Bad Boy Part 4

I nodded my understanding, although I was far from agreeing with his doctrine. Pa went on to remark that while other people had their ways, he also had his, and it was no more than just and proper that he should pursue that way since I had been left in his charge.

"In other words," he concluded, "anyone that thinks you're going to tag around with me in that outfit your Pop bought you has got another G.o.dd.a.m.ned think coming."

He gave me another stogie and urged me to help myself to a second toddy. Then, he left the room, returning a few minutes later with one of his "uniforms"-complete even to the wide-brimmed black hat and Congress gaiters. All that was missing was the cane, and Pa promised to pick one up for me if I felt too naked without it.

Happily, the stogie lodged in the corner of my mouth, I dressed.

The hat and the gaiters had to be stuffed with paper to be wearable. And since Pa stood six feet to my five and weighed two hundred pounds to my one-ten, the suit was a trifle large. But this difficulty was easily solved-to our satisfaction at least. The pants legs were rolled up and under for a few inches, likewise the coat sleeves. A few pins here and there and the job was done.

True, the seat of the pants bagged to my knees, but the coat reached below them. One hand washed the other, to use Pa's metaphor. I looked fine, he declared, and no one but a d.a.m.ned fool would think otherwise. So, equipped with fresh stogies, we sallied forth.

During my long residence in Fort Worth, I often felt that it was cursed with more than its share of d.a.m.ned fools. But it was a western city, and peculiarities of dress went more unmarked than otherwise. Thus, while I drew a number of startled glances, no one, d.a.m.ned fool or otherwise, said or did anything about me.

Pa and I ate a whopping breakfast of steak, eggs and hot cakes, and only once did he see fit to criticize me. That was when he observed me eating from the sharp edge of my knife, and he pointed out the danger of it, suggesting that I use the reverse edge instead.

After breakfast we went to a pool hall where Pa beat me five games of slop pool and I beat him two. We returned to the hotel, then, for a few before-lunch drinks, and following lunch we went to a penny arcade.

Pa had brought the bottle with him, and he became quite rambunctious when "A Night With A Paris Cutie" did not come up to his expectations. He caned the machine. I think he would have caned the arcade proprietor, but that shrewd gentleman wisely gave him no back talk. Instead, he returned Pa's coins and led him out to the sidewalk. He pointed to a burlesque house across and down the street.

"Why look at pictures," he inquired, "when you can see the real thing?"

"Well, now," said Pa, greatly mollified. "Maybe you got something there, friend."

Fort Worth had a number of burlesque houses at that time, and we were able to obtain choice seats on the front or "baidhead" row. Except for three brief and alternate absences, we stayed there until the house closed at midnight.

Those absences? Well, first I went outside to buy a cane so that I could hook the girls on the ramp as Pa did. Then, Pa went out for a fresh supply of whiskey. Then, I went out for a carton of coffee and sandwiches.

It was a wonderfully satisfying day. Pa had given a bottle to the ushers and sent a couple of others backstage, and in that place he and I could do no wrong. We hooked the girls' garments until they were reduced to near nudity. Pa climbed upon the ramp and chased them backstage. Yet they respondcd with laughter and joyous shrieks, and occasionally one would stoop swiftly and plant a kiss on Pa's head.

Each of the succeeding three days, at the end of which the family returned, was a reasonable facsimile of that first day. Hot toddies in the morning, then a pool game, then a burlesque house, with drinks and meals being imbibed at strategic intervals. Also much talk from Pa, much advice delivered in his casual back-handed fashion.

I am afraid that most of what he said was wasted upon me. But I was imbued with a little of his wisdom, at least briefly. I gave Pop no further argument about the clothes, and I submitted silently if sullenly to his criticisms. For a time, I was docile.

Then we bought a house and Pa returned to Nebraska and I started to school.

Texas had only eleven grades of school as compared with the twelve in Other states. Thus, as an eighth-grade student in the Oklahoma schools, I was technically a firstyear high-school student in Texas. Being extremely praisehungry, and anxious to shine in Pop's eyes, I took advantage of that technicality.

Nowadays, it is no unusual thing for a twelve-yearold-and I was still twelve-to enter high school. But it was unusual at that time. More important, in my case, it was completely unjustifiable.

I had read voraciously and far in advance of my years, and I was a walking compendium of largely una.s.similated knowledge drilled into me by Pop. But I was sadly prepared for the inelastic high-school curriculum. In our various moves from place to place, I had been absent from grammar school practically as much as I had attended. Now, I was missing a whole year. I knew nothing of cube and square root and many other things upon which the high-school subjects were predicated.

Despite the sorry state of my elementary schooling, I think I might have done pa.s.sably in the higher grades if I could have put my heart into it. I have almost always managed to do the things I really cared about doing. Similarly, however, and doubtless regrettably, I can do nothing at all if I do not care. And I become uncaring very quickly if I am prodded or driven, or if the people involved are distasteful to me.

To put the last thing first, the Texans are distasteful-or so I soon convinced myself. I studied their mannerisms and mores, and in my twisted outlook they became Mongoloid monsters. I saw all their bad and no offsetting good.

Texans made boast of their insularism; they bragged about such things as never having been outside the state or the fact that the only book in their house was the Bible. Texans did not need to work to improve their characters as Pop was constantly pressing me to do. All Texans were born with perfect characters, and these became pluperfect as their owners drank the unrivaled Texas water, breathed the wondrous Texas air and trod the holy Texas soil.

Texas, it appeared, had formed all but a minuscule part of the Confederacy, and as such had slapped the troops of Sherman silly and sent Grant's groaning to their graves. Singlehanded-almost, anyway-it had thrashed the bully, North. Then, as a generous though intrinsically meaningless gesture, it had conceded defeat, thus ending the awful bloodshed and preserving the Union.

Just as all Texas males were omnipotent, invincible and of irreproachable character, so were all Texas women superbly beautiful and utterly virginal. And woe to anyone who hinted the contrary. Being of an open mind (by my own admission), I was willing to concede that the Texas female was probably somewhat more personable than a Ubangi, but I would make no concessions on the second score. I delighted in pointing out the historic incompatibility of virginity with wife- and mother-hood. Mockinnocent, I demanded that the peculiar Texas situation be explained to me. As a rule, my heretical quizzing was rewarded at this point with a punch in the nose; if not, I would extend the questioning into the sacrosanct realm of Texas sweethearts and sisters.

That, invariably, would get me not one punch but a dozen.

Anything that a Texan might be sensitive about or hold sacred, I jeered at. There was no trick too low for me if it would discomfit the Texans.

I recall-and it makes me squirm to do it-the pleased astonishment of the coach when I applied for a place on the high-school track team. How unselfishly delighted he was that I was at last coming out of my sh.e.l.l. I recall his almost tearful joy as I skimmed tirelessly and swiftly around the track-a half mile, mile, mile-and-a-half, two miles. I was a natural-born two-miler, he declared-rangy, wiry, long legged. I was the best two-miler he had ever seen, and he hugged me ecstatically. The two-mile event was in the bag. If only he had a few more lads like me!

It was a d.a.m.ned good thing for him that he didn't have any more like me, for, while I represented our school in the intramural two-mile race, I did not run it.

I trotted up in front of the grandstand, sat down in the middle of the track and lighted a cigarette.

Only my tender years, I suspect, saved me from being lynched.

12.

I had nor completely plumbed the abyss of ignominy when I came under the influence of a Boy Scout leader, and for a time my descent was checked. Then, suddenly and inexplicably, he became cool and critical, and I resumed my career of making everyone else as miserable as I was.

Years later, when I was shaking out of the grandfather of all hangovers, Pop tried to get at the root of my trouble.

"I just can't understand it," he complained. "I can't see how it started. You were always such a bright, likeable, willing youngster. So well-balanced and adaptable."

"I was, huh?" I laughed hoa.r.s.ely. "Well, well."

"Of course you were! Why, your scoutmaster made a special trip to my office to tell me about you. He said you were the finest boy in his troop."

"Don't kid me," I said. "That guy got me to liking him, then he turned on me and he never gave me a pleasant word from then on."

"Now, I wonder why he did that." Pop frowned in honest puzzlement. "I believe I did tell him that praise could be very bad for a boy, and that I hoped you wouldn't acquire a swelled head. But surely-"

Well.

I was easily the most unpopular student in school. Also, it goes without saying, I was the poorest student. I had read all the standard historians, Gibbon, Wells, even Herodotus, yet I could not-rather, would not-pa.s.s the Texas history courses. I had read a complete twelve-volume botanical encyclopedia, but I failed in botany. I had read Ibanez's Mare Nostrum as well as some of Alarcon's shorter plays in their original language, yet I failed in Spanish. I had sold fillers to the pulp periodicals and brief humorous squibs to such magazines as Judge, but I failed in English. Most thoroughly, I failed in algebra and geometry, two subjects which struck me as so wholly nonsensical that they were beneath, beneath contempt-if you follow my meaning.

In one of my softer moments, I proposed a bargain to my math teacher: if she would prove to me that her chosen subjects were not as stupid as I claimed, then I would study them. She did not take me up on the offer, and she seemed very embittered by it. The good woman gave me what is doubtless the lowest grade ever meted out to a student-not just a zero, but zero-minus.

I was a high-school freshman at twelve. Almost six years later I was still a high-school freshman. From being the youngest I became the oldest, from being a beardless stripling I grew into manhood (junior grade). Strangers to the school often mistook me for a member of the faculty.

I was expelled and suspended so many times for disobedience, refusing to study, cutting cla.s.ses, playing truant, et cetera, that I lost track of them. So also did the school. Suspensions were piled upon expulsions and expulsions upon suspensions, so that the harried records clerk never knew when I was legitimately present or illegally absent. Along toward the last, just before she gave up the unequal struggle with my status, I overheard the tag end of her plea to one of my teachers, ". . . please do not suspend him until he is reinstated from expulsion so I can suspend him as of last month so I can reinstate him to be expelled, sos-so-I'M G-GOING C-CRAAA-ZY!"

Now and then, sometimes for the better part of a term, I escaped into the upper cla.s.ses. But inevitably my scholastic record would catch up with me, and I would be returned to the freshman fold. One term, having received so many lectures that I had begun to fear for my hearing, I decided to try to reform. I promoted myself into the senior cla.s.s. There, where I rightfully should have been had I behaved as I should have, I was polite to the teachers and I studied as I had never studied before. My grades soared higher and higher. As the end of the term neared, I was placed in that select group of students whose marks were so good that they were excused from final examinations.

When finally they were apprised of my status, my teachers were incredulous. They had had no dealings with me before that term, and they could not believe that I was the James Thompson who had established an all-time record for boorishness and b.o.o.bery. Unfortunately, there was indisputable proof that the onerous and ornery James was one and the same with theirs. So, since I lacked the prerequisite courses, my brilliant term's work availed me nothing. I received no credit hours for it.

I was right back where I had started, still a freshman.

Despite my chagrin and disappointment, I did not feel that my work had been entirely wasted. For one thing, I had rid myself of a worrisome suspicion that I was as stupid as most people thought. For another I had been made to see the inexorable crux of my problem.

Obviously, mere study and better behavior were not going to get me out of high school. Not, that is, within a reasonable time. No matter how hard I studied nor how well I behaved, I would still have to spend four more years in school on top of the approximately six years I had already served. The records would force me to.

So there was the problem, not in me, as I saw it, but in the records.

Something would have to be done about them.

At this time, and for some time prior to it, I was employed as a night bellboy in a large hotel. The list of my acquaintances extended into places which, in my present pious state, gives me shivers to think about. A Square Sam myself, I was known to be "strictly okay" and a "right kid." In no time at all I was in touch with a burglar, explaining my problem and asking his help on a fee basis.

"I dunno, kid," he said, scratching his head doubtfully. "I'd like to help you out, but-well, I just dunno."

"But it's a cinch," I said. "The stuff isn't in a safe. All you have to do is pick the locks on a couple doors. Then, you get rid of my record card and fill in one of their blanks. I'll tell you just what to put on it, and-"

"I don't know nothing about those things, kid. I'd foul it up for you, sure."

"Don't do anything to it, then. Just get rid of the record and bring me one of the blanks and-"

"Huh-uh. I go into a place once, I'm through with it. I don't go back no more. Anyway, suppose they look for that card and it ain't there. They'd come down on you like a ton of bricks, kid."

"Well"-I hesitated-"how about this? Take someone with you that-"

"Look, kid!" He held up a hand. "You just don't do things that way. A guy's a penman, he don't do nothing else. He wouldn't touch a burglary for love or money. There's only one way to do this job. Get to the party that keeps the records. Put a fix in with her."

"She's not on the take," I said glumly. "I know that dame!"

"Well," he shrugged, "that's the way you'll have to swing it. If you can't do it from the inside, you just ain't gonna get it done."

I left him disconsolately, all the more depressed because I knew he was right. A new record card, filled out in a hand wholly dissimilar to that of the other cards, would be d.a.m.nably incriminating. Even with a fix in, the crime was certain to be spotted. For as long as school was in session the cards were referred to, and there were certain teachers who knew my record by heart.

I had not one problem, then, but two. To do the job from the inside, and to do it right at the close of the school term. Thus, by the time there was again occasion to refer to that card, I would be safely out of reach, my sins would have become dim in the minds of the authorities, and any long-memoried snoop who sought to make trouble would find his contentions impossible to prove.

It was a large order, one seemingly impossible to fill. Yet fill it I must or become the world's only senile schoolboy.

So fill it I did. And I shall tell you how I did it a little later.

Meanwhile, let us move back in the story, taking its events in as proper a sequence as their general impropriety will permit.

13.

Pop's luck went sour almost from the day he set foot in Texas. The fortune which I was to inherit shrank at the rate of almost four hundred thousand dollars a year. I naturally thought it was a h.e.l.l of a note to be losing all that dough without so much as a soda to show for it, but I was more concerned with certain issues tangential to the main one. Briefly, as I discussed them with Pop, they were about as follows: First of all, was a man who had made such a thorough screw-up of his own affairs a suitable mentor for me? (I did not think so.) Second, with him losing money at the rate of a couple thousand dollars a week, was there any sense in my knocking myself out for a pittance on some part-time job? (I did not think so.) Finally, since I apparently would have no dough to look after, wasn't all this Spartan training I was undergoing pretty d.a.m.ned stupid? (I thought it was.) I was not trying to be snide or facetious, and I was irritated and bewildered that Pop should think I was. I pointed out that if I wanted to be smart-alecky or nasty, I could do a heck of a lot better than that. ("Just ask anyone, Pop.") But Pop was as near to being furious as I have ever seen him.

Addressing me as "sirrah," he let it be known that I was pretty poor comfort for a man no longer young whose life's gleanings were slipping through his fingers, never to be grasped again. He said that when he was my age he had done such and such and so and so, and all I could do was get into trouble and sa.s.s my betters. He said that I was completely irresponsible and out-of-hand, and that the remedy lay in work and more work. He had been too easygoing with me, he said, but now the old free and easy days were over.

I was to study every night from dinner until bedtime. Also, since I had chosen to quit my part-time job as a soda jerk, I would find "suitable" employment on the weekends.

The first ordinance did not bother me particularly. I was no more popular in the neighborhood than I was elsewhere, and normally remained indoors at night for reasons connected with my health. I did not study, naturally, but the fact was difficult to prove. I was always writing something. I always had a half-dozen books spread in front of me. They never had anything to do with my lessons, but Pop would have been the first to argue the fact. The Prince, to his way of thinking, was a splendid and necessary adjunct to the study of civics. So also was there an indisputable relationship between Schopenhauer and sociology, Malthus and mathematics, and Lycurgus and commercial law.

It was easy, then, to meet Pop's "study" requirements. But finding part-time work was something else again. Such employment was difficult to find in that day, and it paid very little when one did find it. It will seem incomprehensible to our contemporary youth, who sneer at offers of a five-dollar fee for mowing a lawn, but my wage as a soda jerk had been five dollars for an approximate thirty-hour week.

Pop was a firm believer in the adage that there is always work for those who want it, and when I found none in the time allotted me, he supplied it. He bought a ladder, brushes, and a supply of paint and set me to work painting the house.

Now, while I showed little liking for useful employment, it does not necessarily follow that I liked useless work any better. And this was worse than useless. The house was only a few months old. It stood in need of paint much less than I. Disgusted and resentful, I did the job at the rate of a few inches a day, painting over and over the same places. The end effect, naturally, was that of a checker board, and the whole place had to be done over by professional painters.

We lived in an unincorporated suburb of Fort Worth. Like our neighbors-a meat packer, a steel magnate and another oil man-we had bought the lots surrounding ours, and our total land holdings were probably an acre. Pop now caused a barn to be built on this surplus land, and furnished it with two purebred Jerseys. And I, I was advised, was in the dairy business.

Since we were outside the city limits, our neighbors were without legal recourse. Mom, her frugal soul mollified by the prospect of free milk for the household, did no more than hint that Pop had become a hopeless lunatic. I protested, of course, bitterly, profanely and continuously. And knowing something of Pop you will know how little my protests accomplished.

I was to have full charge of the cows-"a free hand," as Pop put it. The family would receive its milk free, the remainder would be distributed through a house-to-house milk route, which would be "no trouble at all" for me to establish. I would be allowed to keep any monies remaining-after the care and feeding of the cows had been paid for.

"It's a wonderful opportunity for you," said Pop. "You should be very grateful."

I said something that sounded like "ship."

Not that I gave a d.a.m.n really, but there were no profits from the business. Jerseys are not the hardiest breed of cattle, and one visit from a veterinarian consumed the returns from a week's sale of milk. Too, while customers were fairly plentiful in the beginning, they did not continue so. They seemed alarmed by a milkman who lost no opportunity to declare that he would be fried with onions sooner than touch a drop of that "blank blank triple-blank Jersey juice."

I put up with the dairy until summer. Then, being told that I would have to keep the cows staked out during the day-move them around on a tether from one vacant lot to another-I went down to the railroad yards and caught a northbound freight.

I got as far as Kansas before I was apprehended and returned.

I waited a few days, then caught a freight southward.

I was brought back from Houston.

Pop sold the cows.

I was made to feel, of course, that I had behaved very badly. The family had been put to much expense and trouble, on my account, and the only return I would give them was insolence and shiftlessness.

I was bewildered by this att.i.tude, and still am. Even more now than I was at the time. I have three children, one a fifteen-year-old boy. I think they are pretty good kids, but honesty compels me to say that no one of them has ever made a bed, washed a dish or swept a floor without violent protest. Moreover, they commonly refer to their mother and me as "nuts" or "screwy" and they frequently suggest that we "turn blue" or "stop breathing" or otherwise end our patent misery.

You see, when these children were quite young we had an elderly man living with us. This man would not let the children lift a finger to any task, reproaching us scornfully and speaking darkly of "child slaves." He would not let us reprove them, no matter what their misdeeds. He sternly ruled down the suggestions that treats should be withheld for bad behavior, and that allowances should be earned with household ch.o.r.es. Naturally, the kids got pretty spoiled.

Who was this man, you ask? Who was the man who encouraged our children in insolence, who constantly bawled us out for failing to swallow his dictum that kids were kids and should only be addressed with words of praise?

Who?

Pop.