing about how hard it was to get up in the morning and how “the daily grind is getting to me, man.” Once-enthusiastic kids were complaining like whiny forty-year-olds in dead-end jobs.

The workload
was
hard. Freshman year, we had up to three hours of homework each night, and that worsened as time went on. A biology teacher once put it to me this way: “Getting through Stuy is easy. You have three options: good grades, social success, and sleep. You can only have two out of three.” I chose grades and sleep. The people who chose grades and social success (getting drunk on the weekends when they should've been studying and whatnot) ended up with some problems. They'd come to school bleary-eyed and sleep in the hallways. But missing
sleep was cool—it gave them something to brag about. They'd meet each other and say, “Man, I am so tired. I got, like, twenty hours of sleep this whole week, and I partied all weekend.” Response: “Yeah … I'm not kidding, man, I have three tests today. I was up studying for bio until four.” A war of antisleep bragging rights.

Some days, I went to school on no sleep, but adrenaline got me through. When I took tests, I always got a palpable high—my brain buzzed with endorphins as I stared at those questions. Stuyvesant was a big, exciting place, and just being in the building was a rush for me. I'd walk through the door, no longer a powerless little kid. I was a ninja, prowling the halls in search of good grades.

Stuyvesant had an interesting take on education. The plan, it seemed, was to cram a student's head full of information, test the student repeatedly, and then move on to an unrelated subject with frightening speed. It was a shock, after studying digestion for a month, to hear your biology teacher announce, “Okay, this unit is over. Forget about the human digestive system. On to locomotion in the paramecium.”

But I
did
forget about the human digestive system,
and quickly, because it was no longer on the test. Everything at Stuy was either meaningless or on the test. “It's not on the test? Dude, are you serious, she's not testing us on this?”
Smack
. That would be the sound of a textbook closing. If something wasn't on the test, you just closed your book and smiled.

Problem was, even things that weren't on the test could show up on the final. Stuy finals tended to be standardized, so every biology class took an exam written collectively by the biology department. That meant every final included at least one question you couldn't possibly answer because your teacher had screwed up and not taught it. The final exams at Stuy were everything: the products of your labor, the causes of your anxiety, the details that kept you up at night, the challenges that, once met,
oh boy
. School's … out … for … summer! All you had now was a vague sense of dread that you'd messed up and wouldn't get into a Good College.

I went into Stuyvesant High School terrified; I came to think of the place not as a terror, but as a manageable form of pain. Not a sharp, wincing pain that went away quickly—a chronic, dull, four-year ache that, if pressed on the right way, felt kind of good.

I
leave the house at 7:23 every morning. Well, not exactly 7:23—I wish I were that anal—more like 7:25 or :26. I take fifteen minutes (even if I run) to reach the subway. I spend two or three more minutes waiting on the platform. When the train comes, I run to the front car and try to beat out an adult for a seat. I usually fail. Then, I'm faced with the day's first problem: what to do on the way to school. I have fifteen minutes to kill.

Let's start with the obvious: I could read. At 7:45 A.M., a New York subway car is a remarkably literate place. The
Daily News
, the Bible,
Waiting to Exhale
,
^*
R. L. Stine, a chemistry textbook—half the straphangers are reading. But I can't read on the train. Invariably, I get caught up in a chapter and lose my balance, falling into the businesswoman next to me, who's also reading. She closes her thick, important-looking book and glares at me. I cringe, shuffle away, and look at the floor. Bumping into men isn't so bad;
they just
harrumph
and turn back to the sports section. Still, reading's out.

I could always fantasize, but come on. Cramped by some overweight banker, smelling b.o. that's just starting to stale, wearing a fifteen-pound backpack, and clutching my math notebook in my teeth, I'm going to think about the woman next to me?

I could scan the passengers, like Dad does. He's always analyzing strangers on the train, building stories around their imagined lives. “See those two? He's an architect, and he loves her, but he can't stand her cats.” Never a dull moment for Dad. But I'm no good at crafting urban tales.

I could hum, but this causes problems, too. My humming inevitably leads to openmouthed mumbling, which becomes these horrible “Dun, dun, dada, dun, da” noises, which lead to full-blown, off-key singing in my corner of the subway car. Sometimes I belt out the entire “Spider-Man” theme song (“Is he tough? Listen, bud / He's got radioactive blood”) before shutting myself up.

I experimented with a Walkman. I'd put on the headphones, hunch over, and wear a jaded, sullen-teen face as I brooded in the back of the car. But I'm not sullen, and I can't fake it; the Walkman was eventually crushed by an unruly businessman.

Often, the idea of talking with my fellow straphangers has crossed my mind. There are two I recognize—the annoying woman with the sunglasses who never gets a seat, and the cute green-haired girl who actually seems intimidated by me. Many times, I've been ready to address them, but I always reconsider and pull out my global notes to study.

I could sleep, but how? A typical subway rider sleeps standing up, chin dropped to the chest, or sitting, head tilted back. These positions never work for me. The only way I can rest is by sitting with my backpack on my lap, and my head on my backpack. Bent forward, covered in my coat and sweatshirt, I look like a twisted midget escaped from rehab. My back gets bent up, and then hurts all day. I never actually fall asleep.

Sometimes, though, I fall half asleep. Being half asleep is terrific; my sense of time slows down, and I picture weird things. Sometimes I press my palms against my eyes on the subway to see whirling tunnels or flashing squares. Once, firmly planted in this zone, I saw a gray machine extruding strawberries through a little nozzle.
^*

But I can't be half asleep all the time, and I'm running out of options. I could stare and think about mysteries of the cosmos. Let's see … 
Is there a God?
Please.
How can the universe be older than some of its stars?
Somebody screwed up.
Will we ever conquer disease?
No.
Will the universe expand forever, or will it stop at a point and implode?
Right then, when I'm on implosions, the train hits Park Place. One more stop before school.

My brain shifts modes. I do the mental homework checklist: math, global, English. Either I've done them, or I'll do them at lunch. The train pulls into Chambers Street.

It's 7:58, most likely—I'll know by sneaking a glance at someone's watch.
^*
My back is aching; lint has already sneaked into my interstices. I'm tired and I'm headed off to Sequential Math, where I understand roughly 50 percent of the curriculum. But at least there I've got something to do. These subway trips are going to kill me fifteen minutes at a time.

“N
ed, have you been smoking pot?” Mom asked. I exploded with laughter. I was in the kitchen, clipping my nails, eating cereal, and watching TV.

“What?! What makes you think that?” I turned to Mom. I had never smoked anything in my life, not even cigarettes, and I was tired of her paranoia.

“When you do homework, you turn off the overhead light and use your desk lamp. When you watch TV, you always keep the lights off. People who smoke marijuana become sensitive to light, you know.”

I laughed. “Mom, when I do homework, I use my desk light because it's more
focused
. And I watch TV in the dark because there's no glare that way … seriously.”

“
Oookay
, I'm just checking.”

I'm not sure why my mother is so fixated on me and drugs. I guess it's just baseline suspicion—I'm fourteen, I'm in high school, and America is a morally repugnant cesspool of sex and substances anyway, right?

Mom and I had that little conference on a Thursday night in February. The following Saturday, I told
her I had to go to the West End at 8:00
P.M
. to see a band called Shrivel. Shrivel's lead guitarist, Josh, went to my school. He reportedly had a really good group, and a lot of my friends were going to see him. Mom refused to let me go. I asked her why.

“Well, because I don't know any of your friends, and I don't know what kind of people they are,” she said.

Of course
Mom didn't know my friends—I never brought them to the apartment. It was a three-ring circus, with her obsessing over crosswords, Dad ranting about how dirty everything was, and Daniel and Nora fighting. The people I brought over tended not to return. I
told
my mother about my friends, but those conversations always went badly:

“Mom, I met this cool kid named Sam
^*
in school.”

“Oh, yeah? What's he like?”

“He's a video game addict. He plays this game Warcraft all the time. He's up till three every night playing it.”

“Sounds nice.”

“He's the number five ranked Warcraft player in the
world
, Mom.”

“Uh-huh. Where did he go to school?”

Mom always asked that—where had my friends gone to school before they came to Stuyvesant? I never had a clue; I didn't see why it was important.

So because I never brought my friends home and didn't know what junior highs they'd attended, my mother decided they were bad influences. We had a loud, drawn-out argument about the Shrivel show. In the end, we reached a compromise: Mom would let me go if Dad drove me there and back.

Dad was happy to do it—he liked any excuse to get out of the apartment. He planned to drop me off at the show at 8:00, hang out in some bookstores for a while, and pick me up at 9:30. Now, Dad isn't an embarrassing guy, but the Shrivel show was an important social gathering, and I didn't want him escorting me to and from it. I explained this to him. He understood. He dropped me off a block away from the West End and let me walk there myself.

When I arrived, I didn't know what to do. I'd never been out to see a band before, but I had this vague idea that bands played in “clubs” or “bars,” and this didn't look like either: it looked like a restaurant. Unprepared as usual, I hung around for ten minutes until my socially savvy friends, who had seen a lot of bands, showed up. They led me into the West End, through the restaurant, and down a flight of concrete
stairs. Josh stood at the bottom by the basement door, asking everyone for five bucks.

Next to him was his
mother
.

“Hi!” she gushed. “Thanks so much for coming to the show! And you are …”

“Uh, Ned.”

“Oh, Josh has told me about you. You're from Stuyvesant, right?”

“Yeah.”

She kept talking, but I was no longer listening. I was pondering the inherent wrongness of the situation. A rock concert should be counterculture and youth-driven—not something you invite your
mother
to.
^*
Rock is the opposite of mothers. Nevertheless, I paid my five dollars and walked through the door, into the West End's dim basement.

The opening band was Army of Clones. The band members were about thirteen years old, and they were terrible. The drummer seemed to be witnessing a drum set for the first time; he eyed it strangely and hit it occasionally. I don't think the bassist was even playing anything. Army of Clones had no good original songs because, at thirteen, they had no life experience.
^**
In four years, they might be decent.

I looked around at the audience. The basement was half full, with a bunch of the bands' friends milling around, chatting. But in one corner, there were … 
adults
. Dressed in blazers and ties, sitting with perfect posture and sipping distinguished-looking drinks, they contrasted sharply with the younger members of the crowd. I saw Josh's mother among them, and then it hit me—these were the bands'
parents!
And grandparents! With
video cameras
to tape the gig!

On the faces of these well-off Upper West Siders, I saw the same proud “Look at my kid” grins that parents wear when they see school plays. I could just picture these people lounging at home, beaming at their videotape of Jimmy's First Gig. “Look at him sing about his teenage angst. Isn't that wonderful!”