A Bad Idea I'm About to Do Read online

  And there’s no way you sit around singing Christmas carols unless you feel fine about the world. You have to be happy to sing a carol. That’s why it’s not just called a song. Just look in the dictionary:

  ’Car ol [kar-uhl] noun, verb—oled, oling, olled, olling

  1. a song, especially of joy

  We were real Jersey kids, from a real place, with real problems. We certainly didn’t stand around at night singing songs of joy. Sure, we were spoiled college kids too, but this was taking things to an entirely different level. These Princeton kids lived in a fantasy world where there were very few problems, and inexplicably, this fairy-tale place was sitting right in the middle of our state. Suddenly, without saying a word, all three of us knew we were going to do our damnedest to destroy that fantasy world.

  Meanwhile, the kids around the piano, in what we noticed was becoming a trend, didn’t blink twice at the three shady kids dressed in all black lurking around.

  We made our way toward Rob and Derek’s floor, heading up a stairwell, where we were again thwarted by the presence of a heavy door sealed shut with a magnetic lock. We banged on the door, and as each second ticked by, I realized what a bad idea it was to have come here. This is a bad idea, I thought to myself, that I am about to do. I mean, we were definitely going overboard. We were definitely worked up. And it really wasn’t fair to direct it all at one unsuspecting kid. . . .

  Just as we were coming to our senses, someone opened the door.

  The kid was pudgy—that was the first thing you had to notice about him. Pudgy in a way that belied his innocence. Pudgy like veal, kept in a cage for its whole life so that experience wouldn’t harden its muscles. His large eyes blinked behind his glasses, as if he had been sitting in darkness and we were beams of light. It was almost as if this level of human contact was jarring to him.

  “Can I help you with something?” he asked. His voice was as soft and doughy as his childlike cheeks.

  “We’re friends of Rob’s,” I mumbled, rocking back and forth on my feet. He looked back at me, confused. “From Rutgers. We called him—he’s, uh, not around. He told us we should wait for him until he gets back,” I said.

  He eyed me up and down. I couldn’t tell if it was with suspicion or disdain.

  “Well, you can wait with me, I guess,” he said, obviously bothered that he’d have to babysit us. He motioned for us to follow him down the hallway. Over his shoulder, he off-handedly signed his own death warrant with three innocuous words: “My name’s Deh-reek.”

  To Derek, Framsky was just a made-up name on the computer screen of some dude he lived down the hall from. He didn’t know Framsky went to Rutgers. He didn’t know how unhappy Framsky was with the way things were going for him. He wasn’t aware of Framsky’s habit of overreacting to small things, of making them out to be symbolic of how his entire life was going. He didn’t know how angry he had made Framsky on that night.

  Most importantly, he had no idea Framsky was the clad-in-black, skinny weirdo furiously staring at the back of his head right at that moment.

  Derek almost seemed tragic to me then, completely oblivious to the level of fear to which he was going to be introduced that night. I started to feel bad. It was like standing on a hill, watching an unsuspecting car about to be blindsided by a speeding truck.

  With those feelings rising, I knew that if I was going to bail, if I was going to forgive him and walk away, it would have to happen now.

  Instead, I followed him into his dorm. Without turning around, he said, “There’s some people drinking down the hall. I guess you can come.”

  When we got to the room in question there were about ten kids spread out with their backs to us, all laughing and drinking. Derek announced us. “Guys, these are Rob’s friends from Rutgers,” he said.

  Without even turning to look at us, one of the young ladies said, “Oh, I thought something smelled funny in here all of a sudden.”

  She said it quickly, so quickly that it almost seemed planned. Even more quickly than Andy had answered, yes, he wanted to beat up a Princeton kid. But while I had admired that kind of quickness in Andy, I was aghast when I encountered it in that dorm room.

  Who behaves that way? Were they sitting around all night waiting for some poor Scarlet Knight to walk through the door just so they could get that killer dig out? No—it wasn’t preplanned. These goddamned smart kids just knew how to think fast and articulate their thoughts. Before the insult, the entire night could have taken a turn right there. We could have sat and drank with those kids all night, burying our stereotypes of each other and uniting in the common bonding of being young and drunk. Instead, we were insulted the second we walked into the room.

  At this point, it wasn’t just me who was angry. Andy and Jeff were mad as well. They had entered that night as my backup on a silly adventure. Now, they had witnessed college kids singing Christmas carols around their grand piano on a Friday night, and had been insulted outright by a very smart, likely very rich girl. I, personally, was unhinged on a day-to-day basis, and not really of right mind. Admittedly, Andy fit that bill as well. But now even Jeff, who was the most straight-laced, together guy I knew, was pissed.

  Still, my feelings toward Derek were becoming confused. I was angry about what he had done to me. But in a way I also pitied him: he had initially represented big bad Princeton in our minds, but I knew it wasn’t right to take it all out on one guy. At the end of the day, I knew nothing about him. For all I knew, he could have been the me of Princeton—the token sad kid.

  Noting his dorm-mate’s clear displeasure that we had entered her room, Derek spun on his heels and led us back out into the hallway. We went down to the other end of the hall and followed him into what he explained was his own room. It was huge, at least three times the size of the space I shared with the Russian Bear.

  “You guys can have a seat on the floor,” he said.

  I watched as he sat in an expensive-looking leather office chair, and my recently softened feelings toward him instantly rehardened. There were about six open chairs in his room, not to mention a small couch. But we had been invited to sit on the floor. I now knew everything I needed to know about Derek. He was nothing like me—he was the type of person who thinks it’s okay to tell a stranger to sit on the floor.

  “Actually, Derek,” I said in a voice as calm as could be, “I’m going to sit wherever the fuck I want.”

  His head dropped, and he slowly turned around. He suddenly had the body language of someone who realized he was in some pretty deep shit—the type of deep shit where you invite a stranger over, disrespect him before your peers, ridicule him in private, and then realize you know nothing about him.

  “I—,” he hesitated. “I’m sorry, I never got your name.”

  I paused and locked eyes with him. I held the stare long enough to silently confirm his suspicions that he had fucked up pretty bad. I took a deep breath.

  “My name’s Framsky.”

  All color drained from his pudgy face, and everything about him suddenly screamed I want to be back in Toronto right now.

  He tried his best not to let us sense the fear that was washing over his body.

  “And your friends?” he asked. “What are their names?”

  He sounded like he thought this was a game, like he was delivering his lines as some sort of mastermind. As if we were kids, playing, and he was filling the role of the bad guy. But I wasn’t playing a game. I was lonely. I was socially depraved. I was depressed and scared about my life.

  I snapped.

  “THEIR NAME IS FRAMSKY TOO, MOTHERFUCKER!” I bellowed. I leaned in close to him. “DON’T YOU EVER FUCK WITH ME AGAIN.”

  All the rage that had slowly been building throughout my everyday life boiled over with the massive amount of disrespect I’d been handed since arriving at this dorm. My voice was aggressive. I was lashing out, attacking, trying to beat Derek down verbally. And it was working. He was scared. But I was scared too—because I
could feel in my gut that his being frightened was not enough for me. I felt my hands balling up into fists, and I was aware that I very much wanted to hit him.

  “You have to go,” Derek stammered. “You have to go right now.”

  I ignored him.

  “Don’t you ever fuck with me,” I reiterated. “You have no idea what it’s like out there—you have no idea who I am.”

  From the look in his eyes, I knew something totally validating was happening. He was in the process of realizing that I was right. He didn’t have any idea what it was like out there. He had as much of an idea about what my New Jersey was as I did about his. We were both freshmen in college, both the same age, and we lived thirty miles apart, but we couldn’t have been more different if we had been born on different planets. We lived on two different planes of reality—socially, academically, and culturally. Tonight, those very different existences hit each other head-on, and it wasn’t going well for Derek.

  Tears welled up in his eyes. And that’s when I spread out my arms, like a flying bird of prey, and said what might be the toughest thing I have ever said.

  “I am in your house, motherfucker.” I grinned. “I am in your fucking house. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  He looked at me, and the first tear trickled down his cheek. I was taken aback. Only at a place like Princeton could a guy who looks like me be the bully instead of the bullied.

  “You have to go, right now,” he said, taking a step toward me.

  “I am in your house,” I repeated.

  “Go. Leave,” he said, trying desperately to control his fear.

  “I am in your house,” I said, borderline laughing in his face.

  At this point I was completely lost in a maniacal rage. He took one more step and he pushed me. That was a mistake. I spun around.

  “Framsky,” I said matter-of-factly, making eye contact with Jeff, “shut the door.”

  “We need to leave,” Jeff answered. I looked at him. He was no longer angry. He was scared. Of me. I looked from Jeff to Andy.

  “Yeah,” Andy said. “We need to leave right now.”

  We sprinted, nearly knocking each other over in an effort to get down the stairs. We ran back across campus, leaving behind the pristine dorms, grand pianos, and one fat crying Canadian with a very bright future. Back at Rutgers, Andy and Jeff hung out in my room for the rest of the night. We assumed the police were going to arrive at any moment and that our gathering in one place was a polite way to make their job easier. I don’t know what I was more scared of—my impending arrest or the behavior I had seen in myself that night. I’d always been an angry kid, but usually it was directed inward and reflected itself in my cripplingly low self-esteem. For the first time, I’d gotten truly out of control and saw that anger lash outward. I’d almost brutalized a stranger. Worst of all, I wasn’t sure which I felt worse about: almost doing it or not doing it.

  To our amazement, the police never called.

  “Did you know him?” my mother asked me years later, when I told her the story.

  “No, he was a stranger. He messed with me on the Internet,” I replied. She sighed. Even over the phone, I could sense her shaking her head at me.

  “You went to Princeton to beat up a person you didn’t know?” she asked with exasperation. I could hear the silent follow-up question that went unspoken—What went wrong when I raised you?

  “Yeah. I never told you about that?”

  “No, that’s one of the things you never told me about,” she said. “I never know what you’re gonna come up with.” Then I heard her quietly giggle, like any Jersey girl would at the thought of someone tormenting a Princeton Tiger.

  “So what’s new with you?” I asked her.

  “Not much,” she said. “I tried to send some people an email picture of a kitten, but it didn’t work.... Have you ever heard of something like that?” She paused, and then said with a very heavy sigh, “Only me.”

  It was then that I remembered where my fatalistic penchant for melodrama came from.

  Two years after my mission to Princeton, I went back for the first time. I had to be in the area anyway, so I gave Rob a call. He invited me to meet up so we could get dinner together. As we crossed the still bucolic Princeton campus, he pointed to a dorm.

  “Do you remember that kid Derek?” he asked.

  “How could I ever forget?”

  “You know,” he said, laughing to himself, “he lives in that dorm now.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, actually in that corner,” he said, “on the ground floor.”

  Well, I had to.

  I walked over to the window. It was late spring and unseasonably hot, so Derek’s window was open, with only a screen covering the frame. Again utilizing my God-given abilities as a born-and-raised Jersey guy, I jimmied open the screen and stuck my head in.

  Derek was there on his bed, sleeping in his tightie whities on his back. An oscillating fan was pointed toward him. It was so peaceful, it was almost cute. I leaned farther in.

  “Derek!” I whispered, harshly.

  He shot up out of bed and reached to the windowsill for his glasses. He fumbled with them for a moment, then put them on and looked my way.

  It was two full years later, but to my satisfaction, his jaw dropped open.

  “Framsky?” he said.

  “I’m always watching, man,” I said. “So you be good, Derek. You be good.”

  White Magic

  If you asked me or my brother at the age of nine what we wanted to be when we grew up, we would have lied. We would have answered “police officer” or “teacher” or “astronaut.” Those are the things you expect kids to say, and we knew that. We would never have publicly revealed our real dream, because our parents had made it very clear to us that our dream was embarrassing.

  What we wanted to be were pro wrestlers. It didn’t matter that both of us were the smallest kid in our respective classes. Gregg’s braces and lazy eye? No problem. My deformed elbows and knobby knees? Pay them no mind. No matter what, we had to be professional wrestlers. It was the dream. Nothing could stand in our way, not even our father, who did everything he could to crush that dream without mercy or remorse.

  “I just don’t understand why you like that bullshit,” he’d say, shaking his head. “Bullshit” was his description of choice when it came to wrestling, and it always made me furious. Then again, my father had good reason to hate the “sport.”

  Growing up, Gregg and I often imagined our yard was a wrestling ring. Once, when I was in fourth grade, we were staging a match that ended when I emulated wrestling superstar Sting’s finisher, the “Stinger Splash,” and came down unintentionally hard on my brother’s chest.

  “Stop working stiff, asshole,” he shouted. He leapt to his feet and jumped into the air. His knee crashed into my shoulder, breaking it in two. I screamed and collapsed.

  My mother appeared at the front door and saw me on the ground.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “My shoulder,” I sobbed. “It’s broken.”

  “It is not,” she said. “Stop being a baby. Now come inside and eat your dinner.”

  For the rest of the day, even though my collarbone jutted awkwardly beneath my skin, my parents refused to believe I’d broken anything. That night we attended a Super Bowl party, where Gregg and I got into another fight. Only when I couldn’t swing with my left did my parents realize I was actually hurt and took me to the hospital. My brother and I were so consistently violent that it took my inability to produce more violence to prove to them something was wrong.

  After that, my father forbade wrestling. Gregg and I had to sneak around to watch wrestling, turning the volume low and quickly changing the channel if my parents entered the room. It was our own personal taste of what it must have been like to live under Stalin, if Stalin had hated pro wrestling instead of dissidents and organized religion. (The comparison may seem like a stretch, but
my dad does sport a very Stalinish moustache.)

  And like dreams of democracy behind the Iron Curtain, my dream of being a professional wrestler remained hidden and suppressed, but never completely died. And one night when I was a freshman in college, for a brief, flashing moment I lived my dream. I broke through twelve years of secret obsession and came face-to-face with my ultimate destiny. For one night, I was no longer Chris Gethard, resident geek. For one night, I was White Magic.

  Mere weeks into my tenure at Rutgers, the phone in my dorm room rang. It was an old friend of mine, another huge wrestling fan, Eddie.

  “Dude, did I tell you I trained at Gino Caruso’s wrestling school?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I heard something about that,” I told him. “How’d it go?”

  “I was a terrible wrestler,” he confided in me. “But I made a lot of connections.” He paused, allowing the tension to build. “One of those connections is an agoraphobic man named Carmine,” he said. It was the last thing I expected to hear.

  “Like he’s scared to leave his house?” I asked.

  “The guy’s scared of everything. But he’s got boatloads of money,” Eddie said.

  “Okay,” I said. “So what’s this got to do with me?”

  “Carmine is the owner of Stars and Stripes Championship Wrestling,” Eddie explained. “He made me the promoter.”

  “Okay,” I said, still unsure of where this was going.

  “I want you to come be a manager on our next card,” Eddie said.

  Instantly, I was standing. A rush of euphoria overtook me and almost made me faint. I braced myself against my dresser and took a breath.

  “Are you serious?” I asked. “This isn’t some kind of joke?”

  “No, dude,” Eddie said, “we’re living the dream.”

  Eddie knew I was a funny guy. He thought I had the chops to pull off the part and had convinced the agoraphobe owner of a wrestling league to grant me a job interview.