Running the Bases - Definitely Not a Book About Baseball Read online

  ALSO BY PAUL KROPP

  For Parents

  I’ll Be the Parent, You Be the Kid

  How to Make Your Child a Reader for Life

  The Reading Solution

  For Teens

  The Countess and Me

  Moodkid and Prometheus

  Moodkid and Liberty

  Ellen, Eléna, Luna

  For Younger Readers

  Against All Odds

  Avalanche

  Hitting the Road

  My Broken Family

  Street Scene

  What a Story!

  Copyright © 2005 Paul Kropp

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Seal Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

  RUNNING THE BASES

  Seal Books/published by arrangement with

  Doubleday Canada

  Doubleday Canada edition published 2005

  Seal Books edition published March 2008

  Ebook ISBN 9780385672863

  Seal Books are published by

  Random House of Canada Limited.

  “Seal Books” and the portrayal of a seal are the property of

  Random House of Canada Limited.

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website:

  www.​randomhouse.​ca

  v4.1

  a

  To Lori, my wife,

  my partner and my inspiration

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Paul Kropp

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1 You Don’t Start with a Home Run

  2 A Surprise at the Dance

  3 Project Costs Escalate

  4 The Agreement

  5 Target Number One

  6 Achieving Goal One

  7 More Instructions

  8 An Awkward Moment or Two

  9 In Disgrace with Fortune and Men’s Eyes

  10 If at First…

  11 Practice Makes Perfect

  12 My Limo, My Driver

  13 One Large Slobbery Dog

  14 A Little More Bubbly?

  15 No More Wallowing

  16 Still More Advice

  17 A Little Culture Can Be Just Enough

  18 Another Bill Arrives, and More Advice

  19 I Never Asked for Trouble

  20 Ah, Poetry

  21 The Truth Will Out

  22 Some Truths Are Surprising

  23 When All the Birds Do Squawk

  24 Outside the Fee Schedule

  About the Author

  1

  You Don’t Start with a Home Run

  “YOU DON’T START with a home run,” Jeremy said.

  “A what?” I replied.

  “You don’t start off with some girl jumping in bed with you. You’ve got to run the bases, you know, the first kiss, the messing around…and then you get to home base.”

  “Oh, home base,” I mumbled. A girl named Allison was walking by and had caught my eye. She did a little modelling around town, sometimes appearing in newspaper supplements dressed in revealing lingerie. Today she was dressed in baggy sweats, with no makeup and fly-away hair, but she was still gorgeous.

  “And you don’t start with somebody like that,” Jeremy went on. We both watched Allison disappear in the distance. “You’ve got to start with somebody in your league,” Jeremy told me.

  “What league is that?”

  “Like maybe peewee. Face it, Alan, you’re never going to make it with any of the hot girls around here.”

  Jeremy and I were in the high-school cafeteria, looking around at the various groups nearby. There was a pattern to the way people sat at the tables. Rich kids sat with rich kids, eating the expensive pizza slices; poor kids sat with poor kids eating their brown-bag lunches; smart kids sat with smart kids, actually talking about math or history; the hot girls sat with the other hot girls; the losers with the losers; and I sat with Jeremy. We were beginning the Alan project—a systematic effort to find a girl for me.

  Jeremy was my project manager. At the age of seventeen, I just decided it was time to move on from my dateless, romanceless adolescent life. I decided it was time to abandon my fantasy girls, dream dates and jpegs and actually go out with a real girl.

  My friend Jeremy has been going out with girls since grade five, long before I knew him. He tells me that his sex appeal mystifies even himself, but Jeremy deals with it philosophically as a burden he has to carry. I can’t understand his success with girls either, since Jeremy isn’t particularly good looking and has an unusual amount of spit on his lips most of the time, a trait that gives the general impression that he’s drooling. But there’s no accounting for the choices of women, I tell myself. Look at André Agassi—and he doesn’t even have any hair.

  “I think we have to start you at a lower level,” Jeremy told me as he scanned the cafeteria. “Maybe Jasmine, over there,” he said, pointing to a dark-haired girl sitting by the window. “She’s a butterface.”

  “A what?”

  “A butterface. She’s got a really hot body, but her face isn’t so good.”

  “Oh, like everything’s good but her face,” I said. This project of improving my social life was coming with an expanded vocabulary.

  “Or maybe Hannah the Honker would go out with you,” he said, grinning at me. “With a nose like that, I doubt that she’d have a lot of guys chasing after her.”

  Hannah had been our classmate since grade seven. I wouldn’t have minded a date with Hannah, since at least it would be fun, but the moment didn’t seem right to tell this to Jeremy.

  “Is that it—a choice of two?” I asked him.

  “Okay, how about Maggie over there?” He pointed to a skinny red-haired girl wearing a baggy sweatshirt and jeans. “She’s a bit of an ugger with those braces and the glasses and all, but probably about your level.”

  “My level?” I repeated.

  “Actually, she’s a cut above your level, but let’s ignore that for the moment. You already know her, right?”

  I nodded. I had known Maggie McPherson for ten years or so, ever since we had been on the same soccer team when we were six or seven years old. Back then, she was skinny and well coordinated; I was chunky and more than likely to fall on my face while kicking the ball. Of course, that was a long time ago. These days Maggie is still skinny and she may or may not be coordinated. But she is about the smartest kid at Regis High School, destined for some glittering future if the scholarships come through.

  “Maggie might even get off on a nerdy type like you,” Jeremy went on. “Besides, I hear she has no social life, so she’s probably pretty desperate.”

  “Desperate is good,” I agreed.

  “Desperate is essential in your case,” Jeremy said. “It’s your only chance. As your project manager, I’m advising you to make a play for Maggie. It might just work.”

  I sighed. With friends like Jeremy, it’s possible that I don’t need any enemies.

  “So what do I do?” I asked him.

  “You go up and start with a little chat about something, anything, then you ask her to go to the dance. Pop the question, as it were.”

  I gave him a look. Jeremy is inclined to use phrases like “as it were” in order to sound like a British lord rather than the pimply-faced high-school s
tudent he actually is. Or should I say, we actually are.

  “Chat?” I repeated.

  “About the weather, or school, or something. It used to be called small talk back in the black-and-white movie days. You know how to talk, don’t you?”

  At that moment, I wasn’t sure whether I remembered how to breathe. Maggie was sitting alone at one of the long tables, reading a book despite the noise and confusion of the cafeteria. She usually had lunch with a couple of other girls, but today she was by herself. It was a golden opportunity to make my move.

  “Don’t lose your courage, Al,” Jeremy told me. “Go for it.”

  “Right, go for it,” I repeated, mostly to myself.

  I got up on shaky legs and started in Maggie’s direction. I could feel perspiration everywhere—on my forehead, dripping from my armpits, turning my shirt into a soggy mess. I suspect even my ears were dripping with nervous perspiration.

  It wasn’t that Maggie looked all that intimidating. She sat there in her usual baggy-everything outfit and pink-grey running shoes from some no-name company. She had little round glasses balanced halfway down a button nose. That nose, and most of her cheeks, were dotted with freckles. Her usually frizzy red-blonde hair was pulled back into some kind of half ponytail. And she had a ketchup smear just under her lip.

  “Hey, Maggie,” I said when I got close. I managed to knock against a couple of empty chairs as I made my way between tables.

  She looked up over her glasses and gave me a smile, or maybe it was a wince, I couldn’t be sure.

  “Mind if I sit down?”

  “It’s a free country, as the phrase goes,” she replied.

  I chose to interpret that as a yes. Jeremy had said that I should think positive, think of myself as strong, masculine and desirable. He also told me to exude confidence, but right now all I was exuding was sweat.

  “So, nice day, isn’t it?” I began.

  She looked out the cafeteria windows. “It’s cold and it’s raining.”

  I had to think fast. “Yeah, well it’s a nice day if you like rain, and I kind of like rain because it’s, uh, kind of damp, if you enjoy the damp kind of thing.”

  My god, I thought, I sound retarded. She must think I have an IQ of 32. I had to do something to redeem myself—I had to say something interesting, something intelligent, if not brilliant.

  Nothing came to mind.

  “So what about that math test?” I said. “Wasn’t that a killer?” There. Not brilliant, but something that we had in common. Mr. Greer’s math test had been on area and volume, something about the number of cucumbers you could plant in a field so-by-so big, given so much space per cucumber, which might be interesting if I were a cucumber farmer but otherwise left my mind reeling.

  “I kind of liked it,” Maggie replied. “Those problem tests give you a chance to think, you know?”

  “Oh, yeah, I liked it too,” I lied, knowing I’d be lucky to pass. “Thinking…well, thinking is always a good thing.”

  Oh no, I’m sounding like an idiot again. I talk like I’ve never had a thought in my life. Maybe my IQ really is 32.

  “So speaking of thinking,” I went on, hoping for a clever segue into the real topic, “I’ve been thinking about the dance next Friday.”

  “Oh, that!” she said, spitting out the word like the dance was about as appealing as a cockroach scurrying under the fridge. “The Spring Fling thing. What a cheesy name for a dance.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess,” I said, never having thought twice about it. “I was kind of wondering if you were thinking of going.”

  She actually stopped to look at me through those little glasses of hers. I felt as if she were studying my face, maybe counting the droplets of sweat on my forehead. Naturally, that brought on a new shower of perspiration.

  “Maybe,” she said with a verbal shrug. “It’s mostly a first-year thrill, but I might go if Friday looks kind of void.”

  This is hopeless, I thought. I can’t seem to put three words together that make sense and I’m trying to ask out a girl who can use the word void in conversation. Why did I let Jeremy push me into this?

  “So I was thinking,” I said, but then I was aware that I was repeating myself, so I stopped talking and thought about repeating myself and how stupid that was and how stupid I must be to repeat myself except I’m really not that stupid so I must just be nervous but how stupid it was to be nervous because I was just asking her to a dance and the worst she could say was no and so what was the big deal anyhow?

  “Hello, Alan,” she said suddenly. “Earth to Alan, come in.”

  “Oh, yeah, sure.”

  “For a second I thought you were having some kind of seizure, like that guy Simon in Lord of the Flies.”

  “I was just thinking,” I explained.

  “Oh, right,” she said, and took another bite of her hamburger. The bite made a pickle shoot out of the burger and fall to the table between us. I thought I might try to say something witty about the pickle trajectory, or maybe make some clever literary connection to pickles, but my mind was blank.

  It was Maggie who broke the silence. “Oh, I get it,” she said. “You want to ask me to the dance!”

  “Well, uh, yeah.” Now my face was turning red. I was sweating buckets—no, swimming pools—and now I felt like my face was burning up.

  “You want to do that whole I’ll-pick-you-up-at-seven-and-hold-your-hand-and-kiss-you-goodnight thing, right?” She said this as if the idea just amazed her.

  I hadn’t let my mind jump so far ahead, certainly not as far as the kiss-you-goodnight thing, but given the pickle bits stuck in her braces and the ketchup on her chin, it didn’t seem all that attractive a concept.

  Her eyes seemed to widen behind her glasses. “You think I’m so desperate for a date that I’d go out with you!” she went on.

  “I never said ‘desperate,’” I replied.

  “But you were thinking it,” she told me. “You were thinking, there’s a girl so desperate she’d even go out with Al Macklin. That’s what you were thinking, weren’t you?”

  “No…no, I wasn’t thinking at all.”

  “But you said you were thinking, just a couple seconds ago.”

  “But I wasn’t thinking. Or I wasn’t thinking about that.”

  “What were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking…” and then I forgot what I had been thinking about.

  So now we were both stuck in silence. It seemed the whole cafeteria had fallen into a kind of hush, as though everyone was listening in to this pathetic conversation.

  “I’ll tell you what I’m thinking,” said another voice. Maggie and I both looked up. It was Hannah the Honker, standing with a cafeteria tray in her hand. “I’m thinking you should get out of my chair, Alan.”

  So I got up, looked at Maggie, then looked at Hannah and then looked at the only safe place—at my shoes.

  “Well, see ya,” I said lamely, and to nobody in particular.

  “See ya,” Maggie said as I turned away. And that was the last thing I heard, though I swear Hannah used the word loser in some kind of sentence just before I was out of earshot.

  It was a long, slow walk across the cafeteria. I was sure the eyes of everyone in the room were glued to me, all of them thinking loser as my heavy feet trod the floor. I felt like one of those death-row prisoners you see in movies, walking down the cell block to the electric chair while the other inmates pound their metal cups against the bars.

  I slumped down beside Jeremy.

  “Got shot down, eh?” he said. I guess he could see the whole episode written on my face. “Sometimes they do that,” he said brightly. “It’s a complex psychological response. See, if she shoots you down, then she bolsters her own self-esteem because (a) you asked her out and (b) she was so superior to your asking her out that she turned you down and (c)…well, I can’t think of a (c).”

  He waited a respectful two seconds before going on. “Did she give you any reasons? Li
ke, was it you personally or the dance generally or has she got somebody to go with or what?”

  “Last choice,” I mumbled. “The what.”

  “What?” he repeated.

  “It all got twisted up,” I explained.

  “Well, you can’t just give up, Al,” he told me. “Now sit back and look confident. That’s better. See if you can smile as if going to the dance with that little ugger never even crossed your mind.”

  “She’s not an ugger,” I said.

  “We can discuss that later. Right now, you’ve got to smile. People are watching so they need to see confidence, savoir faire, sang-froid, je ne sais quoi.”

  “What’s sang-froid?”

  “How should I know? I’m studying Spanish.” Jeremy had a wonderful self-confidence that I’d always envied. “It just sounds good.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Don’t despair, Al. This was only a first attempt. By the end of the summer, I promise, not only will you be a success with girls”—he leaned forward to deliver the rest in a serious whisper—”but we’re going to get you laid.”

  2

  A Surprise at the Dance

  “YOU LOOK VERY nice, Alan.” That was my mother speaking just before I left for the school dance. Of course her idea of nice was me wearing a sweater without food stains and putting enough gel in my hair that the weird hairs growing at the back didn’t spring up.

  “Thanks,” I mumbled.

  I almost agreed with her, for a change. I was having a good-acne and good-hair day, two big pluses. I had picked out a pair of pants that seemed pretty reasonable, a nice button-down shirt, and my least-scuffed pair of Nikes.

  “Are you taking anyone to the dance?” She asked this innocently enough, passing by in the upstairs hall while I sprayed on one more layer of deodorant.

  My mother feels quite guilty about prying into my life, but of course that doesn’t stop her from snooping around as much as she can. I put telltale Scotch tape on my notebooks and dresser drawers, so I know that she checks for homework and looks in my drawers for porn, condoms, booze or dope—the major sins of a teenage guy’s life. So far, both my drawers and my life have been remarkably free of sin.