The next morning we went home in the bus, and there was a big celebration there that I’m not going to tell about, because it was just more of the same old crap, and I hung on at school till it was over, since it was only a couple of months, anyhow, and I kept going around with Marsha, and it was really something with the weather warmer, and I looked forward to it for the whole summer, but damned if she didn’t go away on a vacation and not get back until damn near September, and by that time I was about ready to leave for Pipskill and had other things on my mind.
That’s about all there is to it, how it started and how it grew, but I guess before I quit telling about the high school part and start telling about the Pipskill part I’d better tell how it came out between Gravy Dummke and me. As a matter of fact, nothing happened at all for a long time, not until after school was out, and you can bet I kept out of his God-damn cigar store, and I’d just about come to the conclusion that he’d decided to cut his losses and nothing was ever going to happen when all of a sudden it did. I went to town one night and shot rotation at Beegie’s, and I was leaving to go home when this guy I’d never seen before said, “You going home, Scaggs? I happen to be going your way, and I’ll give you a lift.” He was a short guy, but pretty heavy, with one smeary eye that looked like a stinking broken egg and red hair and so God-damn many freckles it looked like the old cow had blown bran in his face, and he kept picking his nose, which is why I didn’t suspect him of anything, I think, because who the hell suspects anything of a guy who picks his nose? I’d heard some of the guys in Beegie’s call him Pinky, so I said, “Sure, Pinky, thanks,” and we went out together and up the street to his car, which was a Chevvie. There was another guy sitting in the back seat, but I didn’t even see him until this Pinky guy and I had got in the front seat and started off, and then I saw him, and I don’t see how the hell I missed him in the first place, because he was as big as a God-damn barn.
We drove fast as hell down the street and around the corner, not toward the side of town where I lived, and I said, “Where the bell you going?” and Pinky said, “You’ll find out,” and I said, “Well, I don’t know where the hell you’re going, but I know where I’m going, and that’s home, so you can just stop this God-damn can and let me out,” and he said, “You’re a smart little bastard, aren’t you? We don’t like smart bastards. It’s our job to teach smart bastards it doesn’t pay to be so damn smart.”
By that time I knew what was happening, that it was Gravy Dummke behind it, and I said, “So you two goons are doing the dirty for that fat slop Gravy Dummke,” and Pinky said, “Who’s Gravy Dummke? Never heard of him,” and I said, “The hell you haven’t, and you can tell him from me that someday I’ll get his God-damn greasy hide for this,” and then the big guy in back reached up and clobbered me behind the ear, and I couldn’t say anything more or hear a damn thing but bells for at least five minutes, and when I’d got over it we were out of town on a gravel road and kept going down the road for about half a mile and stopped. I didn’t figure there was any point in being a lousy hero with no one around to see it, so I jumped out and started to run, but I tripped in the Goddamn ditch and fell on my face, and they were on top of me before I could get up, and the big guy had fists as hard as rock that must have weighed about twenty pounds apiece. They beat the hell out of me, I’ll have to admit it, and as a matter of fact they damn near killed me. They’d drag me up on my feet and then take turns knocking me down again, and once I hauled off and kicked one of them in the crotch, and he fell down and held himself and rolled around yelling, but as luck would have it, it was the little one, and still left me with the big one. After a long time it just seemed to stop all of a sudden, and this was because I passed out, and when I came to, they were gone, and I was still in the ditch.
Well, it took a hell of a long time and was pretty tough going, but I finally got home to bed, and the next morning I was a mess and lied to the old man about being in a gang fight with a bunch of high school guys from another town, and it tickled the hell out of him, and he said it damn well served me right for being a bum. I never told anyone the truth about it all, but I made up my mind I’d get Gravy Dummke for having it done to me, the son of a bitch, and I finally did, too, and I’ll tell about it later in the place it comes.
Part II: Pipskill U.
Well, like Marsha would have said, the summer got pretty God-damn deadly before it was over, and I was glad to get away from the old jerk town when September finally came. I went up to Pipskill University, which was just outside the city on a big hill beside the valley that a river went through, and at first I felt sort of funny being away from everyone I knew, and I wished someone had come up to school with me, someone like old Bugs, or even Tizzy Davis, but Tizzy’s old man had sent him back east to some crummy college that went in mainly for books instead of things like basketball, and old Bugs was too God-damn dumb to go to any kind of college whatever. That was the difference between Bugs and me. I was pretty ignorant myself, I mean, never having taken the trouble to crack any books except once in a great while, but old Bugs was just plain dumb, and the difference between us was the difference between being ignorant and just plain dumb, which is quite a difference. A guy who’s ignorant is a guy who could learn if he wanted to take the trouble, but a guy who’s dumb is just S.O.L. when it comes to anything in the brains department. I don’t want to overdo this ignorance stuff, though, as far as I was concerned. What I mean is, I was ignorant about most of the crap you were supposed to know from books when you got into a college, but I knew quite a bit about a lot of other things.
Old Pipskill was a kind of pretty place, I’ll have to admit that, and you could sit up there on the hill where all the buildings were and look down into the valley where the river was, and it wasn’t half bad. Most of the buildings were made out of this gray stone that you see around, and they all had this God-damn green ivy crawling all over them, and there were all these big trees around that spread out over the walks you walked on, and here and there in various places there were these cast iron statues of guys who had given something or other to Pipskill, or had gone to school there and had later got to be big shots in some way, but I went around and looked at the names under all these statues, and I hadn’t even heard of a one of them before, and I couldn’t help wondering what the hell was the use of being a big shot in a way that hardly anyone ever heard of, and I made up my mind that if I ever got to be a big shot it would be in a way that got noised around.
The first thing I did when I got there was go around to the gym to see the basketball coach, whose name was Barker Umplett, like I told earlier, but the guy I saw was this guy Dilky who had scouted me out at the tournament, and it turned out that he was the freshman basketball coach as well as a scout. He’d gone to Pipskill himself once and had been a big basketball star who’d got his picture in Collier’s and stuff, and in fact I learned that one magazine had printed a whole article about no one but him, and the reason I learned this was because he showed it to me just so I wouldn’t have any doubts about what a wonderful bastard he was.