One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories(59)

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 …

Read





Sex





Play games that you make up





Drink / Do drugs





Sleep in bunk beds





Go Fish





Go Fish (card game)





Comic books





War (card game only)





Conversation





Unstructured Free Time





Horseshoes (coming in 2016)





Friendships





Unforgettable memories





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.