The hallway between the junior high and the high school was maybe forty feet long. For two whole years, I’d been imagining a line right down the middle of it. Then September rolled around, I started walking through that hall every single day, and nobody stopped me. The line had never existed.
You’d think that should have felt like a relief. It didn’t. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I didn’t belong on that side of the building, so I went hunting for something that would make me fit in. Sports were the obvious fix—in Utica, they were basically the only option.
My freshman football tryout was a total disaster. I quit because it hurt too much; that’s the whole story. If I’d stuck it out for another few days, I probably would’ve been fine. But I’ve thought about that failure more than any grown man really should think about anything he did at fourteen.
Baseball was the one I actually loved. When I was little, I was clumsy and couldn’t hit worth a damn, so Little League was mostly bench time for me. Once I got tired of chasing bugs in right field, I volunteered to catch. That got me some playing time, but it also got me beaten to hell. My left hand was permanently bruised. My mom would stuff cotton balls into my catcher’s mitt to cushion the blows. I’d fall forward to block dirt balls, get smacked in the helmet by bats, or sometimes just take a pitch straight up because I couldn’t catch it. I wasn’t a good catcher. I was just the only idiot dumb enough to volunteer.
I wore those bruises like badges of honor.
Newark is home to the Babe Ruth World Series, and we used to play at the complex there. It had four diamonds facing each other so tightly that a deep home run could literally be caught during another game. Still counted as a home run, though—no out. I loved that place.
That brings us to the number thirteen, which explains something about me I didn’t understand until I was fifty. I was a benchwarmer. Every season, when they handed out uniforms, number thirteen was still sitting on the table. It was available because everyone else was superstitious about it. Which meant it was almost always brand new.
I didn’t see bad luck. I saw a clean uniform nobody else wanted, so I took it every single time.
The truth is, I made a career out of taking whatever nobody else wanted because it was just sitting there, then convincing myself I was being shrewd. Sometimes I was. Sometimes I was just the only one willing to pick it up. Just like the catcher’s mitt.
High school tryouts were where the story hit a wall. We had a solid team and a head coach who’d won a couple of state championships, and my friends and I dreamed of playing for him. I didn’t make the cut.
My shining moment came during tryouts. We were out by the right-field fence—the field was squeezed against an old running track, so right field was short. They’d rigged up a chain-link fence with netting fifty feet high so joggers wouldn’t get killed. We called it the Chain-Link Monster. I was standing out there waiting my turn to throw home when I got distracted watching some girls running the near turn of the track. A fly ball bounced off the pole holding the netting and hit me right in the collarbone. I went down in a heap, in pain, in front of everybody. Not exactly the kind of attention I was looking for.
So, I agreed to be team manager instead, hoping I could earn another shot. That didn’t last long either. One senior tore up his shin sliding on the spring dirt and hollered at me to grab ointment from the trainer’s shed. Instead, I brought back heat rub by mistake. He took a big scoop and smeared it all over a raw wound. His screams still make me smile today. It was an accident, I promise.
He became my mortal enemy until he graduated a few months later, making my life miserable in the halls. Slaps to the back of the head, chases—nothing that ever really hurt. I was a small freshman, and if I’d been his size, I think he would’ve done real damage. Then one afternoon, I’d had enough. He had his arm across a classroom door, blocking me, and I stopped and yelled, “What the hell do you want from me? Why can’t you leave me alone?”
Every room within earshot went silent. He never bothered me again.
That was the first time in my life I’d ever stood up for myself. It worked immediately and completely, yet somehow I didn’t manage to apply that lesson for another thirty-five years.
Some of that was courage. Some of it was a show. I wasn’t only telling him to back off; I was telling the whole hallway I wasn’t the kid who got caught stuffing candy and cigarettes in his pockets on Main Street. I wanted to be somebody else. Trouble was, I brought the same kid with me everywhere I went.
There are a few other things about that town worth mentioning before we leave it. My friend Miguel’s father immigrated from Mexico in the seventies, drove a truck, bought his own rig, and eventually a farm. At their house, I had my first homemade tortillas, guacamole ground in a mortar, real chorizo, and real pico de gallo. That was the first food I ever ate that actually made me want to know how it was made.
Our little town still had a town drunk. Delusional, probably schizophrenic. People took care of him sometimes and otherwise let him live his life, sad as it was. I didn’t think much about him back then.
Central Ohio is deeply religious and diversely so—Amish and Mennonites living alongside Baptists, Catholics, Adventists, and everyone else, scattered through little towns and crossroads in rolling farmland. It’s also, for demographic reasons, one of the great test markets for national restaurant chains in America. I’ll come back to that.
A number wasn’t going to save me. But at fourteen, in a building where I didn’t think I belonged, a clean jersey with 13 on the back was something to hold onto. Truth is, I was scared most of the time. Scared of getting found out, mostly, and scared that whatever was already eating at me would get too big to hide. I didn’t have words for any of that yet. I just had a jersey nobody else wanted, and I wore it every season.