We walked down to the bank and looked at the river going past, and she said, “There’s something about a river that makes you feel kind of sad, isn’t there?” and I said it made me feel that way too, which was a lie, and to tell the truth, it wasn’t much of a river, and just a lot of God-damn muddy water as far as I could see. We kissed once while we were standing there, but it was too damn cold with the wind blowing at us across the river, and so we went back to the Buick and really got started. Man, we really wallowed all over the lousy seat, and I won’t tell you what all we did, any details or anything like that, but it’ll give you an idea when you hear what she finally said. She laughed this little laugh and said, “Tough luck, Skimmer. I’m in the saddle.”
To tell the truth, it sort of got me for a minute, hearing her come right out with it like that, just as cool as a Goddamn cucumber, because girls usually act like it was a stinking crime or something and will go all out to keep a guy from finding out anything like that ever happens, and once I razzed old Mopsy about it a little, and she got all colors and began to bawl like I’d accused her of being queer at least. Anyhow, that put a ceiling on us, but we kept fooling around a long time under the ceiling, and she kept whispering things to me like how cute I was, and rugged, and sort of tough-like and different from all the other guys she knew, and then she sat up all of a sudden and looked at her wrist watch and said, “Oh, my God, my hour’s up, and we haven’t evenstartedhome. My father will simply be livid.”
Well, she took the Buick back up that gravel road like a bat out of hell, and I thought more than once that she was going to smash the damn thing up and kill us both, but to tell the truth, I didn’t much give a damn. When we got back to town, she asked me where I wanted her to drop me, and I remembered that I still had old Bugs’s dollar to spend, so I said, “Oh, just drop me off uptown somewhere. I think I’ll loaf around a little.” She let me off right in front of her old man’s bank, which seemed sort of ironic or some damn thing like that, and just before she pulled away she turned and said as if it was just something she happened to remember at the last second, “Oh, by the way, Skimmer, a bunch of us are having a little party at the Club after the game Saturday night, and I wondered if you’d like to go with me.”
“What club?” I said, not that it made any difference, because I intended to go, whatever damn club it was, and she looked surprised and said, “Why, the Country Club, of course,” like what the hell other club is there?
“Oh, sure, the Country Club,” I said. “I thought maybe you meant some kind of special club or something. Anyhow, I’d be glad to go.”
She said swell, and she’d meet me outside the locker room after the game, and then she drove away, and I wanted some cigarettes, so I walked down to Dummke’s to get them. Old Gravy was sitting on a high stool behind the counter reading the Sunday funny papers, and he looked up at me when I came in and said, “Well, well, if it isn’t the God-damn hero. Getting his name on the sports page and everything.”
I said, “Just cut the crap and give me a pack of gaspers,” and he looked shocked as hell and made a big red O with his stinking mouth and said, “Don’t tell me a big athlete like you smokes cigarettes,” and I said, “Ha, ha, you think you’re pretty God-damn funny, don’t you?”
Usually you could needle the greasy bastard into blowing his lid right away, but this time he didn’t get mad at all, but just laughed and tossed the gaspers across the counter and said, “You know, that basketball racket’s got possibilities. You get good enough, you might be able to make a big thing out of it for yourself.”
I thought about old Marsha and me in the front seat of the Buick, and I said, “Maybe I’ve already made a big thing out of it,” and his little eyes got all narrow and still all of a sudden, and he said, “What the hell you mean?” and I said, “That’s none of your damn business.”
Then he laughed again and gave me the change from Bugs’s dollar and said, “Well, I read in the sports page how you made thirty points your first game and twenty-six your second game, so you must be pretty good. After you get a little sharper, you come around and see me, and maybe I can do a good thing for you, and you can do a good thing for me at the same time,” and I said, “I wouldn’t put you out if you were on fire,” and went out.
I still had seventy-seven cents to spend, and I thought about going around to Beegie’s again, but I decided not to go because there was a chance of running into old Bugs there, and besides, to tell the truth, I didn’t get much of a bang out of Beegie’s any more, so what I did was go to a diner for a hamburger and bottle of coke and then to a movie. It was a corny movie, and this doll who was supposed to be such hot stuff wasn’t half as good as Marsha, and Marsha had got more done in the front seat of the Buick for free than this one did in a dozen fancy joints with rich guys all over the place offering her diamonds and fur coats and all kinds of stuff for it. After the movie I went home and started thinking about how I could get hold of some dough for the party Saturday night, because you’d sure as hell have to have a pocketful to go to the damn County Club, and I had exactly seven cents left out of Bugs’s crummy dollar.
That week old Mulloy really worked the hell out of us, and he kept talking about what a tough game it was coming up on Saturday, and how we’d have to be a hell of a lot better than we’d been yet to win this one, because this team was really a sharp one that could beat half the colleges in the country, and altogether he laid it on so God-damn thick you knew it was a pack of damn lies and just a trick to scare us into working all the harder. Old Tizzy and I were getting our business down better all the time, and we got so we could tell by the blink of an eyelash just which way the other one was going to jump, and old Mulloy puffed and blew about what a classy combination he’d made out of us, just like it was all due to nothing but his crummy coaching, and the truth is, whatever caused it, we were slicker than grease.
Along about Tuesday evening I was walking home late, and I was still trying to think of a way to get my hands on at least a fin for Saturday, and who should I meet over on my own side of town but old Mopsy on her way home from the grocery store. I hadn’t seen her to talk to since that night when her old man and old lady had gone to the movies, and she said, “Hi, Skimmer. How come you haven’t been around to see me lately?”
I had a good reason, of course, namely that you don’t eat hash when you’ve got roast beef, but I tried to make it easy on her and said, “Oh, I’ve been pretty busy with basketball and all,” and she said, “You’re really getting to be a big star, and I’m proud of you,” and I said, “Well I guess I’ve just got a knack for it,” which, like I’ve said before, was the way it was.
We kept walking along, and pretty soon she said, “How would you like to come over to my house Saturday night after the game? We could pop some popcorn and listen to music and have some fun.”
“Your old man and old lady going to be home?” I said, and she said they were, and I said, “Then how the hell we going to have any fun?”
She said, “You oughtn’t to say things like that, Skimmer. You sound like you never thought about anything else,” and I said, “Is there something else to think about?” and she said, “Do you want to come, or don’t you?” and I said, “No, as a matter of fact I don’t, because I’ve got a date to take Marsha Davis to a party at the Country Club.”
You could see it knocked her for a loop, me just tossing it off that way, and she got sulky and said, “I guess now that you’re a basketball star and running around with someone like Marsha Davis, you won’t have any more time for me,” and I said, “I guess maybe I won’t.”
“Well,” she said, “you don’t need to think I care,” and I said, “I don’t give a damn whether you care or not, and besides, you ought to be glad I don’t come because you’re so damn determined to save it, and if I was hanging around you might be tempted to spend it.”
That really fixed things up swell, that made everything just fine, and at the next corner she turned and went ove
r a block just to get away from me, and damned if she didn’t go home and tell her old man what I’d said, just like she’d told on old Bugs when he tried to sneak a feel. The first I knew about it was when I got home the next evening, which was Wednesday. The old man was in the living room when I got there, and he said, “What the hell’s this I hear about you talking filthy to Mopsy Beacon?”
He sort of took me off guard, to tell the truth, and my damn tongue wouldn’t work right, and all I could say was, “Filthy? What the hell you mean, filthy? Who says I been talking filthy?”
“You know damn well what I mean,” he said, “and you know damn well who says so. Mopsy’s old man says so, that’s who, so don’t bother to tell any damn lies about it, and I can tell you I’m getting damn tired of having someone like old man Beacon jump me every time I turn around about some damn dirty thing you’ve been up to.”
“That’s just a crying God-damn shame about you,” I said. “Besides, old Mopsy’s just got her nose hard because I won’t have anything to do with her any more, and all I told her was that if she was so damn anxious to save it, I’d just stay away and not tempt her to spend it,” and the old man got quiet then and looked at me and said, “You mean that’s really all you said to her?” and I said yes, and he said, “Well, that don’t sound so God-damn filthy to me.”
That set the old lady off, and she said to the old man, “That’s right. Support him in his wickedness. How the hell can you expect him to be anything but a bum with no respect for womanhood when you say it’s not filthy to say something like that to a nice girl like Mopsy?” and the old man said, “Who the hell asked you to horn in, and how the hell do you know who’s a nice girl and who’s not? You never had any experience at it.”
The old lady began to bawl and cuss the old man and threaten to leave him for talking to his own wife like she was no more than a street-walker, and the old man said any time she wanted to leave he’d be glad to help her pack, and they got going so good that they forgot all about me and Mopsy and how the whole thing had started, and I went in the kitchen and had some cold supper and left. I was still trying to figure out a way to get hold of a fin, because here it was Wednesday already and Saturday would be the day I’d have to have it, and I even thought about going uptown and trying to find a drunk to roll in an alley, but that’s sucker stuff, that’s really taking a big chance for peanuts, and I’d never done anything like that before, and I didn’t do it now. I finally went over to Bugs’s house and told him how I was working on that classy doll for him, and how I thought I might get the job done if only I could scrape up a fin for this brawl at the Country Club, and then I asked him if he thought his grandmother would be good for that much. He said, Jesus, no, it was a long time from last pension day, almost the end of the month, and he’d already got to his grandmother for all she could stand, so I said sure, thanks for nothing, and went away.
Walking along, I got to thinking, What if all of a sudden I’d just see a fin lying on the sidewalk in front of me, just see it lying there as big and green as a God-damn corn field, and I actually got to thinking about it so hard I got the idea that maybe I could make it happen just by thinking of it that way, so I closed my eyes and walked along a way with them closed, and then I opened them and looked down at the sidewalk, but there wasn’t any fin there, of course, and nothing like that ever happens except in some God-damn corny story where some jerk finds some money, a nickel or something, and runs it into a fortune and then spends the rest of his life telling other people what a hell of a guy he is and what bums they are for not doing the same thing.
Just to show you how things go sometimes, though, I finally got the fin with hardly any trouble at all, and that was because Thursday was the old man’s payday, and he got drunk at the tavern on the way home from work and passed out on the sofa in the living room in his clothes. As luck would have it, the old lady had gone over next door for a few minutes just before he came home, and I helped myself to a fin from his stinking pocket while he was flopped on the sofa, and that’s all there was to it. He was a pretty shrewd old bastard, though, and the next morning he missed the fin and accused the old lady of taking it. She said he was a damn liar, of course, which he was, and then she looked at me and said, “Wasn’t you home when your old man came in?” and I said, “Don’t go accusing me of swiping the God-damn lousy fin,” and she looked back at the old man and said, “You lost it, you drunken bum. What the hell you want to accuse us of stealing your money for?” You could see the old man wasn’t convinced of it, but there was always the chance it was true, so he let the matter drop and probably took the fin out of the grocery money later.
That afternoon at practice, we didn’t do anything but take turns shooting free-throws and tossing the ball around and stuff like that because we never went at it very hard the last practice before a game, and afterward we all went in the locker room and sat around on the God-damn hard benches while old Mulloy drew diagrams of plays and stuff on a blackboard with a piece of chalk. To tell the truth, I couldn’t see much sense to it, because once we got in a game we hardly ever used any of the plays but just ran like hell and banged the damn ball at the bucket, but I guess it made old Mulloy feel important to go through all that bull just the same. He’d be talking along about something, and all of a sudden he’d point his damn finger at someone like he was ready to pull the trigger, and he’d say real fast, “What would you do in these circumstances?” and then he’d go on to tell the circumstances, and whoever he’d pointed at had damn well better know what he was supposed to do or else get chewed. You could see from the way the bastard acted that it made him feel important as all hell, a real hot-shot coach and all that, but like I said, we hardly ever went in for any of that fancy crap in a game, and what’s more, he didn’t seem to give a damn whether we did or not, and all he’d do then was jump up and down on the God-damn bench and yell, “Run, run, run!” until you wanted to poke him right in his stinking mouth.
After he finished with the chalk-talk, which was what he called it, he started in with the old pepper crap, and that was even worse. The idea was to get us all steamed up over the game and ready to go out and give our all for the dear old school and such bull, and he began by telling us what a tough team this was we were going to play, and how we’d have to play like we’d never played before if we hoped to beat them, and at first he hadn’t had much hope, to tell the truth, but now he was sorry as hell he’d had so little faith, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it and say right out he was sorry, and he knew we weren’t going to hold it against him, or let him down, and he wasn’t going to say anything more about it, not a Goddamn word, but he knew we were going out there tomorrow night and win this game, and all in all it was just about the sloppiest crap you could ever hope to hear.
When it was all over and he let us go, I went over to old Tizzy Davis, because there was something that had been bothering me, and I wanted him to put me straight, but I hardly knew how to bring it up. I’d thought about it some and had decided that it would be best to be just sort of casual, so I said, “By the way, Tizzy, about this thing at the Club tomorrow night. I forgot to ask Marsha what the guys generally wear,” and he said, “Oh, these things are just little informal brawls. Most of us just wear something like what we ordinarily wear to school,” and so that was all right, a big relief, as a matter of fact, and if he’d said anything else I’d have been right up that old creek without a paddle.
I fooled around the house almost all day Saturday and started out for the school about two hours before time for the game to start, and the old man was home at the time and said, “Where the hell you off to now?”
“I’m off to school to play basketball, if you want to know, that’s where I’m off to,” I said, and he said, “I thought I told you to quit that God-damn foolishness,” and I said, “Who the hell pays any attention to what you say?”
“I’ll damn well show you whobetterpay some attention to what I say,” he said, “and I’ll tell you someth
ing else right now. You get home here early tonight and don’t go lousing around Beegie’s pool hall or bumming the streets, and I don’t want any other old bastard like old Beacon telling me you been talking filthy or doing some other God-damn thing to shame your family.”
I laughed right in his fat face and said, “Shame my family! If that’s not a belly laugh I never heard one. What the hell could I do that would shame this lousy family? Just tell me what I could do, and what’s more, I probably won’t be home until one or two o’clock, or maybe even three, because I’m going to a party at the Country Club.”
He looked at me and said, “Don’t be trying to impress me with any of your God-damn lies, because I know you’re a damn liar and wouldn’t tell the truth if you were getting paid for it by the hour,” and I said, “Who the hell’s trying to impress you? I don’t give enough of a damn about what you think to even bother thinking up a lie for you, and if you don’t believe I’m going to the Country Club, it’s all right with me, and you can go to hell as far as I’m concerned.”
He kept on looking at me, and I could tell he was beginning to believe I was telling the truth, and then he began to laugh sort of soft with his big sloppy beer-belly shaking up and down, and he said, “Well, damn! Ain’t he getting to be a big-shot, though! A regular God-damn plutocrat, going to the Country Club and everything!”
He kept on laughing that way, like he thought it was a hell of a good joke on the other people who went to the Country Club, which maybe it was, come to think of it, and I turned and started to leave again, but he stopped me before I could get out the door, and he’d quit laughing all of a sudden. “By the way,” he said, “where the hell you getting the money to go to the Country Club?” and his eyes were narrow and pretty mean, and I could see that he was remembering the fin that had disappeared from his stinking pocket, so I said in a hurry, “Who the hell needs money? You so God-damn ignorant you don’t know that a guest of someone whose old man is a member doesn’t have to pay for anything? I’m going with Marsha Davis, and no one has to pay for anything because her old man’s a member.”
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