I said it would be a sad day for fairies when the son of a bitch got me in a corner, and I asked him how long he’d been there, and he said a couple of days, and I said it seemed to me he knew a hell of a lot for a guy who’d only been around two days, and he said, “Oh, I pick up things fast,” and then he looked at me for a long time like I was a stinking freak in a sideshow or something, and finally he said, “So you’re another one of old Umplett’s whores.”
It made me a little hot, to tell the truth, and I said, “What the hell you mean, whores?”
“Basketball player,” he said. “Like me.”
“Where’d you get that whore stuff?” I said, and he said, “Oh, don’t get your bowels in an uproar about it. I just call us that because of the way we get paid and kept and all, and I guess if I include myself you got no call to bitch, and besides, I’m all for it, and it looks like a hell of a good life.”
Well, I had to admit that he had the right to call himself anything he damn well pleased, and if it just happened to include me, that was just tough, and what was more, when I got right down to it, I sort of liked the God-damn goofy bastard, and that’s the truth of it. I asked him where he’d played basketball, and he said over in the next state, and he’d had a pretty good deal at the state university over there, but at the last minute old Dilky had shown up with a better one, so he’d changed his mind and come to Pipskill. I told him about how I’d been top scorer in the whole damn state and most valuable man in all the tournaments and everything like that, and he asked me what my points total had been, and I told him, and he whistled and said I must be pretty damn good at that and he’d bet we’d make what he called a damn good one-two punch on the Pipskill team, and all in all I had a feeling we were going to get along good together, and he started calling me Skimmer, and I started calling him Micky, which is what he said he wanted to be called.
The very next morning I got enrolled in some classes, and later I took a test that was supposed to show if you were bright, and I guess I was bright enough at least, because I never heard any more of it, and I got the general idea that they didn’t much care how God-damn ignorant you were just as long as there was some chance they could teach you a little something later, and I’ll have to admit there was another test I took that turned me up ignorant.
This was a test in spelling and grammar and how to say things the right way and all, and I guess I didn’t do much on it, and as a matter of fact, from what they told me, hardly a damn thing. They gave you this test so they’d know which rhetoric class to put you in. Rhetoric is what they called it, but it was the same damn thing they called English in high school, only they made it a little tougher for you, and it had always given me a pain in the you know what, and it still did. Everyone had to take it, there wasn’t any getting out of it, and they had it divided into three classes that they called Rhetoric I and Rhetoric II and Rhetoric Zero. Rhetoric II was for the God-damn geniuses or something, and Rhetoric I was watered down a little for the ones who were no better than they were supposed to be, and Rhetoric Zero was for the ones who loused up the test, and I was in Rhetoric Zero.
This class in Rhetoric Zero only had about ten guys and one girl in it, and the guy who taught it was about the spookiest guy you could hope to meet outside a freak show. He was tall and thin with bones that stuck out at all his God-damn corners, and he had this long face with sad eyes that made him look like a mule, and when he walked his arms and legs just flew off in any damn direction they pleased without any relation at all to the direction he was supposed to be going, and honest to God, it looked like he was about to fly all apart any damn second.
The first day of the class he walked in like this, and he put his crummy old beat-up brief case on the desk and stood there looking at each one of us in his turn without saying anything, and then after a while he said in this God-damn deep voice, “Maybe you’re wondering why I’m teaching this class instead of someone else, and I must tell you now that it’s in punishment for my sins, and how bad those sins are I’ll leave you to surmise from the degree of the punishment.” Well, even a guy in Rhetoric Zero knows when he’s being called a God-damn boob, and I didn’t like it, and I’d have clobbered the bastard if he’d ever said it again, but he didn’t. As a matter of fact, though, what he did was worse, but it wasn’t anything you could clobber him for and explain it afterward.
What he did, he’d talk to you like he was reading out of a primer to a kid, and when you didn’t know something about the damn crummy rhetoric that you were supposed to know, he’d just look at you with these mournful eyes that were like a mule’s and let out this long sigh and say, “Now, Mr. Scaggs, let’s go over it once more,” and he’d bear down on the Mr. like it was a God-damn honorary title or something. His name was Boxer, and I don’t mind admitting I got to hating the son of a bitch, and the longer I was in the class the more I hated him, and I finally got to hating him even more than I hated Gravy Dummke, in spite of the fact that Gravy hired two guys to beat the hell out of me. What made it worse, I just couldn’t put my mind to that rhetoric bull, and I never seemed to know any answers to what he asked me. They had a whole God-damn file of questions and answers on most subjects at the frat house, and generally these got me by pretty well in the other classes I took, but nothing seemed to do any good in rhetoric.
Meantime, I went back to the gym and saw old Dilky again and asked him about my job. He looked down at me with a blank look on his face like maybe I’d asked him who was the second king of Peru or some God-damn place like that, and he said, “What job?” and I said, “The job I’m supposed to do for the hundred clams a month I’m supposed to get,” and for a minute, the way he looked, I began think it had been a lot of bull he’d fed me just to get me up to Pipskill and that there wasn’t really any job or any hundred clams a month, but then he laughed and said, “Oh, that job. Well, we’ll think of something after a while, maybe. Right now, you just come in and sharpen up your eye and don’t worry about it.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s not the God-damn job I’m worried about, it’s the hundred clams,” and he laughed again and said, “Oh, you’ll get the hundred, all right, regular as clockwork the first of every month,” and sure enough, the first of the next month I got the hundred, and I got it on the nose every month after that, too, but old Dilky never got around to thinking up a job for me to do to earn it, which was all right with me, if that was the way he wanted it, and I damn sure wasn’t going to make any issue of it. I kept going in every afternoon to sharpen my eye and get in condition, and there were some other first year guys who came in, too, including old Micky Spicer, and old Dilky got to making us run around and around the God-damn gym for our wind and our legs, and as a matter of fact it wasn’t much fun, but mostly a lot of work, and after a while I began to figure that I was earning my lousy century and then some.
There was one guy who came in whose name was Carboy, and this guy was damn near seven feet tall and still growing, and Barker Umplett, the head coach, had snaked him in off the prairie somewhere to play center for him. He was pretty good in lots of ways and got around on the floor pretty good in spite of being so damn tall and awkward, and he was great stuff for reaching up and snatching rebounds off the board, which is pretty damn important in itself because it keeps the other team from getting more than one shot at the bucket at a time and helps you to keep on shooting yourself until you finally hit it, but the worst thing about him was that he couldn’t hit a bull with a spade. It damn near drove old Dilky nuts. He worked with this Carboy all the time, trying to teach him how to hook over and hit the bucket, but when he hit one now and then it was mostly just an accident, and the truth is, you just couldn’t tell where in hell the God-damn ball was going once he let loose of it. Honest to God, it might go sailing clear up over the lousy backboard or anywhere.