Maybe I could live by my wits. The eight-hour day was impossible, yet almost everybody submitted to it. And the war, everybody was talking about the war in Europe. I wasn't interested in world history, only my own. What crap. Your parents controlled your growing-up period, they pissed all over you. Then when you got ready to go out on your own, the others wanted to stick you into a uniform so you could get your ass shot off. The wine tasted great. I had another.
The war. Here I was a virgin. Could you imagine getting your ass blown off for the sake of history before you even knew what a woman was? Or owned an automobile? What would I be protecting? Somebody else. Somebody else who didn't give a shit about me. Dying in a war never stopped wars from happening.
I could make it. I could win drinking contests, I could gamble. Maybe I could pull a few holdups. I didn't ask much, just to be left alone.
I finished the first bottle of wine and started in on the second. Halfway through the second bottle, I stopped, stretched out. My first night in my new place. It was all right. I slept.
I was awakened by the sound of a key in the door. Then the door pushed open. I sat up on the cot. A man started to step in.
"GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!" I screamed. He left fast. I heard him running off. I got up and slammed the door.
People did that. They rented a place, stopped paying rent and kept the key, sneaking back to sleep there if it was vacant or robbing the place if the occupant was out. Well, he wouldn't be back. He knew if he tried it again that I'd bust his sack. I went back to my cot and had another drink. I was a little nervous. I was going to have to pick up a knife. I finished my drink, poured another, drank that and went back to sleep.
57
After English class one day Mrs. Curtis asked me to stay.
She had great legs and a lisp and there was something about the legs and the lisp together that heated me up. She was about 32, had culture and style, but like everybody else, she was a goddamned liberal and that didn't take much originality or fight, it was just more Franky Roosevelt worship. I liked Franky because of his programs for the poor during the Depression. He had style too. I didn't think he really gave a damn about the poor but he was a great actor, great voice, and he had a great speech writer. But he wanted us in the war. It would put him into the history books. War presidents got more power and, later, more pages. Mrs. Curtis was just a chip off old Franky only she had much better legs. Poor Franky didn't have any legs but he had a wonderful brain. In some other country he would have made a powerful dictator.
When the last student left I walked up to Mrs. Curtis' desk. She smiled up at me. I had watched her legs for many hours and she knew it. She knew what I wanted, that she had nothing to teach me. She had only said one thing which I remembered. It wasn't her own idea, obviously, but I liked it:
"You can't overestimate the stupidity of the general public."
"Mr. Chinaski," she looked up at me, "we have certain students in this class who think they are very smart."
"Yeh?"
"Mr. Felton is our smartest student."
"O.K."
"What is it that troubles you?"
"What?"
"There's something… troubling you."
"Maybe."
"This is your last semester, isn't it?"
"How did you know?"
I'd been giving those legs a goodbye look. I'd decided the campus was just a place to hide. There were some campus freaks who stayed on forever. The whole college scene was soft. They never told you what to expect out there in the real world. They just crammed you with theory and never told you how hard the pavements were. A college education could destroy an individual for life. Books could make you soft. When you put them down, and really went out there, then you needed to know what they never told you. I had decided to quit after that semester, hang around Stinky and the gang, maybe meet somebody who had guts enough to hold up a liquor store or better yet, a bank.
"I knew you were going to quit," she said softly. '"Begin' is a better word."
"There's going to be a war. Did you read 'Sailor Off The Bremen'?"
"That New Yorker stuff doesn't work for me."
"You've got to read things like that if you want to understand what is happening today."
"I don't think so."
"You just rebel against everything. How are you going to survive?"
"I don't know. I'm already tired."
Mrs. Curtis looked down at her desk for a long time. Then she looked up at me.
"We're going to get drawn into the war, one way or the other. Are you going to go?"
"That doesn't matter. I might, I might not."
"You'd make a good sailor."
I smiled, thought about being a sailor, then discarded that idea.
"If you stay another term," she said, "you can have anything you want."
She looked up at me and I knew exactly what she meant and she knew that I knew exactly what she meant.
"No," I said, "I'm leaving."
I walked toward the door. I stopped there, turned, gave her a little nod goodbye, a slight and quick goodbye. Outside I walked along under the campus trees. Everywhere, it seemed, there was a boy and a girl together. Mrs. Curtis was sitting alone at her desk as I walked alone. What a great triumph it would have been. Kissing that lisp, working those fine legs open, as Hitler swallowed up Europe and peered toward London.
After a while I walked over toward the gym. I was going to clean out my locker. No more exercising for me. People always talked about the good clean smell of fresh sweat. They had to make excuses for it. They never talked about the good clean smell of fresh shit. There was nothing really as glorious as a good beer shit - 1 mean after drinking twenty or twenty-five beers the night before. The odor of a beer shit like that spread all around and stayed for a good hour-and-a-half. It made you realize that you were really alive.
I found the locker, opened it and dumped my gym suit and shoes into the trash. Also two empty wine bottles. Good luck to the next one who got my locker. Maybe he'd end up mayor of Boise, Idaho. I threw the combo lock into the trash too. I'd never liked that combination: 1,2, 1, 1,2. Not very mental. The address of my parents' house had been 2122. Everything was minimal. In the R.O.T.C. it had been 1, 2, 3,4; 1, 2, 3, 4. Maybe some day I'd move up to 5.
I walked out of the gym and took a shortcut through the playing field. There was a game of touch football going on, a pick-up game. I cut to one side to avoid it. Then I heard Baldy: "Hey, Hank!"
I looked up and he was sitting in the stands with Monty Ballard. There wasn't much to Ballard. The nice thing about him was that he never talked unless you asked him a question. I never asked him any questions. He just looked at life out from underneath his dirty yellow hair and yearned to be a biologist. I waved to them and kept walking.
"Come on up here. Hank!" Baldy yelled. "It's important."
I walked over. "What is it?"
"Sit down and watch that stocky guy in the gym suit."
I sat down. There was only one guy in a gym suit. He had on track shoes with spikes. He was short but wide, very wide. He had amazing biceps, shoulders, a thick neck, heavy short legs. His hair was black; the front of his face almost flat; small mouth, not much nose, and the eyes, the eyes were there somewhere.
"Hey, I heard about this guy," I said.
"Watch him," said Baldy.
There were four guys on each team. The ball was snapped. The quarterback faded to pass. King Kong, Jr. was on defense. He played about halfway back. One of the guys on the offensive team ran deep, the other ran short. The center blocked. King Kong, Jr. lowered his shoulders and sped toward the guy playing short. He smashed into him, burying a shoulder into his side and gut and dumped him hard. Then he turned and trotted away. The pass was completed to the deep man for a TD.