A Bad Idea I'm About to Do (17 page)

The cop pulled up behind me and directed his spotlight into my rearview mirror, blinding me. Though I couldn't see anything, I heard him get out of his car. He slammed his door angrily and made his way toward me. He shined his flashlight into my side-view mirror in a successful effort to blind me just a little bit more.

“License, registration, insurance now!” he barked at me.

“Sir, I'm really sorry,” I said. In my experience with cops, the only way to get out of a ticket was to be completely subservient. “I—”

“SHUT UP,” he screamed at me, red in the face.

I opened my wallet and handed him my license. Then I meekly opened my glove compartment to get the rest of my
paperwork, and grimaced when I realized things were about to get much, much worse.

“Sir, I hate to say this, but I seem to not have my registration and insurance cards on me right now,” I squeaked.

“Are you kidding me?” he asked, genuinely baffled. This hard-nosed, no-nonsense police officer honestly thought I was messing with him.

“No, sir,” I said. “I seem to have misplaced them.” I looked at him, doing my best to convey the demeanor of a remorseful and cowardly man, hoping he'd take pity on me. He looked over my license.

“Where are you headed, Mr. Get Hard?” he asked. I didn't correct his pronunciation.

“Home,” I answered.

“Back to Fairfield?” His tone made it clear that this was another nail in the coffin.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Well, then,” he grunted, “this exit is not on the way to Fairfield. I guess it's safe to surmise that the only reason you got off at this exit was to evade capture by me.”

I was done trying to get away. I hadn't managed to drive my way out of this mess, and there was definitely no way I was going to talk my way out of it either. I mentally prepared myself for a night in prison.

“Yes, sir, that's correct,” I replied. He shook his head before turning back toward his car. Before he walked away, I blurted out exactly what was on my mind.

“And I just want to say that this is easily the stupidest thing I've ever done in my entire life.”

I didn't say it in a whiny or pleading voice. My tone was flat. I just wanted it on the record. I fucked up, and for some reason, I wanted to make sure he knew I knew that.

He looked at me with a combination of hatred and confusion.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, it is.”

He walked toward his car, his boots clicking on the asphalt. My heart raced as I thought of what life would be like now that my driving privileges would be replaced with a criminal record. Then, the officer paused. He turned and headed back in my direction. I braced myself for a tongue-lashing. Instead, he reached toward the window.

“Get home safe, Christopher,” he muttered, handing me back my license.

“Oh. Okay,” I said.

I leaned out the window as he turned and walked away.

“I'm really sorry to have wasted your time tonight, sir,” I said.

He didn't answer. He got into his car and disappeared onto the highway. I shook, unable to process that he had actually let me go. Anxiety overtook me along with an overpowering sinking feeling. Now that I was out of trouble, I retroactively experienced all of the fear and nervousness that should have stopped me from going on such an ill-advised adventure in the first place. For a moment, I honestly thought I was going to shit my pants.

Luckily I managed to calm down before evacuating my bowels. Driving home, I thought about how dumb I had been. I thought about how my schedule was crazy, how I was slowly killing myself—mentally if not physically—and how things needed to change.

I was also left with one nagging question: Why did he let me go? Maybe he appreciated the honesty I put on display through my admission of guilt and subsequent condemnation of my own intelligence. Maybe I just got lucky, and pulling off the highway meant I had left his jurisdiction, that all he
could
do
legally was put the fear of God in me. Maybe I was so visibly pathetic that he decided to take pity. I will never know the answer, but I spent a lot of time thinking about it both as I drove home that night and since.

Despite my fear, I also thought about how many (yes, ill-advised but absolutely and undeniably) badass things I had pulled off that night.

I'm glad the cop didn't give me a ticket. But not just because I avoided the points and retained my license. All the tickets up to that point hadn't had an effect on me. I'd viewed avoiding them as some sort of weird self-destructive game. In my mind, I had every right to behave how I wanted. It was the cops' job to try and stop me and it was my job to try and get away. We were all just playing our roles.

That cop's leniency was a choice. It made me realize that I had choices, too. I could choose to not push things so far. I could choose to live a less hectic life that wouldn't make me feel that behaving like an insane asshole lunatic was either necessary or cool. I could choose to take care of myself, to put my health and safety ahead of my ambitions and obsessions. Most importantly, in a few different ways, I could choose to slow down.

Eventually I did. But I'm still a driving prodigy, and one day you and everyone else will see the way.

A
s a tried-and-true nerd, I've always suspected that finding one's nemesis was just another step in the process of becoming a man. You grow hair on your body, your voice changes, and you find your ideological counterpart to stand in stark juxtaposition to, highlighting your own heroic tendencies in the process.

Spider-Man had the Green Goblin. Hulk Hogan had King Kong Bundy. And I had Nick Forman. As with nearly every other aspect of puberty, I didn't discover my nemesis until I was in college.

I didn't learn much of anything during my time at Rutgers. I was an American Studies major. I signed up for it because my only goal was to graduate while doing as little work as possible. American Studies was great because most of the class titles could conceivably end in an exclamation point. “Urban Adventure!,” “P.T. Barnum!,” and “Murder in America!” were just a few of the notables from my transcript.

One summer class I took was titled “The Cowboy in Fiction and Film!” We watched a movie during each class, one of them
being
Shanghai Noon
starring Owen Wilson and Jackie Chan. I didn't read any of the books. Each week I'd put my head down and fall sound asleep immediately once class began.

But one day a discussion about a book titled
The Virginian
was keeping me awake. The professor was describing a scene involving a chicken sitting on a rock after its egg had been taken from its nest. He asked the class about the symbolism behind the chicken's behavior. I hadn't read the book, but the conversation was annoying enough to interrupt my slumber, so I took action.

“Chris?” the professor asked when I raised my hand. It's always a sign that you've slacked off when a teacher calls on you in question form.

“Yeah,” I said, wiping sleep from my eyes. “Here's the thing. Even though it was just a chicken it lived life and, therefore, had dreams. That egg represented its dreams.”

Everyone stared at me. For the majority, it was the first time they had heard me speak.

“When the egg was taken away, the chicken sat on a rock,” I continued. “Why? Because even though it knew its dreams wouldn't come true, it still had to chase them.”

I squinted and melodramatically gazed out the window.

“It's something all of us would be well served to learn,” I said. “Achieving your dreams is not always the most important part of life;
having
dreams is.”

“Exactly,” the professor said. He smiled at me.

With that, I dropped my head down on my desk and fell right back asleep.

The only downside to my major was that it required me to take two real classes through the history department. I took mine with a feisty Southern professor named George Kayne. To this day, he's the only person I've ever seen manage to look tough while wearing a sweater vest.

“If you ever have to take a history class,” my friend Sean Gorman told me at the beginning of freshman year, “take it with George Kayne.”

“Why?” I asked. “Is he easy?”

“No, he's hard,” Sean said. “But he's insane . . . in an entertaining way.”

Legend had it that Kayne used to be the chair of the department, but got demoted for punching another professor in the face. He would stalk around the room shouting like a bulldog and turning red in the face. I once watched him make a girl cry on the first day of class for no reason. He even laughed as she exited the room.

“Your tears mean nothing to me!” he exclaimed as she fled.

With such a badass at the helm, you'd think I would have shaped up. But I remained a slacker. Due in part to a nasty addiction to
Mike Tyson's Punch Out
on Nintendo, I managed to screw myself for finals week and had to scramble to get all of my work done. I'd lost the syllabus for Kayne's class and was forced to email him the day before a paper was due. Out of fear, I used a fake email address—[email protected].

“Hey Professor Kayne!” I began. “It's CG Dupree from your Monday/Wednesday class. I'm psyched to get crackin' on this paper, but I just realized I lost the topic. If you could email me back with it, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!”

I woke the next morning to an email from Kayne in CG Dupree's inbox.

“Dear whoever you are,” it read. “There is no one registered in my class under the name CG Dupree. Furthermore, anyone who would start a paper of mine with less than a day to go is destined to fail—not just the paper, but at life in general.”

School wasn't doing it for me, and the more I drifted away from having any sense of academic standards, the more I felt like
I had no place there. In movies about the college experience, the slackers and outcasts find each other. They live together, bonding over their own idiosyncrasies and turning them into their greatest strengths. The helpless freshmen in
Animal House
learn to idolize Bluto. The Lambda Lambda Lambdas form their own frat, boxing out the rest of the Greek system. I wanted to find my own band of brothers to embrace my outside nature with, to unite together against the mainstream. And for a brief window in time, I thought I did.

My sophomore year I moved into a house with five other guys, each one of them a social misfit. Mark was an aspiring rapper who lost his mind freshman year and dropped fifty pounds just to see if he could. Anthony literally never stopped playing video games. The only break he'd give himself was to attend his Chinese calligraphy course. Jesse wore a trench coat—as he had all through high school—despite the fact that Columbine had happened just six months before we moved into our house. His refusal to alter his fashion in reaction to Columbine only made him seem more Columbineish. Eric was a lovable Taiwanese goofball who had never drunk alcohol before living with us. Within weeks of shared residency, he'd become a champion booze-bag and was piously dedicated to online poker.

Over the course of one painfully long year, our house became a pressure cooker that would drive each of us to the brink of madness. The first sign of impending disaster was an infestation of camel crickets—bugs so big and terrifying we once crushed one with a dictionary and flushed it down the toilet only to watch it climb back out. If I had to give you a proper description, I would say a camel cricket is basically a cross between a grasshopper and a dragon and that its natural habitat is the nightmares of men.

In addition, our house was robbed multiple times. We figured the person robbing us was the man who we routinely caught staring into our basement windows, but the crack patrol down at the New Brunswick PD told us that this wasn't enough of a lead to go on.

Without question, the place was a hellhole. But it was also just bizarre. For example, a radiator was mounted on the ceiling directly above Anthony's bed. There was also a hole in the floor directly next to where he slept. We'd drop items down into it and never hear them land. Anthony developed insomnia caused by the knowledge that even if he somehow managed to dodge the radiator that could fall onto him at any moment, he would likely plunge into a bottomless pit in the process.

The list of insanities went on and on. A bat attacked me in my bedroom. The toilets often clogged and my roommates were inconsiderate—a deadly combination that eventually led to a toilet explosion that ended with me crying in the shower, desperately trying to scrub my legs clean of the drunken diarrhea Eric had left behind. It was enough to question the value of our society, let alone our education system.

It's fair to say that in the face of such madness and atrocity, my final roommate, Nick Forman, was actually the one who was able to hold it together the best. At least up to a point. When Nick broke it wasn't the living in filth that got him. It wasn't being attacked by insects from another planet.

In the end what destroyed Nick Forman was the movie
Fight Club
.

Fight Club
was released a few months after we moved into our house, and something about the experience of watching it transformed Nick overnight. He went from being a weird nerd like the rest of us to an intolerable nightmare of a human
being. It wasn't just that Nick saw the movie and got excited over it. It wasn't even that he walked away inspired by it. I legitimately think the experience of watching
Fight Club
rewired the kid's brain chemistry. Afterward, he walked differently, his posture self-assured and confident. He reacted to things differently, his love for Dungeons & Dragons replaced by an obsession with sports. The most evident change, however, was that he talked differently. Inexplicably, he adopted an outdated hip-hop vernacular and began referring to all of his roommates as “Cousin.”