Teen Angst? Naaah ... (22 page)

“Well, sorry,” I shrugged.

“Okay, I'll be back with y'all's drinks.” She walked away.

“Geez,” I grabbed my head. People always think I look young, or act young. I'm going to be that idiot who has to show his I.D. when he's thirty, not
because he looks young and virile but because he's so doofy no one will believe he's an adult.

Crystal returned with our drinks and took our food orders, tapping her pen impatiently on her pad. There was a burly man dressed in black leather seated at a table in the back whom she was eager to talk to. Whenever she stopped dealing with us, she went right to him. Throughout the night, I tried to figure out whether he was a paying customer, her boss, or just some guy she liked.

“I'd like the buffalo wings—Three-Mile Island, please?” I said. The wings came in medium, hot, and Three-Mile Island.

“Ooh, honey, are you sure that won't be too hot for you?” Crystal asked, alarmed.

“I like hot stuff,” I seethed. “I'll be fine.”

“Oookay.”
She tiddled off to get the food, after making a pit stop at the burly guy.

I was beginning to see how Hooters worked. It wasn't that the waitresses were pretty: some were, but some looked like plastic surgery gone wrong. It was that they talked to you; they were
paid
to talk to you; they did so enthusiastically, with smiles. Hooters taps into the deep-down loneliness of the American male.

And the place was almost 100 percent men. We
did see one couple
^*
and one mother-son pairing. Dad and I discussed what kind of kid would go to Hooters with his mom, and what his nickname would be when the murders began.

The conversation cheered me up, and as the night wore on, I forgot about Crystal's remarks and got into the Hooters atmosphere: the laid-back, TV-watching, oh-wow-there's-some-cleavage, bright, safe sleaze of the place. I ate some Three-Mile wings and polished off a cheeseburger. I watched ESPN, talked with my brother, and almost convinced Dad to buy me a beer. Toward the end of the night, I even connected with Crystal on a subject: Conan O'Brien, the late-night TV host.

“Yeah, I met him once,” I told her as she refilled my Coke. “I saw him on the street and shook his hand. He's actually very tall.”

She stopped dead:
“No
. Conan O'Brien is
tall?”

“Oh, sure, he's about six feet four.”

“I don't believe you.”

“I'm dead serious. The other guy on the show, his sidekick, is six feet, and Conan makes him look small. He's a very tall man.”

“My gosh, I never knew that. I'm gonna tell all my
friends, and
none
of them are gonna believe me.” She walked away shaking her head, “Conan O'Brien is
tall!
”

Around 11:00
P.M.
, two hours after our arrival, we were still staring at a lot of food. I couldn't finish my wings; Daniel had hardly touched his; and Dad, who could've eaten everything on our table plus a milk shake, was holding back as part of a diet. Crystal noticed our leftovers and came over with Styrofoam containers, which she loaded with notable grace. “I know you think you're never going to be hungry again, because you ate so much,” she chided, “but believe me, later on, you
will
be hungry again and you'll want to eat this!”

Minutes later she gave us the check. Actually, she gave
me
the check and glanced at me appreciatively. I looked down at it. She had written, “Very nice meeting you and I hope that you enjoyed wild and wonderful WV. Crystal.” With a smiley face. I guess that's something they make all the Hooters girls write.

Dad, Daniel, and I made our way to the van; as soon as we were out of Hooters, we felt comfortable rating it.

“I liked that,” Daniel said. “It was, like, TV and girls. Together.”

“I don't know,” said Dad. “You can get tired of places like that.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled. “You can.”

But that wasn't what I was thinking. I was thinking about Crystal—how awful it was to be near her when it was her
job
to talk to me, and how much nicer it would've been if she had
wanted
to talk to me. I was thinking how fake it all felt.

I was thinking about loneliness, adulthood, my girlfriend situation, college, and how final this all was—the last family vacation, maybe the last nighttime parking-lot walk with my father and brother, for a while anyway. When I got in the van, I convinced Dad to play my live AC/DC tape, and we drove back to the hotel, rocking out.

W
hen
Teen Angst? Naaah …
was published, some of my friends questioned the ending. “It just … ends,” they told me. I responded, “It's life! Life doesn't have tidy endings,” but I understood their frustration. Now, years later, I have the chance to tack on a tidy ending, and it's tempting to say that our class lived happily ever after.

But the truth is, I haven't kept in touch with the vast majority of people from my high school. I think that's a good thing, as I didn't
like
the vast majority of the people from my high school: the ones from the student union, the self-righteous computer nerds, the women … Only the most important ones have stuck around, and they were the ones who had already made it into this book anyway.

Ike, my self-declared vampiric Mayan friend, traveled for a while. The last time I saw him was in his house in Brooklyn. Ike had become involved with “perfect black.” Black dyes, see, are not truly black. They reflect light to an infinitesimal degree. And a small but dedicated group of chemists and fashion researchers are attempting to eliminate this, to
achieve perfect, total black. A noble quest, and one I wish him well on.
^*

I still keep in touch with James, my soft-spoken, trench-coat-wearing friend. (He has stopped wearing trench coats.) Among other things, he managed to get a professional electronic drum set rigged up to Rock Band, the rock music video game that has made all of my youthful musical ventures obsolete. He started playing the game with the real drum set and within a few months
taught himself how to play drums using Rock Band
. Then he took his guitar, bass, and vocal abilities and recorded a demo. Here's hoping someone reads this and offers him a record deal. Maybe we can tour together!

Poppy, who gave me my summer of dominoes and beer, is long gone from East Fourth Street. For better and worse, New York has become so safe and so expensive since this book was written that the unconquerable downtrodden people who taught me so much about life—Poppy, Old Franky/Old Tony, Aeneas, Husky and Lanky, Major—were priced out, forced into other lifestyles, or (I somehow know) sucked into death.

I haven't talked to Judith in a decade.

My family is wonderful, all alive, and, as Dad
says, none of us duds. I do my thing, which although sometimes dudlike can't be entirely written off. Danny got into applied math, aka math that is
completely crazy;
my sister grew into the most practical, implacable person I know.

My mother is happy. When we children left the house, she got dogs, and even though she's a vegetarian, she loves the dogs so much that she rips up roast chicken into bite-sized strips to feed them. But I know that the dogs are just a stopgap until I give her grandchildren. Then I'm going to see some
real
coddling.

Regarding my father: a friend of his told him that
Teen Angst? Naaah …
is really a love story about him. I can see why. He appears in this book as a guide, a friend, a leader, a sage. He's still truckin'. He's still hilarious. He still likes rock music, although he likes jazz better. But most of all, he still tells stories better than anyone I know. The only thing is, he can't
write
them. That's a big reason I write them.

As for me, I've been through lots of dramatic flare-ups since this book was written but ultimately had an incredible, ridiculous life. After
Teen Angst? Naaah …
was published, I went to college and got an idea for a novel about a guy who takes a pill that makes him cool. That book was published a few years later; it's called
Be More Chill
.

When I signed the contract to write
Be More Chill
, though, it wasn't just for one book—it was for two. I proceeded to go (certifiably) crazy trying to write book number two. The thing about writing is that sometimes the stories
don't
come; sometimes you sit there wondering how they
ever
came. That's when you realize why it made sense to the Greeks to just think that there were Muses, and they came or went based on their own schedules, and if they didn't come, you couldn't write. When I look back at this book and see tales about a street punk named Aeneas singing “I got no money today / Because I run-ied away,” I can't do anything but believe that a Muse was watching out for me.

In any case, the Muses weren't coming after
Be More Chill
. I wrote half a book but watched it die on the vine. I can explain exactly what that's like. Have you ever had a bad haircut? And you know as you're getting the haircut that it's no good, but you keep hoping, “Maybe there's some master plan here. Maybe this person really knows what they're doing.” And you want to speak up, but that would be embarrassing, and then, all of a sudden … it's over. And you've got a bad haircut.

That's what it's like to write a bad book.

So one night, I just couldn't deal with this whole failed writing thing. I got up and called the Suicide
Hotline. They told me to go to the nearest psych hospital.

For the next week or so, I had the most intense and amazing experience of my life, with people who changed my perspective on everything. After I got out, I wrote about it. That turned into my third book,
It's Kind of a Funny Story
.

And that book satisfied the contract!

• • •

I had a lot of jobs after college—silly jobs like bike messenger and computer programmer—and part of me always worried that the money from writing would dry up and I'd never escape my parents.
^*
Now, however, anything else is not an option. My resume is all over the place; it looks like the resume of a seagull. I'm a writer from now on, for better or worse, and so far it's mostly all better.

Do I have days where I wake up and no Muses are there and I don't even want to deal with my
life
anymore? Sure. Do I have days where I learn that something—some speaking engagement, some meeting, some project—has been canceled, or I've missed some opportunity, and I want to hit myself in the head for being such a dope? Sure. But above and beyond that are the days when the words come together
and I sit back in my chair and go, “Man, this is fun.” And there are the days where I get an e-mail or a letter from someone who read my writing and liked it and I just slap myself in the head for an entirely different reason, because I'm blessed.

Thank you. Thank you, Mom, Dad, Daniel, Nora, readers, Muses, Margaret. Thank you, all the people who published this stuff, every teacher and librarian who's ever asked me to speak; thank you to the U.S. Post Office for allowing me to send my books cheaply. Thank you, you reading this, you.

Thank you, Hostess Cupcakes and coffee yogurt.