Ginger Kid

by Steve Hofstetter

  After the Stephanie Spencer incident, I steered as far clear of The Clique as I could, but I got to know Victoria senior year. Our math teacher assigned our seats and happened to assign mine next to Victoria’s. She didn’t pick our names out of a hat either—Hofstetter and Layton had five students between them, and there were five students per column. Our math teacher preferred to go alphabetically front to back, which left Victoria and me as row buddies. That’s just basic math.

  It took a while for me to be comfortable sitting next to Victoria. Even before she was announced as homecoming queen, she was royalty. At first I was afraid Victoria was just like everyone else in The Clique, but I quickly learned she wasn’t. Victoria struck up conversation with me every day, asking me about the homework and about life in general. I knew she wasn’t interested in me romantically, and that’s not just lack of self-confidence talking. Victoria had been dating Eugene Kwok, a fellow Clique member, since they were in elementary school together. Unlike Roy and Cathy, Victoria and Eugene had likely been holding hands for quite some time.

  And so, Victoria and I were friends. Not hang-out-after-school friends or phone friends or even lunch-as-friends friends. But we were math-class friends, and I genuinely looked forward to catching up with her in the five minutes before class started each day. Victoria was way too studious to talk during class.

  The fix made more sense now. The inconsequential positions were given to Cathy’s friends, but homecoming king and queen still went to The Clique. If homecoming was rigged for the popular kids like everything else was, at least Victoria was the one to get a victory. I was happy for her. Sure, Victoria won at everything else, too. But I’d rather Victoria get a victory than Scarlet.

  As the prerecorded drum roll for homecoming king began, I stood back and waited for Cathy to call Eugene’s name. Only, Cathy called my name instead.

  I have never had a moment of bigger disbelief in my life than when I heard the words Steve Hofstetter said into that microphone. If homecoming was fixed, why the hell would it be fixed for me? I was barely a peripheral part of the group of friends it was fixed for. And even though Victoria was not, she and Cathy always seemed to get along. Maybe Victoria winning was Cathy’s effort to make it look like homecoming court wasn’t fixed. Maybe I was overthinking it.

  I didn’t get to say anything to Victoria that night, as being crowned—verbally—was the last thing that happened at the dance before everyone went home. But on Monday in math class, I brought it up first thing.

  “Congratulations on homecoming queen,” I said.

  “Thank you, my liege,” Victoria responded, bowing. “How ridiculous was that?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Homecoming king was never something on my to-do list. Especially since we don’t have a football team. Maybe I’ll put it on my college applications as if it was real. That whole thing was a bit of a farce.”

  “I know!” Victoria responded. “We didn’t even get a coronation dance!”

  At that moment, our teacher told us to open our textbooks. And that was the last Victoria and I spoke of homecoming.

  PROFESSOR HOFSTETTER

  I have always loved teaching. As the youngest kid in my family, I enjoy having a chance for people to look up to me. Even more so, I like feeling needed. I’d guess that if you polled one hundred teachers, you’d find a solid number of youngest children and people who grew up needing to be needed.

  Most of my “teaching” experience came from babysitting. I also volunteered to run the kids’ classes for my synagogue, but that consisted mainly of reading to children who were too young to sit still in the service. The classes were run by teenagers who didn’t want to sit still in the service.

  Senior year, I was given the chance to teach for real. Hunter had an option where seniors could, instead of attending one of our own classes, teach someone else’s. I jumped at the chance. Not only could I get my teaching fix, but I could get out of a class, too. As someone who grew up trading baseball cards, I knew a good deal when I saw one. Teaching a class instead of attending a class was like being given a Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card instead of attending a class.

  We weren’t full teachers, obviously, and we didn’t get paid. We were interns for existing instructors. Most teaching interns were tasked with the ever-important job of grading pop quizzes and collecting homework. I had had teaching interns throughout high school and never given much thought as to how a student became one or why. I didn’t like most of my interns, as teachers had a tendency to make their interns play bad cop. Being the one to grade pop quizzes and demand homework rarely ingratiates you to a classroom.

  My situation was a bit different than that of the other interns because I actually got the chance to teach.

  I was interning for Mrs. Acker, my oft-high creative writing teacher from junior year. If you’ve ever had a teacher that you felt was genuinely rooting for you at every step of the way, you have had your version of Mrs. Acker. She smiled often, encouraged everyone, and allowed her students to succeed by eliminating their fear of failure. She was a joy to be around. Also, she sometimes got high and forgot to come to class. So I taught.

  The class I interned for wasn’t creative writing; it was a freshman English class. My responsibilities started out small. Mrs. Acker would let me lead one specific class here and there. Eventually, she had me coming up with my own assignments. And by November, I was teaching one full day a week.

  Mrs. Acker didn’t just encourage creativity in her students, but in me, too. Standing in front of a room of thirty students wasn’t much of a departure from the improv club or my speeches in USY or the softball team. I was timid at first, but I got increasingly bolder as the year went on. Eventually, I gave myself permission to improvise.

  In most non-math Hunter classrooms, the chairs were set up in a U formation around the perimeter of the room. When we administered exams, the chairs were put in rows so the students couldn’t cheat as easily. It was a system many teachers used, and a system students were very familiar with. One day, the students arrived to find the chairs in rows and started complaining about getting a pop quiz. I told the students there was no quiz—the chairs were just set up that way because there had been an exam during the previous class period. None of the students believed me.

  The students kept assuming there must be a quiz. Some asked me how much it counted toward their grade, some made excuses as to why they couldn’t finish the reading in time, and one accused me of being an out-of-touch aristocrat (we were reading Julius Caesar at the time). So I gave them a quiz.

  At the end, I asked everyone to pick up their papers, and when they did, I had them tear those papers into pieces. The lesson that day was to be careful what you wish for.

  I did as many things like that as I could; I prided myself on teaching not just the facts of the assignment but life lessons, too. I pulled inspiration from my favorite teacher and had my own Mikkelsen-isms, and I made sure to let the quiet kids know that class participation would be part of their grade. And I wrote little eights, nines, and tens next to their names when they spoke up.

  When I started high school, I never did the reading, since I had never had to do any prep for class before Hunter. But now that I was a teacher, I read everything. I tore through Mrs. Acker’s reading list so that I could be adept at leading discussions of the material, and so that I could give a pop quiz if I wanted to. I never wanted to—I am not an out-of-touch aristocrat.

  I did, however, make the kids think on their feet. I even taught them improv by having them act out what would have happened if characters had made different decisions throughout the book. If you understand the characters in a book well enough to figure out what they’d do in a given situation, then you understand the book. And if you can grade students based on their interpretation of the characters, then you understand the book, too.

  Teaching was a perfect fit for my nerd-based intellectual curiosity. Through the process of running a classroom, I completed the transfor
mation into a serious student that had begun with Mr. Mikkelsen two years earlier. If you do the prep work, then the assignments are easy. That strategy transferred to my other classes, and I got ahead of my work in almost all of them. When you’ve actually done the reading, there’s no need to avoid getting called on and no need to hem and haw your way through an answer. When you prepare, you just know the information you’re being asked for. Before I did the reading ahead of time, I always thought the kids who knew the answers had magical powers.

  How does he know all this? He’s a witch! Burn him!

  I took my responsibilities as a teacher seriously, and I took the students even more seriously. Even though I wasn’t put together myself, I was more put together than the average freshman. I did what I could to help them with both their assignments and their out-of-class problems.

  Toward the end of the year, I had a how-has-everything-been-going conversation with Mrs. Acker. I told her that while I was genuinely enjoying the work, I wondered about all of my added responsibilities. The further into the year I got, the more I realized that other interns were basically secretaries while I was teaching a class by myself.

  “Why did you sign up for this internship?” Mrs. Acker asked me, with her usual smile.

  “I thought I’d like teaching,” I replied.

  “And do you?” Mrs. Acker asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Even more than I thought I would.”

  “And would you have learned that if all I had had you do was staple papers and collect exams?”

  Touché, Mrs. Acker, touché. She went on to explain that when she failed to show up for class, it was purposeful, because I could never learn to be a teacher if I was doing it just to impress her for a good grade. She was ensuring I could swim by giving me the opportunity to sink. Mrs. Acker explained that there’s no substitute for experience—and if I ever wanted to have a real shot at being a teacher, I needed to understand how teaching was really done.

  I originally took the internship because I liked the idea of teaching, but also because I wanted to get out of taking one of my classes. In the end, I did way more work and learned way more than I ever would have done in a run-of-the-mill classroom. Damn it—Mrs. Acker tricked me into learning and enjoying learning.

  As clever as I thought my little pop-quiz stunt was, Mrs. Acker was miles beyond me. Or she was using the class period to get high in her car. Hey, why not both?

  PRESSING ON

  Another get-out-of-class-free opportunity Hunter had for seniors was something called an ICY project. ICY stood for inter-collegiate year, and the premise was that our senior year wasn’t just supposed to be for learning in a classroom but also for learning for the world in general. I know, we were a bunch of hippies.

  Unlike teaching internships, an ICY project was something that every student did. So I had to choose mine.

  I assume the projects are way more organized and high-tech now, but at the time, the ICY office had a stack of index cards, each one with the name, company, and phone number of a previous ICY project. Those index cards were all we had to go on. There were no reviews or recommendations, no warnings to avoid a project because the boss was a jerk or encouragement to try a project because the work was rewarding. Just a stack of index cards with names, companies, and phone numbers.

  I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I still didn’t have enough confidence to believe that I could pursue comedy as a career, nor did anyone around me believe that would be viable. I’d have been taken more seriously if I had insisted I was going to pitch for the Mets than if I said I wanted to be a stand-up comedian. And that was after I gave up eight runs in a third of an inning.

  I knew the two things I enjoyed most were sports and writing, though I hadn’t ever thought to combine the two professionally. When I told the ICY counselor that I was interested in sports and writing, she also didn’t think to combine the two. That makes sense. The ICY counselor was just a French teacher who spent a few hours a week handing students index cards.

  The three index cards she handed me all had to do with sports or writing. The first card was an internship at the New York Times. As a New Yorker with hopes of being a journalist, there was no better place to work than the New York Times. The problem was that the ICY project was in the classifieds department. What a dream—I could file ads for used cars, just like Woodward and Bernstein.

  It was the New York Times, though. And maybe I could make such an impression in classifieds that they’d bump me up to something really special, like obituaries. I called and left a message.

  The second card was for a counselor position at the YMCA. That, I could get behind. Sure, it wouldn’t help my career at all, but I could get school credit for teaching kids to play dodgeball. I enjoyed teaching Mrs. Acker’s class, and I’d probably enjoy dodgeball even more. I called and left a message.

  The third card was for an internship for Clement Sports. Kenneth Clement was a hockey writer with an office on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The Upper West Side was a half hour bus ride from Hunter in the opposite direction from my Queens apartment. The potential annoyance of the commute alone discouraged me from applying; I knew that commute well from my days dating Colleen Barrett. But Clement Sports was writing, and it was sports. So I called and left a message.

  For a few days, no one called back. I thought about seeing if Marvel still had an internship to offer; but I had long since lost Mary’s number, and who knew if she even worked there anymore. As I contemplated trekking back to the Marvel offices in person, I finally got a call back. It was Kenneth Clement.

  The call was quick—Kenneth seemed like a busy man who had hired many interns in the past and didn’t want to waste time. He offered me the job without meeting me in person and demanded I make a decision while we were still on the phone. I said yes and told him that I would have to tell the other places I was interviewing that I was no longer available. I planned on telling them both that, if they ever called back.

  On my first day working for Kenneth, I quickly learned why I didn’t have an in-person interview. If I’d had an in-person interview, I may not have taken the job. Kenneth’s office was in his home, in a creaky, prewar apartment building. Which war, I couldn’t say for certain. Probably World War I. Possibly the Civil War. Maybe even the Hundred Years’ War.

  Parts of the office were exceedingly impressive. Kenneth had a collection of hockey media guides that dated back to before most teams were in the league. He also had walls and walls of books, many of which he had written. And newspapers. He had so many newspapers. The size of the apartment was also impressive—a four-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side was not cheap. Though it was pretty easy to figure out that he’d been living there since the time that a four-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side had been cheap. You could tell that just by reading the dates on the newspapers.

  The least impressive thing about the office, other than the dust, was the ferret cage. Kenneth had two pet ferrets and part of the job of his interns was to clean up after them. Ferrets can be cute if you’re looking at pictures of them. If you’re cleaning their cages, ferrets are smelly weasels with a tendency to bite. I’d imagine it’s hard to conduct a successful in-person interview when the whole office smells of ferret.

  The first time I had to clean the ferret cage, I made the rookie mistake of thinking the ferrets wouldn’t bolt the moment I opened the door. Thankfully, I was the only one in the office, so Kenneth didn’t see me chasing two ferrets around a four-bedroom apartment. If the ferrets pooped before I caught them, at least there was newspaper everywhere.

  I got used to the ferret smell after a while and got down to work, but I screwed up during my first week (and not just because I almost lost the ferrets). Before Kenneth left to cover a game, he told me to finish researching for a story he was working on. So I did and then headed home. What I didn’t do is tell him where on the computer I had stored the completed files. While I was away for the weekend, visiti
ng family and unreachable, Kenneth had to redo all of my work from the week because he couldn’t find what I’d already done. I learned an important lesson about communication that day, as well as how to stare at the floor when your boss is yelling at you. I spent most of the next week on ferret duty. Yes, the pun is intentional.

  Over the next few weeks, I got better at completing my job, and I started enjoying it, too. I mainly did research for Kenneth’s books, but there were perks. One day, I had to go to the NHL’s offices to pick up a packet of media clips that Kenneth needed for a story. Beaming with pride, I walked into the NHL’s office and picked up an envelope—a job any bicycle courier would have found boring. But this was the office of a professional sports league. To me, that manila envelope was magic.

  Kenneth began trusting me more and more and even let me contribute a few quips for a column he wrote for a newspaper in upstate New York. His column always ended with one-liner observations about sports (and occasionally about music for old people). Kenneth’s one-liners were usually spot-on but fairly dry, so I started writing jokes. After the first few weeks of Kenneth using some of my work, he gave me space in his column, referring to me as his intrepid young reporter or other such terms usually found in Superman comics from the 1950s.

  One day, Kenneth asked me if I wanted to go to a Knicks game. Of course I did—I’d only ever been to one Knicks game in my life; tickets were both expensive and difficult to come by. After I said yes, I thought of the awkwardness of sitting there for a whole game with a boss almost four times my age. Maybe we could pass the time by talking about the game. Or ferrets.

  Before I could even finish worrying, Kenneth left me instructions on where to pick up my press pass. Whoa. Hold the rotary, wall-mounted phone. I was going as press?

  I was going as press. By myself. At seventeen, I was technically too young to get a credential. But Kenneth had been working with Madison Square Garden so long, that rule didn’t even matter. The Knicks’s media department assumed I was eighteen, and when I got to the Garden, there was a credential waiting for me with my correctly spelled name on it. It could have said Dave Hoffmeyer; I’d have been just as excited.