Read Online Young Man With a Horn by Dorothy Baker - Free Book Online Page B

miserably in the face of further discipline. But he stopped only when he had to, when it was time for him to go to Gandy’s or get something to eat.
    Or go to school. He got away with truancy for almost eight months, and just when he was beginning to feel easy in his mind about it, Lowell High School caught up with him at Gandy’s and raised an awful howl about him and Gandy both. He had stayed with his job even after he got his trumpet, because it gave him two-fifty a week and a chance to see Smoke Jordan daily without appointment. Those afternoons of pin-setting, moreover, gave his life something to turn on, a fair substitute for the routine solidity that family life usually provides. It gave him something to get away from and come back to, the tie that makes freedom valuable. The truancy fellow, I must say, gave him a tie that was a beauty from this angle. He hauled Rick into the Juvenile Court, where they made him wait around for a while to get into a receptive mental state and then put some questions to him, very brusque, enough to scare any kid of Rick’s constitution into piety for a good long time. Then they put him on probation, with twice-a-month reports to make, and gave him police escort back to school.
    And there he was with Lowell High School on him like an Oregon boot from eight-thirty until three, Monday through Friday. There were two months to go in what should have been his first year, and of course it was a mistake to make him sit there and say ‘I don’t know’ to every single question they put to him the rest of the term. Very demoralizing, very hard on the pride. But sons of the poor aren’t sent to the seashore with private tutors when they fall behind in their studies. They take their instruction when the State puts it out, and if they fail they fail. Rick Martin illustrated this point perfectly. He got to school tardy by eight months and wholly unprepared, gave out I don’t know as the answer to all questions, and beyond that was literally dumb.
    The Juvenile Court had such a hold on him that he went back to Lowell the next year too, starting from scratch as a freshman. There should have been nothing to it this time; he had an even chance with the new crop of Japanese, but it didn’t work out. He’d got his one answer so firmly in mind the year before that it seemed a waste of time to get up any new ones. He gangled at his desk thinking about music and making up long fictions in which he and Smoke and Jeff and Hazard were always turning the musical world completely upside down and smashing their way to triumph after triumph. He could make up six or seven of them in one day, each one nicely timed to last out a class period, or he could make up one whopper, divided into chapters and broadened to get him through the whole day. It was always the same story with slight variations in events. The charm of ever retelling such fiction lay in the author’s right, as author, to furnish himself, as hero, with everything he lacked in his non-fictional life. He was rich (at least you ought to see his apartment); he was brilliant (witness his profound critical judgments of music and musicians); he was well thought of by one and all but looked upon as something of a god by his constant friends and colleagues, Jordan, Williams, and Hazard (color deleted, at least not so noticeable); and finally and overwhelmingly, he was what a trumpet player!
    He got through the days so, and at three o’clock he was free to dump his books into a locker, get out of the building, and light a cigarette. He might well have been held up to Boy Scouts as an example to support the theory that cigarette smoking dulls the mind and stunts the growth, which was that day’s counterpart of today’s richly advertised notion that cigarette smoking tends to heighten the intellectual stature, steady the nerves, and work wonders for the complexion. And having lighted a cigarette, Rick would go, as fast as he could get there, to the Cotton