One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories(44)

“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? Everything 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.”