Read Online Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph; Mitchell - Free Book Online

now—‘ambisinistrous,’ or left-handed in both hands. My father didn’t know what to make of me, and I sometimes caught him looking at me with a thoughtful expression on his face.”
    Gould stood up and took off his lopsided glasses and peered desperately at the counterman, who was evidently putting off starting on Gould’s order until he had attended to everyone else in the diner, including some people who had come in after we had sat down, but the counterman deliberately ignored him and would not let him catch his eye.
    â€œAnyhow,” Gould went on, sitting back down resignedly, “when I was around thirteen, a couple of things happened that showed me pretty clearly where I stood in the world. At school, we used to do a lot of marching two by two. We’d march into assembly two by two, and we’d march out to recess two by two. I could never keep in step, so they used to put me on the end of the line and I’d bring up the rear, marching by myself. This particular day, I had been kept in after school, and the teacher had let me go to the library room to pick out a book to read, and I was alone in there and out of sight, squatting down at a bookcase in the back of the room trying to decide between two books, when the principal of the school, who was a man, came in with one of the men teachers, the math teacher. They each dumped some books down on the desk, and then they stood there for a few moments, talking about one thing and another, and all of a sudden I heard the principal say, ‘Did you notice the Gould boy today?’ The math teacher said something I didn’t catch, and then the principal said, ‘The disgusting little bastard can’t even keep in step with himself.’ The math teacher laughed and said something else I didn’t catch, and then they went on out.
    â€œNow, it so happened my father was on the school board and took a great interest in the school, and he and the principal saw quite a lot of each other. They were really very good friends; the principal and his wife used to come to our house for dinner, and my father and mother used to go to their house for dinner. Consequently, I was deeply shocked by the principal’s remark. It hurt to overhear myself being called a disgusting little bastard, but it was the disrespect to my father that hurt the most. The Gould boy! That brought my father into it. If he had just said ‘Joseph Gould,’ it wouldn’t’ve been so bad. It would’ve confined it to me. I felt that the principal had insulted my father. I felt that he had betrayed him. At the very least, he had made fun of him behind his back. In some strange way, it made me feel closer to my father than I had ever felt before, and it made me feel sorry for him—it made me want to make it up to him. So that night, after supper, I went into the parlor, where he was sitting reading, and I said to him, ‘Father, I’ve been doing some thinking lately about what I’d like to be, and I’ve decided I’d like to study medicine and be a surgeon.’ I thought it would please him twice as much if I said I wanted to be a surgeon. ‘That’ll be the day,’ my father said. ‘If you did become a surgeon, and if you performed operations the way you do everything else, when you got through with a patient you’d have his insides so balled up you’d have his heart hanging upside down and his liver turned around backward and his intestines wound around his lungs and his bladder joined on to his windpipe, and you’d have him walking on his hands and breathing through his behind and making water out of his left ear.’”
    Gould sighed, and a look of intense sadness passed over his face. “I held that remark against my father for a long time,” he said. “Every once in a while, through the years, I’d remember it, and it would cut me to the quick. Then, years and years later,