Still Pitching (25 page)

The only place where
I felt aggressive and confident was out on the mound—more so now than ever before. When I was pitching well, I could erase that sorry image of myself as the short, chubby kid who the popular crowd shunned or overlooked. As a result, I relished the opportunity to surprise the skeptics who didn't think I had the goods. But put me in the middle of a social gathering—a party or a dance—and I was paralyzed with self-doubt.

I knew I'd have to reinvent myself if I were to have any chance of impressing those Woodsburg girls. I'd have to display the same kind of chutzpah and assurance that I possessed when I was pitching. And what better opportunity than now? Nobody at Grove day camp—except for Ronnie and Rob—had had any previous dealings with me. So far as those girls were concerned, I was an unknown quantity. And that's just the way I wanted to keep things for a while.

For the first few days
of camp, I spent a lot of time getting to know my co-counselor, Steve Katz. Something began to spark when we started commiserating about our high school coaches. Steve was a junior on the Lawrence High basketball team, and he was still waiting for his chance to play. I was in the same bind, I said, with my baseball coach. But I didn't mention that I'd just quit the team. I didn't know this guy well enough to trust him yet.

Shortly after that, we started up what would become a daily ritual. Just before reveille each morning, we'd take off our shirts, shoot baskets on the camp's makeshift court, and make small talk. We knew we were also out there to show off—to impress the girls and let everyone know that we were jocks.

At seventeen, both of us were in the best shape of our lives. Steve was about five ten, with short blonde hair and a lithe, wiry build. He was proud of his physique—almost vain about it. I was more tentative, but I readily followed his lead.

In the previous six months I'd become much less self-conscious about my physique. My chest had filled out, my stomach was tight from doing sit-ups, and my legs were strong and firm from all those years of running on the beach.

Each morning, just after the last bus pulled in, the girl counselors, jc's, and kitchen staff all walked past us on their way to the locker room. To attract their attention, every few days we'd challenge Ronnie and Rob to a game of two-on-two. Some mornings we managed to draw a pretty good crowd of staffers and kids.

Those games quickly turned into fierce competitions—a lot of pushing and shoving and flying elbows. To Steve and me, that court became a kind of proving ground. We cast ourselves as the scrappy underdog kids from public high schools, and we were going to vindicate ourselves by taking on the privileged preppies who we envied and disdained.

It wasn't long before we became close allies. We both had similar backgrounds—not fully middle-class or blue collar poor. Lawrence High was an upscale Five Towns school, but Steve's parents lived in the low-rent district. Their house, a run-down old clapboard, was situated right across the railroad tracks that divided Lawrence from Inwood, the only working-class village in the Five Towns.

Another thing that drew me to Steve was his swagger and savvy with girls. I also knew that he had a connection of some kind to the Woodsburg trio, because I saw all four of them get out of a car together on the first day of camp. I was dying to ask, but I didn't know how to bring it up.

I imagine he knew what I was thinking anyway, because one morning when we were shooting around Steve casually mentioned that he was going steady with Annie Lieberman, the fourth member of the Woodsburg clique. I tried to hide my excitement. Since the first day of camp, I'd been trying to find some pretense that would allow me to talk to even one of those three. Now it looked like I had a possible “in”—a direct line to these previously unapproachable girls.

For the next few days I fired one question after another at Steve. At first, I was worried that he'd think I was too much of a snoop. But the more I asked, the more forthcoming he was. According to Steve, Linda was the self-proclaimed jock of the group. In his opinion, she was something of a show-off. Joanne was “the brain, the intellectual.” And Julie was what Steve called a “provocateur,” a social operator.

Each day he fed me another piece of information. Linda and Joanne were dating Ivy League college guys, he said. And last summer Julie had made it a point to let all her friends know that she was going steady with the Long Beach High basketball ace, Larry Brown. Before long, I knew all about the girls' dating histories.

Steve was having a good time playing off of my curiosities. You could see that he relished his role. I wasn't sure why he was deliberately trying to demystify the three girls, and, it surprised me that he was so forthcoming about his own relationship with Annie. They'd been sleeping together on the sly, he said, for nine months.

He talked about it with an edge of pride in his voice, as if what he had going with Annie was something he took for granted. It had always confounded me that some of the most well-bred, sought after girls were suckers for guys like Steve and Manny. Their attraction seemed to derive from a practiced indifference, an attitude that said, “Don't mess with me. I'm bad.” It was the kind of reckless pose I admired but was never able to bring off.

Whether it was conscious or not, I began to look at Steve as a kind of mentor. Aside from his swagger, I was drawn to his unbridled, almost childlike enthusiasm. If there was such a thing as a connoisseur of girls, he was it. He studied their mannerisms and analyzed their behavior with the same kind of passion and intensity that I brought to baseball.

As a rule, I'd been too self-conscious, too ashamed to let other guys my age know about my inexperience and my fear of girls. I didn't want to risk the sarcasm and ridicule. Whenever I'd talk to a guy about girls or sex, it almost always turned into an uncomfortable competition. Up until now, my only confidante was my friend Carole. For years I'd been looking for a guy like Steve to help guide me through my confusions.

I trusted Steve because so far he hadn't tried to use my naiveté against me. And when he discussed his own sex life, he didn't act like he was rubbing it in or trying to make me feel inferior—the way Ronnie and Rob did. My biggest worry was that I'd grant him too much power over me, the way I'd done with Manny back in junior high.

Midway through the summer
, Steve and I were out shooting baskets, as usual, when the buses pulled in. It was two days before the night of the staff beach party. All week it had been troubling me that I hadn't gathered the courage to approach any of the three girls.

The early morning sun was already heating up the court. Even with our shirts off, we'd already started to break a sweat. As the staff started to shuffle by, I spotted Julie, Joanne, and Linda coming up the path. They were swinging their lunch bags and chatting away. Just as they were passing the court, they turned and looked at us. My mouth went dry. I kept on shooting baskets and talking to Steve, pretending not to notice them. When they moved up the path, I heard what sounded like a wolf whistle, followed by a chorus of high-pitched voices.

One of them said, “Pretty sexy, you guys. You oughta be in the Charles Atlas ads.”

The blood rushed to my neck and face. When I turned, I saw them pointing their fingers at us and giggling. I suddenly felt exposed and shamed. It reminded me of that awful sixth grade dance.

“What was that all about?” I asked Steve.

“They think you're cute,” he said. “It's their way of letting you know it.”

His reply seemed too flip. Was this a set-up that the four of them planned? A way of making me look foolish?

He must have seen the look on my face, because he dropped the basketball and started to explain. He'd gotten a ride home with the girls the night before, he said, and all three pumped him for information. His story seemed way too contrived. I was becoming even more suspicious.

“They were asking me if you have a girlfriend, where you're from, where you go to school, where you live—that kind of stuff.”

I wanted to believe that he was telling the truth, so I decided to test him.

“How come you didn't tell me all this before?”

“I was going to, later on.”

I still wasn't buying it.

“What did you tell them?”

“That you were taken. That you had a girlfriend.”

“But, it isn't true. Suppose one of them asks me?”

“What are the chances of that?” he laughed. “You're not exactly Mr. Personality, you know. You haven't said a word to any of them since camp began.”

Steve shook his head, like he was scolding a kid brother for not picking up his toys.

“Look, you need to lose this attitude,” he said. “They're interested in you, okay? Handle it. It's no big deal, believe me.”

He paused for a long moment and grimaced. He seemed more amused by me than exasperated.

“Why me?” I said, fishing for reassurance. “They can get any guy they want.”

He softened his tone. “That's just the point. I know those girls. They're convinced that every guy on the planet has the hots for them.”

“I'm not following you,” I said.

“They have no idea that you're afraid to talk to them. They think you're not interested.”

“Look, he went on,” warming to the task. “Don't flip out just because they're rich and popular. Guys like us are trophies to them. They think we're either rocks or juvenile delinquents.”

I'd thought about this before, but it was reassuring to hear it from someone more practiced and confident than I was. Steve now had my full attention.

“It doesn't hurt that we're athletes, either,” he offered. “They're cheerleaders. What does that tell you?”

Everything he'd said made sense. It was like I was seeing it for the first time, though. I checked the impulse to tell him how grateful I was for his advice. There I was, putting myself in the subordinate role again.

“Look,” he said, “Julie didn't pick Larry Brown because of his good looks or money. You know what I'm saying?”

It's funny how just a little bit of reinforcement can shift your point of view. At the afternoon staff meeting I thought I caught all three girls staring at me and giggling again. This time, it gave me a tiny morale boost. And a glimmer of hope.

After the meeting, Steve and I hung around to devise a scheme for Saturday night's beach party. I'd been worrying all week, thinking about the humiliating dances and mixers I'd gone to. The awkward sparring, the small talk, the popular crowd pairing off with one another, while I'd invariably end up alone or with some other loser.

But Steve's plan calmed me down. He would run interference for me. The only thing I'd have to do was follow his lead.

“It'll be a two-minute hit and run,” he said “Then we'll both be out of there like a cool breeze.”

When I woke up
the next morning, I was looking forward to the party with almost as much anticipation as if I was preparing to pitch a ball game.

That night, everyone sat around the fire, roasting marshmallows and singing “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” and a bunch of other dumb camp songs. After an hour, I started getting fidgety. Finally Steve gave me the “let's go” sign, and we started to walk over to the fire pit where the three girls had congregated. I made certain not to look over at them, but every step I took made me feel more self-conscious and uneasy. I was thankful it was so dark.

Without any small talk, Steve introduced me. Then he quickly said something about the two of us having a previous commitment. Right as we were leaving, he turned back and said, “Why don't we all get together at the picnic next Friday, right after the softball game.”

I thought I saw Linda the jock nod in agreement. To sweeten the offer, Steve promised he'd invite Annie to come along. Before they could respond, he nodded in my direction and we took off.

It was his idea not to hang around at the beach party. It would go better, he said, if the girls saw me first on my own turf, doing what I did best—which was, of course, playing ball.

“Think of it as having home field advantage,” he laughed.

How did Steve become so shrewd, so fearless? You had to have a lot of balls to make this work. If I'd have dreamed it up on my own, I'm sure I'd have already bailed out by now.

On Monday morning, Steve added one more wrinkle to the plan. He wanted my “phantom girlfriend” to show up at the picnic on Friday.

“It'll make you look even better,” he said.

I tried to talk him out of it. But he'd been right about everything else. No matter how improbable the whole thing seemed, I decided to go along with it.

The phantom, girlfriend idea
took root the previous week, when I was whining about my lousy luck with girls. To gain some sympathy, I'd told Steve the story of my recently failed romance with Ellen Wiseman.

Just before Memorial Day weekend, my friend Carole had brokered another blind date for me, this time it was with Ellen, who she described as a cute, brainy sophomore from her Advanced Geometry class.

On first impression, Ellen looked like the epitome of the “sweet old-fashioned girl” that Teresa Brewer was singing about that spring. She had shoulder-length sandy-blonde hair, deep blue eyes, a pale complexion, and an angelic smile. The way she dressed made her look much too staid: flair skirts, loose cardigans, and lacy blouses, which, I later found out, hid a shapely, alluring figure. But when I met her, Ellen could have passed for a choirgirl. Not exactly my ideal. With my track record, though, I couldn't afford to be choosy.

We seemed like such an improbable match. On our first few dates, she was so demure and reserved. When I finally pressed her, I found out that Ellen was class valedictorian in junior high, she'd been an exchange student in France, and she was already aiming for a scholarship to Vassar or Wellesley.