Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! Read Online Free PDF Page B

Jingle added, “For a young man in love, you have no soul, Tucker. Now this is a love song. This has poetry, Tucker.”
    “Who said I was in love?” Tucker said. “I don’t happen to be.”
    His tone of voice, like Jingle’s posters, didn’t carry a lot of conviction.
    On the other hand, his pulse was normal, he slept well most nights, and he didn’t think of her all the time.
    He had some of the symptoms, he allowed … but not the actual disease.

FOUR
    T HE FIRST DAY OF December, all over Tucker’s school, mimeographed notices announced:
LET’S HEAR IT FOR THE FIFTIES!
    DRESS UP, DANCE, AND DO IT LIKE
    THEY DID IN THE 1950s.
    SONGS FROM THE FIFTIES—LIVE!
    REFRESHMENTS!
    FRIDAY, DECEMBER 10, IN THE RICHTER SCHOOL GYM; 8 O’CLOCK AT NIGHT.
    $1.00 SINGLE; $1.50 WITH DATE.
    Tucker took down one of the notices and wrote across the bottom: Natalia, want to go to this with me? T.
    The next afternoon while Dinky, Natalia, and Tucker were watching the 4:30 movie over at the Hockers’, Tucker passed her the note when Dinky wasn’t looking. Natalia took it into the bathroom to read, and Tucker tried to exercise Nader by throwing a balled-up empty pack of Kent cigarettes for her to retrieve. Dinky’s eyes were glued to I Died a Thousand Times , starring Jack Palance and Shelley Winters. She was working her way through a box of Hydrox cookies.
    When Natalia returned, she had written something under Tucker’s invitation.
I’ll go if Dinky has a date for it too.
    To Tucker’s mind, that was like Natalia saying she’d go if it snowed for three months straight in Biloxi, Mississippi, or if all the Republican members of Congress asked for asylum in Russia.
    Tucker Woolf had never had a date in his life, and besides feeling the unfairness of Natalia’s demand, he felt relief. He gave a shrug of his shoulders across the room in Natalia’s direction, as if to say, “Well, that’s the way the ball bounces, old girl.”
    Then the following day, P. John Knight got up in Creative Writing to read his poem called “Thanks to the United Nations.”
    P. John Knight was not a popular character at Richter School.
    The poem he stood up to read said a lot about P. John.
    Aren’t you glad the Chinese are in the U.N. now?
    Oh boy! And how!
    Who wants to live forever?
    Do you? Do I? Welcome, slant-eye.
    Aren’t you glad we’ll wake up in our beds,
    Someday taken over by the Reds?
    Who are also Yellow?
    Give a Chinese cheer: Chop!
    Give a cheer: Hip!
    Give a Chinese boo: Suey!
    Give a boo: Phooey!
    Give a two-timing U.N. cheer:
    Hip phooey! Chop suey! Yea!
    “Well,” said Mr. Baird, the instructor, when P. John sat down, “that’s more politics than poetry.”
    “All great poets mix politics with poetry,” P. John said. “Yevtushenko, Joel Oppenheimer, Pablo Neruda.”
    “Who’s Pablo Neruda?” Mr. Baird asked.
    P. John heaved an exasperated sigh. “He only won the Nobel Prize for 1971, Professor!”
    You had to hand it to P. John: he did know his facts.
    Mr. Baird said, “But your politics overwhelm your poetry.”
    “Nobody ever thinks so when a pinko puts anti-American sentiments into a poem,” said P. John. “My politics just aren’t your politics.”
    The truth was, P. John’s politics weren’t like anyone else’s at Richter School, and P. John himself wasn’t much like anyone in the school. He had a real old-fashioned haircut, nearly as short as a Marine boot’s, and he always wore double-breasted suits, old-style button-down shirts, and striped neckties. He was a year older than most of the students, but at sixteen he looked middle-aged.
    But it was not the way P. John dressed, and it was not P. John’s poem, which suddenly drew Tucker’s attention that afternoon in Creative Writing. It was something so basic about P. John that Tucker would have been inclined to ignore it altogether, if it hadn’t been for the Fifties dance.
    P. John Knight was a fat boy. He was nearly six feet, with red hair,