Teen Angst? Naaah ... (13 page)

The jock held me up as I staggered out of the gym. “C'mon,” he encouraged, “you can do it.”

I had never actually seen the nurse's office before (I stayed pretty healthy in high school). It looked just as I expected. White walls and informative posters:

“Oh, boy. What happened to you?” the nurse's assistant asked. She was young, a student, possibly a junior like me.

“I fell in gym.” I tried to chuckle.

“Well, get up on this table, and I'll get you some ice.” She motioned me with her chubby hands. I did as she said, removing my right shoe and sock. My ankle didn't look too bad …

The assistant yelped. “Boy, is that swollen!” I looked at my left ankle for comparison; the right one was twice as big.

“Margie, come here!” the assistant called. A short African-American woman walked in with the harried, seen-it-all confidence of a high school nurse.
She took one look at my foot, then at my face. “Well, honey, you sprained your ankle good.” She smiled.

“Are you sure it's sprained? Maybe it's just twisted.” I had this idea that twists were better than sprains. A twist you could walk off. A sprain put you in crutches.

“Sprained, honey, sprained good,” Margie said. “Look at that bird's egg.” She pointed at the swelling.

“Is it broken?” I had never broken anything before.

“Probably not. You'll have to have a doctor look at it.” She placed an ice pack against my foot. “Now, honey, what we need to do is call your parents.”

Margie tied the ice pack to my foot as her assistant entered with a wheelchair. “Hop in,” the assistant said, gesturing.

I did. I was grinning. I'd always wanted to ride in a wheelchair. The assistant wheeled me out of the room.

“I want to do it myself,” I protested. I grabbed hold of the wheels and propelled my chair over to the phone, where Margie was calling my dad.

“Hello, this is the Stuyvesant High School nurse's office, calling about your son.” For some reason, she wouldn't say my name. “Your son has been injured, and you need to come by to pick him up.” I found out
later that since school nurses aren't doctors, they're not allowed to tell parents how their children have been hurt at school. All they can say is, “Your son/daughter has been injured.”

“He wants to talk to you,” Margie said, handing me the phone.

“Hey, Dad. I sprained my ankle in volleyball.”

Dad let out a long breath. I'd ruined his day. “Fine, I'm coming down to get you,” he said. We hung up.

“Well, honey, what you need to do now is get your stuff from your gym locker.” Margie grabbed my wheelchair handles and pushed me into the hall; I took it from there. It was weird—almost an out-of-body experience—to roll around Stuyvesant in a wheelchair. It put me very close to the ground and made me feel four or five years old. It reminded me of how big and snarling my peers were.

“What did you do to yourself, spaz?” someone from my Latin class asked as I rolled toward the elevator.

“Yo, man, you stole a wheelchair?” That was Owen. He'd caught a glimpse of the chair and got excited. “Whoa, awesome, who'd you jack it from? Man, this is so cool, what are you gonna do with it—oh, dude, you really hurt yourself!”

“Yeah.”

“Man, I thought you just took the chair. You really hurt yourself? Did you break your leg?”

“No.”

Owen ran off to tell his friends I'd broken my leg. I got in the elevator—Stuyvesant's elevators were reserved for teachers and disabled kids; I'd never been in one before. I rode up to the fifth floor and wheeled myself to the boys' locker room.
^*

From here, things got cartoonish. As I entered the locker room, the door closed on my wheelchair, knocking me forward, smacking my bad foot into the cement wall. Deadening bolts of pain shot up my leg. The wheelchair was fairly old, and it had a huge turning radius; I couldn't maneuver very well. So I banged my foot a couple more times before getting anywhere near my locker.

I wasn't just in pain—I was scared, rolling around in a deserted locker room. All the guys were gone: the fat ones, the hairy ones, the ones bragging about girls. It was too silent.

I got out of the wheelchair and hopped the last ten feet to my locker. I opened my lock, grabbed my backpack and my Magic cards, and hauled them over to the wheelchair, where I sat down and put my stuff
on my lap. Then I got out of the room as fast as possible (which wasn't very fast), because the whole scene was beginning to remind me of
Event Horizon
.
^*

Outside, some girls were hanging out at their school lockers in the hall—the lockers near the guys' changing room all belonged to attractive females. They glanced at me inquisitively before checking me off as someone they'd dismissed before. The wheelchair and a swollen, naked foot warranted second glances, but not thirds—and certainly not any help. I wheeled back to the nurse's office.

I needed to fill out some official papers: How did I injure myself? Where on my body? Where in the building? The point of the paperwork, I figured, was to prove that the school was in no way responsible for my falling down and that all the professionals involved had treated me properly.

I asked Margie about her experiences as a high school nurse.

“Been here twelve years,” she told me.

“What's the stupidest thing you ever saw?”

Her eyes lit up. “Oh, definitely, when this girl came in holding three teeth in her hand. She'd been sliding down an escalator handrail, see, and she
flew off the end, right into a wall. So I tell her, ‘I need to call your father—what's his number?' And she says, ‘I dunno.' She has no idea what her father's number is, doesn't even know where he works. I have to call some friend who calls the
uncle
who calls the father.”

“Good story.”

“Stupid girl. Really. They took her away, gave her some new teeth. I see her around sometimes.”

Eventually, a phone rang in the nurse's office. My dad had arrived. I wheeled down to the chandelier-lit Stuyvesant lobby, kicked open the doors, and rolled across the sidewalk to the curb, where the family van awaited. Mom was in the front seat, looking distressed at my condition. Dad sat behind the wheel, wearing sunglasses against the glare.

“My goodness, honey, are you okay?” Mom leapt from the van and grabbed the back of my chair.

“Well, I've been stumbling around like an idiot for a while,” I said. “And I've been blown away by the support I've received from friends … and from my dear father.”

Dad was still sitting in the driver's seat, with his hands on the wheel.

“Jim, you're
despicable
,” Mom said. “Get out here and help your son.”

“
Hmmmm?
Oh, yes.” Dad smiled. He was just
messing around. He got out of the van and helped me into the backseat. “How you doing, son?” he asked. “This injury might be good for you; it'll give you a chance to take a load off.”

As I climbed into the van, I saw my math teacher, Mr. Pingeon, standing on the sidewalk taking a cigarette break. Apparently, he had no teachers' lounge to smoke in. He waggled his finger at me, grinning. Everybody loves a wheelchair.

I
have a short and brutal history with television. When I was a baby, Mom somehow got me in a diaper commercial that ran on network TV for months. I never saw it—first, I was a baby; second, no one taped it because VCRs weren't around yet (at least in my family). I never did any more diaper ads, either, because I was a “bad baby”—the kind who scream and cry like normal children, as opposed to the “good babies”
^*
who sit still while being taped for television commercials.

Then, when I was nine or ten, Nickelodeon came to my school and taped our fourth-grade class cleaning up a local park for a segment called “The Big Help.”
^**
The idea was to show kids helping the environment. On one of the Big Help promos, I was featured in extreme close-up, screaming,
“Heeeelp!”
That appearance prompted calls from my cousins in Philadelphia (“Ned, you're on TV! You're on
TV!
”).

My third chance came the June between junior
and senior year. I was called by
The View
, a nationally syndicated talk show, where five female “personalities” sit on a couch for an hour, discussing current events and doling out advice. I was called because the producers of the show wanted me on as a guest—they had seen an article I'd written for
The New York Times Magazine
.

Okay, full story. In the spring of that year, the editor of
The New York Times Magazine
, who had seen my essays in
New York Press
, decided I would be a good person to contribute to the magazine's “Being Thirteen” issue—an in-depth survey of thirteen-year-olds in America. I was commissioned to write an advice column for a typical thirteen-year-old. I did the job. The article appeared that May, and the
Times
paid me one thousand dollars.
^*
I thought that was the end of it. But then Ronnie, this guy from
The View
, called and asked if I was interested in being a guest on the show. He offered me two front-row seats at a live broadcast to see what it was like.

I flipped. I'd always wanted to be on TV—real TV, not diaper commercials or “Big Help” ads—for all the typical reasons. Doesn't everybody want to be on TV for the same stupid reasons? Fame, money, anonymous adoration that somehow fixes all your problems?
Enough of writing silly little articles, dude—I was ready for the Big Time.

There was just one problem. Ronnie was giving me two tickets.
^*
I'd learned that any time adults give you two tickets to anything, they expect you to bring a girl, and I didn't have a girl to bring. Not even a prospect. I could always bring some guy friend, but then the
View
people might think I was gay and book me as “gay teen voice, Ned Vizzini.” I didn't want to misrepresent the gay community.

So I convinced Ronnie to give me four tickets; that way, I could show up with three buddies, like the typical, normal, heterosexual male I was trying to become. With the tickets clinched, I started making phone calls.

First, I phoned Hector, my drummer friend. I played in two bands in high school (neither was as good as Wormwhole),
^**
and Hector drummed in both of them. He looked like a drummer: short, dirty, with a huge forehead. He walked like a caveman, and he was brutally honest and loyal.

“Hey, Hector, you wanna crash a TV show?” I tried to sound cool.

“Oh, wow! Yeah! Sure! What show?”

“I got free tickets. VIP tickets.”

“What show?”

“We get to stay in the executive lounge.”

“What show?”

“Uh … 
The View
.”

“The View?”
Pause. “I've never heard of
The View
.”

“Yeah, I know. Sorry.”

I got this reaction from Ike and Owen when I called them, too. It was tough to get them excited about a show that's essentially a group of women chatting for an hour.

Owen couldn't go, so the next morning, it was just Hector, Ike, and me, meeting in the F station. I quickly assessed that we had a clothing problem. I had dressed up for
The View
, wearing a collared shirt, a belt, and Rockport shoes. Ike, who looked even buffer than the last time I'd seen him, was wearing all black, of course, with steel-toed boots. Hector had shaggy black hair, flannel-shirt-over-T-shirt, faded jeans, and sneakers. My friends weren't presentable, and somehow, the contrast between them and me made me unpresentable, too.

“Are we gonna be on TV?” Ike asked, breathless, as we piled into the F train.

“No, we're in the audience, remember?” I grabbed
a strap. “We're not guests. If everything goes right, I
might
be a guest someday.”

“So, we're
not
gonna be on TV?” Hector shrugged. “Figures.”

“Maybe when they do pan shots of the audience, you'll be on for, like, a tenth of a second.”

“Yes!” Ike and Hector high-fived.

As we pulled into Columbus Circle, I checked someone else's watch. 10:10.