The World According to Garp

story.

“What?” Garp said.

“There's nothing I can d-d-do about my breath,” Tinch said. “I think it's because I'm d-d-dying,” he said, with a twinkle. “I'm r-r-rotting from the inside out!” But Garp was not amused and he watched for news of Tinch for years after his graduation, relieved that the old gentleman did not appear to have anything terminal.

Tinch would die in the Steering quadrangle one winter night of causes wholly unrelated to his bad breath. He was coming home from a faculty party, where it was admitted that he'd possibly had too much to drink, and he slipped on the ice and knocked himself unconscious on the frozen footpath. The night watchman did not find the body until almost dawn, by which time Tinch had frozen to death.

It is unfortunate that wise-ass Benny Potter was the first to tell Garp the news. Garp ran into Potter in New York, where Potter worked for a magazine. Garp's low opinion of Potter was enhanced by Garp's low opinion of magazines, and by Garp's belief that Potter always envied Garp for Garp's more significant output as a writer. “Potter is one of those wretches who has a dozen novels hidden in his drawers,” Garp wrote, “but he wouldn't dare show them to anybody.”

In Garp's Steering years, however, Garp was also not outgoing at showing his work around. Only Jenny and Tinch got to see his progress—and there was the one story he gave Helen Holm. Garp decided he wouldn't give Helen another story until he wrote one that was so good she wouldn't be able to say anything bad about it.

“Did you hear?” Benny Potter asked Garp in New York. “What?” Garp said.

“Old Stench kicked off,” Benny said. “He f-f-froze to death.”

“What did you say?” Garp said.

“Old Stench,” Potter said. Garp had never liked that nickname. “He got drunk and went wobbling home through the quad—fell down and cracked his noggin, and never woke up in the morning.”

“You asshole,” Garp said.

“It's the truth, Garp,” Benny said. “It was fucking fifteen-below. Although,” he added, dangerously, “I'd have thought that old furnace of a mouth of his would have kept him w-w-warm.”

They were in the bar of a nice hotel, somewhere in the Fifties, somewhere between Park Avenue and Third; Garp never knew where he was when he was in New York. He was meeting someone else for lunch and had run into Potter, who had brought him here. Garp picked Potter up by his armpits and sat him on the bar.

“You little gnat, Potter,” Garp said.

“You never liked me,” Benny said.

Garp tipped Benny Potter backward on the bar so that the pockets of Potter's open suit jacket were dipped into the bar sink. “Leave me alone!” Benny said. “You were always old Stench's favorite ass-wipe!”

Garp shoved Benny so that Benny's rump slouched into the bar sink; the sink was full of soaking glasses, and the water sloshed up on the bar.

“Please don't sit on the bar, sir,” the bartender said to Benny. “Jesus Christ, I'm being assaulted, you moron!” Benny said. Garp was already leaving and the bartender had to pull Benny Potter out of the sink and set him down, off the bar. “That son of a bitch, my ass is all wet!” Benny cried.

“Would you please watch your language here, sir?” the bartender said. “My fucking wallet is soaked!” Benny said, wringing out the seat of his pants and holding up his sodden wallet to the bartender. “Garp!” Benny hollered, but Garp was gone. “You always had a lousy sense of humor, Garp!”

It is fair to say, especially in Garp's Steering days, that he was at least rather humorless about his wrestling and his writing—his favorite pastime and his would-be career.

“How do you know you're going to be a writer,” Cushie Percy asked him once.

It was Garp's senior year and they were walking out of town along the Steering River to a place Cushie said she knew. She was home for the weekend from Dibbs. The Dibbs School was the fifth prep school for girls that Cushie Percy had attended; she'd started out at Talbot, in Helen's class, but Cushie had disciplinary problems and she'd been asked to leave. The disciplinary problems had repeated themselves at three other schools. Among the boys at Steering, the Dibbs School was famous—and popular—for its girls with disciplinary problems.

It was high tide on the Steering River and Garp watched an eight-oared shell glide out on the water; a sea gull followed it. Cushie Percy took Garp's hand. Cushie had many complicated ways of testing a boy's affection for her. Many of the Steering boys were willing to handle Cushie when they were alone with her, but most of them did not like to be seen demonstrating any affection for her. Garp, Cushie noticed, didn't care. He held her hand firmly; of course, they had grown up together, but she did not think they were very good or close friends. At least, Cushie thought, if Garp wanted what the others wanted, he was not embarrassed to be seen pursuing it. Cushie liked him for this.

“I thought you were going to be a wrestler,” Cushie said to Garp.

“I am a wrestler,” Garp said. “I'm going to be a writer.”

“And you're going to marry Helen Holm,” Cushie teased him.

“Maybe,” Garp said; his hand went a little limp in hers. Cushie knew this was another humorless topic with him—Helen Holm—and she should be careful.

A group of Steering boys came up the river path toward them; they passed, and one of them called back, “What are you getting into, Garp?”

Cushie squeezed his hand. “Don't let them bother you,” she said.

“They don't bother me,” Garp said.

“What are you going to write about?” Cushie asked him.

“I don't know,” Garp said.

He didn't even know if he was going to college. Some schools in the Midwest had been interested in his wrestling, and Ernie Holm had written some letters. Two places had asked to see him and Garp had visited them. In their wrestling rooms, he had not felt so much outclassed as he had felt outwanted. The college wrestlers seemed to want to beat him more than he wanted to beat them. But one school had made him a cautious offer—a little money, and no promises beyond the first year. Fair enough, considering he was from New England. But Ernie had told him this already. “It's a different sport out there, kid. I mean, you've got the ability—and if I do say so myself, you've had the coaching. What you haven't had is the competition. And you've got to be hungry for it, Garp. You've got to really be interested, you know.”

And when he asked Tinch about where he should go to school, for his writing, Tinch had appeared at a typical loss. “Some g-g-good school, I guess,” he said. “But if you're going to w-w-write,” Tinch said, “won't you d-d-do it anywhere?”

“You have a nice body,” Cushie Percy whispered to Garp, and he squeezed her hand back.

“So do you,” he told her, honestly. She had, in fact, an absurd body. Small but wholly bloomed, a compact blossom. Her name, Garp thought, should not have been Cushman but Cushion—and since their childhood together, he had sometimes called her that. “Hey, Cushion, want to take a walk?” She said she knew a place.

“Where are you taking me?” Garp asked her.

“Ha!” she said. “You're taking me. I'm just showing you the way. And the place,” she said.

They went off the path by the part of the Steering River that long ago was called The Gut. A ship had been mired there once, but there was no visible evidence. Only the shore betrayed a history. It was at this narrow bend that Everett Steering had imagined obliterating the British—and here were Everett's cannons, three huge iron tubes, rusting into the concrete mountings. Once they had swiveled, of course, but the later-day town fathers had fixed them forever in place. Beside them was a permanent cluster of cannon balls, grown together in cement. The balls were greenish and red with rust, as if they belonged to a vessel long undersea, and the concrete platform where the cannons were mounted was now littered with youthful trash—beer cans and broken glass. The grassy slope leading down to the still and almost empty river was trampled, as if nibbled by sheep—but Garp knew it was merely pounded by countless Steering schoolboys and their dates. Cushie's choice of a place to go was not very original, though it was like her, Garp thought.

Garp liked Cushie, and William Percy had always treated Garp well. Garp had been too young to know Stewie Two, and Dopey was Dopey. Young Pooh was a strange, scary child, Garp thought, but Cushie's touching brainlessness was straight from her mother, Midge Steering Percy. Garp felt dishonest with Cushie for not