Ginger Kid

by Steve Hofstetter

  I tried to tell Lindsay to ignore the idiots, since she and I both knew that we hadn’t even held hands, let alone done anything remotely like anyone was saying. But it was too late—people were already spreading wild stories about our walk in the woods, and Lindsay and I were over before we started. Technically we were over four days after we started, but that is pretty much the same thing.

  I’d been rejected again, and it was much worse than it would have been if I had been rejected after that second note I passed. I’d gotten my hopes up only to have them dashed. Also, the rumors about us disturbed my sense of justice. I’d have been happier if Lindsay had dumped me because of something I’d done. At least then I could accept it and try to work on improving that part of myself. No, this was a special kind of awful. I felt helpless. I was dumped for something out of my control.

  “I like you, Steve,” I imagined Lindsay saying. “But the Mets don’t look like they’ll make the playoffs this year, so I just don’t see a future together.”

  I hated what I was going through, but I also I hated what Lindsay was going through. I wanted to change our fate, but I couldn’t. A big romantic gesture would have only made things worse for Lindsay.

  Lindsay was right that I didn’t understand what she was going through, as I’ve never been slut-shamed, and I doubt I ever will be. But I did get that the only person in this story who had anything to be ashamed of was Scarlet Daly. I looked forward to the start of the next school year. If there was any justice in the world, when Hunter shuffled the deck again, I’d finally end up in a class free of Scarlet.

  BETWEEN THE LINES

  It is a hard thing to realize that sometimes dreams are just dreams. I had to finally admit that baseball wasn’t my thing.

  By the time I was four years old, I was already a baseball fan. I was at a neighbor’s house, and they had the Yankee game on. I asked them to change it to the Mets game—because I was raised correctly.

  There’s a lot to be romantic about when it comes to baseball: the long and recorded history, the lack of a clock, and the timing of starting in the spring. I did love that I could pour through statistics quietly on my own and still be a part of a vast community just by wearing a certain hat. But mainly, I loved baseball because of family.

  My father and my brother, David, were baseball fans before I was old enough to understand that Ruth was a man’s name. When I was still too young to cross the street, I was playing baseball in a schoolyard with David. Thankfully, we lived on the same block as the school, so no street crossing was necessary.

  I signed up for Little League when I was seven, as soon as I was old enough to be eligible. And after getting hits in my first five at bats, I really believed that I was going to be a professional baseball player. Until I got hit in the face.

  I was not a brave kid. Hell, I’m not a brave adult. But as a kid, I was terrified of pain. Theo eventually used this very fear to torture me. No one explained to me that pain is temporary. No one explained to me that the vast majority of injuries a kid sustains go away as soon as that kid sees ice cream. I was always scared of getting hurt, and then one day I did.

  The pitch wasn’t coming fast. We were young enough that our coaches were the ones pitching to us, and maybe that’s why I didn’t get out of the way in time—I had no reason to suspect that my coach would hit me in the damn face. I don’t even know how it happened. I was seven. I had a small face.

  After I got beaned, I was a different player. Despite going five for my first five, I didn’t get a hit again the rest of that season. I was afraid to face any pitcher, even my coach.

  I could no longer hit, but I was a solid fielder, and years of playing catch with my older brother meant I had a good arm. I started teaching myself to pitch. Pitchers aren’t expected to be good hitters. And maybe if I worked hard enough at it, I could be the one who accidentally hit people in the face.

  I wasn’t a very good pitcher—I didn’t know how to grip the ball correctly or how to have the right form. I just knew you’re supposed to aim it over the plate and throw as hard as you can. It turns out there’s a bit more nuance than that.

  When Hunter fielded a junior varsity baseball team for the first time, I signed up immediately. Our coach had no experience at all—he was an assistant science teacher who had barely ever held a baseball glove. But somehow he ended up in charge of a bunch of students pretending to be a baseball team. Our first game was so messy, it was like a pick-up game with one adult watching. I watched, too—I was a pitcher, after all. Pitchers don’t get to play in every game.

  After that game, it was my coach’s lack of experience that led him to say one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard someone say. “Steve—you’re starting against Horace Mann.”

  Horace Mann was a prep school with one of the best baseball teams in the city. And I, the worst pitcher on the worst team in the city, was going to be starting against them. My coach was sending me on a suicide mission.

  Somehow, I got the first batter to ground out. The second reached on a single and I walked the third. And then, the fourth batter grounded my first pitch right to our second baseman, who fielded it cleanly and started a double play that ended the inning. Sorry—that’s what should have happened. Instead, the ball bounced off his glove, everyone was safe, and the inning continued for a very, very long time.

  Many hits and errors later (including another one by the second baseman), I’d given up eight runs. If I’d died on the mound, we’d have forfeited. A forfeit is scored as a 9–0 loss. My performance was only one run better than an actual suicide mission.

  I had lost any composure I pretended to have. I wasn’t just hit-table now; I was wild. I was trying to throw my arm off, doing anything I could to just get out of that damn inning. That’s when I let a ball get away from me. And I hit someone.

  I didn’t hit him in the face, but I flashed back to getting hit as a child anyway. That paired with my horrible inning (or third of an inning) left me rattled. It was clear to anyone watching that I was done. My inexperienced coach mercifully yanked me. We joined the league late, so this was the last game of the season; I don’t know why he left me in so long. It’s not like we were saving our other pitchers for the playoffs. Put as many people in as you need to in order to end this carnage, and let us go get ice cream.

  My coach didn’t remove me completely; he pulled a double switch and left me in as the designated hitter. Hitter? Really? That’s the thing I was worst at. For a science teacher, my coach was pretty allergic to facts. I never had him as a science teacher, and I’m glad. I wouldn’t want to learn that the atomic weight of tungsten is whatevs.

  Even if I had been a good hitter, I now had to get back into a solid headspace by the time I was at bat. When the top of that inning finally ended, my team poured back into the dugout. Most of them ignored me or gave me an encouraging pat on the shoulder. But one of them didn’t see the importance of helping my headspace and chose to yell at me instead.

  Of all people to tell me how much I sucked, how I ruined everything, and how I had no business playing baseball, it was our second baseman. The same second baseman whose errors started this mess. The same second baseman who had been torturing me all year. The same second baseman who was named Theo Webster.

  I grabbed a bat out of the bat rack and started toward Theo; I was angry and I wanted to scare him. I had no intention of actually hitting Theo, but even threatening him was stupid. Standing up to Theo was the right thing to do, but sans Louisville Slugger. Or whatever knock-off bat our team could afford.

  Grabbing that bat was a weak, emotional moment, and it takes a stronger person to not fight than it does to fight. And several even stronger people got between me and Theo. My coach did the only smart thing he did all season and finally took me out of the game.

  When I got home, I was inconsolable. I was upset at how I had pitched and upset at how I had reacted to Theo and upset at the reality that baseball was not going to be my ticket to a scholarship
. As much as I loved watching the game, I wasn’t going to be playing it.

  I asked my brother, who was as big of a baseball fan as I was and whose baseball career was just as over as mine, what to do next. And my brother gave me the advice that would change my life.

  David drew three parallel lines on a piece of paper.

  “Most people,” he said, pointing to the middle line, “live their life here. They don’t go far down, but they don’t go far up either. The further you go toward this top line, the further you will also go toward this bottom line. You decide if that’s worth it. I’ve never been a fan of the middle.”

  It was a tough day for me, but he was right. I’d much rather have highs and lows than a bunch of middles. Sure, I’d never play professional baseball. But that is true of almost everyone in the world.

  One other thing that made me feel better was the realization that because of the errors, all the runs I gave up were unearned. I finished my baseball career with a pristine 0.00 ERA. That’s a Hall of Fame number.

  IMPROV-MENT

  After the debacles of Alexa Howard, Stephanie Spencer, and Lindsay Messner, it would have made sense for me to try to avoid any attempts at romantic entanglements for a while. But the heart wants what it wants. Also, Elaine Audley, my new crush, was very, very pretty.

  Elaine’s smile aside, I didn’t let my mistakes determine who I was. As long as you learn something from a mistake, it’s not truly a mistake. If you cross the street and get hit by a car, the lesson is not to avoid crossing the street again. It’s to cross the street more carefully. And to not cross it with Alexa Howard lest you get pushed into traffic.

  The lesson I learned from dating Alexa was that some people will be more interested in the idea of dating you than actually dating you. The lesson I learned from pining for Stephanie is that simply being attracted to someone isn’t enough to make a connection. The lesson I learned from trying to date Lindsay was to not let what other people say about your actions dictate those actions.

  Elaine had been a child model who grew up to be a teen model. Beyond being beautiful, she was also extremely kind to me. Unlike Alexa, who was nice enough until she wasn’t anymore, Elaine was genuinely interested in me as a person. She went out of her way to say hello to me, always asked how I was, and smiled directly at me rather than simply in my general direction.

  I don’t remember the pretext I used the first time I called Elaine. It was probably about a homework assignment or another equally transparent excuse.

  If I was being honest, the conversation would have opened like this: “Hi, Elaine? This is Steve. I just wanted to ask you a question I could have asked literally any other person in our class. But while I have you on the line . . .”

  The only time such a ruse works is when the other person wants you to call them anyway. By the third week of school, everyone (even the quiet redhead) had plenty of people they could call about homework. When you call someone outside of your circle, there’s clearly an ulterior motive.

  Once, I was almost at the receiving end of one of those calls. When I was a junior in high school, I came home from Jacob’s apartment and my mother let me know that “some girl called asking about the physics homework.”

  “Who was it?” I asked, impatient. My mother didn’t remember the girl’s name. I freaked out, and my mother couldn’t understand why. There was a pretty obvious explanation for why I was so upset: I had never taken physics. This was a girl calling me with the same type of weak excuse I’d used for years, and my mother hadn’t bothered to remember who it was. The physics girl never called back, probably assuming I’d received the message and taking my failure to respond as rejection. I agonized, trying to find out who that girl was. Thanks, Mom.

  But my homework ruse worked with Elaine, and we started talking often. Often soon turned into every day. After school, we’d sit on the phone for hours, talking about nearly everything. Everything but the fact that I clearly liked her.

  Did Elaine know? She couldn’t have. If she knew I liked her and she liked me back, she’d have said something. And if she knew I liked her and she didn’t like me, we wouldn’t have been talking this much. I must have been doing a wonderful job of hiding my feelings by calling her every single day.

  After two months of this, I finally asked Elaine to lunch.

  “Wow!” you might be saying. “Where did Steve suddenly get the courage to ask a model on a date?”

  Simple. I didn’t.

  I asked Elaine to go to lunch with me, and as silence enveloped the world, I threw in, “as friends.” I chickened out like I was being served in the cafeteria.

  As friends was a technique taught to me by one of my new friends, Rebecca Chaikin (a girl I was actually just friends with). Rebecca was the first platonic female friend I’d had, and she was extremely valuable—Rebecca often shared her insights into female behavior. Like the as-friends gambit.

  The idea was simple: Ask a girl to lunch and make it clear that you’re just asking as a friend. Guy friends eat lunch together all the time, right? That way the girl won’t feel any pressure to say yes, the guy won’t be rejected, and you’ll both get some quality alone time together. Once you’re on the non-date, she’ll be so charmed by your winsome personality that you’ll be in a relationship before you know it!

  This was, and is, a horrible idea.

  I was voluntarily banishing myself to the friend zone. Rebecca was a dear friend, but she knew just as little about picking up women as I did. You can’t trick someone into being attracted to you by simply spending platonic time near them. And Elaine was not attracted to me. Thankfully, Elaine spared me the indignity of going to a platonic lunch by turning me down, even as friends. Perhaps she saw through my homework ruse after all.

  Elaine and I still talked, as she really did value me as a friend—she just didn’t want to lead me on. Our phone conversations stayed just as frequent, and during one of them, Elaine told me about how she’d joined the improv club and how much fun it was.

  That was the best thing about Hunter: The school was known for its academics—but the clubs! There was a radio club, a skate-boarding club, and even an LGBT club. That may not seem like a big deal now, but in the early 1990s, that was not common. Hunter had a club that catered to every aspect of every lifestyle, hobby, and pursuit, no matter how trivial. There was also a board game club where they probably played Trivial Pursuit.

  I didn’t know anything about improv, but I knew a ton about stand-up comedy. In addition to the George Carlin albums my father raised me on, I consumed every bit of stand-up I could find. My favorite show was “Comic Strip Live,” and I even enjoyed Andrew Dice Clay and Dennis Leary. As I told you, I was derivative back then.

  A few years earlier, I had written some ideas for jokes, mainly because my brother had done the same. But I never had any intention of performing them. I was too shy and too quiet. Those jokes were just written for me.

  Improv terrified me. I was a writer; I wasn’t funny off-the-cuff. Despite the success of my “Steve, please!” opener, I’d bombed ever since. Improv sounded like one of the toughest things a person could do, other than continue to go to school surrounded by bullies.

  None of my fears mattered when Elaine told me I should join the improv club. We may not have been going to lunch together, but I still liked and respected her. When Elaine told me to do anything, I said yes.

  Elaine didn’t just tell me I should join the improv club. Elaine told me I should join the improv club because I was funny. What? Elaine Audley thought I was funny? Maybe all those hours on the phone had paid off.

  No one thought I was funny. I didn’t even think I was funny anymore. Okay, Elaine, I’m in. Can I join immediately? When do they meet? Do you think they’d mind if I waited in the hallway for the next three days until they do? Where is this bridge I’m supposed to jump from?

  The improv club met in a classroom every Monday during lunch. For an hour, two-dozen teenagers played classic improv game
s like Party Quirks, Quotes, and World’s Worst. It wasn’t groundbreaking comedy, but it was groundbreaking for me. To see people my own age creating like this was something I didn’t think was possible. I was enthralled from the first game.

  Students of varying ages were generating comedy out of nothing, and they all seemed to respect one another. There were no bullies here—only people who valued one another as much as they valued getting a laugh. Because improv is not a solo art, you need to be adept at teamwork in order to excel. There were no Tommys or Theos here. Bullies like Tommy and Theo would fall flat on their faces in the improv club. Which would actually be pretty funny.

  Something Elaine didn’t tell me was that the improv club had a tradition of forcing first-time attendees to perform. It may have been a trial by fire to see if you have the confidence and courage for improv, or it may have been just the world’s softest hazing ritual. But, like I’d been doing in class since I got to Hunter, I slumped in my chair and tried not to be noticed.

  When Sheryl, the president of the improv club, realized I hadn’t performed yet, she called my name. Reluctantly, I walked to the “stage”—the area of the room where the teacher’s desk usually resided—and proceeded to play a game of Questions.

  The way questions works is two people create a scene by alternating asking questions. The goal is to build on what the last person said and to construct comedy from creatively staying within the limits of the game. The participants are told who they are and what the scene is, like someone getting pulled over for speeding. And the rest is up to them.

  I was told to start. “What seems to be the problem, officer?”—a meek cliché.

  The other participant countered. “Do you know how fast you were going?”

  “Why, is your radar gun broken?” I asked, getting a mild chuckle.

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “Have you been drinking?” My first solid laugh.