The Moth (28 page)

My friend’s name was Craig, and I met him at college. We both went to a place called Trinity at the University of Toronto, and it’s this weird little place. We would wear long black academic gowns, and jackets and ties to all meals, and we would say Latin grace before we ate. We didn’t really have jocks because we weren’t large enough, and we didn’t really have a party culture because we were too nerdy for that.

All we really ever did was sit around and make fun of each other. Which I realize all students do, but we did this to an extraordinary extent, and the person who was best at that game of making fun of everyone was my friend Craig.

Craig was this tall, incredibly handsome guy, and he had this extraordinary charisma. Women flocked to him. He was just this sort of legend with the ladies. He had this sense of
humor that was something that I had never encountered before in my life. And he really kind of led us like the Pied Piper.

At one point he decreed that everyone should have a nickname, and not just a casual nickname, but a serious nickname that had been considered and thought about. So, for example, there was a woman named Felicity Smith who was this busybody. She ran everything, and she was always in people’s business. And we thought long and hard about what her nickname should be, until Craig finally said, “Falickity Split.”

And there was a guy named Kai Carmody who was this incredibly serious, studious guy, and we wanted to have a nickname for him, but it was very difficult because he was so boring. We thought about it and thought about it, and finally Craig said, “High Comedy.”

Now, that makes it sound like Craig was all sort of sweetness and light, but he actually wasn’t. There was a kind of a mean streak in him—he had an instinct for the jugular. He really could expose and identify someone’s weakness, but it didn’t matter because there was something about his sense of humor that made it possible for him to pull that off. For example, there was a guy who was this brilliant, incredibly good-looking person, who everyone loved—he was just a kind of winner. And he did all kinds of wonderful things on campus. And he had one very small weakness, which was that he wasn’t nearly as successful with women as you would have thought. And Craig decreed that he should have a nickname, and we couldn’t think of one. This guy was so perfect. And finally Craig came up with one. The guy’s name was Saul Pinkston, and Craig said, “Small Dinkston.”

But nicknames were just part of it. Craig’s real gift was songs. He had this ability to, almost on the fly, make up songs
about people, and he would sing them at the most inopportune moments—it was this gift that I’d never seen before in anyone.

I remember once there was a guy at college called Phil Walk. And Phil was this big, schlubby guy. He always dressed really bad, and his hair was always sticking out in every direction. He was always charging around. And one time we were sitting in the dining hall—we would sit around Craig in the dining hall for hours after every meal—and Phil Walk charges in, and Craig just starts singing the Phil Walk song. We’d never heard it before, and we think he made it up right in the moment, but it was to the tune of “Feelin’ Groovy” by Simon and Garfunkel:

[
singing
]

And there was a whole long verse after that and the chorus. I just remember the chorus:

[
singing
]

I realize, in retrospect, that I was in love with Craig in that way that you are when you’re eighteen and you meet someone who’s just more brilliant and whose light shines brighter than yours. And all I wanted to do was to be as funny as him, and to make him laugh, and to bring him jokes and songs and see if I could seize his interest. And, you know, I was never as good as
him, but it never seemed to matter because there was this quality of generosity about him; he really wanted everyone around him to be as funny as he was.

It was even an honor to be made fun of by Craig, because he did it with such panache and such joy. And I can remember the time that I thought that for the rest of my life, whenever I had some funny thought or came up with some funny song, I would just call up Craig and sing it to him and make him laugh, and that was going to be a part of who I was for as long as I lived.

But then something happened that changed everything, and that is that Craig met a woman named Leigh, and they decided to get married. Craig met Leigh at graduate school. And they were like night and day. Craig was from a small town called Barrie in northern Ontario, from a very modest background. And Leigh was from Phoenix, and she was really wealthy; her father was some hotshot Republican defense contractor. And Craig was kind of an indifferent student—he was still working away on his Ph.D. because he spent so much time with people. Whereas she had gotten her Ph.D. already—she had gotten it in two years, and she was off. And more than that, she was incredibly dominating. I mean, we thought Craig had a powerful personality, but she put him to shame. She would finish his sentences. She would pay for everything. She would boss him around.

Worst of all, she didn’t have a sense of humor at all. She had none of Craig’s wonderful, whimsical take on the world. She was the anti-Craig in many ways.

I realize now, looking back with the perspective of history, that I hated her. I really did. Not just for the fact that she had taken Craig away, but because she had changed him—she had changed who he was and what he meant to me.

But at the time I didn’t realize that at all. None of us did. All we knew was that this beloved figure in our life was getting married, and what kind of gift do you give to someone like that, the ultimate songster? Well, you give him the gift of a song, right? Not just any song, but the best possible song you can come up with. And that was where the trouble started.

The wedding was in Phoenix, which is where her family was from, and her parents were called Dick and Celeste. They looked like they had fallen asleep under a heat lamp. They were uptight “Republican country club” kind of people. And the wedding was this extraordinarily elaborate affair. There must have been seven different events, and we drove up and down the interstate in these air-conditioned vans with chauffeur drivers.

And I remember the rehearsal dinner was at this Western-style steakhouse, and there were big plates of glistening steaks; it was just obscene. And we had planned our song for the wedding, and we had decided that at the rehearsal we would just do a little teaser. And so at the end of the evening, my friend John was elected to do the honors, and he reached into his pocket, and he took out a huge folded paper, and he said, “I just want to say a very simple thanks to the people in Craig’s life who have made him who he is. I’d like to thank his parents for giving him that joy. I’d like to thank his science teacher in high school for giving him a love of chemistry, and I’d like to thank his Boy Scout leader who gave him such a love of the outdoors. And most of all, I’d like to thank the women in his life who paved the way for this relationship with Leigh.”

And he just started to read, “Rachel, Mary, Julie, Lauren…”

And then he unfolded the paper, and it reached all the way to the floor. And he just started to read one name after another, and we of course were collapsed with laughter. We thought this
was the funniest thing of all time. But I happened to look across the table at Leigh, and there was this mixture of loathing and contempt and pure rage on her face. And I had this feeling like,
Oh my God!

And when we went back to the hotel, I said to my friends, “You know, maybe we can’t do this song. I don’t think Leigh’s going to take it well.”

And for a moment we were going to shelve everything, and I wished to God that we had, but we didn’t because I think, in some ways, we could not wrap our minds around the fact that our friend Craig had grown up and moved on. In our minds, we were still sitting around the dining room table at college with him singing songs.

The wedding was the next day, and it was at some extravagant resort off in the desert outside of Phoenix, and every defense contractor in the state of Arizona was there, and they all had wives with the hair and the bosoms out to here. And there were big pitchers of martinis on every table, and all kinds of backslapping and admiring references to Ronald Reagan, and long speeches.

And finally it was our turn, and we were really nervous because we had been preparing this gift for so long, and it meant so much to us that this was what we would give Craig on the greatest day of his life.

And so the three of us walked to the front of the room, and we turned to the band, and we said, “Do you know Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’?”

And they said, “Of course.”

We said, “Well, our song will be sung to that.”

And we started to sing.

[
singing
]

And after we finish the first verse, I look over at Leigh, and she has that same look on her face that she had before, and I can tell she knows what’s coming. She knows enough about Craig, and, more importantly, about
us
, to know that this will not end well. And were I a savvier or a smarter person, I would have just cut it off then. But I couldn’t. Because we were in mid-song.

[
singing
]

And then I look across at Leigh, and I see that she’s standing up, and then she grabs Craig by the hand, and she pulls him up, and I realize to my horror that they’re leaving their own wedding reception.

And as they walk towards the door, he looks back at me.

And the look in his eyes is a mixture of pain and confusion
and betrayal. It’s one of the most painful moments of my life. And it’s also the last time I ever laid eyes on Craig.

But what are we going to do? We’re only halfway through the song. We haven’t even gotten to the bridge. All of our best material is still ahead of us. So we keep singing to this random group of defense contractors in the middle of Arizona.

[
singing
]

Malcolm Gladwell
has been a staff writer with
The New Yorker
magazine since 1996. His 1999 profile of Ron Popeil won a National Magazine Award, and in 2005 he was named one of
Time’
s 100 Most Influential People. He is the author of three books,
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference (2000), Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), and Outliers: The Story of Success
(2008), all of which were number one
New York Times
bestsellers. His latest book,
David and Goliath,
will be published in October 2013. From 1987 to 1996, he was a reporter with
The Washington Post,
where he covered business and science and then served as the newspaper’s New York City bureau chief. He graduated from the University of Toronto, Trinity College, with a degree in history. He was born in England, grew up in rural Ontario, and now lives in New York City.

CYNTHIA RIGGS

I
was born on Martha’s Vineyard, and I come from a long line of Vineyarders.

I spent many years off-island, working as a boat captain, and then I returned to the Vineyard and came to live in West Tisbury with my mother—Dionis Coffin Riggs, a poet. She and I opened a bed-and-breakfast catering to poets and writers.

After her death when she was almost ninety-nine, I was kind of at loose ends, and a bed-and-breakfast guest suggested that I go back to school and get a degree in creative writing. So I filled out an application form, and they accepted me.

Somebody told me I ought to write murder mysteries. Two years later, when I was seventy, my first murder mystery was published by St. Martin’s Press. I’ve now had ten published, and the eleventh is on Kindle, and I’m working on the twelfth right now.

Well, about six months ago, a mystery came into my life that was totally unexpected. I had thought about a guy that I’d met many years before. His name just sorta popped into my
mind, and so I looked him up on Google, and I couldn’t find him, so I sorta forgot about it. Well, two weeks later, I got a package from him.

Now, it included his name, and when I’d Googled it, I’d spelled it wrong. The return address was a latitude and a longitude. I opened the package, and inside was an archival envelope that had a whole bunch of old, dried-up, yellowed paper towels in it. The paper towels were all covered with scrawled-out cryptograms. Also in this package there was a little note, with a more modern cryptogram.

Well, I had no idea what this was all about, so I looked at some of the messages on these paper towels, and it all came back to me.

When I was eighteen years old, I was a marine geology major at a college in Ohio—of course. My college managed to find me a college job lasting for four months in San Diego, working for Scripps Institution of Oceanography sorting plankton at a research project. Now, I was just thrilled. I’d never been out West before. I was working in a real laboratory. I was eighteen. Most eighteen-year-olds are clueless; I was particularly clueless.