Ham On Rye - Charles Bukowski [35]
Of course, after that we never studied our homework, and that was all right until the day Mr. Stanhope gave us our first examination.
“Shit,” said Peter Mangalore out loud, “what are we going to do?”
Peter was the guy with the 10-incher, soft.
“You’ll never have to work for a living,” said the guy who looked like Jack Dempsey. “This is our problem.”
“Maybe we ought to burn the school down,” said Red Kirkpatrick.
“Shit,” said a guy from the back of the room, “every time I get an ‘F’ my father pulls out one of my fingernails.”
We all looked at our examination sheets. I thought about my father. Then I thought about Lilly Fischman. Lilly Fischman, I thought, you are a whore, an evil woman, wiggling your body in front of us and singing like that, you will send us all to hell.
Stanhope was watching us.
“Why isn’t anybody writing? Why isn’t anybody answering the questions? Does everybody have a pencil?”
“Yeah, yeah, we all got pencils,” one of the guys said.
Lilly sat up in front, right by Mr. Stanhope’s desk. We saw her open her biology textbook and look up the answer to the first question. That was it. We all opened up our textbooks. Stanhope just sat there and watched us. He didn’t know what to do. He began to sputter. He sat there a good five minutes, then he jumped up. He ran back and forth up and down the center aisle of the room.
“What are you people doing? Close those textbooks! Close those textbooks!”
As he ran by, the students would close their books only to open them again when he had run past.
Baldy was in the seat next to mine, laughing. “He’s an asshole! Oh, what an old asshole!”
I felt a little sorry for Stanhope but it was either him or me. Stanhope stood behind his desk and screamed, “All textbooks must be closed or I will flunk the entire class!”
Then Lilly Fischman stood up. She pulled her skirt up and yanked at one of her silk stockings. She adjusted the garter, we saw white flesh. Then she pulled at and adjusted the other stocking. Such a sight we had never seen, nor had Stanhope ever seen anything like it. Lilly sat down and we all finished the exam with our textbooks open. Stanhope sat behind his desk, utterly defeated.
Another guy we jerked around was Pop Farnsworth. It began the first day in Machine Shop. He said, “Here we learn by doing. We will begin right now. You will each take an engine apart and put it back together, until it is in working order, during the semester. There are charts on the wall and I will answer your questions. You will also be shown movies about how an engine works. But right now please begin to dismantle your engines. The tools are on your workshelf.”
“Hey, Pop, how about the movies first?” some guy asked.
“I said, ‘Begin your project!’”
I don’t know where they got all those engines. They were greasy and black and rusted. They looked really dismal.
“Fuck,” said some guy, “this one is a hunk of clogged shit.”
We stood over our engines. Most of the guys reached for monkey wrenches. Red Kirkpatrick took a screwdriver and scraped it slowly along the top of his engine carefully creating a black ribbon of grease two feet long.
“Come on, Pop, how about a movie? We just got out of gym, our asses are dragging! Wagner had us doing the hop, skip and jump like a bunch of frogs!”
“Begin your assignment as requested!”
We started in. It was senseless. It was worse than Music Appreciation. Some clanking of tools could be heard and some heavy breathing.
“FUCK!” hollered Harry Henderson, “I’VE JUST SKINNED MY WHOLE GOD-DAMNED KNUCKLE! THIS IS NOTHING BUT FUCKING WHITE SLAVERY!”
He wrapped a handkerchief tenderly around his right hand and watched the blood soak through. “Shit,” he said.
The rest of us kept trying. “I’d rather stick my head up an elephant’s cunt,” said Red Kirkpatrick.
Jack Dempsey threw his wrench to the floor. “I quit,” he said, “do anything you want to me, I quit. Kill me. Cut my balls off. I quit.”
He walked over and leaned against a wall. He folded his arms and looked down at his shoes.
The situation seemed truly terrible. There