Ham On Rye - Charles Bukowski [39]
I found him one day in the hall. I stopped him.
“You don’t look like shit to me,” I said. “How come everybody thinks you’re hot shit?”
Walden glanced over to his right and when I turned my head to look in that direction, he slid around me as if I were something from the sewer and then a moment later he was in his seat in the class.
Almost every day it was Miss Gredis showing it all and Richard thumping away and this guy Walden sitting there saying nothing and acting like he believed he was a genius. I got sick of it.
I asked some of the other guys, “Listen, do you really think Harry Walden is a genius? He just sits around in his pretty clothes and doesn’t say anything. What does that prove? We could all do that.”
They didn’t answer me. I couldn’t understand their feelings about this fucking guy. And it got worse. Word got out that Harry Walden was going to see Miss Gredis every night, that he was her favorite pupil, and that they were making love. It made me sick. I could just imagine him getting out of his delicate green and blue outfit, folding it across a chair, then climbing out of his orange satin shorts and sliding under the sheets where Miss Gredis cuddled his curly golden head on her shoulder and fondled it and other things as well.
It was whispered about by the girls who always seemed to know everything. And even though the girls didn’t particularly like Miss Gredis, they thought the situation was all right, that it was reasonable because Harry Walden was such a delicate genius and needed all the sympathy he could get.
I caught Harry Walden in the hall one more time.
“I’ll kick your ass, you son-of-a-bitch, you don’t fool me!”
Harry Walden looked at me. Then he looked over my shoulder and pointed and said, “What’s that over there?”
I looked around. When I looked back he was gone. He was sitting in the class safely surrounded by all the girls who thought he was a genius and who loved him.
There was more and more whispering about Harry Walden going over to Miss Gredis’ house at night and some days Harry wouldn’t even be in class. Those were the best days for me because I only had to deal with the thumping and not the golden curls and the adoration for that kind of stuff by all the little girls with their skirts and sweaters and starched gingham dresses. When Harry wasn’t there the little girls would whisper, “He’s just too sensitive…”
And Red Kirkpatrick would say, “She’s fucking him to death.”
One afternoon I walked into class and Harry Walden’s seat was empty. I figured he was just fucking-off as usual. Then the word drifted from desk to desk. I was always the last to know anything. It finally got to me: Harry Walden had committed suicide. The night before. Miss Gredis didn’t know yet. I looked over at his seat. He’d never sit there again. All those colorful clothes shot to hell. Miss Gredis finished roll call. She came and sat on the front desk, crossed her legs high. She had on a lighter shade of silk hose than ever before. Her skirt was hiked way back to her thighs.
“Our American culture,” she said, “is destined for greatness. The English language, now so limited and structured, will be reinvented and improved upon. Our writers will use what I like to think of, in my mind, as Americanese…”
Miss Gredis’ stockings were almost skin-colored. It was as if she were not wearing stockings at all, it was as if she were naked there in front of us, but since she wasn’t and only appeared to be, that made it better than ever.
“More and more we will discover our own truths and our own way of speaking, and this new voice will be uncluttered by old histories, old mores, old dead and useless dreams…”
“Thump, thump, thump…”
25
Curly Wagner picked out Morris Moscowitz. It was after school and eight or ten of us guys had heard about it and we walked out behind