by John Irving
"Do I have b-b-bad breath, Garp?" Tinch asked.
"'Good' and 'bad' are matters of opinion, sir," Garp said.
"In your opinion, G-G-Garp?" Tinch said.
"In my opinion," Garp said, without batting an eye, "you've got the best breath of any teacher at this school." And he looked hard across the classroom at Benny Potter from New York--a born wise-ass, even Garp would agree--and he stared Benny's grin off Benny's face because Garp's eyes said to Benny that Garp would break Benny's neck if he made a peep.
And Tinch said, "Thank you, Garp," who won the writing prize, despite the note submitted with his last paper.
Mr. Tinch: I lied in class because I didn't want those other assholes to laugh at you. You should know, however, that your breath is really pretty bad. Sorry.
T. S. Garp
"You know w-w-what?" Tinch asked Garp when they were alone together, talking about Garp's last story.
"What?" Garp said.
"There's nothing I can d-d-do about my breath," Tinch said. "I think it's because I'm d-d-dying," he said, with a twinkle. "I'm r-r-rotting from the inside out!" But Garp was not amused and he watched for news of Tinch for years after his graduation, relieved that the old gentleman did not appear to have anything terminal.
Tinch would die in the Steering quadrangle one winter night of causes wholly unrelated to his bad breath. He was coming home from a faculty party, where it was admitted that he'd possibly had too much to drink, and he slipped on the ice and knocked himself unconscious on the frozen footpath. The night watchman did not find the body until almost dawn, by which time Tinch had frozen to death.
It is unfortunate that wise-ass Benny Potter was the first to tell Garp the news. Garp ran into Potter in New York, where Potter worked for a magazine. Garp's low opinion of Potter was enhanced by Garp's low opinion of magazines, and by Garp's belief that Potter always envied Garp for Garp's more significant output as a writer. "Potter is one of those wretches who has a dozen novels hidden in his drawers," Garp wrote, "but he wouldn't dare show them to anybody."
In Garp's Steering years, however, Garp was also not outgoing at showing his work around. Only Jenny and Tinch got to see his progress--and there was the one story he gave Helen Holm. Garp decided he wouldn't give Helen another story until he wrote one that was so good she wouldn't be able to say anything bad about it.
"Did you hear?" Benny Potter asked Garp in New York.
"What?" Garp said.
"Old Stench kicked off," Benny said. "He f-f-froze to death."
"What did you say?" Garp said.
"Old Stench," Potter said. Garp had never liked that nickname. "He got drunk and went wobbling home through the quad--fell down and cracked his noggin, and never woke up in the morning."
"You asshole," Garp said.
"It's the truth, Garp," Benny said. "It was fucking fifteen-below. Although," he added, dangerously, "I'd have thought that old furnace of a mouth of his would have kept him w-w-warm."
They were in the bar of a nice hotel, somewhere in the Fifties, somewhere between Park Avenue and Third; Garp never knew where he was when he was in New York. He was meeting someone else for lunch and had run into Potter, who had brought him here. Garp picked Potter up by his armpits and sat him on the bar.
"You little gnat, Potter," Garp said.
"You never liked me," Benny said.
Garp tipped Benny Potter backward on the bar so that the pockets of Potter's open suit jacket were dipped into the bar sink.
"Leave me alone!" Benny said. "You were always old Stench's favorite ass-wipe!"
Garp shoved Benny so that Benny's rump slouched into the bar sink; the sink was full of soaking glasses, and the water sloshed up on the bar.
"Please don't sit on the bar, sir," the bartender said to Benny.
"Jesus Christ, I'm being assaulted, you moron!" Benny said. Garp was already leaving and the bartender had to pull Benny Potter out of the sink and set him down, off the bar. "That son of a bitch, my ass is all wet!" Benny cried.
"Would you please watch your language here, sir?" the bartender said.
"My fucking wallet is soaked!" Benny said, wringing out the seat of his pants and holding up his sodden wallet to the bartender. "Garp!" Benny hollered, but Garp was gone. "You always had a lousy sense of humor, Garp!"
It is fair to say, especially in Garp's Steering days, that he was at least rather humorless about his wrestling and his writing--his favorite pastime and his would-be career.
* * *
--
"How do you know you're going to be a writer," Cushie Percy asked him once.
It was Garp's senior year and they were walking out of town along the Steering River to a place Cushie said she knew. She was home for the weekend from Dibbs. The Dibbs School was the fifth prep school for girls that Cushie Percy had attended; she'd started out at Talbot, in Helen's class, but Cushie had disciplinary problems and she'd been asked to leave. The disciplinary problems had repeated themselves at three other schools. Among the boys at Steering, the Dibbs School was famous--and popular--for its girls with disciplinary problems.
It was high tide on the Steering River and Garp watched an eight-oared shell glide out on the water; a sea gull followed it. Cushie Percy took Garp's hand. Cushie had many complicated ways of testing a boy's affection for her. Many of the Steering boys were willing to handle Cushie when they were alone with her, but most of them did not like to be seen demonstrating any affection for her. Garp, Cushie noticed, didn't care. He held her hand firmly; of course, they had grown up together, but she did not think they were very good or close friends. At least, Cushie thought, if Garp wanted what the others wanted, he was not embarrassed to be seen pursuing it. Cushie liked him for this.
"I thought you were going to be a wrestler," Cushie said to Garp.
"I am a wrestler," Garp said. "I'm going to be a writer."
"And you're going to marry Helen Holm," Cushie teased him.
"Maybe," Garp said; his hand went a little limp in hers. Cushie knew this was another humorless topic with him--Helen Holm--and she should be careful.
A group of Steering boys came up the river path toward them; they passed, and one of them called back, "What are you getting into, Garp?"
Cushie squeezed his hand. "Don't let them bother you," she said.
"They don't bother me," Garp said.
"What are you going to write about?" Cushie asked him.
"I don't know," Garp said.
He didn't even know if he was going to college. Some schools in the Midwest had been interested in his wrestling, and Ernie Holm had written some letters. Two places had asked to see him and Garp had visited them. In their wrestling rooms, he had not felt so much outclassed as he had felt outwanted. The college wrestlers seemed to want to beat him more than he wanted to beat them. But one school had made him a cautious offer--a little money, and no promises beyond the first year. Fair enough, considering he was from New England. But Ernie had told him this already. "It's a different sport out there, kid. I mean, you've got the ability--and if I do say so myself, you've had the coaching. What you haven't had is the competition. And you've got to be hungry for it, Garp. You've got to really be interested, you know."
And when he asked Tinch about where he should go to school, for his writing, Tinch had appeared at a typical loss. "Some g-g-good school, I guess," he said. "But if you're going to w-w-write," Tinch said, "won't you d-d-do it anywhere?"
"You have a nice body," Cushie Percy whispered to Garp, and he squeezed her hand back.
"So do you," he told her, honestly. She had, in fact, an absurd body. Small but wholly bloomed, a compact blossom. Her name, Garp thought, should not have been Cushman but Cushion--and since their childhood together, he had sometimes called her that. "Hey, Cushion, want to take a walk?" She said she knew a place.
"Where are you taking me?" Garp asked her.
"Ha!" she said. "You're taking me. I'm just showing you the way. And the place," she sa
id.
They went off the path by the part of the Steering River that long ago was called The Gut. A ship had been mired there once, but there was no visible evidence. Only the shore betrayed a history. It was at this narrow bend that Everett Steering had imagined obliterating the British--and here were Everett's cannons, three huge iron tubes, rusting into the concrete mountings. Once they had swiveled, of course, but the later-day town fathers had fixed them forever in place. Beside them was a permanent cluster of cannon balls, grown together in cement. The balls were greenish and red with rust, as if they belonged to a vessel long undersea, and the concrete platform where the cannons were mounted was now littered with youthful trash--beer cans and broken glass. The grassy slope leading down to the still and almost empty river was trampled, as if nibbled by sheep--but Garp knew it was merely pounded by countless Steering schoolboys and their dates. Cushie's choice of a place to go was not very original, though it was like her, Garp thought.
Garp liked Cushie, and William Percy had always treated Garp well. Garp had been too young to know Stewie Two, and Dopey was Dopey. Young Pooh was a strange, scary child, Garp thought, but Cushie's touching brainlessness was straight from her mother, Midge Steering Percy. Garp felt dishonest with Cushie for not mentioning what he took to be the utter assholery of her father, Fat Stew.
"Haven't you ever been here before?" Cushie asked Garp.
"Maybe with my mother," Garp said, "but it's been a while." Of course he knew what "the cannons" were. The pet phrase at Steering was "getting banged at the cannons"--as in "I got banged at the cannons last weekend," or "You should have seen old Fenley blasting away at the cannons." Even the cannons themselves bore these informal inscriptions: "Paul banged Betty, '58," and "M. Overton, '59, shot his wad here."
Across the languid river Garp watched the golfers from the Steering Country Club. Even far away, their ridiculous clothing looked unnatural against the green fairway and beyond the marsh grass that grew down to the mudflats. Their madras prints and plaids among the green-brown, gray-brown shoreline made them look like cautious and out-of-place land animals following their hopping white dots across a lake. "Jesus, golf is silly," Garp said. His thesis of games with balls and clubs, again; Cushie had heard it before and wasn't interested. She settled down in a soft place--the river below them, bushes around them, and over their shoulders the yawning mouths of the great cannons. Garp looked up into the mouth of the nearest cannon and was startled to see the head of a smashed doll, one glassy eye on him.
Cushie unbuttoned his shirt and lightly bit his nipples.
"I like you," she said.
"I like you, Cushion," he said.
"Does it spoil it?" Cushie asked him. "Us being old friends?"
"Oh no," he said. He hoped they would hurry ahead to "it" because it had never happened to Garp before, and he was counting on Cushie for her experience. They kissed wetly in the well-pounded grass; Cushie was an open-mouthed kisser, artfully jamming her hard little teeth into his.
Honest, even at this age, Garp tried to mumble to her that he thought her father was an idiot.
"Of course he is," Cushie agreed. "Your mother's a little strange, too, don't you think?"
Well, yes, Garp supposed she was. "But I like her anyway," he said, most faithful of sons. Even then.
"Oh, I like her, too," Cushie said. Thus having said what was necessary, Cushie undressed. Garp undressed, but she asked him, suddenly, "Come on, where is it?"
Garp panicked. Where was what? He'd thought she was holding it.
"Where's your thing?" Cushie demanded, tugging what Garp thought was his thing.
"What?" Garp said.
"Oh wow, didn't you bring any?" Cushie asked him. Garp wondered what he was supposed to have brought.
"What?" he said.
"Oh, Garp," Cushie said. "Don't you have any rubbers?"
He looked apologetically at her. He was only a boy who'd lived his whole life with his mother, and the only rubber he'd seen had been slipped over the doorknob of their apartment in the infirmary annex, probably by a fiendish boy named Meckler--long since graduated and gone on to destroy himself.
Still, he should have known: Garp had heard much conversation of rubbers, of course.
"Come here," Cushie said. She led him to the cannons. "You've never done this, have you?" she asked him. He shook his head, honest to his sheepish core. "Oh, Garp," she said. "If you weren't such an old friend." She smiled at him, but he knew she wouldn't let him do it, now. She pointed into the mouth of the middle cannon. "Look," she said. He looked. A jewel-like sparkle of ground glass, like pebbles he imagined might make up a tropical beach; and something else--not so pleasant. "Rubbers," Cushie told him.
The cannon was crammed with old condoms. Hundreds of prophylactics! A display of arrested reproduction. Like dogs urinating around the borders of their territory, the boys of the Steering School had left their messes in the mouth of the mammoth cannon guarding the Steering River. The modern world had left its stain upon another historical landmark.
Cushie was getting dressed. "You don't know anything," she teased him, "so what are you going to write about?" He had suspected this would pose a problem for a few years--a kink in his career plans.
He was about to get dressed but she made him lie down so that she could look at him. "You are beautiful," she said. "And it's all right." She kissed him.
"I can go get some rubbers," he said. "It wouldn't take long, would it? And we could come back."
"My train leaves at five," Cushie said, but she smiled sympathetically.
"I didn't think you had to be back at any special time," Garp said.
"Well, even Dibbs has some rules, you know," Cushie said; she sounded hurt by her school's lax reputation. "And besides," she said, "you see Helen. I know you do, don't you?"
"Not like this," he admitted.
"Garp, you shouldn't tell anybody everything," Cushie said.
It was a problem with his writing, too; Mr. Tinch had told him.
"You're too serious, all the time," Cushie said, because for once she was in a position where she could lecture him.
On the river below them an eight-oared shell sleeked through the narrow channel of water remaining in The Gut and rowed toward the Steering boathouse before the tide went out and left them without enough water to get home on.
Then Garp and Cushie saw the golfer. He had come down through the marsh grass on the other side of the river; with his violet madras slacks rolled up above his knees, he waded into the mudflats where the tide had already receded. Ahead of him, on the wetter mudflats, lay his golf ball, perhaps six feet from the edge of the remaining water. Gingerly, the golfer stepped forward, but the mud now rose above his calf; using his golf club for balance, he dipped the shiny head into the muck and swore.
"Harry, come back!" someone called to him. It was his golfing partner, a man dressed with equal vividness, knee-length shorts of a green that no grass ever was--and yellow knee socks. The golfer called Harry grimly stepped closer to his ball. He looked like a rare aquatic bird pursuing its egg in an oil slick.
"Harry, you're going to sink in that shit!" his friend warned him. It was then that Garp recognized Harry's partner: the man in green and yellow was Cushie's father, Fat Stew.
"It's a new ball!" Harry yelled; then his left leg disappeared, up to the hip; trying to turn back, Harry lost his balance and sat down. Quickly, he was mired to his waist, his frantic face very red above his powder-blue shirt--bluer than any sky. He waved his club but it slipped out of his hand and sailed into the mud, inches from his ball, impossibly white and forever out of Harry's reach.
"Help!" Harry screamed. But on all fours he was able to move a few feet toward Fat Stew and the safety of shore. "It feels like eels!" he cried. He moved forward on the trunk of his body, using his arms the way a seal on land will use its flippers. An awful slorping noise pursued him through the mudflats, as if beneath the mud some mouth was gasping to suck him in.
Garp and Cushie stifled their laughter in the bushes. Harry made his last lunge for shore. Stewart Percy, trying to help, stepped on the mudflats with just one foot and promptly lost a golf shoe and a yellow sock to the suction.
"Ssshhh! And lie still," Cushie demanded. They both noticed Garp was erect. "Oh, that's too bad," Cushie whispered, looking sadly at his erection, but when he tried to tug her down in the grass with him, she said, "I don't want babies, Garp. Not even yours. And yours might be a Jap baby, you know," Cushie said. "And I surely don't want one of those."
"What?" Garp said. It was one thing not to know about rubbers, but what's this about Jap babies? he wondered.
"Ssshhh," Cushie whispered. "I'm going to give you something to write about."
The furious golfers were already slashing their way through the marsh grass, back to the immaculate fairway, when Cushie's mouth nipped the edge of Garp's tight belly button. Garp was never sure if his actual memory was jolted by that word Jap, and if at that moment he truly recalled bleeding in the Percys' house--little Cushie telling her parents that "Bonkie bit Garp" (and the scrutiny the child Garp had undergone in front of the naked Fat Stew). It may have been then that Garp remembered Fat Stew saying he had Jap eyes, and a view of his personal history clicked into perspective; regardless, at this moment Garp resolved to ask his mother for more details than she had offered him up to now. He felt the need to know more than that his father had been a soldier, and so forth. But he also felt Cushie Percy's soft lips on his belly, and when she took him suddenly into her warm mouth, he was very surprised and his sense of resolve was as quickly blown as the rest of him. There under the triple barrels of the Steering family cannons, T. S. Garp was first treated to sex in this relatively safe and nonreproductive manner. Of course, from Cushie's point of view, it was nonreciprocal, too.
They walked back along the Steering River holding hands.
"I want to see you next weekend," Garp told her. He resolved he would not forget the rubbers.
"I know you really love Helen," Cushie said. She probably hated Helen Holm, if she really knew her at all. Helen was such a snob about her brains.
"I still want to see you," Garp said.
"You're nice," Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. "And you're my oldest friend." But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.