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
~ToriannaLamba