Read Miami Blues for Free Online Page A

ever told me that before. Here--take the rest of my salad."
    "You didn't even try the yogurt."
    "Yogurt? I thought it was soured ice cream."
    "No, it's yogurt. It's supposed to taste a little sour."
    "I don't like it."
    "I'm sorry, Junior. I guess I should've had you meet me at the Burger King. It's right across from the school."
    "I'm not that hungry. I had a club sandwich in my room, before I bought these new clothes."
    "Your blue shirt matches your eyes. Did you buy it because it matched your eyes?"
    "No. I liked the extra pockets. It's too hot to wear a jacket, and I need the pockets. Is it always this hot?"
    "It's only about eighty-five. That's normal for October. In the summer it gets really hot, especially up in Okeechobee. And then there're mosquitoes, too. It gets so hot you can't do anything even if you wanted to. When you go out to a drive-in movie at night, all you do is sweat and drink beer and spray Cutter's."
    "Cutter's?"
    "That's mosquito spray, and it really works, too. Oh, they'll still buzz around your ears, but they won't land on you--not if you spray on enough Cutter's. There's another brand, when you spray too much on, you get a rash. But you don't care about the rash, because you've already got a rash from prickly heat. We better pay and go to class."
    "I'll pay. Give me the ticket."
    "No, it's my treat. If you want to, you can go to class with me. It's air-conditioned, and Professor Turner won't mind. He'll think you're a member of the class anyway. He told us that he doesn't learn our names. He finds out the names of the A and F students soon enough, he says, and the rest of us don't matter. I'm only a C student in English, so he's never even called on me yet."
    There were thirty-five students in the class; thirty-six, counting Freddy, who took the last seat in the row by the back wall, behind Susan. There were no windows, and the walls, except for the green blackboard, were covered with cork. The city noises were shut out completely. The students, mostly Latins and blacks, were silent as they watched the teacher write _Haiku_ on the green board with a piece of orange chalk. The teacher, a heavy-set and bearded man in his late forties, did not take roll; he had just waited for silence before writing on the board.
    "Haiku," he said, in a well-trained voice, "is a seventeensyllable poem that the Japanese have been writing for several centuries. I don't speak Japanese, but as I understand haiku, pronounced _ha--ee--koo_, much of the beauty is lost in the translation from Japanese to English.
    "English isn't a good language for rhymes. Three-quarters of the poetry written in English is unrhymed because of the paucity of rhyming words. Unhappily for you Spanish-speaking students, you have so many words ending in vowels, you have the difficulty in reverse.
    "At any rate, here is a haiku in English."
    He wrote on the board:
    The Miami sun,
    Rising in the Everglades--
    Burger in a bun.
    "This haiku," he continued, "which I made up in Johnny Raffa's bar before I came to class, is a truly rotten poem. But I assure you I had no help with it. Basho, the great Japanese poet, if he knew English and if he were still alive, would positively detest it. But he would recognize it as a haiku because it has five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. Add them up and you have seventeen syllables, all you need for a haiku, and all of them concentrating on a penetrating idea.
    "You're probably thinking, those of you who wonder .about things like this, why am I talking about Japanese poetry? I'll tell you. I want you to write simple sentences--subject, verb, object. I want you to use concrete words that convey exact meanings.
    "I know you Spanish-speaking students don't know many Anglo-Saxon words, but that's because you persist in speaking Spanish to one another outside of class instead of practicing English. Except for giving you Fs on your papers, I can't help you much there. But when you