On the way back to the buses on that first trip, we stopped at the gift shop （which was disappointingly not run by old-timey people and charged modern-day prices）。 Our school had earmarked a couple of bucks for each student to buy something, and all the kids went straight for the personalized items: license plate key chains that said “Ryan,” large pencils pre-engraved with “Tommy,” little glasses that said “Randy” and seemed useless to drink from because they only held one and a half ounces of liquid—what good is that? I knew from previous experiences in gift shops down the Jersey shore and in the city that personalized items never included my real name, “Kalpen.” I always checked anyway. Always held legitimate hope that maybe this was the place that had a “Kalpen” mug. I’d go straight to the K section: Kacey… Kagan… Kareem. Then, willing to settle for a misspelling, I’d do the same with the Cs: Cain… Caleb… Cameron. No dice. They never had any variation of my name. I was too different. Maybe the next gift shop…
* * *
An early spring afternoon that same year. Three p.m. School was dismissed. Ryan Sokolowski and I walked past the flagpole just as Zita Guardino’s mom sped up to the turnaround in her jet-black Trans Am with the windows down. Bon Jovi played through the speakers. Mrs. Guardino was the cool mom. She was younger than the other parents, wore formfitting jean jackets, tight leather pants, and the same dangly earrings and teased bangs as her daughter, who everyone had a crush on. Everyone. Zita Guardino was a fifth-grade version of Mrs. Guardino, who, by the way, looked much more like a fun older sister than somebody’s mother, and how this happened was one of the great mysteries of our eleven-year-old lives.
Ryan and I smiled and waved. Zita hopped in, and the Trans Am peeled out just as fast as it came in. With “You Give Love a Bad Name” fading down McClelland Avenue, Ryan confidently asked, “Doesn’t Zita’s mom look like such a hooker?”
Now look, I had no idea what a hooker was. But I could tell from Ryan’s face that I was supposed to know. That it was cool to know. Whatever this hooker business was, it seemed like Ryan finally made sense of the mystery of Mrs. Guardino’s youth. （A hooker, yes, that explains it!） “Totally!” I shouted, with too much enthusiasm. “I was actually just thinking that!”
The next day on the playground, I was super eager to share this cool, secret piece of information I had about Zita’s awesome mom. So, when a bunch of us were at the monkey bars, I covertly announced, “Hey guys, did you know that Zita’s mom looks like a hooker?” Randy Finn was standing within earshot. His eyes got so wide he looked like a frog. This excited me. Whatever a hooker was, Randy clearly knew, too, and he couldn’t believe I was cool enough to be in the know.
After recess, when Randy tried to start a humming contest in class, the teacher busted him quickly and threatened to send him to the principal’s office. In a desperate gambit, he stood up and declared to the entire room, “Well, shouldn’t Kalpen get sent to the principal’s office too? He said that Zita’s mom is a hooker!”
Stunned silence. “That’s it, Randy!” the teacher screamed. “To the principal’s office! NOW. You can apologize to Zita and Kalpen later.” As Randy stormed out the door, I was horrified. I looked to Ryan Sokolowski for guidance. He avoided my stare. Whatever a hooker was, in this fragile moment it had become obvious that it was not the answer to the mysterious creature that was Mrs. Guardino. I panicked. I wanted to cry. “It’s okay, Kalpen,” the teacher said, “I know he’s lying. I know you would never say something like that.”
I was so distraught and guilt-stricken when I got home from school that day. What was so bad about being called a hooker? I didn’t intend to say anything mean about Mrs. Guardino. I was just trying to fit in. Is Zita’s mom a hooker, or is she not a hooker? Is being a hooker a religion? A job? Does it involve a hook? I needed answers, which meant I needed to ask somebody, fast.
“Mommmmmm! What’s a hooker?”
“Where did you hear that word?!” she asked in shock. At school!3 Mom explained that a hooker is someone who sells her body. It’s not okay to ever use that word or refer to anyone by it. And that was that.
The explanation created more questions than answers.
What parts of her body does a hooker sell?
Also, how can she sell her body? Doesn’t she need it?
WHAT IS THE HOOK FOR???
It was clear I wasn’t getting any more info, so I didn’t ask. I didn’t feel any less guilty. In my heart, I knew I’d have to come clean the next morning. I’d need to tell the teacher that Randy—the fastest and worst-behaved boy in fifth grade—was actually telling the truth this time, and maybe didn’t deserve a week of detention alone. I would admit that I didn’t know what a hooker was when I said it on the playground. I had merely repeated it to fit in.
On the walk to school, my thoughts wandered back to the time Randy had called me the n-word on the playground. I should have said something to the teacher then too, I thought to myself. That was not okay. Facing my moment of truth and realizing I had the upper hand here, I felt my first tinge of vindication. I walked into the classroom and confidently kept my mouth shut. I let Randy take the fall for the hooker comment.
At the age of eleven, my curiosity led me to learn the power of words. The beauty of imagination. And the consequences of silence.
* * *
By middle school, I looked like this:
I’d be sitting on the couch laughing at The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, crushing over Candace Cameron in Full House. I’d mimic Steve Urkel in Family Matters with zero sense of irony, thinking, Nobody has glasses that thick in real life （I must have been blind）。 What a photo! You likely have one of two reactions to how I looked. You’re either in the category of “Oh man, I can totally relate, middle school was cruel to me too,” or you’re saying, “Hahahaha, you were the kind of kid I used to pick on!” If you’re the latter, then you loved middle school, and I urge you to google all the people you made fun of as a kid just to see how much more successful we are than you.4
As a newly teenaged nerd struggling to find his place in the world—or at least in Marlboro Middle School—I regularly got book-checked in the hallways, tormented in the lunchroom, and picked last in gym class. Every time. I was also lucky to grow up in a diverse New Jersey town, with kids from lots of different spiritual backgrounds.
At thirteen, this meant that I was an active participant in the Central New Jersey bar mitzvah scene. I attended countless bar and bat mitzvahs over the course of my middle school years, interacting with large families who were a lot like mine: They were boisterous, liked to eat, and loved asking deeply personal questions in as loud a voice as possible.
“Are you Jewish?” Aviva Finkel’s eighty-year-old grandmother shouted to me across the rectangular wooden seder table one Passover. “Because you look like ya could be hay-uff.”
“No, Bubbe,”5 I said, “my parents moved here from India, remember?”
“Well,” she complimented, “you could pay-uss for Sephardic.”