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  CHAPTER SIX

  “Charity Thief”

  I’m starting part 2 of this book with a story because I’ll be using it to model the skills and strategies that follow. This doesn’t mean that it’s my best or my most popular story. It’s simply one of my most crafted stories. Perfect for teaching.

  I first told it at a Moth StorySLAM in New York City. I finished in second place (and had a memorable encounter with The Moth founder George Dawes Green, which I will discuss in a later chapter), then I recrafted the story and told it at a Moth StorySLAM in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My name was drawn first that night. Although I ended up with the spot most loathed by storytellers, I won the slam — the only time I’ve ever won (or seen anyone win) from first position.

  The story is transcribed from a performance at one of my shows and is lightly edited for the page. I mention this because stories that are told orally differ greatly from stories written for the page. You’ll see that there is less formality and more repetition. I’ve left all of these elements here to give you a sense of what the live version sounds like. You can also listen to the live version of the story on the “Storyworthy the Book” YouTube channel.

  It’s the fall of 1991. I’m twenty years old. I’m driving down a lonely stretch of New Hampshire highway. I’m driving home from the very first booty call of my entire life, and I’m excited because I don’t know that this is also going to be the very last booty call of my entire life.

  It’s in this moment of excitement that the right front tire of my 1976 Chevy Malibu blows out, but it doesn’t just deflate. It disintegrates. It throws rubber and wire across the road in a way I didn’t think was possible, and it takes everything I have to get the car over to the shoulder and to a stop.

  And it’s 1991. I don’t have a cell phone. I don’t have a spare tire. I haven’t seen a car on this stretch of road for a long time. So I do the only thing I can think of doing: I start hiking back up the road to search for help.

  Seven hours later, after having given all my money to a half-naked mountain man named Winston in exchange for a balding spare tire, I’m back on the road, heading home, a hundred miles between me and my apartment in Attleboro, Massachusetts, when I look at the instrument panel and see that I have no gas.

  All the money I had — every penny to my name — is in the hands of a half-naked mountain man. I don’t have a credit card. I don’t have an ATM card. I don’t even have a checking account.

  So I take the next exit and roll my car into a Citgo station, and as I park the car on the edge of the lot, facing a field of fall foliage, I grip the steering wheel in anger. I’m angry, but I’m also sad. I’m twenty years old. I’m a McDonald’s manager. I make $7.25 an hour, and I am the richest person I know. My mother is living on welfare with my pregnant teenage sister. My brother joined the army a year ago, and I haven’t heard from him since. My father disappeared from my life ten years ago. The only person I know who can help me, who even has a credit card or a car that can make this hundred-mile trip to New Hampshire, is my friend Bengi, and he is off on some college weekend. I can’t get in touch with him, because in 1991, when you want to call someone, you need to make a phone ring on a wall, and you need to make that phone ring at the moment the person you want to speak to is near that phone, and you need the number for the phone to make it ring, and all of that is impossible for me to get.

  This was not the plan for my life. I’m sitting behind the wheel, staring into a field of bright colors, yet I feel anything but bright. I was not supposed to be this alone this early in my life. You’re not supposed to be twenty years old and have absolutely no one in your life to call for help. As I sit there in my car, staring into that field of orange and yellow, I see my future ahead of me. An endless series of moments just like this one, when I need help but will have none.

  So I make a plan. I’m going to beg for gas, because it’s 1991. Gas is eighty-five cents a gallon, so eight dollars is all I need to get me home. I’ll offer my license, my wallet, everything in my car as collateral in exchange for eight dollars’ worth of gas and the promise that I will return and repay the money and more. Whatever it takes.

  So I rehearse my pitch, take a deep breath, and walk in. There’s a kid behind the counter, probably about my age. I tell him my problem. I ask him to help. I make my offer. The kid refuses. He doesn’t want to risk his job.

  So I leave. I go back to my car. My plan is simple. I’m going to wait for this kid to go home. Wait for the next person to come on duty, and while I wait, I’ll refine my pitch. I’ll beg again. I’ll beg until someone, anyone, gives me some money for gas. But as I climb back into the car, I see my crumpled McDonald’s uniform on the backseat, and I suddenly have an idea.

  An hour later, I’m standing on the porch of a small, red-brick house on a quiet residential street. I’m knocking on a blue door.

  I’m wearing my McDonald’s manager’s uniform. Blue shirt. Blue pants. Blue tie. Gold name badge. I’m holding a gray McDonald’s briefcase with a big M engraved on the front like a shield.

  I knock on that blue door again.

  When the door opens, a man is standing in front of me. He looks about fifty, but he might as well be five hundred. He’s one of these guys who looks as if he has all the wisdom of the world wrapped up in him, and in that moment, I know that he knows that I’m about to do something terrible.

  And I agree. This is a terrible idea. I know this now.

  But it’s two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. I’m standing on his porch in a McDonald’s uniform. It’s one of those moments when you realize that the only way to get out of a terrible situation is to go through with it. So I take another deep breath and say, “Hi, I’m Matt, and I’m collecting money for Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities.”

  The man doesn’t move. He doesn’t say a word. He’s like Stonehenge. Frozen in time and forever waiting for this moment. Waiting for me to arrive.

  The next words that come out of my mouth surprise me as much as they surprise him, because they are completely unplanned. “My mom died of cancer when I was a little boy, and now my sister is dying of cancer, and I’m just trying to do whatever I can to help.”

  The man finally moves. He points his finger at me and says, “You stay right there.” Then he walks back into his house, and I know what he’s doing. He’s calling the police, and they will come and arrest me for stealing money from McDonald’s (which will actually happen two years later, but not on this day). On this day, he returns to the door with a twenty-dollar bill in his hand, which is like $20,000 to me on this day. As I raise my hand to say, “No, it’s too much,” he says, “No. My wife, Lisa, died of cancer five years ago.”

  Now it’s my turn to freeze.

  He keeps talking. He tells me about her cancer. Her death. He tells me that his two kids came back from California for the funeral, but he hasn’t seen them since that day. He says that the last two years of Lisa’s life were hard, but it was the very last year that he regrets the most. He tells me how hard his wife fought to stay alive, and he wishes now that he could have told her that it was okay to go, but he loved her too much to say the words.

  Before I realize what is happening, I’m sitting on the porch with this man as he spills his guts to me, and in that moment, I know that I am, without a doubt, the single worst person on the face of the earth.

  The man talks to me for twenty minutes about his wife and his children, and when he’s done, he hugs me as if he hasn’t hugged a person in five years. Then he presses the twenty-dollar bill into my hand. It feels like poison now.

  I say good-bye. I walk down the stone path, up the street, and back to the gas station. I use his money to put gas in my car, and I hit the road, once again heading in the direction of home. And as I pull onto the highway, I remember the last time I was sitting behind this wheel, just an hour or so ago, feeling lonely, worried that I would be alone for the rest of my life. Now I know how stupid I was, because tonight I’ll sit with
my friends in the living room and eat pizza, drink beer, and watch The Simpsons.

  But that man — he will be alone tonight behind that blue door. He’ll be alone tonight and tomorrow night and probably for many, many more nights. I leave New Hampshire knowing that I know nothing about loneliness, but also knowing that I never want to know about loneliness the way that man understood it that day and will probably understand it for many, many days thereafter.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Every Story Takes Only Five Seconds to Tell (and Jurassic Park Wasn’t a Movie about Dinosaurs)

  There are many secrets to storytelling, but there is one fundamental truth above all others that must be understood before a storyteller can ever be successful:

  All great stories — regardless of length or depth or tone — tell the story of a five-second moment in a person’s life.

  Got that?

  Let me say it again: Every great story ever told is essentially about a five-second moment in the life of a human being, and the purpose of the story is to bring that moment to the greatest clarity possible.

  I know this sounds a little ridiculous, but it’s absolutely true. Also, rejoice! This truth — once understood and embraced — makes the storyteller’s job much easier.

  These five-second moments are the moments in your life when something fundamentally changes forever. You fall in love. You fall out of love. You discover something new about yourself or another person. Your opinion on a subject dramatically changes. You find forgiveness. You reach acceptance. You sink into despair. You grudgingly resign. You’re drowned in regret. You make a life-altering decision. Choose a new path. Accomplish something great. Fail spectacularly.

  These are the moments that make great stories. They are the moments that we seek when doing our Homework for Life. They are often small and sudden and powerful. These are the best stories. They are the only stories worth telling.

  In “Charity Thief,” my five-second moment comes when I realize that I know nothing about loneliness, and more importantly, I never want to know loneliness in the way that man in New Hampshire knew it on that day. In the story, that moment happens when he tells me that his wife, Lisa, has died of cancer and that his children haven’t returned home in more than five years. I can still remember that moment as if it were yesterday. As he spoke those words to me on that tiny porch, I felt my heart sink. All the strength in my body left me. At that moment I was sure that I was the worst person on the planet. It was the moment when I understood how truly stupid, self-absorbed, and selfcentered I was.

  That is the purpose of my story. I’m trying to tell my audience that there was a time in my life when I felt alone and lost, thinking that I was facing a lifetime of solitude, only to discover how foolish and blind I was to feel that way. The rest of the story is crafted to serve that singular moment in time and only that moment. Anything in the story that doesn’t help bring that moment to the greatest clarity possible is marginalized, shaded, or removed entirely. Anything that helps bring clarity to that moment is strengthened and highlighted.

  We’ll talk about lies of omission in a coming chapter, and you will see how much I have left out of that story for the sake of my five-second moment. You’ll see how much I have left on the cutting-room floor to bring my five-second moment to the greatest clarity possible.

  Understanding that stories are about tiny moments is the bedrock upon which all storytelling is built, and yet this is what people fail to understand most when thinking about a story. Instead they believe that if something interesting or incredible or unbelievable has happened to them, they have a great story to tell. Not true.

  Think about the story that I mentioned in chapter 3 about my secret childhood hunger. In that story, my wife tells me she knows that I was hungry as a boy. She has uncovered my lifelong secret. The full version of that story runs about seven minutes (and can be seen on the “Storyworthy the Book” YouTube channel), but it all boils down to that singular moment at a dining-room table with my wife. Everything else I chose to include in the story only serves to bring that moment to the greatest possible clarity.

  In the complete version, I describe the food insecurity that I experienced so often as a boy. I make you laugh when I tell about all the clever and bizarre ways that I managed to find food for my siblings and myself. I introduce you to my wife and kids. I talk about my marriage. I show you my unending frustration over Charlie’s throwing food. All of this seeks to bring you as close to seeing and experiencing that five-second moment with as much clarity as possible. I want you to understand its weight. Feel its power. I want you to feel as if you are sitting at that table with us. If I’m good, you may even feel something akin to what I felt in that moment.

  It’s a story that makes people laugh and weep. It’s one of my most-requested stories, and yet the moment is tiny. A few words spoken by a wife to a husband at the dinner table. A moment that would possibly have been forgotten if I hadn’t been doing my Homework for Life. Yet it was one of the most important moments of my life. It’s the moment I realized that my wife knows my heart better than I do. I’m so grateful that I was able to see it for what it was.

  Many times storytellers fail to understand the importance of these five-second moments. They see the big when they should be looking for the small. They come to me and say, “I went to Tanzania last summer. I want to tell that story onstage.”

  My answer is always the same: No. Visiting Tanzania is not a story. Your ability to travel the world does not mean that you can tell a good story or even have a good story to tell. But if something happened in Tanzania that altered you in some deep and fundamental way, then you might have a story. If you experienced a five-second moment in Tanzania, you might have something. Think of it this way: If we remove Tanzania from the story, do you still have a story worth telling?

  If the answer is no, then you probably don’t have a story. If the answer is yes, you might have something I want to hear.

  A storyteller and friend named Christina O’Sullivan tells a story about her trip to Laos in her early twenties. She climbs a mountain and discovers a one-room schoolhouse in a monastery at the summit. Inside are thirty boys and one girl, along with their teacher, who is a man. She’s invited to stay and visit. She meets children more invested in their education than she has ever been. She learns why there is only one little girl in the classroom. In doing so, she discovers something fundamental about herself that changes her outlook on life forever.

  This is a great story, because if we remove Laos completely, Christina still has a story to tell. It does not rely on an exotic locale or unusual food. It doesn’t depend upon an audience’s interest in a foreign culture. The story hinges upon Christina’s five-second moment in that school, and that school could have been anywhere. It could have been in her hometown.

  Years ago I sat on a panel of Moth storytellers and producers, listening to storytellers pitch their stories as part of The Moth’s book tour for their first collection. A man told us about a time in his childhood when he drove his father’s truck through the garage and into a swimming pool. It was a story filled with excitement, suspense, and humor. He pitched it well. When he finished, one of the producers asked the man what that story meant to him. “How did it change your life?”

  The man explained that whenever he’s sitting on a barstool or eating dinner with friends, he knows that he has a story that can make people laugh.

  “Yes,” the producer said. “But did the experience fundamentally change you in some way?”

  “Yes,” the man said. “I always have a good story to tell. Something to make people laugh. I love that.”

  The producer explained that this man had more of a romp than a story. A romp is an entertaining and amusing anecdote — often longer than you might imagine an anecdote to be — but not something that will move an audience emotionally. There was no resonance to his story. No lasting effect. Nothing for the audience to connect to. It was fun and exciting and surprising, but
it was unlikely to remain in the hearts of the audience in the way a good story can. He had no five-second moment, so the story could never be great.

  These five-second moments can also be found in film and literature. My favorite example (and one I will refer to again and again in this book, so you should probably go and watch the film) is the original Jurassic Park, written by Michael Crichton and David Koepp and directed by Steven Spielberg. That movie was an enormous success, and most people assumed that it was because the dinosaurs had been rendered by computer-generated imagery and looked truly lifelike for the first time in Hollywood history.

  Nope.

  In fact Jurassic Park is not a movie about dinosaurs at all. Crichton, Koepp, and Spielberg use the dinosaurs to entertain and excite their audience, raising the stakes and building suspense (more on this later), but the dinosaurs are not at the heart of the story. The five-second moment in that movie has nothing to do with dinosaurs at all.

  Jurassic Park is a movie about a paleontologist named Alan Grant, who is in love with a paleobotanist named Ellie Sattler. Grant and Sattler are a couple, but they are not married. It appears that the primary sticking point in their relationship is Grant’s unwillingness to entertain the thought of having kids. In fact, he does not like children at all, much to Sattler’s disappointment. He considers them noisy, time-consuming, boring, and expensive. He says that they smell. In one of the first scenes of the film, he explains to a small boy about how a dinosaur might eviscerate him, using a fossilized dinosaur claw to demonstrate.

  Over the course of the movie, Grant finds himself thrust into the company of two children, and ultimately he and these two kids must survive Jurassic Park on their own. Grant risks his life repeatedly to save these children, and as he gets to know them, he discovers a surprising affection for each one. The boy, Tim, is adventurous and bumbling, and he loves dinosaurs as much as Grant himself. The girl, Lex, is an old soul. Mature and wise. Skilled with technology. Surprisingly calm in the face of danger.