One More Thing Read online

  “It’s nice,” said the old man. “But shouldn’t I be paid for it? If people are well paid for reality television and cotton candy and dunking a basketball, why can’t they be well paid for changing young minds? I mean, wouldn’t more people do it? Bright, selfish people? Nothing wrong with being selfish. If more people thought they could make a fortune curing cancer, wouldn’t more people be trying to do that?” He turned to Mr. Hunt. “You, I don’t need to explain this to you. You’re a teacher.”

  Mr. Hunt smiled, a private type of smile that we all could see.

  The old man made a lot of sense, except for the cotton candy reference. What was that about? Could you really make a lot of money that way? Maybe he knew someone who made a lot of money in candy. Or maybe he was just old, and you just had to ignore a few of the things he said to get to the wisdom.

  I had an idea and raised my hand. I knew my idea was so good I didn’t even wait to be called on.

  Bright Ben, they sometimes called me in name games at the beginnings of school years.

  Maybe it had affected me.

  “Do you still have it?”

  “Have what?”

  “The train stationery.”

  “Maybe somewhere,” said the man. “Why?”

  “You could use it to prove you came up with the problem,” I said. “Plus, you could even maybe sell the original to a museum.”

  Mr. Hunt murmured something to himself that sure sounded to me like “Bright Ben.”

  The old man coughed to clear his throat, even though it didn’t sound like there was anything to clear. “Yes, it’s in a shoebox. Or I think it is. I definitely know which one it would be in, anyway.”

  He acted like there wasn’t anything more to say about this, even though there obviously was, so I spoke again, this time without raising my hand.

  “Could you check?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe I could. That’s the box where I put … Where I put … Letters, you know. That’s where I put …” There were now longer and longer pauses between each word. “Pictures … that’s …” Then that change in voice again: “June.”

  Then just breathing for a while.

  “You know, I did go through the box once. And it wasn’t there. But I didn’t look very carefully, though. I didn’t even really look at all. Just put my hand in there and took it out. That’s not really looking.” He paused again. “But I’m not looking again. But maybe it’s there. You know, maybe I’ll look again. That’s not a bad idea.” But he said all of this like he knew he never would.

  “Where do you live?” asked Mr. Hunt, gently. “Are you going to need any help getting back?”

  “I live in Columbus. I told you that. I have my whole life. I figured I’d start out on the East Coast and then work my way back across the country. See with my own eyes just how big this problem is. Your class is my first stop, actually.”

  “You came here straight from Columbus, Ohio?”

  “Yes.”

  “All the way to Massachusetts? All by yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s pretty far,” said Mr. Hunt with concern. “How long did it take?”

  “Nice try, nice try,” said the old man. “You want your class to know how long my train took, you gotta pony up.”

  Everybody laughed at once, and the laughter seemed to surprise, and then lift, the old man.

  “It is … I guess what you said before, it is nice seeing that you all know it,” said the old man. “It’s a reward. Not the only reward, but … you take what you can get. I’ll try to get more, but you take what you can get. It’s done so much good for the world that I do feel like I deserve more. But, yeah, that’s a good thing.”

  “It’s a good problem to have,” said Mr. Hunt.

  “Huh? What?” said the old man.

  “I guess,” said Mr. Hunt, louder and slower, “that in a way, it’s a good problem to have.”

  “Oh. Ha,” said the old man.

  He walked to the door and put his hand on the doorknob, and we all waited for him to turn it, but he left it there for a very long time.

  It’s very suspenseful for someone to put a hand on a doorknob but not turn it, especially if he’s old.

  “June … the shoebox … good problem to have, too.”

  He opened the door and left.

  “What the hell does that mean?” said one of the other Matts.

  “Language,” said Mr. Hunt.

  Johnny Depp, Fate, and the Double-Decker Hollywood Tour Bus

  The universe will tell you what it wants from you, if you listen to it. And one hot Friday in July, the universe told Johnny Depp what it wanted from him—not what it needed from him, because it definitely didn’t need this—but what it wanted.

  The sign came in the form of a red double-decker tour bus slowly rounding Mulholland Drive, the winding desert highway that tops the hills of Los Angeles and divides the sporadically glamorous city from the negligibly glamorous valley. Both sides glitter, and the tourists were dazzled by all of it, and Johnny Depp, riding alongside the bus, knew that if he took off his helmet, someone would notice him, and before long, it would be a big deal.

  He was right: it was a very big deal. “JOHNNY DEPP!” The bus sped up slightly to match the pace of Johnny Depp, who kept fully focused on the road ahead as cameras flashed and bus riders waved. He was enough of a performer to know that playing it cool like this now would excite them more, in the long run, than if he waved back right away.

  When he finally did wave, with a tiny “who, me?” that he saw Sean Penn use once in Mystic River and always envied, the bus went crazy.

  Johnny Depp revved the engine and did a wheelie. The crowd broke into wild applause.

  Before today, some of the more naive riders on the bus had bought into the notion that celebrity sightings were a regular feature of Los Angeles life, that a substantial proportion of the people in L.A. were the ones they had already heard of, and so while the sighting of Johnny Depp on a motorcycle had certainly delighted them, it had not shocked them. But this, now, was undeniably special, to everyone. Johnny Depp was showing off for them, doing tricks, and it really was something else.

  In their excitement, both the bus and Johnny Depp had gradually sped up without noticing, and now Johnny Depp saw the heat-and-haze-weakened bites of light racing more and more quickly toward his motorcycle, and in an instant he realized that what was also approaching, in tandem, was an offer from the universe: legend or star, either one was fine, but he didn’t have much time to decide, because the main way you recognize moments like these is by how fast they seem to be racing away.

  Everyone dies, thought Johnny Depp as he raised both hands off the motorcycle, and flew into the drab valley below under a blanket of phone flashes and the eyes of newly born secondhand-legends; but not everyone is remembered like this.

  Discussion question:

  Do you think Johnny Depp should have driven his motorcycle off the mountain highway to his death? Why or why not?

  Being Young Was Her Thing

  Being young was her thing, and she was the best at it. But every year, more and more girls came out of nowhere and tried to steal her thing.

  One of these days I’m going to have to get a new thing, she thought to herself—but as quietly as she could, because she knew that if anyone ever caught her thinking this thought, her thing would be over right then.

  Angel Echeverria, Comediante Superpopular

  You only needed one great bit, and that was all he had. But that was all you needed.

  He would do crowd work for twenty minutes, loosening the crowd up, throwing in some local references to life in the Bay Area and to Mexican American life at the turn of the millennium—basically just putting everyone at ease and letting them know he was one of them, which he was, and that he wasn’t going to hassle anybody, which he wasn’t.

  Then he’d start the bit.

  “You ever go into this store, Whole Foods, man? Everythin
g is so expensive.”

  People were already laughing without even noticing that they were. Yes, of course they had been inside a Whole Foods, and yes, of course they had noticed the higher prices.

  “But you know why it’s so expensive? It’s all up to the food. It’s all in the food’s mind. It’s because of how the food thinks of itself.” He pointed to his brain. “The food believes in itself, man. It has confidence. It has self-respect. It has self-worth. You just have to look at the labels: SOY NUTS.”

  He held his expression and waited for the quickest pockets of the crowd to catch on and spread the laughter to the people around them. It usually took between five and five and a half seconds to reach its peak.

  “SOY milk.” Now the whole crowd was with him.

  “The food knows what it is, man! It proclaims it!”

  He was killing, and there was no looking back now.

  “You go into Albertsons or Vons or, you know, that knockoff Vons, Jons?” Yes, they knew. “You see the shelves?” He went into his shopper voice (which was also his cop voice): “What’s this? Who are you?” Now he shrugged his body deep into his shoulders and adopted the voice of a wimpy, moody adolescent boy: “Miiiiilk.”

  This was it, this was the bit all right—the one they had paid to see without even knowing what it would be—and he wasn’t going to let it go anytime soon.

  “Who are you?” repeated the cop/shopper. “Nuts, I guess,” said the same dumb, shy boy through Angel Echeverria’s microphone, shyly shuffling his feet, one on top of the other. “I guess I’m nuts. I don’t know if you want to buy me.” Angel Echeverria then reclaimed his confident self again, a confidence lifted subtly but perceptibly higher than before by the knowledge coursing through his body that he now was so thoroughly destroying the audience he so loved. “You go into Whole Foods? SOY NUTS!!!” He pounded his fist proudly on an invisible podium and waited—not even for the sake of timing now, but for people to pause and literally replenish their breath so they would be physically able to laugh more. “YO SOY SAUCE! CÓMPRAME!” He could now slip in and out of English and Spanish and they wouldn’t even notice the transition; it was as if he weren’t a comedian anymore but the voice in their own heads entertaining them at this point. “Sí, yo tengo una identidad, un confidence, un pride. YO SE QUIÉN YO SOY! I am worth it!” He strutted around the stage, elbows high, being for the crowd a proud bottle of soy sauce with a smile headed skyward as the men and women in the audience, enveloped in the comfort of being entertained and the elation of being understood, applauded and cheered as long as they could, minutes on end, to express a gratitude that would last for months.

  Everyone who saw Angel Echeverria saw him a second time, but no one saw him a third. They all wished he would find a new bit as good as the Whole Foods bit, and so did he. But he had what he had and he did what he did, and everyone remembered him fondly.

  The Market Was Down

  Nobody knew why the market was down that day. But it didn’t stop everyone from having a theory.

  “Worries over Spain’s role in the EU brought the market down today,” said a woman on the radio. “The market had an off day today, due to uncertainty in oil futures,” announced a man on television. “Market Slightly Down as Health Care Details Come into Focus” wrote a newspaper writer.

  The truth was no one knew why the market was down. It started the day, just … down. It stayed down most of the day. It had an up moment for a little bit around lunch, but was still, just, down.

  Why was the market down? No reason. Well, stupid stuff. Actually, to be honest, maybe it was Spain at the beginning, but it was really only worried about Spain because it woke up looking for something to worry about. Then, before long, the market started worrying about bigger things, things that didn’t seem to have an answer.

  If the market had never existed, would anyone miss it? Would anything really be different? Did anyone actually really care about the market, or did they just think they could make money from it? And then there were all those people who said they hated the market, and they always seemed so much cooler and better looking than the people who liked the market—were those people right? Were they on to something? Was the market soulless? Evil? Pointless? Harmful? Bad?

  The market calmed down for a minute when it pictured Warren Buffett. What an undeniably warm, wise, lovely man Warren Buffett was! And he sure loved the market. With all his heart, without question. That made the market feel better.

  But then the market thought of something so sad it made it want to kill itself: what if Warren Buffett was just wrong? This made the market feel worse than ever: the idea that an obviously wonderful old man like Warren Buffett might have wasted his heart loving something as terrible and worthless as itself, the market. Now the market felt so guilty and terrible it let itself wonder what it would be like if it let itself completely collapse. But it didn’t. Oh, that’s ridiculous, the market told itself: now you’re just down because you’re down. Come on. Look alive.

  The market began to pick itself up a bit. People were happy to see the market improve—everyone was rooting for it (except for a few people who were always betting on the market to fail, but there would always be people like that; and those were people that even the people who hated the market hated). When the market realized how many people were counting on it, and how many people were hoping it got better, that made it pick itself up a little more. It felt more valued, more confident. Feeling that way made it look that way, too, and that made more people treat it that way. And that made it feel that way even more.

  It was still down, though. Just kind of down.

  What time was it? It felt late.

  The thing was, the market could only be what it was. That’s what it was: the market. Some people would always love it; some people would always hate it. Was it good? Was it bad? It wasn’t its job to know. It was just its job to be what it was.

  As the sun started to burn its way down in the sky, the market decided to just stop thinking for a while, stop working for a while, and get some rest.

  The next day, the market was up!

  The Vague Restaurant Critic

  “More satisfying than a candy bar, but less satisfying than love,” wrote the vague restaurant critic in his debut review.

  “This is not helpful at all,” murmured his readers to themselves, meaning no harm as they went elsewhere to find information more like what they had been looking for.

  Before the vague restaurant critic could write a second review, he was fired.

  A couple of weeks more and he might have caught on. He might have developed a following beyond the world of the traditional restaurant review readers for what he was doing, for the statement he was trying to make—about criticism, about restaurants, about our expectations in life on a larger level.

  But he was fired before any of that could happen.

  If it was even going to happen.

  He didn’t care. He knew what he did.

  But he kind of did care. He wished other people knew what he did, too.

  One of These Days, We Have to Do Something About Willie

  We had all known for years that someday, sooner or later, we would have to do something about Willie.

  We knew this from the night we met him: freshman year, orientation week, at the first real party we went to—the first party that didn’t have ice cream. He was standing by the speakers, spinning pop-rap songs off the click-wheel edition of the iPod; he looked untroubled beyond his years, a life-sized version of the people you see on trophies; he seemed to be blazing outside the lines of his own body, as if he were drawn in crayon by an excited five-year-old; whatever fuel source was powering him couldn’t possibly be sustainable, and its excess poured easily off of him in the form of expansive declarations about how awesome the party was, an enthusiasm that somehow circled back in order to power, even overpower, the party that was powering him; and when he noticed the three of us, all aspirants to social normalcy who had chosen
this college partly because it scored higher than average among schools of its academic caliber under the “Party School” index on the U.S. News & World Report college guide, he decided in that moment, for some reason we would never understand or question, that he loved us, and that we would forever be at the center of his infinitely expanding galaxy of friends.

  I think we knew even then how much he was going to transform our lives; and that eventually, to pay him back, we really would have to do something about him.

  After college, the four of us all moved to different cities. I moved to New York to work as a copy editor for an alternative weekly (not the one you’re thinking of); Josh went to San Francisco to work for a video-sharing website (not the one you’re thinking of); Dave spent three months of an intended year backpacking alone through Japan and Singapore and then hastily abandoned it to go home to Chicago and apply to law school; and Willie, with more than enough alum connections to make up for a general studies diploma, got a job as an entry-level investment banker in Houston.

  Even though we lived in different places, we still saw ourselves as moving through life as a group. It would have been great to get to see each other more—that was, in fact, one of our most frequent topics of conversation—but for four people pursuing their dreams in different cities, our presence in each other’s lives really was quite substantial. We were more in touch with one another than with anyone else, including (if not especially) our families, and we gave one another as much advice and support as we ever had—more, even, because there was more to talk about, more decisions to make. We all still considered each other the closest people in each other’s lives.