Vizzini

These past couple of weeks had me moving and not in touch with the internet much. I could write about what’s going on at this time, but it’s still too “now” or too close for me to really step back and form anything. Today I’ll post something I wrote earlier this year, something I recently came across and can’t get out of my head. If I can’t get something out of my head in terms of writing, that’s a good place to start, like a “sign”. I feel the ending here is too abrupt but at this point, I don’t know how else to end it or where to go from there. Perhaps that’s for another time.

Vizzini

Years ago, my father got me Ned Vizzini’s book, Teen Angst? Naaah! I liked it well enough. He writes about growing up in Brooklyn, going to Stuyvesant high school, playing Magic: The Gathering and there’s a funny piece about his take on the original Super Mario Bros theme music. He also wrote for the NY Press from time to time, the free, weekly, writerly newspaper mostly available in Manhattan. My sister and I once saw him perform in an East Village café, I can’t remember the name now. Arlene’s Grocery? The Sidewalk Café? He appeared in a burlap sack, announced to the mic, “he’s back in the sack!”, audience laughing in encouraging response, and then read from his new book at the time, Be More Chill, which I haven’t read yet. I emailed him a kind of fan letter and inquired about getting him to speak in my sister’s junior high school, "Shallow JHS 227" since he did that sort of thing. He thanked me and marveled at a school actually called “Shallow”. It was named after an Edward B. Shallow, so the joke of “Edward be shallow” was inescapable, poor guy. He was also impressed that someone from Bensonhurst read the NY Press. Well yeah, I happened to reside there at the time, it didn’t mean I was confined to that 18^th Avenue neighborhood, I still went to “the city” often.

We never arranged for him to speak at Shallow for whatever reason, but as luck or fate would have it, he spoke at my sister’s writing award ceremony when she was in high school. This was called the Silver Key Awards and it took place in NYU.  Esmeralda Santiago was there as well, an author I absolutely adore and will be sure to write about more in this blog eventually.

“You can write, you’re all good writers!” he energetically assured the young adults.

In Teen Angst…, he wrote something curious about Stuyvesant. He pointed out that it had escalators, unlike most NYC public schools, because he thinks the mayor or the city thought it’d be wise to invest in schools that had New York’s smartest students, something to that effect. It makes me wonder if he really believed that, that it wasn’t just a question of entitlement. Of having parents who invest more in your education and/or a secure environment growing up. In my opinion, it’s not necessarily New York’s brightest students that attend, the biologically more intelligent or anything, sometimes it’s the ones who get their intellect nurtured and encouraged more. He wrote about how much he liked Hunter College (probably in the NY Press), its Oasis room, the fact that it wasn’t corny enough to be advertised on a subway. I went to Hunter as well, but before that, I went to BMCC, the two year community college which totally did and does advertise on the subway like many other CUNY’s. What is wrong with doing that? With reaching the masses for education? Did he have an elite complex? I wonder if Vizzini ever considered these things. He was very young when he wrote Teen Angst… so I wonder if his opinion or perspective changed with time… throughout his very short life.

Unfortunately, he recently committed suicide. He was 32. I’m sad that he’s gone, that he took his life so early, with a wife and kid to boot. It makes me sad because I once tried taking my own life at 15 and I was able to get a second chance. So anyone who doesn’t get that second chance, part of me thinks, wow look at you, you really set out to do that, you weren’t playing, you really committed to that shit, unlike me who bitched out and told my mom to get help because omg look at what I had just done… and now there’s no more suffering on your part, you turned yourself into a void. And there’s that other part of me who’s more like, duuuude, you could’ve held out maybe! Maybe it was just a bad episode, a bad wave, maybe you needed different meds, a better therapist, maybe give less of a fuck of this molehill of a problem that you think is a mountain and "fuck the Red Knight" (as someone apparently tweeted this "Fisher King" reference in response to Robin Williams’ death). Just tell that Red Knight to fuck off already.