He was sitting in a stinking little office just off the locker room when I got there the first day, and he stood up and shook my hand in this God-damn manly way that damn near cracks your bones and said, “Well, well, Skimmer, I see you made it,” and I said I had, and he said, “Well, how do you like old Pipskill U?” and I said what I’d seen of it looked okay, and he said, “The more you see of it, the better you’ll like it,” and I thought, Well, I’ll make up my own God-damn mind about that, and then he took me out through the locker room and showed me the gym.
To tell the truth, I didn’t think much of it, and it was pretty old and dark when the lights weren’t on, and there wasn’t much room for anyone to sit and watch, and as a matter of fact it didn’t seem as good as the one in the high school. I was just about to say something about it looking like a God-damn crackerbox to me, but before I had a chance he said sort of off-hand, “This is just the old gym where the freshman team practices, of course,” and I felt a little better and asked him where the hell the first team played, and he said, “Oh, they use the field house. Haven’t you been down there yet?” I said I hadn’t, and he said, “I’ll take you down and show it to you right now. Man, it’s a honey,” and he did, and it was.
It was made out of gray stone, like the other buildings, only it was a lot newer and didn’t have any ivy on it, and from the outside it looked like a great big God-damn cow barn, but on the inside it was fancy as hell and looked like it covered about a thousand square miles and had enough room for about a million people to sit and watch, and as a matter of fact old Dilky said there was room for fifteen thousand. I got to thinking that fifteen thousand people could make a hell of a lot of racket if they were even half as crazy as the God-damn spooks who went to the games at the high school, because there were usually only a couple thousand at the high school at the most, and I found out later that the people who watched the games at Pipskill were even crazier, and when you played in the field house it was just like being in all the God-damn nut houses in the world wrapped into one. As a matter of fact, Pipskill was what’s called a basketball school, and no one cared if the stinking football team wound up in the cellar every year, which it always did, but if the basketball team didn’t win the league championship and everything else that was around to be won, somebody better look out for his God-damn head.
I might as well say right now, though, that I didn’t get to play much in the field house the first year because they had this lousy rule that you could only play three years on the first team — the varsity team, it’s called — and the first year you had to play on the crummy freshman team, and you went around and played the freshman teams at the other schools in the league, and no one paid much attention to it. I was against the rule and thought it was pretty God-damn crummy, and I tried to think of a way to get around it, and I asked Dilky if I couldn’t play the first three years and just skip the last one, but he said I couldn’t and it was just something I’d have to put up with, though he thought himself that it was pretty stinking not to let a guy play four years.
After we’d looked at the field house, old Dilky took me around to the frat house where I was going to stay and introduced me to a guy named Mellon who was a senior in the school. This guy turned out to be the big cheese around the frat house, and I didn’t like him from the start because he had this snotty attitude, and you could tell just by looking at him that his old man was loaded, a God-damn millionaire or something, and the truth is, he was nothing less than the vice-president of a railroad, as it turned out. Anyhow, this Mellon spook had a way of tipping up his chin and looking at you down the sides of his stinking nose, and his nose would sort of quiver like whoever he was looking at needed a God-damn bath, and he looked at me this way and held out a hand with the fingers kind of dangling from it. “How are you, Scaggs?” he said, and I said I was all right and took his hand, and it was just like picking up a handful of fishing worms, and he said, “I understand you’re a damn fine basketball player,” and I said I sure as hell was.
Old Dilky said, “Well, Skimmer, I’ll leave you to get settled now. We don’t start serious practice for another month, but you’d better drop in afternoons and start getting your eye back,” and I said I would, and he went away, and Mellon said, “You’ll be bunking with Spicer. Come along now, I’ll show you your room.” I didn’t know who the hell Spicer was, but I followed Mellon upstairs to the room, and Spicer wasn’t there, but it was a damn swell room, and I don’t mind saying it was a hell of a lot better than any room I’d ever had or thought about having. Mellon hung around a few minutes telling me some of the God-damn house rules I was supposed to mind, but I didn’t pay much attention, just wishing he’d go the hell away and leave me alone, and after a while he did, and I went over to the window and looked down at the yard.
It was a big yard with the grass as green and smooth as one of Beegie’s pool tables and a box hedge all around it that was clipped slick and level on top by someone who knew just how to do it, and the house itself was a lot like the house Marsha lived in, only bigger, with white pillars at the front and green shutters at the windows and everything, and as a matter of fact I was damn lucky to get a fancy place like that to flop in, because usually you had to be pledged and voted in and all that crap, but they had it set up to let star basketball players in without it, and I’m not kidding myself a God-damn bit that I’d have never got in otherwise, but otherwise, as far as that goes, I wouldn’t have been at the God-damn school at all.
I flopped on the bed and lay there thinking that this was sure as hell the life and wishing that the old man and the old lady could get a look at me now, and I was still lying there when the door opened and this guy about six feet tall came in, and he had sort of sandy hair that stuck up every which way on his God-damn head and a nose that looked like it had got caught in a knuckle shower, and he saw me flopped on the bed and said, “You’re Scaggs, and I’m Spicer,” just like that, just like he’d settled the God-damn issue once and for all, and it annoyed the hell out of me, to tell the truth, and I said, “The hell we are!” and he stopped and laughed and ran his hand through his crazy hair and said, “Well, aren’t we?” and I was bound to say then that I was Scaggs, at any rate, and he could damn well be Spicer if he wanted too.
He sat down in a chair and swung his legs up over one arm and said, “I suppose old Bunny brought you up,” and I said some creepy bastard named Mellon had done it, and he said, “That’s Bunny,” and I said, “Why the hell you call him Bunny?” and he said, “Didn’t you notice the way his nose quivered? Like a damn rabbit’s?” and I said I had, as a matter of fact, and he said, “Well, that’s why we call him Bunny.”
“He acted pretty snotty, if you ask me,” I said, “and just between us I felt like poking him in the mouth,” and he said, “Everyone feels like that about Bunny, but no one ever does it because he’s got all the God-damn money in the world, or anyhow his old man has, which is the same thing in the long run. Personally, I think he’s a fairy.”
“What makes you think he’s a fairy?” I said, and he said, “Well, he’s got this damn dainty way about him, you just watch the way he flips around and goes on about things, and you never see him with any girls or anything, in spite of having a car of his own and all that money, and besides, he was kicked out of some school back east, and everyone thinks that was the reason, so don’t let him get you in any dark corners.”