Indignation Read Online Free PDF Page A

Christ’s sake!”
    “Getting sick,” said Flusser, adding to the smile a small derisive laugh, “would do you a world of good.”
    “He’s crazy!” I shouted at the other two. “Everything he says is crazy!”
    “You destroy Beethoven’s Quartet in F Major,” said Flusser, “and I’m the one who’s crazy.”
    “Knock it off, Bert,” said one of the other boys. “Shut up and let him go to sleep.”
    “After what the barbarian has done to my record?”
    “Tell him you’ll replace the record,” the boy said to me. “Tell him you’ll go downtown and buy hima new one. Go ahead, tell him, so we can all go back to bed.”
    “I’ll buy you a new one,” I said, seething at the injustice of it all.
    “Thank you,” Flusser said. “Thank you so much. You really are a nice boy, Marcus. Irreproachable. Marcus the well-washed, neatly dressed boy. You do the right thing in the end, just like Mama Aurelius taught you.”
    I replaced the record out of what I earned waiting tables in the taproom of the inn. I did not like the job. The hours were far shorter than those I put in for my father at the butcher shop and yet, because of the din and the excessive drinking and the stink of beer and cigarette smoke that pervaded the place, the work turned out to be more tiring and, in its way, as disgusting as the worst things I had to do at the butcher shop. I myself didn’t drink beer or anything else alcoholic, I’d never smoked, and I’d never tried by shouting and singing at the top of my voice to make a dazzling impression on girls—as did any number of inebriates who brought their dates to the inn on Friday and Saturday nights. There were “pinning”parties held almost weekly in the taproom to celebrate the informal engagement of a Winesburg boy to a Winesburg girl by his presenting her with his fraternity pin for her to wear to class on the front of her sweater or blouse. Pinned as a junior, engaged as a senior, and married upon graduation—those were the innocent ends pursued by most of the Winesburg virgins during my own virginal tenure there.
    There was a narrow cobblestone alleyway that ran back of the inn and the neighboring shops that fronted on Main Street, and students were in and out of the inn’s rear door all evening long either to vomit or to be off alone to try to feel up their girlfriends and dry-hump them in the dark. To break up the necking sessions, every half hour or so one of the town’s police cars would cruise slowly along the alleyway with its brights on, sending those desperate for an outdoor ejaculation scurrying for cover inside the inn. With rare exceptions, the girls at Winesburg were either wholesome-looking or homely, and they all appeared to know how to behave properly to perfection (which is to say, they appeared not to know how to misbehave or how to do anything that was considered improper), sowhen they got drunk, instead of turning raucous the way the boys did, they wilted and got sick. Even the ones who dared to step through the doorway into the alley to neck with their dates came back inside looking as though they’d gone out to the alley to have their hair done. Occasionally I would see a girl who attracted me, and while running back and forth with my pitchers of beer, I would turn my head to try to get a good look at her. Almost always I discovered that her date was the evening’s most aggressively obnoxious drunk. But because I was being paid the minimum wage plus tips, I arrived promptly at five every weekend to begin setting up for the night and worked till after midnight, cleaning up, and throughout tried to maintain a professional waiterly air despite people’s snapping their fingers at me to get my attention or whistling at me sharply with their fingers in their mouths and treating me more like a lackey than a fellow student who needed the work. More than a few times during the first weeks, I thought I heard myself being summoned to one of the rowdier tables with