Read The Choirboys for Free Online

Baxter Slate of 7-A-1. “Hear! Hear!” He held up his fifth of Sneaky Pete, drained it in three gulps, suddenly felt the special effects of the port and barbiturates he secretly popped, fell over and moaned.
    There was however one thing which endeared Roscoe Rules to all the other choirboys: he was, next to Spencer Van Moot of 7-A-33, the greatest promoter any of them had ever seen. Roscoe could, when he cared to, arrange food and drink for the most voluptuous tastes—all of it free—for the other choirboys, who called him an insufferable prick.
    At first the only thing Roscoe didn’t like about his partner Dean Pratt was his styled red hair. But he soon came to hate his partner for his drunken crying jags at choir practice. There was another thing about Dean Pratt which
all
the choirboys despised and that was that the twenty-five year old bachelor’s brain became temporarily but totally destroyed by less than ten ounces of any alcoholic drink. Then it was impossible tomake the grinning redhead understand
anything
. Any question, statement, piece of smalltalk would be met by an idiotic frustrating maddening double beseechment:
    “I don’t get it. I don’t get it.” Or, “Whaddaya trying to say? Whaddaya trying to say?” Or, most frequently heard, “Whaddaya mean? Whaddaya mean?”
    And so, Dean Pratt eventually became known as Whaddayamean Dean. The first few sessions of the MacArthur Park choirboys found Roscoe Rules, Calvin Potts or Spermwhale Whalen eventually grabbing the lanky redhead by the front of his Bugs Bunny sweatshirt and shaking him in rage with Dean in drunken tears babbling, “I don’t get it. I don’t get it. Whaddaya mean? Whaddaya
mean?”
    Yet Whaddayamean Dean became the first policeman Roscoe Rules ever took home to meet his family. Roscoe, one of three choirboys who were married, lived on a one acre piece of ground east of Chino, California, some sixty miles from Wilshire Station. Even the few friends Roscoe had made these past four years would not drive that far to be sociable. Roscoe loved it there and made the daily trek gladly. His children could grow up in a rural setting as he had. Of course they would not have to work nearly as hard. His two boys, eight and nine, only had to hoe and weed and water his corn, onions, carrots, squash and melons. Then after cleaning the animals’ stalls, picking the infectious dung and hay from the horse’s hooves and treating the swaybacked pony for ringbone, they could have the rest of the day for playing. After they studied for a minimum of one and a half hours on weekdays and two on Saturdays and Sundays. And after they took turns pitching and catching a baseball for forty-five minutes on weekends.
    Roscoe Rules had convinced both his sons that they would be allstar players their first season in Little League. And they were. And he had convinced them that if they didn’t getstraight A’s through elementary school they would get what the recalcitrant pony got when it misbehaved.
    Roscoe’s two sons hated riding as much as the pony hated being ridden, but when the pony wouldn’t ride, Roscoe would snare the pony’s front feet, loop his rope around the corral fence and deftly jerk the animal’s legs back toward his hindquarters, catching the beast when it fell with a straight right between the eyes. He wore his old sap gloves with the lead filled palm and padded knuckles (which a sob sister sergeant had caught him beating up a drunk with and which he had been ordered to get rid of). That jerking rope, that punch and the bone bruising force of crashing to earth never failed to tame the pony who would obey for several weeks until the stupid creature forgot and became stubborn. Then he would require “gentling” again. Roscoe Rules believed that animals and people were basically alike: they were all scrotes.
    Roscoe was very proud of the clean healthy life he had provided for his sons away from the city He counted the years, months and weeks