Tales From Gavagan's Bar (17 page)

             
It was after that game that I really began to put things together. I remembered then that it wasn't just football and
poker. As far back as I could go, I never could remember winning a bet. Even when I was a kid in high school, I'd say: "Bet you a nickel," and have to pay the nickel.

             
I mentioned this quirk to Johnny Bell Griscom, who was my roommate and a psychology major—the whole business, including the queer idea that maybe my birth in the Harz Mountains had something to do with it. That the fairy gift had been one of not being able to win a bet, that is.

             
He laughed at that, and then turned serious. "I don't doubt that you have trouble winning a bet," he said, "but you mustn't attribute it to anything like fairies. It's a perfectly good case of psychology—perhaps with some parapsychological influence added, you know, a certain amount of ESP which, in a manner we don't understand as yet, warns you that something is not going to happen, so you bet on it. It's analogous to the death wish."

             
I told him that I didn't wish for any death; I just wanted to win a bet once or twice to prove that I could and then forget the whole business.

             
Johnny Bell got very serious and professional about it. He said, yes, this whole business was giving me a neurosis, and I better get rid of it before it became serious. Otherwise, I couldn't make any progress. The way to do it, he said, would be to make a bet on something that was an absolute certainty. He'd help me.

             
So we went out for a walk. I remember it was in October; a windy day. As we came down the street toward the Hotel Bristol, I noticed they had a new awning out over the street, a big blue one. "That's the first awning the Bristol has put up in five years," I said. "I'll bet you a quarter it lasts all winter."

             
"Done for a quarter," said he. The next minute a gust of wind caught that awning and ripped it from hell to breakfast.

             
I paid him the quarter and we went back, with me feeling pretty low. Johnny Bell said that when a neurosis like that hit you, the thing to do was progress through it and out, and if it couldn't be done one way, it could in another. So we talked it over some more, and he thought of a plan that
might work out, in view of the fact that was an election year. We were all of us pretty liberal there at college, but we knew Truman didn't have a chance. So Johnny Bell and I went down to a betting room, and I put ten dollars on Dewey. If he won, I'd be money ahead, and be rid of that jinx, or neurosis, or whatever it was; if he didn't, why then, I'd be happy anyway.

             
Election night I didn't even bother to sit up hearing the returns. Don't tell me it was the unions getting out the labor vote or the Republicans all staying home, or the farmers, or anything like that. I know better. It was my fairy godmother keeping me from winning a bet.

             
Johnny Bell said it was the most interesting case of parapsychology he'd ever studied. He talked to me about my father's work and made a lot of notes. At the same time, he said that if I had a neurosis like that, it was something like having one leg or being allergic to lobsters. The right thing was not to submit to it as a handicap, but to capitalize on it and make use of it as a source of progress.

             
He asked me what I was worried about aside from this betting matter, and I told him he knew as well as I did, that I was a good deal upset about my mid-term examinations in physics and chem. I wasn't lying down on the job. I just couldn't seem to get those two subjects through my head. It was serious, because my father had died by that time, and my mother was making some sacrifice to put me through college. If I flunked those two, I would be set back a year.

             
"All right," said Johnny Bell, when I told him. "We'll make an experiment. I'll bet you fifty cents, even money, that you pass both exams. You bet that you flunk. I know you want to pass badly enough so you'll try."

             
We wrote it out. As soon as I got into the examination room for physics, I knew I had it worked. The only questions on the paper were exactly the few to which I knew the answers. It was so easy I was tempted to turn in a couple of blank sheets to see what would happen, but I decided there was no sense in crowding things too far. As it was, I got an A on the examination, the first one I had had in physics all
year.

             
All I had to do, then, was bet against getting anything I really wanted. That gave me an idea. The thing I wanted most right at the moment was Mary. She was the daughter of the Latin prof and more or less the belle of the campus. I had dated her a few times, but so had nearly everyone else, and especially Loomis, one of the halfbacks on the football team. It looked as though he had the inside track, because in addition to being an athletic hero, he came from a family that was pretty well fixed. So I hunted up Loomis one night and led the conversation around to Mary by asking him if he was going to take her to the New Year's Eve party.

             
"I haven't asked her," he said, "and I don't think I will."

             
"Why not?" said I.

             
He laughed in a rather embarrassed way. "Well," he said, "she's a perfectly nice girl, and good fun and all that, but confound it—I want to look around before I put on the ball and chain."

             
"What do you mean?" I said.

             
"Not that I blame her," he said. "Things aren't too good there at home. But she's pretty frankly on a husband-hunt. I'll bet she gets married within six months. She'd even grab you if you asked her in a nice way."

             
You can imagine the opening that gave me. I said: "Oh, phooey. Girls that try that hard never make it. I'll bet you five dollars that she doesn't marry anyone within three years—least of all, me."

             
"You're on," said he, and we shook hands on it. I figured that if the prohibition against my winning bets worked this time, it would be cheap at the price.

             
I didn't tell Johnny Bell Griscom about that bet; I don't know why. But I took Mary to the New Year's Eve party. Rather late in the evening we were sitting out a dance, and I was trying to work up enough courage to ask her what I wanted to, when she suddenly turned to me and put one hand on mine. "Jerry," she said, "let's be modern. As long as leap year isn't quite over yet, I can ask you—I want you to marry me."

             
There it was, you see. I went around in a kind of purple swoon all through the spring term. If I hadn't been thoughtful enough to bet Johnny Bell Griscom on the result of the finals, I doubt whether I would have passed. We were married right afterward. Loomis was the best man, and I gave him five dollars for his services.

             
That brought up another problem, though. I didn't have any money and neither did she, and the jobs for young college graduates weren't very wonderful. But figuring it out carefully, I thought I saw a way to make progress through the very thing that had been dogging me—whether it was a fairy gift, or parapsychology, as Johnny Bell Griscom called it.

             
So, without saying anything to Mary, I took nearly all the money we had and went out to the race track. I don't know anything about racing, but I could tell easily enough from a newspaper that in one race there was a favorite named Lanceolate, on whom the odds were 3 to 2. I went to the window where they place the bets, and waited till I saw a likely-looking customer who made a bet on this horse. As soon as he got away from the window, I struck up a conversation with him. I told him he was crazy to bet on Lanceolate; that the horse had fallen arches or something. I forget what reason I gave. Of course, since he had just placed his money on the horse, that made him angry enough to argue, which is what I had counted on. I pretended to get argumentative, too, and ended by offering to bet him five dollars to one that Lanceolate didn't win.

             
He offered to take all the money I wanted to bet at that figure, but I wouldn't give him any more. You see, all I wanted to do was get it recorded that I had made a bet against Lanceolate. Now I knew that Lanceolate would win. He couldn't help it; I had bet that he wouldn't. So then I went up to the window and spent everything I had—it was about five hundred dollars—on tickets for Lanceolate to win.

             
I guess I was so busy with my scheme and figuring out how I was nearly going to double my money that I hadn't noticed the clouds gathering overhead. But just as the man at the window shoved my tickets across to me, the clouds cut loose
             
with a tremendous lightning-flash. It made a crack like a cannon-shot. The lightning hit the flagpole not fifty feet from where I was standing and blew it all to splinters. The shock knocked several people down, and upset all the horses so that the next race had to be held up nearly half an hour.

             
There wasn't any rain. After the panic had settled down a little, I pulled myself together and went up into the stands with the rest of the people to watch the race.

             
Of course, Lanceolate didn't win. Instead of nearly doubling my money, I was just out nearly every cent I had. When Mary found out what I had done, you can believe she let me know what she thought of it, too. It wouldn't have been the least use to talk to her about parapsychology or the fairy curse, either. She just didn't believe in that sort of thing. As far as she was concerned, I had just thrown the money away.

             
I don't know how much of it I believe myself, but I believe enough of it to be scared. I was never so scared in my life. I'm convinced that flash of lightning was aimed at me, and the next
time I make a bet, there'll be another one, and this time it won't miss. That's just what I get for trying to progress. I say phooey on it. In fact, I say phooey on everything. I want another drink.

#
★
#

             
...
He brought his fist down hard on the bar. Mr.
Cohan smiled amiably. "Now, Jerry," he said. "The little woman will be expecting you soon."

             
The massive young man looked at the clock. "My God!" he said. "You're right." He scooped up the change from his bill and dived for the door.

             
Mr. Cohan said: "There's a fine lad that has had some bad luck. That woman he married now would sour the temper of the blessed saints, so she would. Ah, well, it ain't all of us can marry happy."

-

             
"It's like this," said Doc Brenner, drinking from his Scotch and Soda as he sought for the proper phrase. "Like this: this Lysenko claims that if you change the environment, like the soil a plant grows in, for instance, a change is produced in the germ plasm, and future generations will have new and different characteristics."

             
Mr. Jeffers produced a handkerchief with which he mopped his brow, either as an antidote to the heat of the day or to the flood of Brenner's words. "But isn't that sometimes true?" he asked. "I read once where, if you take seeds of the best Turkish tobacco and plant them in Kentucky, you get Kentucky tobacco."

             
"It works the other way, too," said Brenner. "There isn't any real change in the tobacco plant in such a case. It only takes up certain flavors from the soil it grows in. What this Lysenko means is that by changing the soil or the water or something, you could get a tobacco plant to produce apples and to keep on producing them."

             
"But look here," said Jeffers. "How does this germ plasm get changed, then? If it didn't change somehow, we'd all still be monkeys, wouldn't we?"

             
"We would not," said Mr. Cohan, severely, setting a fresh glass of beer before Jeffers. "I mind the day me brother Julius, that's on the force now, came home with words like that on his lips. The priest gave him fifteen Ave Marias and me own father,
God bless him, washed the boy's mouth out with soap and water."