But ten years later, I started hanging out with Jacob Corry. Jacob and I were in the same class, and he was one of the few people in that class who wasn’t a complete jerk to me. The thing I liked most about Jacob was his obsession with music. Also, I liked that he wasn’t a complete jerk to me.
Before Jacob, my relationship with music was simple. Someone played it and I listened. But music was certainly cool. And if you could play guitar, man, you were the coolest. Or so I imagined.
See that kid wearing the wrong-sized, flannel, hand-me-down shirt? He can play the first few chords of three different songs. He’s the coolest.
Jacob took guitar lessons a few times a week, and he was good. Like, really good. Like, people should not be that good at anything good. And Jacob tried to teach me.
This became our ritual—I’d go over to Jacob’s apartment after school, and he’d teach me whatever I was able to learn, which wasn’t much. I parroted Jacob’s opinions that Gibsons were better than Fenders and electric was more fun than acoustic and Joe Satriani was a god. I had never heard of Joe Satriani outside of the context of Jacob discussing him, but after I looked him up, sure, he was the best.
Sometimes we’d go to the Sam Ash on Queens Boulevard, where anyone could play the instruments they had for sale. Jacob would pick up a thousand-dollar guitar and play something great on it. And then I would very carefully pick up a hundred-dollar guitar and play the four chords he taught me: C, G, D, and e minor. If I wanted to get fancy, I’d change the order. And when Sam Ash was selling a Steve Vai autographed guitar, I pretended to be very impressed. I had never heard of Steve Vai outside of the context of Jacob discussing him.
Eventually I learned bar chords and power chords and even hammering on and pulling off. I was never proficient, but I became competent. The time had come for me to get my own guitar. Since I couldn’t afford more than packets of ramen for lunch, that was going to prove difficult.
Music was not foreign in my house. My mother played many instruments, including guitar. I really did damage her piano, which was particularly awful of me because she made extra money giving piano lessons. After the piano incident, I stayed away from my mother’s musical instruments. It was pretty easy to stay away because my mother had no interest in any music written after 1965.
My mother didn’t even like the good, pre-1965 stuff. There were no Beatles in my house. There were Penguins and Alley Cats and Blue Jays and Spaniels and Flamingos. But no Beatles. My mother loved two genres of music: folk and doo-wop. And neither one of those were cool.
No one in history has said, “See that kid wearing the wrong-sized, flannel, hand-me-down shirt? He can play the first few chords of Earth Angel. He’s cool.” More likely they’ve said, “See that kid wearing the wrong-sized, flannel, hand-me-down shirt? He can play the first few chords of Earth Angel. Let’s get him.”
I had nothing against folk music—I could appreciate Peter, Paul, and/or Mary, and folk spawned Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, James Taylor, and other people whose last names are also first names. But I didn’t want to play folk music. I wanted to rock. Maybe it’s called folk music because your folks like it.
My mother had an extra guitar, partially because she had an extra one of everything she rarely used. I asked if I could have it. The neck was chipped, it needed new strings, and the only way I could make it rock was to break it onstage (as if it wasn’t already broken enough). But my mother said yes, and suddenly I had a real guitar. And suddenly, the one-hundred dollar guitars at Sam Ash looked super-expensive by comparison.
I took my new, deformed baby to Sam Ash and had it restrung. I don’t know whether they were more surprised that someone was spending money on such a piece of garbage or that Jacob and I were spending money at all. But I had a guitar and that was all that mattered. And Jacob was kind enough to stop telling me that electric was more fun than acoustic. Considering the guitar I had, there was no need to rub it in.
Even once I had my own guitar to practice on, I wasn’t very good. I could never get my fingers fully calloused like Jacob could, and sheet music still read like Braille to me (which is probably harder to read with calloused fingers). But simply having a guitar to poorly noodle on gave me the street cred to start hanging out in what was affectionately known as the Freak Hallway.
Hunter High School’s hallways are shaped like a Q. The vast majority of high school and Lord of the Flies takes place in that O-shaped part of the Q. But in that little nubbin that extended out and transformed the O into the Q, that’s where the freaks hung out.
The freaks weren’t freaks so much as they were artists. They were painters and theater kids and guitar players. They were people who didn’t fit in with the cliques of the world and preferred to exit the popularity rat race rather than run behind it.
Hunter’s name for the Q nubbin was the Art Hallway, as the art classroom was right there. But at some point in Hunter’s history, one of the popular kids called everyone in that hallway a bunch of freaks, and the freaks proudly adopted the moniker.
I desperately wanted to fit in with the kids that didn’t fit in, and that’s where my new guitar helped. I’d sit in the Freak Hallway during lunch, alternating between packets of ramen and plucking my guitar. I quietly played the few things I knew how to play, attempting to mask my lack of knowledge, talent, and confidence. The Freak Hallway was a much healthier escape than the nurse’s office, and it allowed me to overhear conversations that made me realize that other people’s lives sucked, too. Every now and then, I’d even make a friend.
Most of the freaks had walls up, solidly constructed from years of bullying. So most of the friendships I made were brief and superficial. But we were all, at the very least, kind to one another.
One day as I was silently pretending to play my guitar, a senior sat down next to me.
“Mind if I play a little?” the stranger said.
“Sure,” I responded, handing him the worst guitar he had ever held.
“Let me show you something,” he started strumming. “You know how to do basic chords, like C-D-G-e minor?”
“Of course,” I said, concealing the fact that they were pretty much all I knew. “Who doesn’t know C-D-G and e minor?”
“Well,” he went on, “C-D-G-e minor is the basis for most hit songs.”
I was familiar with this—it was the reason Jacob taught those chords to me. But the senior played way more than I knew: Green Day, Bush, Blues Traveler, Johnny Cash, Pearl Jam, Lynyrd Skynyrd, John Denver, Bob Dylan, and . . . the Penguins.
He showed me that Earth Angel’s G-em-C-D was virtually the same as Green Day’s G-D-em-C.
And that was the nature of the Freak Hallway. Fourteen-year-old computer nerds and seventeen-year-old goth kids sat and ate lunch together. Because, like doo-wop and punk, the basic elements of the song were still the same.
THE MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY SALE
The house I grew up in was extremely large relative to my family’s economic success, which was small. Real estate agents would have described it as having great bones. It did, in the way that after someone dies you can see their bones.
The other houses on the block were all much nicer, but they were also much smaller. The house to the left of ours was even being completely redone. That way their house would have a ton of curb appeal, as long as you didn’t look just to the right at ours.
My parents needed a big house because they had four kids, but also because my parents loved stuff. The great thing about a big ugly house is that it can fit so much stuff, your kids will be ashamed of inviting anyone over. My parents’ love for stuff is why I always went to Jacob’s apartment. It was easier to play guitar when there was room to move.
What kinds of stuff did my parents have? All the stuff. Our basement and parts of our first floor were covered in scary piles of what most people would refer to as garbage but what the Hofstetters called possessions. We had the slate of a pool table permanently propped up against the wall und
er a sheet. We had a bolt of denim in our dining room. And we had the old, used carpet from my synagogue, in case we ever decided to carpet a twenty-thousand-square-foot building in the style of the 1970s. This was not a place I wanted to show anyone.
Most adults don’t know what a bolt of denim is. A child with no interest in the sewing arts certainly shouldn’t know what a bolt of denim is. But I knew what a bolt of denim was because my parents were pack rats. They were not hoarders, but they could see the exit ramp to Hoardtown. Most of the stuff they kept was not completely worthless, as it could easily fetch a nickel at a yard sale. If an item had some value to someone somewhere, my parents held on to it. As they say—one man’s trash is another man’s bolt of denim.
The best way to explain my parents’ desire to keep everything is that, at one point, my mother had two copies of a book called Organize Yourself! Two separate people in her life saw that book and knew that they needed to buy it for her. And my mother, in the most Hofstetter way possible, kept those two copies of Organize Yourself! on different shelves.
Even the real stuff we had was often broken. Our TV was a decade past being old, and when the screen inevitably started flipping, we had to know exactly which part of the TV to smack to get it working. Our microwave was fixed in a similar fashion. Unfortunately, our VCR and stereo didn’t have good spots to hit, so those just sat there broken. But every now and then we actually got new stuff. Nothing nice—just new.
That January, my mother took us shopping over the holiday weekend. Not New Year’s weekend—Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend. Even then, I found the idea of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day sale tacky. Beth was adopted and black, so we learned about Martin Luther King Jr. early. Dr. King dreamed of a future where his four children could be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. There was no part in that dream that described one-day sales. Especially not white sales.
I didn’t get to go shopping much, so that trip was not the time for civil disobedience. We were a hand-me-down family, and the only time we ever bought anything new was when we absolutely had to. That’s what this trip was—I was taller than my siblings, cousins, and many people my age, and I was growing quickly. I was low on winter clothes, so my mother used the sales as a way to save a bit of money on keeping me warm. It’s what Dr. King would have wanted.
“I have a dream,” Dr. King once said, probably not followed by “where one of my four children will outgrow the other three and have to get his own winter coat.”
When we returned from our winter clothing expedition, we knew our house had been broken into immediately. There was no way to tell if it had been recently ransacked, as it always looked ransacked. Our big break-in clue was that the back door was cut in half. Someone had taken an axe (or something that functioned similarly to an axe) and chopped half of the door clear off. And my older brother, David, had somehow slept through it.
I have to applaud the burglars on the creativity of their break-in. First, they broke in on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Most burglars would choose more obvious shopping holidays like Black Friday or literally any other day of the year. But these guys knew that the Hofstetters couldn’t resist the bargains being offered in the name of the most important civil rights leader in history.
Also, most burglars break a window or check for an unlocked door like a bunch of uncreative hacks. Only the truly inventive burglars contemplate a wood door’s weakness. And wood’s obvious weakness is an axe. Though perhaps they used a chainsaw—David is a heavy sleeper.
We pieced together that someone had broken in very loudly, but David didn’t think anything of it because of the ongoing construction next door. He heard a loud noise and just rolled over and went back to sleep. Shortly after that, a phone call did wake David up. Him walking to my parents’ room to pick up the call must have spooked the burglars, who fled. While walking to the phone, David heard some people downstairs, and he heard them leave when he picked up the phone. He just assumed the burglars were us, on our way to score some savings in the name of racial equality.
Despite their axe-capades, the burglars didn’t have much time in the house alone, so they grabbed what they could. And what they could grab was my Nintendo and all my games. Damn it! That was the one thing I owned that could get friends to come over and ignore the bolt of denim.
The axmen also managed to steal the broken stereo and the broken VCR. Seriously, that’s all they took. They were probably cursing themselves as they left that they didn’t have time to grab the bolt of denim.
I would love to have seen the look on the thieves’ faces when they walked into our big house and saw nothing of value. And not just nothing of value, but everything of not value.
“I’m sure there’s jewelry in here somewhere,” one would say, after breathlessly emptying my mother’s drawers. “It’s probably behind these eight giant rolls of used seventies-style carpet.”
Retail, I was burgled out of $800 worth of stuff. But the two things I lost that were worth the most were my time and my feeling of security. It was all the Saturday nights I’d spent earning that money that mattered.
I’d wasted so much time working to make the money for what they stole. If I could have had those nights back, imagine all the parties I could have not gone to. Okay, babysitting was actually a pretty great way to spend my time.
To have all the results of your hard work completely stripped away is a terrible feeling. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus is punished by being forced to roll a boulder uphill, watch it roll back down, and then roll it back up again. The reason that’s such a harsh punishment is because hard work is particularly awful when it produces no results. And this thief had just eliminated all of my results. The burglar made sure that I’d been babysitting uphill.
The feeling of security they stole from me was even more important. According to the first crime statistic I lazily googled, one in every thirty-six homes in America gets broken into each year, so you will probably experience a home invasion sometime in your life. And it’s pretty awful. The idea that someone could be in your home without your permission is terrifying no matter how little your property is worth.
It took me a few weeks before I could get a good night’s sleep again. I jumped at every sound as if it were another axe. I’d wake up frantically and ask David if he heard anything. He wouldn’t reply, because he’d be fast asleep.
The break-in wasn’t all bad. Aside from learning that David owning an alarm clock is utterly pointless, I learned my parents had theft insurance. Theft insurance made sense in a neighborhood where people break doors in half with axes. I wished the thieves had stolen the denim and the carpet just to confuse the insurance adjusters. Also, so it would have been gone and I could actually have friends over.
It took several months, but eventually the insurance company paid the full value it would have cost to replace my games, and I spent it on something more important to me.
My parents gave me the full $800, which was more money than I’d ever seen at once before. And possibly more money than I’d ever seen in total before. Fearing I might blow it on something silly like an amazing unforgettable experience instead of pointless physical stuff, my parents made a rule against that. I was told that since the money was to replace the possessions that had been taken from me, I was to spend it on replacing those possessions.
If there’s one thing my parents believed in, it was the perceived value of possessions. I was tempted to ask my parents how much they wanted for the bolt of denim, but I did not want to lose the money completely.
After buying some decent strings for my guitar, for the first time in my life, I spent money on my appearance. I bought new clothes. And not from Goodwill or the Salvation Army or a neighbor’s yard sale, but actual new clothes. They were still on the discount rack, but they were new and they were mine. I also bought deodorant and cologne. If I was going to look fresh, I should smell that way, too.
My mother accused me of going back on my
promise to only buy tangible items, since deodorant and cologne were perishable. She also questioned what a fourteen-year-old kid needed with cologne. I did my best to explain to her that a fourteen-year-old is not a kid but a person.
I was enough of a person to babysit actual children, to play a musical instrument, and to have had (and lost) a girlfriend. I was a person that was judged and shamed and bullied by other people. I spent my money to buy Right Guard rather than Street Fighter because all the Hadoukens in the world wouldn’t stop a bully from teasing me. But not smelling like I’d just been in a street fight might.
Considering what happened to our door, I should have also bought some Axe.
The break-in ended up being a positive experience for me. The thieves stole my sense of comfort, but I replaced it with a sense of style. The thieves stole my sense of pride in my work, but I replaced it with a sense of pride in my appearance.
Most importantly, I learned two things my parents should have already known: “stuff” isn’t that important and nothing good can come of going to a sale on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
THE LONG RIDE ON THE SHORT BUS
Because Hunter had students from all over New York City, buses were often segregated by borough, and usually by neighborhood. We didn’t have the school bus—we had several small, competing bus companies, and they were all those mini, five-row buses. There’s a delicious irony that at one of the top academic schools in the country, everyone took the short bus.
My first bus to Hunter was relatively quiet, because it was run by a very professional bussing company. The bus driver couldn’t have been cast better—she was an old, angry, no-nonsense woman who made Rosie the Riveter look like June Cleaver. She chain-smoked and barked orders at us, and if we weren’t outside waiting when she got to our houses in the morning, she just left. My first bus was quiet and always on time because we were scared to test the driver. Because she was a professional.
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