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Show 153 Red and Helen in the Past Past Red was no dummy and to his mind he'd been an adult for a long time. He never wasted a god-damn second because he didn't have any to waste; he peddled papers in the morning before high school and peddled papers in the evening after high school and after that went down to the Kronenburger Club on Xxaxak German Street, v/here the Germans used to live kaiaxaxxkaxa at the turn of the century before they moved south and made a little German-burg up on Marvin Avenue, and set pins at the bowling alley. He gave all the money to his mother, Emma, and she gave him back an allowance of $2 a week. That gave him enough to buy a pad and some KX charcoal pencils, that gave him enough to kx buy a gxx used guitar, and that's what he did at night when he went home and on weekends, he made sketches and learned chords, except sometimes on Sunday afternoons after church he went over to the field on Holland Street and played football, the one thing he xx wanted to do and couldn't because he had to work, play high school football for South High who had the best football team in all of Pennsylvania and New York and Ohio x and probably the world and even the starters for South High who came over to Holland Street Field on Sundays couldn't bring Red down when he had the ball, and even Lank Ward who ran the ball for South High and last spring high jumped a£ over six feet (and everybody knew it would be a half a century before anybody else did that) kept telling Red to go out for the team but Red couldn't because if Red didn't work then the Loops would lose their house, and Emma didn't even like him playing on Sundays, but that she gave him, that was the one thing she gave him. Then it was going to be Red's senior year and Red was thinking. He didn't know much about girls but he knew th*y liked athletes and ikaxgkxixaagxxkBXMXXMaxkB though maybe he was the best athlete in the whole city, nobody knew it, and nobody was going to know it as long as he had to keep v/orking, so Red saved up some more of his $2 a week and when he had enough he stopped playing football on Sundays and went downtown and took dance lessons; if he couldn't blast the world into submission he'd finesse it into submission, but only on last resort. go eveiT though it turned out that Easi South's Homecoming |
