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ISBN 978-1-4197-2870-9
eISBN 978-1-68335-262-4
Text copyright © 2018 Steve Hofstetter
Book design by Alyssa Nassner
Published in 2018 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS.
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
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ABRAMS The Art of Books
195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007
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TO “JACOB,” “MASON,” “OZZIE,” “RANDY,” AND “REBECCA.”
WITHOUT YOU, THIS WOULD HAVE GONE VERY DIFFERENTLY.
CONTENTS
Opener, Feature, Headliner. A typical American comedy show is divided up into those three acts, in that order.
The Opener is so raw and in over their head that, no matter how much promise they may have, they’re often completely lost.
The Feature finally has the experience and knowledge to advance past being the opener, but their desperation to become the headliner can lead to failure.
The Headliner, however, takes the failures they’ve lived through during their earlier stages and uses those lessons to develop the quiet confidence that comes from finally understanding the game.
That, in essence, describes my high school journey.
Opener, Feature, Headliner.
OPENER
ONE QUICK THING
OLD SCHOOL AND NEW SCHOOL
TOMMY AND THEO
MY FAVORITE VACUUM
DOWN WITH THE SICKNESS
THE WIND IS GONE
HUMBUCKERS AND WAWA PEDALS
THE MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY SALE
THE LONG RIDE ON THE SHORT BUS
JUST FOUR DAYS
BETWEEN THE LINES
IMPROV-MENT
FEATURE
LOOK AT THIS GIANT KINNUS
THE MARVELOUS INTERNSHIP
STAY TOGETHER FOR THE KIDS
THE TEACHER WHO TAUGHT ME EVERYTHING
BOWLING FOR DATES
COACH HOFSTETTER
THE SECOND ELECTION
THE PRANK WAR
THE PLAY IS THE THING
THE THIRD ELECTION
BLAZERS AND ZOMBIES
HEADLINER
ROCK, ROCK, ROCKAWAY BEACH
WHEN I FOUGHT A RAPPER
KING HOFSTETTER
PROFESSOR HOFSTETTER
PRESSING ON
THE DAY THAT WAS TEN MINUTES LONG
I STOLE A PIMP
PAPA WAS A ROLLING STONE
THAT TIME I KILLED TWO PEOPLE
KEEP IN TOUCH!
DOING THE WRONG THING BY DOING THE RIGHT THING
DOING THE RIGHT THING BY DOING THE WRONG THING
WHEN I SPOKE UP
ONE MORE THING
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
OPENER
ONE QUICK THING
Hi. Maybe you’re reading this because you have good taste in books; or someone you know has good taste in books; or someone who threw this out used to have good taste in books, before they became a jerk. No matter the reason, hi.
I don’t know exactly why you’re reading this book, but I know exactly why I’m writing it. I’ve gotten to do some pretty cool things in my life. I’m a stand-up comedian, and I perform a few hundred shows a year. More than one hundred million people have watched me on YouTube. I’ve been in some movies and even hosted my own TV show. And I’m writing this while on a plane to New Zealand. Don’t worry—I didn’t just mail myself there. I’m actually going for a show. Life has been good.
But if you had predicted any of this when I was in high school, I wouldn’t have believed you. Partially because I’d have been wary of the sorcery you used to glimpse the future. But mainly because for me, life in high school was not good. I was a scared, shy redhead from Queens who spent way more time getting made fun of than being funny. The only way I’d have believed I was going to New Zealand by myself is if one of the bullies mailed me there.
As I got older, I learned that most of us get bullied. Most of us get scared. And most of us have never been to New Zealand by ourselves. Except people from New Zealand; they’ve pretty much all been there at some point. I hear it’s super-nice. Maybe I’ll let you know in the next book.
The exact reason I’m writing this book is because I wanted to share my story in the hope that you can see it as your own. Spoiler alert: My story comes out okay in the end. I’m hoping that yours does, too.
OLD SCHOOL AND NEW SCHOOL
I was a pretty happy kid. And then, I wasn’t.
Baseball is not an easy sport to play one-on-one, but my brother, David, and I improvised. We would walk the block to our schoolyard, and one of us would play outfield while the other hit fly balls. Our lives would probably have been easier if we preferred basketball. But we wanted to be baseball players, so we played baseball.
Meanwhile, my sister Beth and I would spend most nights dreaming up crazy stories about what our future lives would look like. Sometimes she was a doctor and I was a lawyer. More often, I was a baseball player and she was an actress. Every time, we were both rich and not living in a three-bedroom house with six people. And, every time, we would laugh.
But I was at my happiest when I was in school.
I know that sounds strange. What normal kid is happy in school? Don’t misunderstand: I looked forward to dismissal and the weekend and summer vacation like everyone else. But when I was a kid, school was good to me. Because school was easy.
The first thing that made school easy was the familiarity. I’m the youngest of four and from Briarwood, a neighborhood in Queens where teachers work at the same school so long, it’s like they’re serving time.
I imagine a judge pounding a gavel in front of a roomful of graying, chalk-covered middle-agers. “You are hereby sentenced to twenty-five years of glitter-covered hand turkeys,” he’d shout, jowls trembling. The teachers would then shuffle back to their respective faculty lounges, where they’d be met with a lifetime supply of instant coffee and rexo sheets and debate whether or not this was better than picking up trash off a highway.
All my teachers had taught three Hofstetters before me, so I often started the school year being given some sort of in-front-of-the-class responsibility like passing out reading materials or helping pronounce students’ names. I accepted with an artificial air of reluctance, thereby not losing my street cred while simultaneously exuding authority.
Meanwhile, my sister Beth was just one year older than I. So when I was in fifth grade, I knew the sixth graders and they knew me. That cemented my street cred. There is no greater grade school validation than an older kid saying hello to you in the hallway and meaning it.
Something important to know about where I grew up is that Queens is the most diverse county in the country, and Briarwood is the most diverse neighborhood in Queens. There were always twenty to thirty kids who would start the year unable to speak more than a few sentences of English. My closest friends’ names were Anant, Jung-Hoon, and Chao. We were a real-life Disney Channel show, except we never formed a band.
Because of the number of students who didn’t speak English, school was easy academically. I had an unfair advantage when it came to homework: The school taught toward the students having the most trou
ble, so those of us who could speak English natively were rarely pushed. The most academically challenging thing we had to do was trace our hands to draw a turkey.
To make school even easier, my siblings were older, and they judged me according to their contemporaries. Sure, some of their classmates were idiots—a boy in Beth’s class once interrupted the sex ed presentation to announce he’d do whatever he could to avoid getting his period—but my siblings were smart and their friends were smart, and they demanded the same of me. I was already learning long division in the second grade because David would think I was an idiot if I didn’t.
The first time I understood my advantages, I was eleven years old. One of the new teacher’s aides was being led around the class by a student named Pampas (really, there were very few kids named Mike or Sarah anywhere near that school), and Pampas stopped when she got to my desk.
“This is Steve,” Pampas said. “He’s the smartest kid in the school.” Because Pampas was named for a heavily populated region in South America, I trusted her opinion.
Kidding. I initially reacted with incredulity. There were hundreds of other students. There had to be someone in this school smarter than I was. I looked around the room and saw most of my classmates giggling at the teacher having “aides.” Okay. So maybe I was overestimating my contemporaries.
Before Pampas’s declaration, I’d never held myself up against my classmates. I knew I’d always gotten good grades on my report cards, and I aced the citywide math and reading tests. I also drew a solid hand turkey—but who didn’t?
When you’re a kid, you tend to think what’s normal for you is normal for everyone. I never realized my family didn’t have money until I babysat for a doctor. Talk about rich! Every one of his kitchen drawers opened without needing to be coaxed with a jiggle. Every. Single. One. That guy was loaded.
Until Pampas said something, I just assumed school was easy because the work was easy—not because I was particularly good at it. But after I considered the possibility that she was right, I started reveling in my new identity. I didn’t have to just be the “youngest Hofstetter”—I could have my own thing. I could be the smart kid. Yeah—I liked that.
When the entrance test for Hunter College High School came around, I was excited. Hunter is a competitive public high school in Manhattan. The top 2 percent of students in New York City are selected to take the entrance exam, based on scores from a citywide test you take when you’re ten. Then, those in the top 5 percent of scorers on the entrance exam are offered admission to Hunter.
I was one of a handful of students in my school eligible to take the test. The importance of this was not lost on me. This was my big break, and I leaned into my smart-kid persona. For the first time in my life, I studied. I read quiz books. I took practice exams. Anant and I even went to extra math classes taught during lunch. And when the Hunter test came, I was ready.
Unfortunately, Anant was not. Anant was no academic slouch. But while he would go on to attend the University of Pennsylvania, he just missed the cut for Hunter. I was in, but I was in by myself.
It was a big deal for a kid from Briarwood to get into Hunter—it had been years since any of us had been accepted. It was an odd neighborhood; I remember one nasty snowstorm where plows left enormous drifts throughout the neighborhood. I watched two kids play on top of my oldest sister Leah’s car for half an hour before realizing it was a car and not just a mound of snow. It took thirty minutes for these kids to deduce that mounds of snow don’t usually have visible antennae and windshields and aren’t usually in a parking space in between two other cars.
I knew I would miss my friends, but I was excited about being surrounded by other smart kids. What I didn’t realize is that I was a sea turtle excited about swimming with sharks.
“Look at their beauty!” My naïve turtle self would exalt, before realizing one of the sharks had just eaten my flipper.
I decided that to fit in at Hunter, I would need to make a good impression, and quickly. Perhaps I wasn’t smart after all.
I would have been much better biding my time and finding my friends naturally. Surely there’d be other wannabe baseball players in the school or other people who loved to write. Instead of relying on commonalities, I went with the time-honored approach of coming off as extremely desperate for attention.
My need for attention actually worked in the beginning. At the end of the first day of class, my social studies teacher was going around the room taking attendance. Like every teacher we’d had that day, she asked each of the students what they’d prefer to be called. Kristopher became Kris. Jonathan didn’t want to be Jon, and Jennifer transformed to Jenny. I found the pageantry of it all amusing, since no one in Briarwood had ever asked Pampas if she preferred Pam.
When the teacher got to my name, she just called, “Steven,” and quickly moved on to the next name without asking me what I preferred. I saw the opportunity for comedy. “Steve, please,” I said in an imperious tone, despite never being called Steve by anyone ever. My classmates had already heard me answer to Steven five times that day, and they knew that I was just messing with this one teacher, who looked perplexed as giggles filled the room. I’d taken a shot at the expense of a teacher and it worked. Flaunting authority? Man, this new kid has guts!
It was a solid first day of school. And I wish I could have ended on that joke: “Goodnight, everybody! Thank you for coming to high school! I’ll see you next year. Remember to tip your waitstaff!” But “Steve, please” was the last joke that landed for an absurdly long time. Like, years. Unfortunately, as the jokes fell flat, I tried harder. The amount of effort was noticeable, and trying too hard is the high school equivalent of putting your Tinder profile on your front door—depressing, pathetic, universally frowned upon, and good at keeping teenagers away from you. My classmates’ opinions of me dwindled so quickly that if someone were to graph my popularity from the first day of school to winter break, it would have looked like a black diamond ski slope. Or perhaps a vertical line.
Meanwhile, my teachers got progressively more annoyed. The positive attention I had handed to me from Briarwood faculty was missing at Hunter. These teachers had never seen my family draw hand turkeys. To them, Hofstetter was just the last name of the pretentious kid who insisted on being called Steve.
And as I flailed for social acceptance, I wasn’t even the smart kid anymore. That identity had been stripped from me as soon as I got my first real exam back. There was a big red D on the top of the page, and beneath it, a note said, “Steve—you need to try harder.” Well, at least she was calling me Steve and not Steven. Small victories.
If I’d had an exam to measure my social skills, it would have had a big D at the top with a note that said, “Stop trying so hard.” With every terrible joke I made, I flailed more. I was in social quicksand. I went from the new kid who was surprisingly funny to the new kid who wouldn’t shut the hell up. So, after weeks of trying and more trying, I did the only thing I could think of to stop the bleeding: I shut the hell up. I stopped raising my hand in class. I stopped talking to strangers in the halls. I stopped being a happy kid.
The fearless red-headed kid who was willing to crack a joke at a teacher’s expense on the first day in a new school was gone. Suddenly I was quiet and shy. And I regretted ever leaving Briarwood. I’d have given anything to return to my simple life and run around in the snow on top of a car.
I pictured my neighborhood friends having fun without me. “This is Anant,” I envisioned Pampas saying to their new teacher. “He’s the smartest kid in the class. Steve was, but he’s dead now. Socially, anyway.”
The only way to learn how to handle trauma is to experience it. If you grow up in Southern California and you go to college in Minnesota, that first cold winter is really going to sting. That’s what Hunter had become for me: endless social tundra with the wind of other students’ taunts whipping at my face. I had to learn how to deal with the cold.
At Hunter, I was on my ow
n. And I wasn’t happy.
TOMMY AND THEO
Throughout my life, I have found most bullies to be painfully uncreative. Every now and then, you get a Shakespeare with fists, but take a look at some YouTube comments and you’ll see that a bully’s insults typically come in two varieties. The first is a string of obscene-ish words that make no sense together, such as, “You anus boner butt plug.” Um, what? When someone like that insults you, wear it as a badge of honor. I don’t want to be liked by anyone who thinks that “sentence” is worth saying.
The second, more common type of uncreative bully insult is repeated use of the same word until it has absolutely no meaning. The specific words bullies rely on change over time, but the pattern is the same. I have been called a cuck thousands of times in the last year, and every one of those people thought they were being clever. Every one of them was wrong.
In the ninth grade, Tommy Tillet thought he was clever, too. He was also wrong.
I do not know what I did to make Tommy choose me as a target. Perhaps he was jealous of the attention I got from my awesome “Steve, please” line. More likely he did it because he knew I wouldn’t fight back.
One of Tommy’s favorite go-tos was to loudly interrupt me every time he heard me speaking. This was particularly obnoxious behavior, considering how seldom I spoke. Tommy’s interruptions made me want to speak even less often; but being quiet wasn’t enough to shield me from Tommy’s wrath.
When I’d sit silently, Tommy would stick notes to my back. The notes would say things like STUPID and MORON and other words that in a just world might have been used to describe Tommy himself. Perhaps he was just signing his work.
Tommy relied mainly on pranks you could find in old Archie comics, so at least I knew what was coming.
Theo Webster, however, was a different story.
Theo reveled in making me actually fear for my safety, constantly hinting that at any moment, he would beat me to a pulp. Theo would fake punch me in the hallway to see if I’d flinch, which I did every time. I’d flinch, and he and his goon friends would laugh as if to say, “Look at this loser. Being born with basic protective instincts. What a coward!”
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