Some of the kids laughed. He could make them laugh, and although he couldn’t make them like him, that was absolutely okay. They were dead-enders headed for dead-end marriages and dead-end jobs. They would raise dead-end kids and dandle dead-end grandkids before coming to their own dead ends in dead-end hospitals and nursing homes, rocketing off into darkness believing they had lived the American Dream and Jesus would meet them at the gates of heaven with the Welcome Wagon. Morris was meant for better things. He just didn’t know what they were.
Miss Todd – then about the age Morris would be when he and his cohorts broke into John Rothstein’s house – asked him to stay after class. Morris lounged splay-legged at his desk as the other kids went out, expecting Todd to write him a detention slip. It would not be his first for mouthing off in class, but it would be his first in an English class, and he was sort of sorry about that. A vague thought occurred to him in his father’s voice – You’re burning too many bridges, Morrie – and was gone like a wisp of steam.
Instead of giving him a detention, Miss Todd (not exactly fair of face but with a holy-shit body) reached into her bulging book-bag and brought out a paperback with a red cover. Sketched on it in yellow was a boy lounging against a brick wall and smoking a cigarette. Above him was the title: The Runner.
‘You never miss a chance to be a smartass, do you?’ Miss Todd asked. She sat on the desk next to him. Her skirt was short, her thighs long, her hose shimmery.
Morris said nothing.
‘In this case, I saw it coming. Which is why I brought this book today. It’s a good-news bad-news thing, my know-it-all friend. You don’t get detention, but you don’t get to choose, either. You get to read this and only this. It’s not on the schoolboard’s Approved List, and I suppose I could get in trouble for giving it to you, but I’m counting on your better nature, which I like to believe is in there somewhere, minuscule though it may be.’
Morris glanced at the book, then looked over it at Miss Todd’s legs, making no attempt to disguise his interest.
She saw the direction of his gaze and smiled. For a moment Morris glimpsed a whole future for them, most of it spent in bed. He had heard of such things actually happening. Yummy teacher seeks teenage boy for extracurricular lessons in sex education.
This fantasy balloon lasted perhaps two seconds. She popped it with her smile still in place. ‘You and Jimmy Gold will get along. He’s a sarcastic, self-hating little shit. A lot like you.’ She stood up. Her skirt fell back into place two inches above her knees. ‘Good luck with your book report. And the next time you peek up a woman’s skirt, you might remember something Mark Twain said: “Any idler in need of a haircut can look.”’
Morris slunk from the classroom with his face burning, for once not just put in his place but rammed into it and hammered flat. He had an urge to chuck the paperback down a sewer drain as soon as he got off the bus on the corner of Sycamore and Elm, but held onto it. Not because he was afraid of detention or suspension, though. How could she do anything to him when the book wasn’t on the Approved List? He held onto it because of the boy on the cover. The boy looking through a drift of cigarette smoke with a kind of weary insolence.
He’s a sarcastic, self-hating little shit. A lot like you.
His mother wasn’t home, and wouldn’t be back until after ten. She was teaching adult education classes at City College to make extra money. Morris knew she loathed those classes, believing they were far beneath her skill set, and that was just fine with him. Sit on it, Ma, he thought. Sit on it and spin.
The freezer was stocked with TV dinners. He picked one at random and shoved it in the oven, thinking he’d read until it was done. After supper he might go upstairs, grab one of his father’s Playboys from under the bed (my inheritance from the old man, he sometimes thought), and choke the chicken for a while.
He neglected to set the stove timer, and it was the stench of burning beef stew that roused him from the book a full ninety minutes later. He had read the first hundred pages, no longer in this shitty little postwar tract home deep in the Tree Streets but wandering the streets of New York City with Jimmy Gold. Like a boy in a dream, Morris went to the kitchen, donned oven gloves, removed the congealed mass from the oven, tossed it in the trash, and went back to The Runner.
I’ll have to read it again, he thought. He felt as if he might be running a mild fever. And with a marker. There’s so much to underline and remember. So much.
For readers, one of life’s most electrifying discoveries is that they are readers – not just capable of doing it (which Morris already knew), but in love with it. Hopelessly. Head over heels. The first book that does that is never forgotten, and each page seems to bring a fresh revelation, one that burns and exalts: Yes! That’s how it is! Yes! I saw that, too! And, of course, That’s what I think! That’s what I FEEL!
Morris wrote a ten-page book report on The Runner. It came back from Miss Todd with an A+ and a single comment: I knew you’d dig it.