One More Thing (27 page)

“Why?” he asked.

“I met someone,” she said. “I’ve fallen in love.”

“Who?” he asked.

“Bob.”

“I love Bob!” he said, lighting up. “Oh, what a great guy. That’s a perfect match, you and Bob! I’m so happy for you.”

He then remembered the issue at hand.

“But why are you resigning?”

“I broke the one and only rule you told me,” she said. “ ‘Never fall in love.’ I fell in love.”

“Oh, honey,” he laughed. “That’s not a real rule! I just knew you’d never find love if you were looking for it.”

The World’s Biggest Rip-Off

Here’s a story with a happy ending.

I am a thirty-eight-year-old married father of two. A couple of summers ago, I took our family on our first-ever family vacation.

The plan was to drive from our home in New Hampshire to my wife’s parents’ lake house in Canada. On the way there, we would stop for a night at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Then a week at the lake house. Then on the drive back we would spend a couple of days at Niagara Falls.

The Baseball Hall of Fame was a disaster. My son hated it, and we had stopped there only for him. Basically, he spent the whole time asking if his favorite players would ever end up in the Hall of Fame, and I told him the truth, which was no, because of steroids. Maybe I should have lied.

The lake house was a disaster, too. My kids somehow got it in their heads that they wanted to watch the movie
The Hangover
. Of course I wasn’t going to let them watch
The Hangover—
they were eight and ten years old—but they decided to make the whole week a fight about whether or not they could watch it. My wife’s parents thought this whole thing was my fault, because they didn’t know what
The Hangover
was and they didn’t understand why I wouldn’t let two young children watch it.

Niagara Falls was a disaster. My eight-year-old daughter was the one who had begged to see it because a couple from a television show she watched got married there. But when I pointed it out to her from the car window on the drive to our hotel—“Look, Niagara Falls!”—she said it looked different than she thought it would and went back to her book. Great, I thought. We have two days here, and that’s all there is to do, and she’s the only one who wanted to see it, and she’s already bored by it. And that
was
all we did. And it
was
boring.

As we started the drive back home, we passed a sign on the highway for the Guinness World Records Museum, and my kids said they wanted to go. It was the first thing they had wanted the whole trip that I could conceivably let them have, so even though we were already over our budget for the trip, I said okay, let’s check it out, and pulled off the highway.

But the museum was a disaster, too. The lines were long, and nothing impressed my kids. Not the World’s Largest Watermelon, not the World’s Hairiest Woman, not the World’s Fastest Toilet. Not the fingernails guy. Nothing.

I was about to call it a day when I saw a small hand-drawn sign above a curtain in a corner:

WORLD’S BIGGEST RIP-OFF. $100 PER PERSON
.

I waved my wife over.

“No, no. Absolutely not.” She said tickets to the museum had already taken us way over budget for the trip, and we weren’t paying a hundred dollars a person for something else now, especially something that the sign said right there was a ripoff. “No, no, no. No way.”

Something about it really intrigued me, though. I asked the guy in front of the door, who wasn’t wearing official museum gear—just black pants and a black T-shirt—if there was at least a children’s rate.

“One hundred dollars a person. No discounts. No refunds. Cash only.”

This only made me more intrigued. What the hell was in there? I had to know. But the more interested I got, the more skeptical my wife became. “You know what?” she said. “Fine. Just go in yourself and take a look if you need to know what’s in there so bad. We’ll wait.” But this was a family vacation, I said. Whatever I was about to experience, I wanted to experience with my family.

I told my wife to wait with the kids and I ran out to an ATM down the block. It only let me withdraw up to a $200 limit, so then I ran back and begged my wife to let me borrow her card and tell me her PIN so I could withdraw two hundred dollars more.

At this point, my wife was understandably starting to lose her cool a bit. She said I was acting like a fool and a sucker and some other harsher things that I’d rather not make the effort to remember right now. I’m not going to lie: it was a tense moment in our marriage. Finally, she told me that I was no longer the type of person she could trust with her ATM password, but that if it was this important to me, I could wait in the museum with the kids while she went across the street herself to withdraw two hundred dollars from her card, but that she needed me to know she would “never, ever forget what happened today.” I said yes, thank you, it was indeed this important to me.

Fortunately, as I said, this story has a happy ending. Inside the secret room was a mind-blowingly elaborate, incredibly well-executed interactive holographic exhibit on the Bernie Madoff hedge fund scam of 2009. It was beyond amazing—just jaw-droppingly intricate and detailed and smart and interesting and well designed. The holograms actually interacted with you, putting you in the mindset of the people who got ripped off, and
very compellingly conveyed the scope of the scam he pulled—did you know the numbers involved? Staggering.

Anyway, all of us were absolutely fascinated. And it kicked off a whole bunch of questions, too. I mean, really, how often do kids ask you questions about how stocks work, how bonds work, what’s a manageable risk for an investment, what our investment values are—stuff like that? And it was actually really good for me and my wife, too, to get on the same page. (Especially after what we had gone through that day.)

So anyway: they learned, we learned, we connected, we had fun, and it was a unique experience that we all got to share together and that stayed with all of us. To this day, two years later, I still catch the kids looking over my shoulder while I check the financial news online. And whenever we talk about the trip, which is often, everyone always smiles, and someone inevitably does an imitation of the funny hologram of Bernie that greeted us on the way in, making a really funny, evil-smirky face. “Inveeessst with meeeeee!”

You thought my wife was going to be right on this one, didn’t you? Everybody always does when I start to tell them this story. That’s okay. She’s usually the one who’s right about this kind of thing. About everything, actually—I married well. But this time, luckily, I was the one who was right.

The Walk to School on the Day After Labor Day

I was sad that summer was over.

But I was happy that it was over for my enemies, too.

Kate Moss

When I was sixteen, I would come home from school every day and stare at pictures of Kate Moss for hours.

Then one day, on a school trip to New York, I saw Kate Moss. I went up to her and pulled her coat.

“Are you Kate Moss?” I said.

“Of course,” she said.

“How did you become Kate Moss?”

She moved her face close to mine and smiled and whispered.

“Every day,” she said, “when I came home from school, I would stare at pictures of Kate Moss for hours, until one day, I was Kate Moss.”

“How many hours?”

“Four.”

When I went back home, I tried staring at photos of Kate Moss for four hours a day.

Now I’m Kate Moss.

Welcome to Camp Fantastic for Gifted Teens

Dear Gifted Teen:

Picture, if you will, the heartbreakingly temporary canvas of a summer night. Each moment evaporates into the mist of memory as fast as it can be felt. The muggy scent of summer’s stillness is pierced only by the trivial phosphorescence of a mindless firefly. Dead stars linger on in the sky as a sick joke—absence itself masquerading as a panoply of permanence.

This is a typical summer evening for a gifted teen. The pleasures of youth are smothered in the mind’s crib by the much-praised pillow of your own awareness. Activities are to be mastered, friends are to be impressed, and life is to be learned, not lived.

Rest assured: there is an escape from what makes you special—and it begins right here.

Camp Fantastic is a place for teens to have sex, do drugs, and stay out of trouble.

Things you can do at Camp Fantastic include …

At this point, you may be a bit curious about the person writing you this letter. I am a former gifted teen myself. Years of neglect from loved ones about the peculiar challenges of my predicament—particularly with regard to maintaining the delicate and necessary self-restorative cycle of mindfulness and mindlessness that comes much more naturally to those whose inner cerebral acrobatics are not permanently set to emergency-high levels of attention-demand—led to a series of emotional breakdowns over the course of my life that have spangled my generally extraordinary intellect with the welcome-textured scars of impulsive thinking and counterproductive endeavors, as well as flash-bouts of radically unfiltered and unnecessary honesty, some of them on display in this very letter.

After many long and unprofitable years acquiring bottle cap collections and selling them for scrap metal (long story—it’s not quite as stupid as it sounds, but essentially the sentimental and historical interest affixed to the bottle caps forced me to buy them at a considerable premium over the value of the metal itself), I found myself facing a brutal foreclosure on my house in the Hamptons. In the ensuing panic, I founded Camp Fantastic, primarily as a tax dodge but also as a way of changing lives for the better.