The World's Greatest Underachiever and the Lucky Monkey Socks

by Henry Winkler

  It must be! It’s got to be! The socks!

  “Hankie, I told you today was the day!” Papa Pete said. “I knew you could do this.”

  I was so excited. I was speechless. I had really thrown the ball and it had really gone exactly where I wanted it to go.

  There are no words to describe the thrill that was rushing through my body. I vowed never to forget the feeling. I kept on throwing to Papa Pete. I didn’t want to stop. Ten throws. Twenty throws. Almost every one straight and accurate and fast. Nolan Ryan, Satchel Paige, Cy Young, Sandy Koufax – step aside, gentlemen, and make way for Hank Zipzer. The man with the arm of steel.

  Suddenly, the door to the courtyard flew open and Ashley and Frankie came running out.

  “Hank!” Ashley said, pushing her glasses back on her nose. “I can’t believe my eyes.”

  “You’ve been holding out on us,” Frankie said, slapping me a high five. “Why did you tell us you couldn’t throw? That’s not what I see.”

  “We were upstairs helping my grandma chop vegetables for soup,” Ashley said. “And we heard this bam, bam, bam. We looked out the window and saw you throwing strikes. Hank, where have you been hiding that?”

  “Honestly, guys,” I said, “I’ve never thrown like this before. I don’t know what’s got into me.” I couldn’t tell them about the socks. They’d think I had gone nuts.

  Papa Pete walked across the courtyard and came over to Frankie and Ashley. He pinched both of their cheeks. “How are my grandkids?” he said. Even though they’re not his grandkids, he calls them that and they love it. Every kid on the planet would want to be Papa Pete’s grandchild – that is, every kid who likes lollipops and root-beer floats and big hugs and free tokens for video games.

  “How do you like the arm on this boy?” Papa Pete asked, giving me one of those big hugs I just mentioned.

  “Zipparooney, you throw like a Yankee,” Frankie said.

  “Correction. I throw like a Met,” I answered. It’s amazing that Frankie and I have remained best friends, even though he’s a Yankees fan and I’m a Mets fan.

  “Whoever you throw like, I want you to pitch for my team in the Olympiad,” said Ashley.

  “What team is that?” asked Papa Pete.

  “The Yellow Team.” Ashley turned to Papa Pete. “You’re looking at the first female manager of an Olympiad softball team in the history of PS 87,” she said proudly.

  “My hat is off to you,” said Papa Pete, taking off his hat and saluting Ashley. “I always knew you’d be a big shot some day.”

  “Hi, guys,” said a nasal little voice from behind us. It was Robert Upchurch, third-grade nuisance. He had spotted us. No matter where we are in the building, Robert will sniff us out like a mouse smells cheese and want to join in. He’s like our shadow. A very bony, long-winded, nose-blowing shadow.

  “Perhaps you’d all enjoy it if I gave you a brief history of the Olympiad,” Robert said.

  “Perhaps you can skip it, dude,” Frankie said. But once Robert has it in his mind to tell you about something, you have no choice but to wait it out. The boy has got a brain like a tape recorder, and once he’s on “play”, there’s no shutting him off.

  “The Olympiad is a school competition, now in its twenty-seventh year at PS 87. Everyone in the third grade or above is either put on the Yellow Team or the Blue Team,” Robert droned on. The kid was on autopilot. We all started to yawn, but that didn’t stop old Robert. No, sir.

  “We participate in three events to test our mind, body and spirit. The softball game is the traditional test of the body, the Brain Buster Quiz is our mind test and the Triple C is the spirit test.”

  “Triple C, that sounds serious,” said Papa Pete.

  “Actually, it is extremely serious,” said Robert. “It stands for Clean and Clutter-Free Competition. Last year, Terry Sladnick set a school record in this event by washing her hair every day of the school year, including weekends, without getting even one split end. Now that’s what I call clean and clutter-free.”

  “Have you finished the lecture, Robert?” Ashley said. “Because I have business to discuss with Hank.”

  “Actually,” said Robert, “I have more to say.”

  “Actually, you don’t,” said Frankie, “because if you do, I’ll have to tie your lips together with a red ribbon and give them away for Christmas.”

  “Hank,” Ashley said, putting her business face on. Ashley is the business manager of our magic group, Magik 3, and we picked her for that job because when she means business, she means business. “I want you to pitch for the Yellow Team. You’ll be our secret weapon.”

  “Let me take your temperature, Ash,” I said. “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. You have to trust me. Today was an accident.”

  “Come on, Hank. If you did it once, you can do it again,” Ashley pleaded.

  “I agree,” added Papa Pete. “I’ve been telling him there is a wonderful baseball player inside him, just waiting to come out.”

  “Well, say hello,” Frankie said, “because he just arrived.”

  Even though Frankie and Ashley are my best friends, I just couldn’t tell them the truth. It sounded too crazy. One minute, I’m the worst ball thrower in history. The next minute, I throw like I’m on fire. And the reason is that I’m wearing my sister’s red monkey socks. You see, that sounds crazy even to me and I’m the one who’s saying it.

  “Hey, I’ve just remembered that my clothes are in the dryer,” I said. “I’ve got to go, guys. See you later.”

  “Hank?!” Ashley called out as I bolted for the door.

  “Can’t do it, Ashley,” I shouted back without turning round.

  As the door to the building closed behind me, I heard Papa Pete say, “I’ll talk to him.”

  “Well, good luck,” Frankie answered. “I know Zip, and he doesn’t sound like he’s in a listening mood.”

  While we ate our crunchy dills that afternoon, Papa Pete tried to talk me into pitching for the Yellow Team. I said no. With or without monkey socks, a guy knows his limits.

  I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I have learning difficulties. Certain things at school are really hard for me, like reading and maths and spelling. And certain things out of school are hard for me too, like throwing and catching. There are so many things to concentrate on that my mind just sort of goes blank. My mind and my hands don’t seem to like each other. They sure don’t listen to each other.

  I’m not bad at all sports. My best sport is archery, which I did at camp last summer. I even won a Master Archer badge for hitting ten bull’s-eyes in a row. Too bad I don’t live in Robin Hood’s time. I would have been such a cool dude, running around in those green tights, shooting my bow and arrow to protect people. Cool dudes with bows and arrows aren’t too welcome on the Upper West Side of Manhattan these days.

  After Papa Pete left, I went to my room to study for my social studies test. I was lying on my bunk bed with my headphones on and my book on the Hopi Indians open next to me. There was a really interesting picture of the oldest house in America that was built for the chief of the Hopi over one thousand years ago. I stared at the picture, thinking about all the things they didn’t have way back then – toilets, skateboards, striped toothpaste, mobile phones, Pop-Tarts. Of course, even if they had had Pop-Tarts, they couldn’t have eaten them because they didn’t have toasters, either.

  “Hank! How many times do I have to call you?” I could hear my dad yelling through the headphones. He tapped me on the shoulder and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  “Don’t do that, Dad. You scared me!”

  “I’ve been calling you for the last five minutes,” he said.

  “I was studying.”

  “With headphones on?” he said. “You shouldn’t be listening to music while you’re studying. How many times do I have to tell you that?”

  “I’m not listening to music,” I said. “Here, listen for yourself.”

  I hand
ed my dad the earphones and he put them on.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “It’s Dr Berger reading from our social studies book.”

  Dr Berger is the learning specialist at my school, and she works with me sometimes to work out how I study best. She is really nice and doesn’t think I’m even a little bit stupid.

  “She recorded some Hopi facts for me to listen to,” I told my dad. “She thinks maybe they’ll stick in my head better if I listen to them while I’m looking at the book.”

  “Sounds like that would be more confusing,” my dad said. “If the TV is on when I’m doing a crossword puzzle, I can’t concentrate on either of them.”

  “It’s working for me, Dad,” I said. “I know so much about the Hopi that I didn’t know ten minutes ago. Like did you know that—”

  “Save it for the table,” my dad interrupted. “Dinner’s ready.”

  “What are we having?”

  I always ask that question with some fear, and I have a good reason for that. My mum is what you’d call an experimental cook. At her deli, The Crunchy Pickle, her goal is to bring lunch meat into the twenty-first century. So, instead of making salami and corned beef the normal way, she makes them out of tofu and soy and a bunch of other low-fat, low-taste things. At home, our kitchen is her science lab. She’ll whip up a leek and soy-milk soufflé at the drop of a hat and then throw in a side dish of mock tuna with bean sprouts just for fun. Most of her dishes taste like what I imagine paper tastes like.

  “It looks like lasagne,” my dad whispered, “but I don’t know what Mum has planted under that top layer of pasta. I do know this: the pasta is made from wheatgrass.”

  “Do we have to mow them before we eat them?” I asked.

  That made my dad laugh, which is not something that happens every day. Or even every week.

  We sat down at the dining-room table, which is actually the part of the living room that we call the dining room. It was the five of us Zipzers. That would be my mum, the lovely Randi Zipzer; my dad, Stan; my nine-year-old sister, Emily; and let’s not forget her not-so-lovely iguana, Katherine. Katherine was wrapped round Emily’s neck like a scaly scarf.

  I don’t usually love it when Katherine joins us for meals. First of all, looking at a scaly face when you’re eating doesn’t do much for the old appetite. And, second of all, she has this long grey tongue that shoots out on to your plate and steals the best part of your dinner. If there is a best part, that is.

  My mum cut into her green lasagne experiment and put a helping the size of Montana on my plate.

  “Dig in, everyone,” she said with a big smile. She looked so happy with her creation.

  I dug in. My fork went in and found what was buried under the wheatgrass pasta. I don’t know what it was, but let me just say this: whatever it was made the wheatgrass pasta look delicious by comparison. It was dark brown with flecks of black. And it was oozing.

  “What’s this, Mum?” I asked. I was afraid of the answer. Very afraid.

  “Mushroom puree with crushed blueberries,” she answered. “Taste it, honey.”

  All eyes were on me. I put some of the mushroom puree on my fork and shoved it in my mouth quickly. I’ve found that if you don’t breathe while chewing, you don’t really taste what’s in your mouth. I didn’t breathe. I chewed and swallowed and took a big gulp of milk. Then I smiled at my mum, who was waiting for my comment.

  “Wow,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “Wow, wow, wow.”

  “I knew you’d like it.” My mum smiled.

  I looked over at Katherine and when my mum wasn’t looking, I slipped her a big bite of the lasagne. She shot her long tongue out and faster than you could say, “I’m going to barf now,” her tongue sprang back in her mouth and she buried her head in Emily’s hair. I looked under the table for Cheerio.

  “I hate to do this to you, boy,” I whispered, “but I’m a desperate man.”

  I held a bit of the lasagne in my hand and slipped it under the table. Cheerio took one sniff and started spinning round in circles. He actually spun himself out from under the table, across the living room and over to the front door. He wanted out, and I didn’t really blame him.

  “So, Hank, how’s your studying going?” my mum asked.

  “Great, Mum. My brain is getting so full of information about the Hopi.”

  “It doesn’t take much to fill up your pea brain,” said Emily. She is really smart, the total opposite of me, but I wasn’t going to let her get away with that remark.

  “Hey, Emily,” I said. “I bet you don’t know how many kinds of corn the Hopi Indians grew.”

  “Seven,” she said in her Miss Know-It-All voice.

  “Twenty-four,” I answered. It’s not often I know something Emily doesn’t know, so I went in for the kill.

  “I bet you don’t know what a kiva is,” I grilled her.

  “A chocolate bar from Switzerland,” she said.

  “Hey, so close, yet so far,” I said. “It’s an underground room that you can only get to by ladder where the Hopi built fires and had their religious ceremonies and sweated a lot.”

  “That’s great, Hank.” Emily made a face at me. “Now can we talk about something interesting, like the digestive system of the gecko?” Emily is a major reptile person. As if you couldn’t tell.

  “Emily, let Hank tell us about the Hopi tribe,” my mum said. “He’s doing such a good job of studying for his test tomorrow.”

  “I didn’t know you could learn so much just listening to a tape,” I said. “Like, did you know that the Hopi think of themselves as caretakers of the earth? They believe you can’t own the land, but you have to share it with everybody. And they make these dolls called kachinas and they use them to pray for rain and other things they need.”

  “Who doesn’t know about kachinas?” Emily said.

  “Oh, really. Then what kind of wood are they made out of?” I said.

  “I know,” Emily answered. “I’m just not in the mood to say.”

  “As if cottonwood was right on the tip of your tongue,” I said.

  “Honestly, Hank, you learn three little facts and you think you’re so smart,” Emily said. “Those of us who are going to be on the Brain Buster Team in the Olympiad have to know a million things like that.”

  Everyone stopped eating and looked at Emily.

  “Em, sweetheart, I didn’t know you had been chosen for the Brain Buster Team!” my dad said. He gave her a big kiss on the cheek, barely missing Katherine, who stuck her snout out to get in on the action.

  “My teacher strongly suggested that I could lead the Blue Team to victory by becoming a Brain Buster,” Emily said, glancing over at me with her smarty-pants look. “I was the first third-grader they asked.”

  My dad’s smile was so wide you could see that the wheatgrass pasta had got stuck between almost every tooth.

  “Oh yeah? Well, I have some Olympiad news myself,” I said before I even knew what was coming out of my mouth. “I am going to pitch for the Yellow Softball Team.”

  I was? Hank Zipzer, stop your mouth. Stop it right now.

  My mouth wasn’t listening, though. It went right on.

  “Yeah, Ashley and Frankie were practically begging me today. They saw me throwing to Papa Pete in the courtyard and I was on fire.”

  My dad picked up his glass of water with lemon wedges and held it up.

  “Here’s to my two Olympians,” he said, and took a big gulp.

  “This pitching thing, that’s a very exciting change for you, isn’t it?” my mum said.

  “I didn’t miss the centre of Papa Pete’s glove once today. I was having a lucky day,” I said, taking a swig of my milk.

  “Oh, speaking about lucky,” Emily said. “Mum, remind me to make sure I wear my lucky monkey socks on Tuesday for the Olympiad.”

  I nearly choked on my milk. Did she just say what I think she said?

  “What do they look like?” I asked.

&nbs
p; “The red socks with the monkeys stitched on them,” Emily said. “They always bring me luck. I wore them when I got one hundred per cent plus ten extra-credit marks on my maths test. And I wore them when I got the solo part in the Winter Sing. And…”

  I didn’t hear the rest of what she said. All I could do was look very slowly, so that no one would notice, down at my feet, which were covered in my sister’s lucky monkey socks.

  Maybe they really were the reason I could suddenly pitch.

  No, it couldn’t be.

  No way.

  After dinner, I tried to go back to studying for my social studies test. I had already finished listening to the tape, so I picked up my book and looked at the pictures. It had a whole page of pictures of kachina dolls. One was wearing moccasins with tiny beads. Another one had a cape made out of rabbit fur. In one hand he had a big spear, and in the other he was holding an orange, black and yellow shield covered in feathers. But no matter how long I stared at those pictures, all I kept seeing were monkey faces on each doll.

  I’ve learned that when I have a powerful problem in my brain, it hangs around in there and takes up all my thinking space until I deal with it. I definitely had monkey socks on the brain, which isn’t very comfortable, so I decided to deal with it.

  I dialled Frankie’s number. You know when you really want to talk to someone, how it seems like the phone rings for ever? That’s what happened. It felt like it took fifteen rings before Frankie’s dad answered.

  “Hello, Dr Townsend,” I said.

  “Ah, it’s the young Mr Zipzer,” he said. “Always a pleasure to hear your mellifluous voice on the phone.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  I had no idea what I was thanking him for. He’s a professor of African-American Studies at Columbia University and he uses words that are a block long. They’re so long, I don’t even know how he gets them all out in one breath.

  “Frankie was just talking about you at dinner. He said you’re developing quite a rotation on the pitched ball.”