Page 205 - WhyAsInY

you Can taKe tHe Boy out of BrooKlyn
don’t believe that I ever saw Art standing still. No one in Brooklyn ever ran, except, of course, from someone else in Brooklyn.
• Peter Nichols, a graduate of some boarding school, did nothing that I can recall at all—except drink, and much more seriously than any- one else. He failed out, which was an extremely rare occurrence. (It was said that the only way that one could fail out was to truly want to do so, and I guess that that was true in his case.) That is not to say that academic life was not difficult; as we shall see in the next chap- ter, it was. Still, he was the only person that I can recall who didn’t make his grades.
• David Kirp spent all of freshman year getting counsel from people on the floor as to each of the courses that we took. Every course had its specialist; I was his specialist for English 1 and 2. One of the pro- fessors once and famously called attention to the fact that Kirp can easily be spelled backward. Nobody thought the remark to be uncalled for. He graduated magna cum laude, now specializes in edu- cation, and is the author of a book called Improbable Scholars.
• Mark Perry was a “jock” (a serious athlete, usually a player of a contact sport), actually a nice-guy jock, who played end on the freshman football team. We got along pretty well, and I liked him. He once threw a snowball through my window, which isn’t very nice, but I still regard him as a nice-guy jock. (Window breaking via snowball was so common that the school dealt with repair costs by imposing them on the room’s occupant rather than on the window breaker.) I responded to his action by taking a Brooklyn-style approach to reprisal. Notwithstanding that I had, as I have said, a damned good outfield arm, I was so surprised by Mark’s snowball coming through my window and shattering the glass all over my desk during one of those rare times when I was studying at it that I ran up the stairs and punched out two of his windowpanes while he sat there in mute amazement. I say that he was a nice-guy jock
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