It was a cold, dark night in December when I hopped in my car alone for the first time. I filled my 12-disc CD changer my parents bought me for my birthday with a few all-time favorites. I just wanted to cruise to nowhere in particular. It was my 16th birthday and I was going to take it all in.

So I wound through the curvy streets listening to Dave Matthews Band’s #41 and U2’s With Or Without You just thinking and driving. There’s something special about 16, which is weird since it’s just one year, or in this particular case, one day past 15. The freedom that came with that age was such a powerful thing. I no longer had to wait for my mom to take me to Best Buy to buy that new CD. I no longer needed a ride to hang out with friends. I was no longer just a kid.

Later that night I drove to PepperoniNip’s house, picked him up, and brought him back to my house to watch The Blair Witch Project. It was unbelievable, not because of the movie, but because I drove one minute down the road to pick him up. Usually I drove my friend Colossus to school. He made us late almost every single day, but luckily my homeroom teacher didn’t care. Once Colossus was nearly an hour late, so we skipped first period and got breakfast at Burger King. Once I wanted to see if we could still make it on time, and passed a car on the double yellow. I think she flipped us off.

Since my birthday was earlier than many of my friends, I became the permanent driver. My buddies started inviting me to get-togethers with people I didn’t used to hang out with, including females. Back then I was too shy for my own good, scared of girls and large groups. The hottest girl in our grade, Orange, once called me “the man of few words.” So when I didn’t talk much, merely cracking a joke here and there, the girls probably thought I was Ben, the mysterious friend of Zeke and Big Easy who drove them everywhere and never said much. And I loved it.

Most of our fun involved doing stupid things as only 16-year-olds know how: blasting ‘N Sync while driving 95 mph with Zeke sticking his head out the window; trying to get into R-rated movies (and getting caught); forcing our religious friend, Crest, to listen to the Methods of Mayhem song Proposition Fuck You; and making ridiculous bets. We once bet Crest he wouldn’t drink the water from a flower vase off the table of McDonald’s. We added chewed pieces of M&M’s and French fry. He won his $5 fair and square.

I once bet Big Easy that he wouldn’t wear a colorful serape (basically a cape) around school for a whole day. He bought it at an antique shop. He looked so absurd that we threw down for $30. Sure enough, the next day he wore it. “I almost got beat up in the bathroom,” he said. Of course, I had gotten wind from an inside source that he briefly took it off, thus breaking the rules for the bet.

When school was out and I passed through the lobby to get to tennis practice, he was there ready to be paid. Actually, everyone was there to see him cash in. “I don’t know Big Easy, I heard you took it off one time in the hallway.”

It was stupid of me to get into it in front of everybody. There was too much pressure. When Orange chimed in that he deserved his money, it was over. No way could I hold out on a request from Orange.

Tennis was really a great sport to play in high school because it attracted the kids who weren’t good enough athletes to play anything else. That attitude made practices somewhat informal and a ton of fun. But don’t get me wrong – we played hard and we played to win. For the first few matches my doubles partner was Froddy, and we absolutely annihilated people. This was even after I started experiencing significant pain from my tumor, which was growing ever so fast in my left hip. On our last match together before the coach paired him with somebody else, I was totally and completely unable to run. Other players had jokingly been calling me a pussy, and now I started to wonder if I was a pussy. I also wondered if my tennis skills were diminishing, or if the new $80 racket I bought was worse than my old $20 piece of shit.

Later in the season my teammates stopped calling me a pussy because I was diagnosed with a heart murmur. At tennis practice my coach wouldn’t let me run until we knew what it was. Before getting my echocardiogram, I thought it was a big deal and acted accordingly by trying to get sympathy out of people. In actuality, it was as benign as heart murmurs get, with some doctors unable to hear it. It’s ironic that a massive and aggressive tumor made me a pussy, but an almost undetectable heart murmur made me a badass.

Cancer truly never crossed my mind as a legitimate possibility, even though my pain was substantial and had been getting worse. I also had a permanent bruise on my lower back, right on the pelvic bone. But how many 16-year-olds think an injury is cancer? A couple teammates passively brought up the idea, but we all laughed it off. Cancer was impossible at our age – something reserved for the “sick kids”. I was young, strong, healthy and active. There was no motherfucking chance I was a “sick kid.”

That summer in 2000 was one of the best three-month periods of my life. Not only did we have no responsibility whatsoever, we also had the freedom to do whatever we wanted. HollaAtYoBoy and I chilled together almost every day. We played a lot of Super Tennis on Super Nintendo. “Who else should we recruit to be in the Super Tennis Club?” we joked. Other popular activities included watching Half Baked and trying to find pictures of Mandy Moore’s ass. It was a tough job, but somebody had to do it.

To give a sense of how easy-going my life was, when the game Perfect Dark came out my friend Infinicuralier and I played it 11 consecutive hours, with a short dinner break. I was 16 without a care in the world, except how to seduce Orange without having to talk.

My family went on a trip to Israel that summer, which I thought was going to blow nuts. Things went all wrong before the trip even started. Our flight from D.C. to Toronto was delayed four hours. When we finally took off from Toronto to Israel it was already midnight. After being in the air for an hour the captain said one of the computers was down, so we had to turn around – not before dumping tons of fuel in the air. We touched back down in Toronto at 3 AM, where we waited in chairs another three hours. The airline put us in a hotel for the next three hours. We were supposed to take off again at 11 AM, but that was delayed several more hours. At one point we were sitting in the plane waiting, not knowing if we were staying or going. My brother JD and I decided to play “Survivor,” where we’d see who from our area of the plane could stay in his seat the longest without going to the bathroom, going back to the terminal, or losing his mind. When all was said and done, we arrived in Israel 21 hours late.

We met the rest of our tour group in Jerusalem, which included the goalie for the Junior Olympic soccer team, and a really hot Jewish girl. The kids in the group were all very cool and formed a nice clique.

The first night was Shabbat, so we went to the Western Wall and watched hundreds of Jewish men in black top hats praying. It was incredible; the most religious experience of my life. The next night we walked up and down Ben Yehuda Street with all the shops and bars. I bought a white t-shirt with the Superman shield wearing a black top hat and Hasidic sideburns. It read “Super-Jew”. There is a strange coincidence to this, which I’ll get to later.

All the kids avoided Israeli food as much as possible. We missed the hell out of our American dining, and took every opportunity to eat at McDonald’s or Pizza Hut. For some reason Israel has a problem with stray cats. They were everywhere. None of the food, even the Big Mac, tasted anything like we were used to and we joked that we were eating cat burgers.

The second night I tried alcohol for the first time in my life. JD and the others bought a bottle of 80 proof vodka and started taking long, 8-second swigs. They made it look so easy that I didn’t think I needed a chaser. I grabbed the bottle, gulped, then stared blankly across the room at the hot Jew for a second before coughing uncontrollably. “That shit burns!”

Supposedly, Israel’s drinking water came from the sewer, so my parents constantly supplied us with 2 liter bottles of water. But rebellious JD chose to drink the sewer water instead, pretending to love it.

One of the stops on the trip was to the Dead Sea, which has so much salt that you float. Word of advice: after you get diarrhea, which you unquestionably will if you eat cat burgers, don’t try to sit and float in the Dead Sea.

On one of the last nights we played soccer where I, instead of the Junior Olympian, played goalie. By that point almost every movement hurt. “When we get home I’ll see the doctor and get it fixed,” I told them. “It’s probably just a stress fracture.” I can’t imagine their reaction when I later told them through instant messenger that it was in fact cancer.

The trip was an awesome experience. We joked the entire time, speaking in surfer language and pulling pranks. The hot Jew brought a camcorder and taped some of our adventures. Too bad we lost touch and I never saw the video.

At the end of the summer I took an SAT prep course with SuperSoccerStar, who was my friend’s cousin. Back in the day we used to sneak him on our house soccer team as a ringer. Through the prep course we became pretty good friends, and after the last session we went to his house to play video games. I started getting terrible diarrhea cramps, probably from the cat lingering in my belly, and quickly left because I didn’t want to destroy his bathroom. That was the last time I saw him before I was well into my chemo regimen.

I got my first MRI in August. I didn’t know what to expect and was kind of nervous. “It’s just a bunch of really loud noises, like a jackhammer,” my friend Hamburgers assured me. I expected them to say it was a stress fracture, and when they told me to get a second MRI, I was surprised. Did you have trouble finding my hip the first time? It’s only a bigass bone. It took three weeks to fit me in for a second MRI, which is pretty pathetic if they suspected cancer. After that, they said I needed a bone scan and this time my doctor made them scan me one day later. He must’ve known.

What a job it must be for the bone scan technician. She saw my future in perfect clarity on her computer screen – a bright white spot over my left hip. Amazingly, I still had no idea what was wrong. After the bone scan I was told to drink two full bottles of water because they had given me nuclear medicine for easier detection. I drank three bottles because I was scared of nuclear medicine, a minute fraction of the toxicity of chemotherapy. It’s all relative, isn’t it? A healthy person fears nuclear medicine and a cancer person fears his future amputation or cancer recurrence. They may be equal, just different.

After everyone was too much of a pussy to tell me, it came down to me and my mom at the kitchen table. “Benjamin…you have a tumor.” I knew right then and there what the bone scan technician had already known – I had cancer growing in my pelvis and would need treatment to kill it. I didn’t know much about chemotherapy or radiation except that it fucked people up. And I only knew that from watching Charlie Salinger receive treatment on the TV show Party of Five.

I went to school the next day after telling only three people. I don’t even know why I went to school that day; I couldn’t focus on anything. I had been rocked by a life-altering uppercut less than 24 hours earlier and was now walking around the halls listening to people complain about petty high school problems.

Two days later, on Sunday morning, I went to Temple ready to teach Hebrew. I was originally supposed to teach the 4th grade, but there was some confusion and they didn’t know where to put me yet. I took a seat in the sanctuary and Mrs. R, the mother of a student I had just finished tutoring for his Bar-Mitzvah, took a seat next to me. “Tell me what you know,” she said. I guessed my mom had told a few people.

“I don’t know much. They don’t know what it is yet, or if it’s anything.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

“No, I’m fine. Thanks.”

Like I said, when I turned 16, I was no longer a kid. I rose to the challenge and faced cancer like a man. I didn’t need help or anyone to do anything for me. I may spend my whole life trying to figure out how it happened, but within the first couple months of treatment I realized I was invincible. It probably sounds crazy, but I saw myself as a real-life Superman. Unable to be penetrated. Unable to be destroyed.

A week later my doctor said for certain I had bone cancer. Now I knew everything. My best friends and I went to Hamburgers’ house where I told them all that I knew. It was a typical Saturday night; the only difference was that one of us would soon be going to battle. We laughed and joked as usual. When we decided to take a trip to Taco Bell, I walked up his basement stairs and jokingly said, “I can feel my cancer poking out my ass.” At the Taco Bell drive-thru, Zeke pissed off the employee and we’re pretty sure she spit in our food.

Less than one week later my new life began. I am certain that the girls at school no longer saw me as the mysterious guy that cracks two jokes before taking Zeke and Big Easy home. They now saw me as the sick kid. I know this because that is how I would’ve viewed anyone else that had gotten cancer. I did everything in my power to show them otherwise. I’ve done everything I can since then, and I’ll do everything I can forever.

**********

Last year I went to see a skiing movie with my roommate and some of the students he’d been giving skiing lessons to. When we left I asked him how old they were. “I think they’re probably 16,” my roommate replied.

At first I couldn’t believe it. They looked so young – like kids. And that’s when I recognized that we don’t suddenly stop being kids when we turn 16. And I didn’t stop being a kid when I got cancer, even though Sweet Sixteen was over. I still say it was the best year of my life, perhaps never to be topped. There is something really powerful about that age – maybe it’s because my life changed then, maybe not. But to me, 16 will always be The Golden Age.

This and other stories can be found at my blog: I’ve Still Got Both My Nuts