Johnny Hangtime Read online

  Johnny Hangtime

  Dan Gutman

  Dedicated to the kids who inspired me at schools I visited in 1999…

  In New Jersey: Moorestown Middle and South Valley in Moorestown, Harrison Township in Mullica Hill, Livingston Park in North Brunswick, Smalley in Bound Brook, Mountain Park in Berkeley Heights, Hamburg in Hamburg, Holly Glen in Williamstown, Davis in Camden, Oak Knoll in Summit, Hillview in Pompton Plains, Stonybrook in Kinnelon, Cedar Mountain in Vernon, Stephen Gerace and Pequannock Valley in Pequannock, Roland Rogers in Absecon, Durand in Vineland, Morgan in Sparta, St. Charles in Palmyra, Byram in Stanhope, Duffy and Mackinnon in Wharton, St. Charles Borromeo in Cinnaminson, Barley Sheaf in Flemington, Morris Plains in Morris Plains, St. Mathias in Somerset, Sharpe and Politz Foundation in Cherry Hill, Bacon in Millville, Indian Hill in Holmdel, Logan in Swedesboro, Cedar Hill in Towaco, Hillside in Bridgewater, Beeler and Van Zant in Marlton, Toms River Intermediate in Toms River, Allenwood in Allenwood, Delran Intermediate in Delran, Winslow #6 and Mullen in Sicklerville, Littlebrook in Princeton, Bernardsville Middle in Bernardsville.

  In Pennsylvania: Lower Salford in Harleyville, Englewood, Knapp, and Gwynedd Square Schools in Lansdale, Hatfield in Hatfield, North Wales and Gwyn-Nor Schools in North Wales, Keith Valley in Horsham, Clarks Summit, Appletree, and Abington Heights Middle School in Wilkes-Barre, Quarry Hill in Yardley, Kutztown in Kutztown, March in Easton, Sugartown in Malvern, Penn Bernville in Bernville, Jenkintown in Jenkintown.

  In Texas: St. Mark’s, Episcopal, Greenhill, and Parish Day School in Dallas. Redland Oaks, Coker, Northern Hills, Thousand Oaks, Northwood, Huebner, Oak Meadow, Stone Oak, and Longs Creek School in San Antonio. Roosevelt Alexander in Katy. Tomball Junior High in Tomball. Smith, Winship, Hirsch, Jenkins, and Dueitt School in Spring. Oak Creek, Beneke, Bammel, Ponderosa, Link, and Clark School in Houston.

  In Oklahoma: Skyview, Central, Parkland, Ranchwood, Shedeck, Myers, Surrey Hills, Lakeview Middle, and Independence Middle School in Yukon. Central Middle, Mayfield Middle, Northridge, and Coronado School in Oklahoma City. Western Oaks in Bethany.

  In New York: Goshen Intermediate in Goshen, Mt. Pleasant and Central Park School in Schenectady, Colton in Spring Valley, Murray Ave. in Larchmont.

  In North Carolina: Sherwood Park, Vanstory Hills, Lillian Black, Hefner, and Brentwood School in Fayettville.

  In Michigan: Warner, Bean, and Hanover Horton Middle in Spring Arbor.

  Also: Hilliard Station in Hilliard, Ohio. Brunswick in Greenwich, Connecticut. The Right To Read Program in Presque Isle, Maine. And coolest of all, The Cairo American College in Egypt.

  “Nobody ought ever to do that again.”

  —Annie Edson Taylor, the first person to

  go over Niagara Falls and live, in 1901

  Contents

  Epigraph

  1 Fall in New York

  2 Kids, Don’t Try This at Home!

  3 Crazy Joe Thyme

  4 Liberty…Or Death

  5 The Great Ricky Corvette

  6 Augusta

  7 Boris Bonner

  8 Time of My Life

  9 Wishful Thinking

  10 Mixed Up

  11 Blowing Stuff Up

  12 The Ultimate

  13 Two Birds, One Stone

  14 Liar

  15 Confrontation

  16 The Coward

  17 The First Substitute

  18 The Second Substitute

  19 A Present

  20 Acting

  21 The Third Substitute

  Afterward… Well, you can probably guess what happened with everybody afterward.

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Dan Gutman

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  FALL IN NEW YORK

  The Empire State Building points skyward, like a gigantic pencil, 1,454 feet over the island of Manhattan. It was built with sixty thousand tons of steel, I’ve been told. That’s enough to lay down railroad tracks from New York to Baltimore. The building has 60 miles of water pipe and 3,500 miles of telephone wire. There are seventy-three elevators inside. On the outside, 6,500 windows need to be washed continually. The eighty-sixth floor observatory sits 1,050 feet above street level.

  And I’m about to jump off it.

  It’s a clear day, just a few minutes after sunrise. New York City is spread out, waking up before me. I can look down on the Chrysler Building and the United Nations. There are three bridges in the distance stretching across the East River. The ships plowing through the early morning waters look like toys in a bathtub. The cars below don’t look like Fords or Toyotas. They look like Hot Wheels and Matchbox. People—well, they’re so tiny I can barely see them at all.

  Looking out at the horizon, I estimate that visibility must be eighty miles or more. New Jersey lies across the Hudson River. I bet I can see all the way to Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts too. It occurs to me that alarm clocks must be going off up and down the East Coast right now. People are waking up groggily after a long night’s sleep, putting their feet on solid ground.

  Looking straight down past the tips of my sneakers, I can look down the eighty-six stories stretching toward Fifth Avenue below. The Empire State Building hasn’t been the tallest building in the world for years, but it’s still the most beautiful, if you ask me. I remember reading that they built the whole thing in just twenty-five weeks. Fourteen men were killed during the construction. But none of them jumped off.

  I have been planning to do this for months. Thought about it over and over in my mind. I would wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it. Finally, I’m ready. I’m nervous. I’m scared. But I feel like King Kong.

  They say a penny dropped from this height would go through a skull like a knife through Jell-O. What would happen to a human body that fell so far?

  I would be killed, of course. No question about that. But would there be anything left of me? Any remains for Mom to identify? Or would some sanitation crew simply scrape me off the pavement like an egg off a skillet, and then continue on down the street picking up trash? If I think too much about that, I’ll chicken out, I know.

  The shadow of the sun is creeping across the city, one avenue at a time. The air is thin, and it’s cold up here. Wind coming off the river makes the building sway back and forth slightly. Maybe it’s just an optical illusion. I slide my sneakers forward a couple of inches, so the toes hang over the edge and my heels rest on brick.

  My hands are behind my back, grasping the iron rails tightly. I can feel my heart beating. Maybe even hear it. Or is that a guy with a jackhammer fixing a pothole down below?

  There’s no turning back now. I bend my knees, let go of the iron bars, and push off, hard, stretching my arms out in front of me. For a moment, I feel like I’m suspended in the air, like a cartoon character who doesn’t fall because he hasn’t yet noticed he’s run off a cliff.

  And then, the inevitable. Gravity reaches up and grabs at me. I start to fall, first slowly. You pick up speed so fast in free fall. The wind rushes by my face, ripping at my hair. It turns me around. My clothes are flapping. It’s dizzying.

  I’m powerless now. It’s out of my control. When you jump, it’s the only time no part of your body is touching anything. There’s nothing for your muscles to push against. It would be an incredibly relaxing experience, if only we could relax in this situation. Nobody can.

  And it’s over so quickly. In the movies, things like this go on forever. But real life doesn’t happen in slo-mo.

  It’s over much more quickly than I expect. I don’t have the chance to enjoy it. All too soon, my body hits bottom.

  2
>
  KIDS, DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME!

  “Cut!” Roland Rivers hollered into his bullhorn. “That was beautiful, Johnny! Great job, everyone!”

  Even before I landed in the middle of the air bag, I knew we had the shot. The crew gave me a nice round of applause. One of the guys helped me to my feet and into a window on the seventy-fourth floor. The rest of the crew deflated the air bag and removed the rigging from the side of the Empire State Building to get ready for the next scene they’d have to shoot.

  I wiped the sweat off my forehead with my sleeve. Helicopters surrounding the building buzzed away.

  There are only two kinds of people who jump off tall buildings: lunatics and stuntmen. I’m no lunatic.

  My name is Johnny Thyme. That’s what everybody calls me back home. But in the movie business I’m known by my “professional” name—Johnny Hangtime.

  Stuntmen and stuntwomen, as you probably know, take the place of actors and actresses when they have to shoot dangerous scenes for movies, TV, and commercials. Big stars aren’t allowed to jump off buildings, crash through windows, run through fire—things like that. If they were to get hurt, it would ruin the whole movie and possibly their career. Most actors probably wouldn’t do those dangerous stunts anyway. So professional stuntmen are hired to do the job.

  Or stuntkids. I just turned thirteen. There are about seven hundred professional Stunt people in the United States, but only a few of us are minors. So when child actors need to do something the least bit dangerous, there’s a good chance I’ll get the call to take their place.

  The movie we were shooting was called New York Nightmare. It’s about a group of terrorists who try to attract media attention to their political cause by committing terrible crimes at famous New York City landmarks. I was stunt doubling for the actor Ricky Corvette. He plays this brave kid who single-handedly stops the terrorists. It’s a goofy story, but then, that’s Hollywood. Not every movie can be Gone with the Wind, you know?

  Roland Rivers is the director of New York Nightmare, and I trust him with my life. Roland is almost completely bald, but he has a long beard, and a ponytail sticks out the back of his head. He’s got hair everywhere except where you’re supposed to have it. Once I asked him why he has the ponytail and he replied in that great British accent of his, “Why, my good man, if I were to cut it off, I’d have no hair at all!”

  We had the Empire State Building gag carefully worked out in advance, of course. That’s what stunt people call a stunt—a gag. Roland and I spent days going over every detail so it would come off perfectly. He filmed my fall from several angles and distances. When I hit the air bag, he shot it from a helicopter above the building.

  The big air bag, you see, looks just like the surface of a blimp. The special-effects people will draw a blimp on a computer and paste it right into the scene. When Roland gets into the editing room, he will cut to a computer-generated long shot of a blimp hovering alongside the Empire State Building. When he splices all the fake shots together with the real shots of me, it will look like I jumped from the eighty-sixth floor observatory straight onto the blimp.

  Roland could have faked the whole gag if he wanted to. Through careful camera placement, special effects, and by using background shots of New York, he could have filmed the scene in a Hollywood soundstage. That would have been a lot cheaper and safer, and most people watching the movie would never know the scene wasn’t shot at the actual Empire State Building.

  But Roland is a “stickler,” as he puts it. He wants everything to look real.

  “The audience must feel like they are there,” he always says. “To make them feel that, we must be there. Do the thing. Put life on the line.”

  Both of us wanted to get the shot right the first time, and we did. If we had to shoot it all over again, it would cost a lot of money. Besides, jumping off the Empire State Building once was plenty for me.

  “Did you feel them, Johnny?” Roland asked, throwing his arm around me as he ushered me into an office on the seventy-fourth floor.

  “Uh, no,” I replied, peeling off my kneepads and elbow pads. “Feel what?”

  “Endorphins, baby! The endorphins!”

  Oh, yeah. The endorphins.

  Roland had been a high-school science teacher in England until he changed careers and got into directing movies. He says that chemicals called endorphins inhibit our brain cells from experiencing pain. When they get into our bloodstream and attach to certain nerve receptors, they put us in a state of euphoria. Roland believes that doing stunts like jumping out of buildings releases endorphins from the pituitary gland, which is about the size of a peanut and sits at the base of the skull. He thinks that if a scene gets my endorphins flowing, it will get the audience’s endorphins flowing too.

  Roland’s kind of nutty, but he is a genius.

  “You and I are the same, Johnny,” Roland confided to me one day. “We need endorphins. You get them by doing stunts, I get them by watching you do stunts.”

  “It was exciting,” I told Roland. I didn’t want to disappoint him by letting him know I didn’t feel any endorphins surging through my system.

  “I wish I were you, Johnny,” Roland sighed. “I’d be in a constant state of euphoria. But alas, I cannot. I lack but one quality that keeps me from achieving this unreachable goal.”

  “What’s that, Roland?” I asked.

  “Courage, my boy!” he bellowed. “Courage!” With that, he slapped me on the back and let out a cackling laugh.

  At that moment, my mom burst into the office, ran toward me and wrapped her arms around me. Looking at her, you would think I had missed the air bag.

  “Johnny!” she cried. “Are you okay? I’m sorry I was late. They closed off the observation deck and I couldn’t convince the guard I was your mother.”

  “Everything went fine, Mom,” I assured her. She started squeezing me and kissing me and stuff. The guys on the crew started making kissy faces and snickering behind Mom’s back.

  “Mrs. Thyme!” Roland boomed. “So good of you to stop by! Looking gorgeous, I might add. Johnny was fabulous, as always.”

  “Johnny,” Mom begged, ignoring Roland. “I wish you would quit this. I’m going to have a heart attack one of these days.”

  “Quit?” Roland said, horrified. “Meredith, your son is a stunt genius! You must nurture this ability. He has a very unique and sought-after talent.”

  I had to laugh. As if jumping off a building takes talent! Mom turned to Roland and backed him into the corner, all serious.

  “Was an ambulance waiting in case something went wrong, Roland?”

  “Yes, Meredith,” Roland said dutifully.

  “Was the net in place in case Johnny missed the air bag?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were there three doctors standing by at all times?”

  “Yes.”

  “An EMS crew?”

  “Yes! Meredith, every safety precaution was taken to protect your son, I assure you.”

  Mom appeared to relax a little, and Roland wrapped his arm gently around her shoulder.

  “Meredith,” he said softly. “Are you familiar with Galileo’s law of falling bodies?”

  Mom shook her head no. Roland has a way with words, and he started laying it on thick.

  “All objects fall with a constant acceleration of thirty-two feet per second, Meredith. In other words, with each passing second, an object will fall thirty-two feet faster than it did the second before.”

  I knew Mom couldn’t care less, but Roland could just grab people with his eyes and rivet their attention on him. He was a master at it.

  “It doesn’t matter if you drop an anvil or a tennis ball,” Roland continued. “Heavy objects don’t fall any faster than light ones. You don’t believe me, do you? Hold out your hands.”

  Roland picked up two statues of the Empire State Building from a shelf. One was about two inches tall and the other was the size of a large bowling trophy. He placed one statue in
each of Mom’s palms, caressing her hands from beneath.

  “Now, drop them!”

  Mom dropped the two statues. Sure enough, they both hit the floor at the exact same instant. A security guard looked at Roland suspiciously.

  “See?” Roland cooed, still holding Mom’s hands. “Because of the law of falling bodies, I knew Johnny would fall sixteen feet in the first second. And I knew he would fall forty-eight feet the next second. And I knew he would fall eighty feet the third second. So after three seconds, Johnny was moving ninety-six feet per second, sixty-five miles per hour, and he had fallen one hundred forty-four feet. That’s the height of a twelve-story building. And do you know where we put that big, soft air bag Johnny landed on, Meredith?”

  “Twelve stories down?” Mom asked.

  “Precisely!” Roland exclaimed. “Johnny was in good hands—the hands of Galileo. The hands of Aristotle. The hands of Isaac Newton, and the hands of America’s own Albert Einstein!”

  As far as I’m concerned, Galileo, Aristotle, Newton, and Einstein didn’t know squat about falling objects. None of them ever jumped off a building. But it was a masterful performance on Roland’s part, I had to admit. Like I said, the man is a genius.