My Celeb BFFs: Vin Diesel

            Vin Diesel may prove a little more challenging to befriend. But we’d get along great because we’re both surly and presumably hate people. I don’t fancy running into him anywhere normal. I think to gain Vin Diesel’s friendship, we would have to undergo some crazy mission together, reminiscent of Identity Thief or The Hangover (and I’m Alan), because I can’t really picture him voluntarily spending time with me unless it was absolutely necessary. Then he’d get to know my personality and we’d be inseparable (so to speak).

            The only possible way this friendship could happen (even though we’re literally BFF soulmates) would be that Vin Diesel is getting his mom a sapphire tennis bracelet because she’s always been there for him and he wants her to know he appreciates it even if he doesn’t always say it aloud (he’s not big on that emotional bullshit). But these mob gangsters break into the jewelry store the night before Vin Diesel goes in to buy the bracelet. They didn’t collect their “protection” money from the jeweler, so, with the help from their inside man (the guard who stands at the entrance) they replace a few of the jewelry items for clever decoys that are actually bombs (like in Ms. Congeniality with the tiara). They plan to blow the place up during business hours to send a message. Plus, they get to keep the real jewelry.

            Maybe they see Vin Diesel go into the jeweler and refrain from setting off the bomb because he’s famous. Or because he’s Italian. Or maybe he went in at 11 and they planned to blow it up at noon. Regardless, he goes in and buys the sapphire tennis bracelet that is actually a bomb, and the jeweler wraps it in a lovely blue box (because Vin Diesel of course shops at Tiffany). Obviously, the guard at the entrance sees the whole transaction go down but cannot think of anything to prevent the sale without causing a scene. So he lets the other guys know what is happening, and when Vin Diesel exits the store, they are ready.

            This is where I come in. I would be walking down the street and probably get shoved into the side of a building as a throng of men dressed in black suits ran past me. Brushing myself off, exhaling and chanting my mantra I hate people, I’d start walking again and get distracted by something shiny on the sidewalk—a sapphire tennis bracelet. At this point, it all depends on my moral compass. Obviously, I see Tiffany & Co. a little ways down the street, and the bracelet would clearly say that it came from there. But, what if it actually isn’t stolen? What if someone lost it (because taking a lost bracelet is so much better)? If I take the bracelet, my friendship with Vin Diesel becomes imminent. If I don’t, I merely pass him on the street, giving him that same dopey look I gave The Rock, only Vin Diesel won’t play along. He’ll glare straight ahead and pretend I don’t exist. So, I take the bracelet and decide to put FOUND posters of it around later. This way, I’m still a good person and I get to be friends with Vin Diesel.

            Meanwhile, the throng of men has met up with my future BFF, who has spotted them pointing at his carrier bag and now believes that they plan to rob his mother of a symbol of his affection. So he breaks out in a run. Not because he’s a chicken, but because he loves his mom and wants her to get this tennis bracelet that he spent so much time and money on. He takes a backward glance to see if they’re running after him (which they are), and just as he starts to turn his head forward again, he crashes full force into me, who is staring at him, star-struck. Luckily the bomb is the kind that detonates by remote so we don’t explode. But Vin Diesel doesn’t know how lucky we are, so he is really, really pissed at me for butchering his getaway.

            The mob gangsters have completely forgot about the other bombs in Tiffany (or maybe they left some men behind to keep watch on things) and now have us surrounded, pointing really big guns at us. They order Vin Diesel to empty his carrier bag. He produces a beautifully wrapped blue box and is ordered to open it and show them what is inside. He does, so angry now that he is unmindful of the beautiful wrapping job and destroys it by ripping it to pieces and waving the tennis bracelet in their faces. They flinch, which Vin Diesel notices. I don’t because I’m staring at him still. After it finally sinks in that I’m probably in a hostage situation with Vin Diesel and he may or may not be able to get us out of it, I notice the bracelet he’s holding and dig its identical twin out of my purse. Now the mob gangsters are confused. Did Vin Diesel buy the bracelet or did I? But they’re really smart mob gangsters and they figure that between the two of us, Vin Diesel is more likely to be able to afford a white gold tennis bracelet with 10 sapphires. But sensing the momentary confusion and probably thinking it’ll work to our advantage—or maybe because he’s figured out he’s holding a jewelry-bomb and he hates my guts—he quickly clasps both bracelets to my wrist. But he’s not very good at it. I don’t picture Vin Diesel being very good with working jewelry clasps, so he kind of messes it up. In the end, he holds up my wrist to show the mob gangsters, who talk amongst themselves quietly, probably deciding that they should have enough bombs outside the tennis bracelet to blow the place up and that my life is expendable, so they politely inform us that one of the bracelets is a bomb set to detonate at noon, hoping that Vin Diesel will save himself so the world won’t have to lose such a fine actor and they file away quite calmly.

            I am a mixture of emotions—horror because there’s a bomb clasped to my wrist; excitement because I’m standing next to Vin Diesel; fancy because I’m now wearing two gorgeous tennis bracelets; and giddy because he touched me (twice, if you count him literally running into me). But then Vin Diesel smashes the fancy emotion when he tells me to take both of the bracelets off.

            Here’s the thing: Vin Diesel doesn’t know how to clasp bracelets, so the two bracelet clasps are tangled together and I can’t get them free. I mess with them for a while because I’m afraid to tell him that they’re stuck together because what if he gets insecure and thinks I’m calling him out for not being able to clasp a bracelet? He might leave me to explode. But when he finally asks what the fuck I’m doing and why aren’t the bracelets off already and can’t I do anything right, I have to tell him that they’re stuck and the only way to get them off is to break them (which would probably cause me to explode and Vin Diesel’s mother to never know how much he loves her) or go back into Tiffany and have them take some fancy tools to them. But we don’t want to go back in there because the probability of getting blown up goes up a little bit. So we have to scramble around and find someone to disarm the bomb so that I keep my life and Vin Diesel keeps the white gold sapphire tennis bracelet and his mother’s affection.

            But Vin Diesel knows a guy who is close by (because why wouldn’t he know dudes who can disarm bombs?), which is good because it’s 11:45, and Vin Diesel has plans to meet his mom for lunch and he can’t give her the bracelet if it’s blown up.  So he grabs my bomb-free arm firmly (touching me for a third time!) and hauls me through a maze of streets without relaxing his grip, because when someone has a bomb clasped to her wrist it makes sense to run away from the one person who can help in this very specific situation. Or maybe he was afraid I’d fall behind, run into someone, and somehow cause it to detonate early through sheer clumsiness.

            We get to the place in about five minutes, and Vin Diesel shoves me inside first because he has no patience for me reading signs—but I don’t need to read the sign above the building to know where he has taken me. It’s the police station. I admire Vin Diesel for his quick thinking under pressure, but I admittedly feel stupid, not having thought of it first.

            He marches me up to the front desk, where a very bored lady looks up from whatever she is doing as I cheerfully say, “Hello!” Not waiting for her response, Vin Diesel launches right into, “We need someone who can disarm a bomb. Now.”

            But Vin Diesel wasn’t thinking too quickly on his feet because this causes the lady to panic and me to say, “Why did you say it like that?” and for him to snap, “They should be good at dealing with emergencies.”

            I’m just about to point out that this is probably a larger-scale emergency than she was prepared for, when she shrieks, “For God’s sake, why’d you bring it here?!”

            Then, Vin Diesel exhales sharply, whips around, thrusting my bomb wrist in her face, and snarls, “One of these is a bomb that is set to explode in nine minutes. If you can’t disarm it, then whichever one is the real bracelet will be gone too. That means my mom won’t get the very expensive present I bought her, and I will be very fucking angry. You get it?”

            “There’s no need for that type of language, sir,” she says nervously, her hand inching toward something out of sight on the desk. Even though she knows who he is, she doesn’t want to call Vin Diesel by name because she feels it diminishes her authority.

            “Just get my mom’s bracelet off without blowing it up!”

            “And without blowing me up,” I add.

            “We got a problem, Sandy?” says a voice from behind us—and suddenly I realize that she was calling security. (Which I didn’t know the police could do…why do the police need security?)

            “We’ve got a bomb threat,” she says, regaining her composure.

            I turn to face a very large, very burly man who is looking at Vin Diesel with a slight frown, as if debating the cooler option—asking for his autograph or putting him in handcuffs.

            “We’re not fucking threatening you!” Vin Diesel shouts.

            “You kind of were,” I say but he ignores me.

            “We were asking for your help! We need to disarm the bomb!”

            “Can’t you disarm the bomb?” the security guard asks. “Didn’t you do it in a movie once?”

            “Ronnie,” Sandy says sharply. He’s compromising his authority.

            It’s 11:54.

            “MOVIES AREN’T REAL LIFE!” Vin Diesel roars.

            I start to cry.

            And then everyone pays attention to me.

            “Jesus,” Vin Diesel says, rolling his eyes.

            “Calm down, there,” Ronnie says, looking very uncomfortable at the sight of female tears.

            “Aw, sweetie, what’s wrong?” Sandy asks, coming over and putting an arm around me.

            “I WANT THIS FUCKING BOMB OFF MY WRIST!” I scream.

            A beat of silence, then—

            “Five minutes,” Vin Diesel says quietly.

            “Ronnie,” Sandy says in a panicked voice.

            “Right,” he says, sprinting away at a surprisingly fast rate.

            Vin Diesel looks at me again as I frown at the clock in anticipation. “Where did all those tears go?” he asks, giving me a suspicious look.

            “Tears won’t do us any good now,” I inform him.

            Ronnie reappears with some dude.

            Vin Diesel gives me an expression that could be a smile and says, “Impressive,” and this is probably the real moment we become friends, but neither of us knows it because we’re focused on the very important things we have to lose.

            The dude comes over to me and leads me through a door by my bomb-free arm that has apparently now become a leash. We enter a very bare room with a table that has some tools that look like they could do painful things if intended for use on humans and he sits me down on one side, himself on the other, and stretches my right arm across the table. He examines the two, determining which is real and which is the bomb—it doesn’t take him long. Then he gets to work with the bomb torture devices.

            Ronnie and Sandy have presumably evacuated the building, but Vin Diesel stays with me, pacing back and forth, frequently checking the clock.

            “Two minutes,” he says sharply.

            “Shut up,” the dude says, making history as the first person ever to tell Vin Diesel to shut up.

            Vin Diesel doesn’t like this much, but a quick glance at my wrist reminds him why we’re here and how far we’ve come, so he resumes pacing back and forth silently, eyes flicking constantly to the clock on the wall. I don’t think it’s occurred to him that he is in the same room with a bomb and that it will be irony at its finest when the bomb goes off if the dude is—

            “Done,” says the dude.

            Vin Diesel rushes over, nearly knocking me down. “Did you ruin the real bracelet?” he demands.

            The dude looks offended, says nothing, and strides out of the room with the bomb. I sit still, eyes locked to the clock as it clicks slowly toward noon—just in case the dude was wrong, affiliated with the mob gangsters, or just wanted me and Vin Diesel to die and left the bomb on my wrist and took off with the real bracelet. Vin Diesel is unsuccessfully fiddling with the bracelet, trying to get it off my wrist without asking for my help. Finally, he offers to take me to lunch with him and his mother (probably because he can’t think of another way to get the bracelet to his mom because he unclasp it and I’m making no effort to help).

            Three seconds…

            Two seconds…

            One second…

            BOOM!

            Vin Diesel jumps, shouting “Fuck!” and I exhale a sigh of relief.

            “Jesus,” he sighs, running a hand quickly over his head. “Goddamn.”

            Then, as he realizes what just happened, he slowly turns and catches my gaze.

            “On second thought,” I say, “we probably should have told them about the other bombs.”

            And that’s when we become BFFs.

~ToriannaLamba