There wasn’t a ton to see—it was an office, after all. But we were led around the cubicles for about fifteen minutes and taught about the production process, and we got to see some unfinished pages and recognized many names on many doors. When it was all over, our host gave me the phone number for the internship coordinator and walked us out.
As we were leaving, the receptionist pointed to the rack with the new issues on it and said, “Why don’t you take a few souvenirs?”
Ciro hadn’t spoken a word the entire tour, but now I fell silent, too.
“Go ahead,” she said. “That’s why they’re there. Take whatever you’d like.”
I grabbed X-Men, Spider-Man, Silver Surfer, Darkhawk, and Captain America. I didn’t want to be greedy, so I just grabbed the books I would have bought anyway. Ciro was too petrified to move, so I grabbed a few more and shoved them in his hand.
It took me two weeks to muster up the courage to call the internship coordinator. And when I did, a very nice woman named Mary picked up. Mary told me that the receptionist had filled her in on our visit, and she was surprised I hadn’t called yet. While I contemplated a viable excuse, Mary launched into the description of the internship program. And then she asked what college I went to.
“I’m in high school,” I responded, crestfallen.
“Oh,” Mary said. “Well, that’s unusual. And your high school has an internship program?”
“Kind of,” I said, immediately regretting my informality and quickly switching to a more professional vocabulary. “They encourage us to pursue extracurricular opportunities beyond the classroom.”
“You mean they want you to get after-school jobs.”
I paused to try to come up with an impressive answer. I did not have one.
“Yes.”
Hunter did have an internship program, but it was only for seniors. And even Ciro wouldn’t be eligible because he already had an internship at his father’s law firm. There were probably no free comic books there.
Mary explained to me that she couldn’t arrange anything for after school, because their day would be close to done by the time I got there. But if I could come for a half day each week, they could find something for me.
Marvel freaking Comics had just offered me an internship. But first, I had a few hurdles to clear.
I told my mother. Well, the words fell out of my mouth in front of my mother. She gave me permission if my teachers were okay with me missing the time.
I figured out that Thursdays would work for Mary’s one-day-a-week mandate. I had only two afternoon classes—English and Math. They were the only two classes where I was doing well, and the teachers liked me. Both teachers said yes. Second hurdle cleared. But the final hurdle was tougher to defeat than Magneto, the Green Goblin, Thanos, Lodestone, and the Red Skull combined. The final hurdle was my principal, Dr. Haanraats.
Dr. Haanraats was a tall, thin, unflappable man who had been the principal of the high school since the dawn of time. There was an easy-to-believe rumor that he lived across the street from Hunter and jogged around it at five A.M. just to keep an eye on the place. In order to accept Marvel’s internship, my teachers said I needed his blessing.
I quietly and carefully walked into his office like I was Captain America looking for stolen World War II paintings. I asked if Dr. Haanraats was available. Much to my chagrin, he was. I was led into Dr. Haanraats’s office and encouraged to have a seat across from him. I would rather have been looking for World War II paintings.
I told Dr. Haanraats about the internship, how Mary said that I was the youngest student Marvel had ever offered it to, and how much it would mean to me. I told him that I had my teachers’ blessings. I told him about my typically strict mother somehow green-lighting this. And I asked him if he could be the final sign-off.
Dr. Haanraats gave a brief and cold “no.”
My timidity was immediately replaced by anger. I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to flip his desk over. But my improv training prevailed.
“Hunter is a good high school, isn’t it?” I asked rhetorically. He gave me a confused “yes” in reply.
“Well,” I continued. “The point of going to a good high school is to work hard and get accepted to a good college. And the point of going to a good college is to work hard and get a good job. And here I am, being offered a good job. So, shouldn’t we take it?”
I felt clever. I even included him in the we so that this could be his success, too. I also felt proud that I wasn’t taking no for an answer. This wasn’t like when I stood up to Alexa or when I tried to stand up to Scarlet. This was so much more important. Unfortunately, my efforts were useless.
“My answer is final,” Dr. Haanraats said. “I take my students’ education very seriously, and I do not let them skip school to play with comic books.”
Play with comic books. Now I understood. If this were an internship at a hospital or on the floor of the stock market or at Ciro’s father’s law firm, Dr. Haanraats would have taken it seriously. But to him, this was childish. To him, Rembrandt was an artist. Ron Lim, who I am sure Dr. Haanraats had never heard of, was a clown with a pen.
“It is a shame you didn’t have an opportunity like this when you were my age,” I snapped as I stormed out. “Maybe you wouldn’t have ended up a high school principal.”
Thankfully, I was out of the room before Dr. Haanraats could react. I knew I’d let my anger get the best of me. I also knew that being a high school principal was a fine and respectable job. But sometimes in improv the scene takes over.
STAY TOGETHER FOR THE KIDS
Much like Romeo and Juliet, my parents drew closer together because their families tried to keep them apart. But Romeo and Juliet had the good sense to end things before they brought kids into it.
I cannot remember a time in my life when my parents weren’t fighting. When I was a toddler, the fights would end in extended make-up hugs. Toddler Steve thought it was funny to crawl between their legs to try to push them apart as they hugged. Maybe I knew that the peace between my parents, like the hug, was only temporary.
As my siblings and I got older, the fighting got worse and the hugs vanished. My parents were never physically harmful to each other, but they yelled and they screamed and they cried. Oh boy, did they cry. My house was like someone chopping onions during a Sarah McLachlan animal-adoption ad.
The fighting didn’t bother the kids too much, and we did what we always did: We responded with humor. On one of David’s birthdays, my mother was screaming at him to do the dishes. As he ignored her, she stormed into the dining room and said, “You will do those dishes, birthday or no birthday.” I replied, “birthday.”
But David had the best comeback of our entire childhood. My father, after a particularly rough back-and-forth, screamed at David to “go to hell.” David calmly replied, “Maybe we can carpool.”
I was twelve when my parents sat us all down to announce a working separation where my mother would move into the basement but my parents would stay married. If you’ve never heard of a working separation where one parent lives in the basement before, that’s because it’s a ridiculous idea. Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like if I had grown up in Los Angeles, where there are no basements.
Our basement was not a place where someone could physically sleep, let alone work on their marriage. My mother cleared out some boxes of wrapping paper, a filing cabinet, and whatever other garbage was in the way to make room for a bed. As she cleaned, she discovered there was already a bed down there, just buried under some boxes of wrapping paper, a filing cabinet, and whatever other garbage was in the way. The bolt of denim stayed put, since it lived in the dining room.
My parents’ separation lasted only a few months before my mother moved back upstairs. Did that mean that my parents had worked through their separation? According to the fighting, no. It was more likely that my mother was tired of sleeping amid filing cabinets.
I’d imagined she filed all
of her emotions down there: “This drawer is A through E. It’s where I file all my anger, angst, anxiety, bitterness, blame, chagrin, codependence, conflict, confusion, contempt, despair, disappointment, drama, and ennui. I have a separate drawer for F.”
Two years later, my parents finally announced the divorce we all saw coming. A battle over property ensued and lasted particularly long because both of my parents were pack rats. My parents argued over every little thing—even old, frayed towels that neither of them had used in years. One thing I learned from my parents’ divorce was that you shouldn’t marry anyone you couldn’t handle getting divorced from. It seems antithetical, but if you’d ever watched two people arguing over an old, frayed towel, you’d understand.
It had become painfully clear that for the last few years of their marriage that my parents had been staying together for the kids. In their case, that idea was dumber than the working separation. If someone is contemplating divorce and doesn’t go through with it because they’re afraid they won’t see their kids, I get that. But to prolong a toxic environment as if that will somehow be better for the development of children is ridiculous. I love both of my parents, but my home life got much better after their divorce.
The next step after dividing up the things that didn’t matter was to divide up the things that did. Since most of what my parents owned was worthless, I’m certainly not talking about any family heirlooms or Swiss bank accounts. After the frayed towels, it was time to divide up the kids.
I have three siblings, but my oldest sister, Leah, was already engaged and on her way out of the house at the time so it was just me, Beth, and David. My parents, for all their fighting and ridiculousness, both loved us very much and both wanted all three of us. Since they couldn’t make a decision, they let us choose. I realize that I am lucky to have been raised by two parents who both wanted to keep their children. But I was not lucky to have been the mediator.
I’ve made clear throughout this book that I had problems with my parents’ lateness, their frugality, and their seemingly hereditary nerd-dom. But I loved them both, and choosing which one to live with was as difficult as getting to a Little League game on time. Picking which parent to live with was the toughest decision I’ve made in my life. I imagine it was slightly tougher than negotiating which ratty towel to keep.
The first part of the decision was easy. David, Beth, and I wanted to stay together. So we concluded that our decision had to be unanimous. And as real estate agents say, the remaining choice came down to location, location, location.
My mother’s plan was to move to Forest Hills, a neighborhood in central Queens convenient to Manhattan, with a ton of subway access. Meanwhile, my father was moving to Bellerose, a neighborhood with no subway at all that is as far east as you can go and still be considered in New York City. Bellerose is in New York City like Attu Station, Alaska, is in the United States.
If we lived with my mother, Beth could leave the school she hated and be zoned for one of the best public high schools in New York. David would be just two miles from his college campus. And I would have a forty-five-minute commute to Hunter instead of the 90-minute commute I’d have with my father. The answer was not easy, but it was obvious.
When we told each of them our choice of who we were going to live with, we wanted to make sure they understood exactly what they had put us through. So, after we let them know we’d decided on our mother, we asked each parent to choose which one of the kids they’d live with if they could also only choose one.
My father paused, smiled, and gave us a “touché.” He was proud of us not only for having the emotional maturity to understand the gravity of the question but also for having the dark sense of humor to spin the decision on him. My father thought for a bit and chose me. I was the most easygoing of the three kids and thus the easiest to live with. It made sense—I’d spent my time at Hunter learning how to not be in the way. Besides, he’d previously told David to go to hell.
My mother had a different reaction. She burst into tears, said she realized what a horrible thing we had had to go through, and blah blah more crying blah. It was the Sarah McLachlan onions all over again. Sure, my siblings and I had made our point, but we were tired of tears—we would rather have gotten an answer and my mother had gotten the joke.
Before David, Beth, and I were done, there was one more joke we needed to tell, and this time we were guaranteed laughs—we were our own audience.
The reason I haven’t written much about my sister Leah is that she is six years older than me and she wasn’t really part of the immature hijinks that bonded the rest of us. David, Beth, and I stayed up late watching stand-up while Leah stayed up late to tell us to go to bed. The best description of her came from David, who commented, “she’s at the age where she should be having fun instead of telling other people not to.” At the time David described her that way, Leah was a teenager and genuinely excited to pick out wallpaper.
Beth, David, and I gathered in Leah’s room and gave her our fictional news. We weren’t choosing our mother or father—we were choosing her. In an Oscar-worthy performance, the three of us convinced Leah that, because she’d looked out for us all these years, we thought that her and her new husband would be the best option for us. We somehow kept our faces straight as Leah’s face contorted, trying to hide her panic. As Leah tried to carefully convince us that living with her wasn’t in our best interest, we broke.
“What, are you crazy?” David said. “We don’t want to live with you. We barely want to go to your wedding.”
Leah threw a pillow at David as Beth and I fell over laughing. After our emotional day, we needed it.
THE TEACHER WHO TAUGHT ME EVERYTHING
The first few days of tenth grade were particularly difficult. We had moved to Forest Hills after the divorce, and the first night in the new apartment was my birthday. Moving isn’t easy on anyone. But coupling moving with your parents’ divorce and with turning fifteen didn’t make it any easier. Change-of-address forms make horrible birthday presents.
There were two great things about the move: I was now just two blocks from my guitar buddy Jacob Corry and my mother mercifully ended her short-bus experiment. My sister Beth transferred to a closer school, and my mother begrudgingly accepted that I was old enough to take the subway to Hunter—especially because I could take it with Jacob.
Another positive aspect of tenth grade was that while our class determined our homeroom, we also had selectives. We were given the choice of physics or chemistry, the choice of art or music, and the choice of gym based on sport; and we were placed in math classes based on how we scored on a test. Most importantly, we were given options when it came to social studies—my worst class.
I was still fighting to keep my grades at a respectable level, so this was a huge relief. At the end of ninth grade, I’d filled out the form to be placed into Ancient Civilizations, since I’d already learned a ton about ancient Egypt in Hebrew school. I figured my prior knowledge would give me a mummified leg up. What I hadn’t counted on was that my mother still hated submitting forms on time.
When Jacob and I got to school that first day of tenth grade, we picked up our schedules. Mine said that my social studies selective was Economics, not Ancient Civilizations. This had to have been a mistake. Unfortunately, it was not. The office assistant explained that they didn’t receive my form until after the deadline. I still got my first choices of art because music was more popular, chemistry because physics was more popular, and softball because basketball was more popular. But Ancient Civilizations had too many people register, and I was exiled.
I didn’t even complain. I just thanked the assistant and moved on. I knew exactly what had happened, and I felt responsible. I should have sat with my mother and watched her sign the form and then walked it to the post office myself. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, and I am stuck in my second choice of social studies class.
My teacher was a seventy-two-year-old man named Def
orest Mikkelsen. This was his forty-eighth year teaching high school, and I liked him immediately. Mr. Mikkelsen was truly funny and taught in a more engaging style than I’d ever seen. He had tons of sayings (my favorite was “Figures don’t lie, but liars use figures”), and it became pretty clear that my mother’s delay in form-submitting was a huge stroke of luck. Mr. Mikkelsen may have been old, but he was way better than mummies.
On the third day of class, I approached Mr. Mikkelsen on my way out to ask him a question about the homework assignment. As I spoke to him, he was writing numbers next to a few student’s names. I didn’t know what they meant, but when I saw him write a nine next to my name, I asked why.
“If someone demonstrates a solid knowledge of the material, I give them an eight, nine, or ten,” Mr. Mikkelsen responded. “If they show that they clearly didn’t do the reading, I’ll give them a zero. Everyone else, I leave blank. I factor these numbers in at the end of the year to determine your class participation grades.”
I was floored. All I’d done that day was answer a question directly asked of me. It was a basic question, and anyone who’d paid attention at all would have known the answer. And for that I got a nine?
More surprising was that Mr. Mikkelsen’s numbers comprised an equitable class-participation grading system. I had had a litany of teachers who factored in class participation based on a feeling at the end of the year rather than your actual work over the course of nine months. A student could do nothing for eight months, have a strong May, and fool a teacher into thinking that they were a better student than they actually were, because they had improved. But this system was actually fair.
The next day, I volunteered answers instead of giving them when called on. When I walked by Mr. Mikkelsen’s desk after class, I glanced over to see a ten next to my name. My plan was working. I was going to get my grades up just by talking. Actually, Mr. Mikkelsen’s plan was working—he’d turned a C student into a B student in one day.
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