Ginger Kid

by Steve Hofstetter

  Somehow, my story of a delayed flight worked and the clerk checked me in. Probably because the clerk didn’t care at all, since he worked at an airport Best Western.

  If my brother and I had gotten caught, we’d have been grounded until there was no more ground in the world. And I didn’t even really need a hotel room, as Hope and I had only been making out. But it was nice to get some privacy for a few hours. That night, I was making out with my girlfriend in a hotel. This was no longer the friend zone. I wasn’t even in the same hemisphere as the friend zone.

  An added bonus was that this time, while we were making out, Hope unbuttoned her shirt. I had never seen a woman with her shirt off before, and it would be more than year before it happened again. That alone was worth the risk of being grounded.

  The night that I risked my freedom to rent a room in an airport Best Western was a magical night. And it was the last time that Hope and I saw each other.

  A week later, we were on one of our nightly phone calls. Hope spent more than an hour telling me the intricate details of a game of tennis she had played while I feigned interest for her benefit. Because feigning interest is what I thought you are supposed to do for someone you think you love.

  After Hope had finished with her blow-by-blow recap of her friendly game of tennis, I walked by a newspaper sitting on my kitchen table and noticed a story about a trade the Mets were considering. I commented on it, and Hope flipped out.

  She yelled at me about how our relationship was one-sided and how I always wanted to talk about me, me, me. I fired back that I’d just listened to an hour of the ins and outs of her tennis game and had made one brief comment about baseball. I spent all day in school keeping to myself; why couldn’t I talk about my interests with Hope? She was my girlfriend!

  As we fought, I realized Hope was right about one thing: I was always the one forcing my dad to drive me to Brooklyn. I was the one buying her presents. I was the one who risked my freedom to get us a hotel room. The thing she was right about was that our relationship was one-sided, just not the side she believed.

  I feigned interest in Hope’s tennis game because I always feigned interest in what she was genuinely interested in. I didn’t care about tennis and I didn’t like going in to Brooklyn and I didn’t enjoy watching her plays. I’d rather have talked about Amy’s boyfriend.

  Hope may have been guilty of ignoring my interests, but I was as guilty of lying about hers. Without realizing it, I had been dishonest with her the entire time. We didn’t have much of anything in common—we just really liked making out. We weren’t even in love—we just loved the idea of having someone else in our corner. And when I realized the foundation of our relationship was a lie, I ended it. Six months earlier, I couldn’t fathom having a girlfriend. And now I was breaking up with one.

  I do not regret any of the time I spent listening to Hope talk about tennis or the hours I spent in the car going to Brooklyn to watch her inside joke–filled plays. I learned a lot from that relationship, mainly that you can only pretend to have common ground with someone for so long before you realize that you’re actually as far apart as central Queens and south Brooklyn.

  The night that I broke up with Hope Womack, I was a very different person than I was the night we first met. I was older. I was wiser. I was more confident. And I had seen a boob.

  COACH HOFSTETTER

  I was lucky when it came to faculty in tenth grade. Not only did I have Mr. Mikkelsen for economics, but I had Mr. Piccirillo for gym.

  Mr. P., as everyone called him, taught a gym elective that consisted of wrestling and softball. Yes, the two great tastes that taste great together. Wrestling and softball was an odd combination, and I wasn’t particularly interested in wrestling, but I liked the idea of softball enough to try it. And the alternative basketball selective was paired with track. Running a mile has never appealed to me, so wrestling and softball was my choice.

  There’s an old joke that goes, “those who can’t do, teach. And those who can’t teach, teach gym.” That was not the case for Mr. P.

  Mr. P. taught gym because he loved it. But Mr. P.’s real passion was coaching. Now a Hall of Fame college wrestling coach, Mr. P. still coaches swimming at Hunter. Mr. P. felt about coaching the way I felt about getting to play softball instead of being forced to run a mile.

  Gym was always a bright spot for me at Hunter. I wasn’t good enough to excel on a team, but put me in a random group of thirty smart kids and I was an above-average athlete. And in gym class, there was no pressure. Gym class wasn’t made up of officiated games; gym class was made up of drills. I was good at drills. There was no way to quantifiably lose a drill.

  Softball was particularly easy. I didn’t have to be taught how to crow-hop or when to throw to the cut-off man. That was stuff I had known from birth. Playing gym softball for me was like the exchange student from Panama taking a Spanish class. They speak Spanish in Panama, right? I never did well in social studies.

  One day, Mr. P. told the class he was looking for an assistant coach for the girls’ softball team. Student coaches were a regular thing at Hunter. Most teams had a student assistant to help with the equipment, the stats, and other such grunt work. In exchange we got credit toward the seventy-five hours of community service we’d need to graduate. At the time, I associated community service with cleaning trash on a highway, so coaching softball seemed way better. I got the gig.

  Before I started, Mr. P. gave me the stat books from the previous year, and I nerdily studied them to see who the best players had been. I was doing that with baseball cards anyway, so why not with people I’d actually meet?

  I noticed something odd: There were hardly any stolen bases. At the first few practices, I stayed quiet and watched. By then, I was good at not making a bad first impression—I’d just not make any impression at all. But eventually, Mr. P. handed one of the practices over to me while he handled some paperwork. I took my moment.

  I knew a few of the girls already. Some I got along with, like Sheryl, the president of the improv club. Some I did not, like Alexa Howard, the president of the be-mean-to-Steve club. Alexa had tortured me ever since we’d broken up. She always had a snide comment or rude name for me as we passed in the hallway, and she even purposefully sabotaged a homework assignment when a teacher forced us to pair up. Alexa enjoyed bothering me so much that she found it worthwhile to get a zero. “Zero” was also one of the names she called me in the hallway.

  Thankfully, Sheryl was a starter and Alexa was a bench player. So the team was more likely to follow Sheryl’s lead.

  With Sheryl’s help, I got everyone’s attention and had the starters go out into the field while I stepped up to the plate. Organized baseball had passed me by, but I could still use my lifetime of baseball knowledge to stay a part of the game. Or a version of the game, anyway.

  I took my bat and pointed to centerfield with it like Babe Ruth calling his shot. The girls groaned, rolled their eyes, or made other such gestures that meant “get a load of this idiot.” Even Sheryl looked annoyed. But it was all part of the plan. Instead of swinging at the first pitch, I bunted down the third-base line.

  The fielders were so surprised by the bunt, no one was in position to field it, and I made it to first easily. They were even more surprised when I didn’t slow down, rounded first, and headed for second. Trying to take second is a ridiculous thing to do on a bunt. Which is why they didn’t expect it.

  The first baseman’s hurried throw was wide, and the ball sailed into the outfield as I rounded second, well on my way to third. By the time the left fielder chased down the errant throw, I was already past third and on my way home. The throw beat me home by ten feet, but I ran right into the catcher’s glove, knocked the ball loose, and scored.

  I’m pretty proud of a lot of my professional accomplishments, but none of them compare to the time I bunted a home run.

  “Every time you reach first,” I said to the team, “I want to see you on second a few pit
ches later. If you can surprise them, no catcher in this league has an arm that can throw you out. I want you running. Now, who is up next?”

  Alexa continued to roll her eyes, but most of the girls were impressed by the new challenge. As Mr. P. got back over to the practice, he liked what he saw enough to let me run the drills for the rest of the day. By the end, the girls were bunting their way on, taking huge leads, and stealing second. They were high-fiving and cheering for each other and making huge improvements. I could see why Mr. P. loved coaching. Watching such instant progress was awesome.

  Over the course of the next few months, I was accepted as a member of the team. I was a nerdy member whose job included sorting through stats and baking cookies, but I was still part of the team. The girls loved that I posted their stats on the bulletin board, picked a player of the week, and yelled ridiculous things to trick the other teams. A team favorite was waiting till there were two strikes on an opposing rookie. I’d yell to our pitcher, “she’s got two strikes, she has to swing!” Our pitcher would fire one out of the strike zone and, more often than not, the bewildered rookie would take a useless hack at it. It only worked once per game, but it worked.

  Alexa continued to roll her eyes at me and crack jokes at my expense, but the team liked me and Alexa’s barbs were being shouted from the bench, so they were largely ignored. The team was too busy winning to care about what Alexa had to say.

  We won. And we ran—oh boy, did we run. The team stole more than four times as many bases as they had the previous year, and we finished 13 and 1 in divisional play. We lost in the playoffs, but it was still an incredible season. I felt great about accomplishing something and even better about accomplishing something as part of a team. I also felt great about girls saying hi to me in the hallway. I had nothing even remotely flirtatious with any of them, but the attention was enough to make me happy.

  See that girl who just said hi to me? I’d reassure myself. She doesn’t want to date me, but she respects the hell out of how I keep a scorecard.

  Also, my friendship with Sheryl led to something even more important. She was graduating and needed someone to replace her as president of the improv club. I was one of two people she picked to be copresident.

  Roll your eyes at that, Alexa.

  THE SECOND ELECTION

  By the end of tenth grade, I was generally feeling much better about myself. I had friends in USY, the softball team liked me, my grades were going up, and I’d had a girlfriend whom I’d broken up with. So I let it ride.

  As chapter vice president in my youth group as a sophomore, I was considered an up-and-coming leader in the organization by all the staff. To have the staff like you is not the key to popularity. But some of the students liked me, too.

  There was, however, a divide between the popular kids and the ones who were considered up-and-coming leaders by the staff. When girls talked about who they thought was cute, they never complimented anyone on their leadership skills. I know because they had the discussion of who they thought was cute right in front of me. Usually about my friend Mason.

  Carter Sokol was another one of the boys everyone thought was cute. Carter had flowing blonde hair and was muscular and thought it was hilarious to moon people. Meanwhile, I parted my red hair, was scrawny, and changed in the bathroom so no one would see my underwear. Carter and I were extremely different. And we ran against each other for vice president of the division.

  The division was one step up from the chapter, and it encompassed all of New York City. Winning uncontested in my chapter was one thing, but the division was a different animal. And since I didn’t have good hair or big muscles or a lack of shame, my only chance at beating Carter was to be funnier than him. He could charm the crowd all he wanted, but if I was funnier, I could potentially win everyone over. I worked on my speech for weeks. If there was one thing I knew about kids like Carter Sokol, it’s that they weren’t likely to put the work in.

  The plan was to have Mason nominate me with a funny speech. I took the girls’ conversations I’d been overhearing about cute boys and translated them into utter buffoonery.

  The crowd was read a page from my nominator’s “secret diary” where, instead of discussing my qualifications, Mason talked about how dreamy I was. Everyone there knew I was qualified, but what some of them didn’t know was that I was fun, too. Mason finished, and I took the mic. I paused, shuffled my papers, cleared my throat, and flexed my scrawny right arm like I was on Muscle Beach.

  The crowd laughed, and from then on I had them. That nomination speech was the opposite direction from where everyone thought I’d go. Instead of showing that I was an up-and-coming leader, I showed I was human. When the staff called my name as the winner after the votes were tallied, the room applauded.

  I had to wait until the school year started again in order to actually be the vice president. Over the summer, I was bored, I was broke, and, now that I was single again, I was lonely. Single again—that was not a phrase that came naturally to me. For so long, again was not part of that phrase. I was just single as if it were a perpetual state of being. It was Newton’s Law—a redheaded nerd uncoupled stays uncoupled. And as someone who wrote jokes paraphrasing Newton, staying uncoupled seemed like it was going to happen for me.

  I learned that some kids from USY were working at Ramah, a summer camp in upstate New York. And one of their families was asking around to find an extra babysitter.

  Babysitting made me money, but it did not make me cool. Women in their twenties and thirties are attracted to men that are good with kids, but that instinct doesn’t kick in until after high school. My classmates got their money from working in fast-food places or from playing poker or (in The Clique’s case) from simply having parents. I got mine from changing diapers.

  But babysitting was something I could do for the summer. I could make some money, tell bedtime stories to practice my improv, and perhaps work on my newfound ability to make friends.

  I took the job, and I went upstate. I’d spent my life in New York City and had never spent more than a few nights away from home before. But I committed to work for ten weeks at a summer camp, living in a staff bunk with a bunch of strangers.

  The quiet and shy kid I’d developed into was officially dead outside of Hunter. He was replaced by someone with confidence who sought out attention and who had even had a real girlfriend once. I tried not to bring that up too much, lest Amy pop up over my shoulder to remind me that she had a boyfriend.

  I packed all the hand-me-downs I owned into a hand-me-down duffel bag and headed to a tiny town named Wingdale. But the day before I left for Ramah, I did one more crazy thing—I got an extremely stupid haircut.

  I was not the first fifteen-year-old to get an extremely stupid haircut, and I am sure I was not the last. I wasn’t rebelling or trying to make a statement. I was, however, trying to be cool. The problem with trying to be cool is that when you put effort into being cool, you’re inherently uncool. But at least I no longer parted my hair, because the entire left side below where the part had been was now just red stubble. I had shaved one-third of my head.

  This was not a popular haircut or one I’d ever seen before. I was just sitting in the barber’s chair wanting to shake things up. If you’re having trouble picturing it, imagine someone with a side part. Now, shave everything beneath the part clear off. And then please stop laughing.

  People who didn’t know me may have thought I was punk rock, until they noticed I was wearing a baseball T-shirt with Looney Tunes characters. The good thing was that no one in the staff bunk was cool. Anyone spending their summer working as a babysitter at a Jewish summer camp is inherently uncool. So, in relation to everyone else, I was somewhere in the middle.

  Whether or not we were cool in the general sense of the word, a hierarchy does form in every group. My haircut prevented me from being at the top of this hierarchy. But I risked being solidly at the bottom when I unpacked and made my bed.

  The only bed sheet
s I had brought, because they were the only bed sheets I had, were the Smurf sheets I’d slept in since I was two years old. My parents had not yet caught up with their children getting older. And since my parents were the same people who spent weeks fighting over ratty towels, buying me new sheets because I was going to camp wasn’t going to happen. I didn’t have to take the Smurf sheets to camp—I could have borrowed Beth’s Bambi sheets, Strawberry Shortcake sheets, or other Bambi sheets. Smurf sheets were the obvious choice.

  As I’d finished making my bed, one of my bunkmates (who I could already tell was going to fill the cool vacuum in this hierarchy) asked, “why the hell do you have Smurf sheets?”

  I responded, “the chicks dig ’em.”

  The rest of my bunkmates laughed. I wasn’t serious—other than Hope, no woman I wasn’t related to had ever seen my Smurf sheets. Hope had never commented on them. I just said it because I thought it was funny.

  There is a valuable lesson that I was just starting to learn: People by nature are self-conscious, so if you project confidence, they will retreat. The reason my “chicks dig ’em” joke worked is because the bunk bully was expecting me to retreat. Not caring what people say about you is a tremendous weapon against bullies.

  The would-be bully’s power was removed entirely an hour later when three of the female staff members came to the bunk to introduce themselves. Pleasantries were exchanged and we all made plans to sit together at dinner, without knowing that there was a staff table we were all supposed to sit at anyway. As the girls left, the cutest one of the three pointed to my bed and said, “I like those Smurf sheets!”

  She said it genuinely, so she was not expecting the big laugh her compliment received. I thanked her and she left, a bit more confused than she had been when she walked in. The bunk hierarchy had been established, and I was at least toward the top of the middle.