A Bad Idea I'm About to Do (2 page)

“Fuck you, bitch,” yelled the woman who lost. “Karma will fuck you in the face.”

That didn't faze me at all. Most things don't. But for some reason the word “cunt” still does.

The impact of the word was even more pronounced when I saw the woman he had directed it to spring out of her seat and head toward my end of the car. Imagine
anyone's grandma
. She was tiny, her white bushy hair slightly unkempt, her too-large purse balanced precariously in the crook of her arm as she fled from the madman who had just screamed “cunt” in her perfect little grandma face.

She hurried past me and sat down in the far corner of the car. The homeless guy continued.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am here today to ask for donations,” he said, “so I can pursue my dream . . . of being a
professional wrestler
.”

At that point my internal monologue went into overdrive.

You don't get to call a woman a cunt
, I thought to myself,
when you have the same fucking dream I had when I was nine years old
.

“I have wrestled in the independent leagues,” he shouted as he headed in my direction, “but I need money to take more classes. Because there are still so many people I want to beat!”

I would sooner give you money if you were up there saying “Please give me money to support my heroin addiction,”
I thought.
It seems like a more direct route to exactly the same result.

“With your help, I know I can be a world champion!” he bellowed.

Even in the world of professional wrestling, it's not okay to speak that way to women
, I fumed to myself.
Even the scummiest wrestler on earth
(we can all agree that's Jake “The Snake” Roberts, right?)
would be like “Yo dude, cool out with the cunt shit.”

The man made his way past me. I didn't say anything. Despite all the indignation screaming to be let out from the depths of my psyche, I just kept playing poker on my smartphone.

I didn't feel that guilty. Other people actually
gave him money
.

But the thing is, a few years back I would absolutely have engaged this man in a dialogue. I can say with certainty that I would have confronted him about calling the old woman a cunt, and if that didn't lead to my being beaten on an underground train, I would then have eagerly asked him where he trained in the art of professional wrestling. And if this was actually something he did, I would have asked him to take me to his school. Because I desperately would have wanted to see a homeless wrestling school.

I know I would have done all of these things, because those are precisely my instincts even today. If there is a school out there where dozens of homeless people are jumping off ropes and landing on each other, it is something I absolutely need to experience firsthand. I can't tell you how hard it was for me not to confront that man on the train, but also not to ask him for every detail regarding his unlikely or, at best, confusing pursuit of fake fighting.

Instead, I bit my lip and lost a few more hands of mobile-phone poker. It's taken me thirty years of life, but I've finally discovered that normal people don't embrace craziness; they resist it. I didn't say a thing to the homeless wrestler. A few minutes later, I got off the train.

That's improvement, right?

In a sense, the stories you are about to read are about instances in my life when, rather than get off the train, I stayed on well past my stop. It's not that I'm anything special. I'm just your average geek trying to get by.

The only thing close to a remarkable quality I might claim to possess is that when most people would say no, I too often say yes. (I refer to this as a remarkable quality. Most people just call it stupidity.) It's an impulse that has certainly made life more interesting for me, but it's also been very detrimental at times.

Either way you view it, I hope the daring or idiocy described in these pages provides some cathartic relief for those of you who can think back to a situation where you may actually regret not taking a chance on what at the time seemed like a very bad idea. After all, my experiences confirm that, in most cases, people don't go out on a limb for a reason—straying outside of one's comfort zone is often dumb and causes trouble. By the end of the majority of these stories you'll likely feel good about not taking the road less socially advisable. Then again, sticking to the normal road can also be what leads us to the times we've all had when we wish we'd spoken up, but didn't; situations we look back on where we felt pushed around, forgotten, or inconsequential and wish we'd done something about it. So maybe these stories will also inspire you to take a chance in that regard. In any case, I hope that when you read these stories you can find something to relate to, take some kind of comfort in the fact that we've all been in strange situations—or, at the very least, realize that you could have made things so much worse.

It would make me feel a lot better if you did.

I
'm obsessed with basketball. I'll drop anything to watch an NBA game. I'll watch summer league games. I'll watch old games on ESPN Classic. I'll even watch the Wizards play the Timberwolves.

I also love playing basketball, even though I'm not very good at it. Luckily, I've joined a team of comedians who are just as enthusiastic and equally bad. We're called The Del Harris Marathon, and what we lack in skill we make up for in dirty play and hilarious taunts. We're not the best, but we're gritty. We're part of a league that donates the dues teams pay to charity. My team plays for the March of Dimes, a noble organization if ever there was one.

The kind-hearted nature of this endeavor only makes my behavior during games that much less excusable.

Case in point: the third week of the season we played our rivals, The 4Skins. They're a bunch of Jewish guys who run set plays and are known for smothering defense. They're antisocial and cocky. We consider them our archenemies.

When we're playing The 4Skins, the chatter never stops.

“Nice cut, Ari!”

“Good hands, Harry!”

“He can't stop you, Goldie!”

One of them even plays in a protective facemask. They're just the worst. They get my anger up. And that's a problem.

I'm unable to tell you what it feels like to be “a little” mad. My emotions work as if controlled by a light switch. I'm either fine or I'm out of control. I once spilled a container of thumbtacks and got as angry at myself as I did when I screwed up my relationship with my high school sweetheart. If I'm under the impression that there are Golden Grahams in my cupboard, then realize that there in fact are none, there's a high probability I'll be as sad as I was at my grandfather's funeral.

In other words, my reactions aren't in proportion to the things I'm reacting to. It's something I've been working on with a very lovely shrink for the past few years.

But against The 4Skins one day, all that hard work went out the window.

Even in a charity basketball league, there are rules and those rules should be enforced. So I'm sorry, but if there is supposed to be a thirty-second shot clock and the ref doesn't seem to care, I'm going to enlighten him.

I was riding the bench with my friend Gavin, perhaps the nicest person I know.

“This is fucking bullshit,” I seethed to him. “I've gotta say something.”

“I don't know, man,” he said. “Is it really worth it?”

I jumped off the bench and threw my hands wildly in the air.

“SHOT CLOCK,” I screamed. “REF! WHAT ABOUT THE SHOT CLOCK!”

The ref ignored me.

“Why won't you pay attention to the FUCKING SHOT CLOCK?” I shouted.

“Dude,” Gavin said. He shook his head, imploring me to calm down.

I stared at him with steely resolve before turning back in the ref 's direction.

“Why do we even HAVE a fucking SHOT CLOCK?”

The ref blew his whistle.

I am the only player in the history of our charity sports league to be given a technical foul while on the bench.

M
y closest friends are all people who have learned to laugh at me during these types of situations. Otherwise, it would probably be impossible for them to tolerate my semi-frequent outbursts of completely uncalled-for emotion. They've figured out how to roll with these particular punches but have often wondered aloud where my anger comes from, and are generally shocked at my answer. Especially if they've met my parents.

For her part, my mother actually has no need to express outward anger, because she is very smart and skillfully passive-aggressive. My mother is Catholic, and that means she is a legitimate master of guilt inducement. I don't remember her ever yelling at me when I was growing up, but I do recall being on the business end of the following choice statements quite often:

“I thought I raised you better than that.”

“I didn't realize that I was so terrible.”

And worst of all: “I just didn't know you were that kind of person.”

Usually, a heartbreaker of a line like that would be more than enough to put me in my place when I was acting out as a kid. But even when it didn't, she never resorted to screaming or yelling.

She'd simply say, “Okay . . . I'll just tell your father about this when he gets home.”

Most people who meet my dad immediately like him. “He just seems like a nice guy,” they'll say. “A nice guy with a moustache.”

In addition to the moustache, his defining characteristics are that he's big (six foot two), slightly out of his element in social situations (but in an endearing way that's accompanied by a goofy grin), and a national expert on water treatment. When we go on vacation, his first order of business is to taste the tap water.

“Man, the pH is all off,” he'll say, shaking his head. “I should go talk to these guys.” You can't not love a guy who makes it his personal crusade to travel around America giving the locals slightly better drinking water.

My father's other interests include gardening, baking, and my mom. He's like the big quiet friend everyone wants in life. I don't feel cheesy saying I'm lucky he's my dad.

But like a suburban town that's home to a serial killer, or a likable athlete who runs a dog-fighting ring, my father has a dark side.

“Not
your
dad!” people say when I tell them my anger is inherited from him.

Then I recount a tale that has been passed down through my family for thirty years—a tale of a wronged man out for justice. A tale of vengeance. A tale of my father.

In August of 1980, I was three months old. My older brother was the tender age of two, and he was a bad sleeper. For my mom, this meant long sleepless nights that really took a toll on her. My father has always been incredibly protective of my
mother, and seeing her exhausted and at the end of her rope made him even more so than usual.

My parents had recently moved into the first home they owned, on Franklin Avenue in West Orange, New Jersey. It was nothing fancy. There was no front lawn, so the modest house sat right up against the road. The cracked driveway led to a cramped backyard. The interior was the same: small and cozy, an admitted fixer-upper.

Both of my parents had grown up in the neighborhood and knew it well. The section of town it was located in was generally a good one, but had always had a rough element. Up the street was Colgate Park. For generations it had been a meeting ground for teenage kids—specifically, the type who liked to cause trouble—and around this time there was a notorious crew of burnouts who called the park their home base.

My father became obsessed with launching into home improvement projects. This is how he's been with every home he's owned since. It pains him to hire anyone to do something he can do with his own hands. I think this gives him the sense that these houses aren't just random buildings anymore—they're really his.

That's probably why the door was such a big deal.

The first alteration he made to the house on Franklin Avenue was to install a shiny, white aluminum door. After all, this was the brand-new entrance to his brand-new home. It was the literal gateway that would welcome visitors into the biggest and most important purchase he had ever made.

Perhaps that helps explain the vigilante death spree my father embarked upon.

A few nights after the door was proudly hung on its hinges, my parents were awakened at two in the morning by a terrifying crash. My brother woke from a rare night of sound sleep and
screamed. I was up and crying as well. My father ran downstairs to discover that someone had kicked in his brand-new door. The first personal touch he put on his house had been destroyed.