Always in the past, Mom had served as a bulwark against Pop’s extremes of family management, but she proved remiss in this emergency, a fact decidedly less puzzling in retrospect than it was at the time. Pop had behaved intelligently—instead of with his sporadic brilliance—throughout his partnership with Jake Harmon, and she was naturally inclined to regard his intense interest in me as a continuation of that intelligent behavior. Moreover, say what you will, it is difficult to dispute the judgment of a man who has made a million dollars.
I was finally impelled to dispute it, in fact to raise holy hell about it, when Pop took me to buy my school clothes, the chief item of which was a blue-serge knickerbocker suit with velvet-braided lapels and pearl buttons. I had not used any profanity in years—and never in front of Pop whose nearest approach to cursing was an occasional darn or gosh. But now I cut loose. Before I could be dragged out of the swank men’s clothing store, the swallow-tailed clerks were fleeing for cover, their manicured fingers stoppering their scarlet ears.
I was returned to the hotel and confined to my room. As further punishment, I was advised that I would not be allowed to accompany the family on a tour of the oil fields, but would remain in Fort Worth in the custody of Pa.
I advised the family—at the top of my lungs—that they could all go to hell.
Pa had joined us in Fort Worth with the announced intention of getting us settled, but actually, I am sure, as a way of getting away from Ma. He had given me none of the support I expected in my skirmishes with Pop, and I was thoroughly disgusted with him. Pa—the orphan—said that I was damned lucky to have a smart man like Pop looking after me. He said that it was every man’s right to make a damned fool of himself, and that my turn would come later.
I was disgusted with Pa. I felt that he had failed me sorely. Thus, the following morning, when he came into my room after the family’s departure, I told him to get the hell out.
“Have a smoke,” said Pa, tossing me a foot-long Pittsburgh stogie. “Got a little surprise for you.”
The surprise, or part of it, arrived right behind him: a white-jacketed waiter with a pitcher of boiling water, a bowl of lemons and sugar. Pa took a bottle of bootleg corn whiskey from his hip and mixed us two tremendous hot toddies.
“Kind of like old times, ain’t it?” he said, slanting his savagely humorous old eyes at me. “You remember that night out by the privy when—Now, what the hell you sniveling about, anyway?”
“I—n-nothing,” I said, choking back a sob.
“Light up, then. Drink up. Stop acting like a goddamned calf. Anything I hate to see it’s a fella cryin’ in good whiskey.”
I lit up and drank up. The steam from the toddies mingled with the clouds of cigar smoke, and the morning sunlight shone through it upon Pa’s bald head. It seemed to me he wore a halo.
“I tell you somethin’, Jimmie,” he said casually, freshening our drinks from the bottle. “We all got our own way of doin’ things, an’ that’s the way we got to do ’em. Ain’t no man can do a thing another fella’s way. Ain’t no use tryin’ to make him. He’ll just go his own way all the harder, an’ he’ll be your enemy besides.”
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 goddamned thing 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 damned 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 damned 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, damned 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 “baldhead” 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 responded 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 first-year high-school student in Texas. Being extremely praise-hungry, and anxious to shine in Pop’s eyes, I took advantage of that technicality.
Nowadays, it is no unusual thing for a twelve-year-old—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 unassimilated knowledge drilled into me by Pop. But I was sadly prepar
ed 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 passably 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 motherhood. Mock-innocent, 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 shell. 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 damned 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 not 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 hoarsely. “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—pass 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 classes, 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, so—s-so—I’M G-GOING C-CRAAA-ZY!”
Now and then, sometimes for the better part of a term, I escaped into the upper classes. 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 class. 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 boobery. 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.”