Read Online Changing the Past by Thomas Berger - Free Book Online Page B

perhaps put out to anyone who applied, and took her to the movies and tried to feel her up. She made a scene in the theater, from which Riggins was thereupon banned for life, and next her father threatened to thrash him and subsequently almost came to blows with Gordon Riggins, Sr., after which the two families, friendly for a generation, became enemies.
    And no one thought of blaming Jack Kellog, the only begetter of this calamitous sequence. Riggins in fact became, at least in his own mind, Kellog’s best friend.
    â€œI ain’t any good with words, Jack. It don’t matter with guys, but I just don’t know how to talk to girls.”
    Ordinarily Kellog would have responded, callously, with the gag about the bear coming down the chimney, but Riggins had uniquely addressed him by his first name, and he was moved.
    â€œHuh. That’s tough, Gordo.”
    â€œSee,” Riggins said from his urinal, next to the one being used by Kellog, “what I was thinking, that’s your specialty, talkin’: you got a million of ‘em. I don’t care if they come from books, you know how to tell a joke. That one you told the other day, Jesus, it was real funny: the old coon seein’ the snake crawlin’ out of his pants and thinkin’ it’s his dick? I tried to tell that one to my old man, after supper that night, but you know what? I couldn’t do it. I just can’t get that nigger-talk right.” He had finished peeing and was violently whipping his peter in the air, to dry it. “He slapped my face, anyway: he’s the only one allowed to tell a dirty joke.” Riggins punched his large fists together. “I tell you, I’m bigger’n him now. I could trim his ass any old day.”
    Kellog was on the last button of his fly; it was his other pair of pants that had the zipper. In a slightly superior tone, as befitted an expert, he said, “Whoever you’re talking to, you got to act like you’re in charge whether you are or not. You can’t let them think you’re uncertain. And don’t let ‘em rush you. And you have to get the words exactly right. For some reason, the same joke ain’t funny if you stumble over just one word, They’ll make fun of you for your mistake and won’t laugh at the joke itself.”
    â€œI don’t know,” Riggins said dolefully. “I just get tongue-tied.” He knew no need to wash his hands, even though Kellog was providing a good example. As the latter was reaching for a paper towel, Riggins said, “What I was wondering, maybe you could put in a word for me with Betty Jane Hopper. Know what I mean? Crack a few jokes—clean ones, nothing dirty. She goes to Sunday school every week. Then work in someplace that I like her, that Gordon Riggins thinks she’s neat.”
    â€œWhy the jokes?” asked Kellog. “I could just tell her, couldn’t I?” Putting his talent to this sort of use would seem to demean it.
    â€œSoften her up,” Riggins said as they went through the swinging doors into the basement corridor. “Girls listen to guys who make ‘em laugh.”
    Kellog had noticed this, to a degree, but he had not arrived at Riggins’ theory of the so-called softening-up process. Being entertained was another thing than being manipulated…or was it? After classes he lingered at the corner of the schoolyard, where Riggins had assured him Betty Jane could be encountered on her way home, and when she came along he said, “Hey, Betty Jane, did you ever hear the one about the big fat lady who went into the department store and asked the floorwalker where she could buy talcum powder? Now, this guy was bowlegged, see, and he said, ‘Walk this way.’” Kellog bowed his own legs and demonstrated. “So the lady said, ‘If I walked that way, I wouldn’t need the powder!’”
    Betty Jane frowned. “That’s pretty