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Baltimore Arena | vv-travel.ru

The Baltimore Arena [3] (formerly 1st Mariner Arena and Baltimore Civic Center) is an arena located in Baltimore, Maryland.The arena is about a block from the Baltimore Convention Center at the corner of Baltimore Street and Hopkins Place, it is also within walking distance of the Inner Harbor. It can accommodate up to approximately 14,000 people, although this figure varies depending on the type of event.

Arena officially opened in 1962 as the Baltimore Civic Center. It was built on the site of the “Old Congress Hall” where the Continental Congress met in 1776. As one of the largest redevelopment cornerstones for the Inner Harbor in the 1980s, it was reopened after renovation and was renamed the Baltimore Arena in 1986.In 2003, it was renamed 1st Mariner Bank, which acquired naming rights to the arena for 10 years. It was reported that 1st Mariner Bank paid the city $ 75,000 a year to keep the naming rights in the complex. It is owned by the city of Baltimore and operated by SMG, a private management company. The 1st Mariner Bank Arena hosts 800,000 people annually.

The cornerstone of the arena was laid in the arena in 1961 with a vault that included messages from then President John F.Kennedy, then Maryland Governor J. Millard Tawes, and later Mayor of Baltimore J. Harold Grady. The vault was opened in 2006.

The current site that was selected for the Baltimore Civic Center was not actually one of the many sites proposed to the Big Baltimore Committee in 1955. Among the nine sites proposed were two at Druid’s Hill Park, three at the end of the Inner Harbor Basin (where the World Trade Center and Harborplace are now located), and one at Clifton Park. [4]

Contents

1 History
1.1 1960-1970s 1.2 1980-1990s 1.3 2000s 1.4 2010s

2 Replacement of Baltimore Arena 3 Transportation 4 Notes 5 References

History

View from the northeast (corner of Baltimore and Svoboda St.)

1960-1970s

Arena has been host to many events ranging from boxing, music, sports and wrestling.

In 1962 and up to 1976, the Baltimore Clippers of the American Hockey League played their home matches at the arena. Clippers withdrew from the AHL mid-season, 1974-75, to allow the Baltimore Blades (relocated by Michigan Stegs) of the World Hockey Association (WHA) to end their season.Clippers regrouped for one final AHL of the 1975-76 season. Baltimore Arena has hosted two other AHL franchises. In Baltimore, Skipjacks ran from 1981 to 1993. The Baltimore Bandits played two seasons in Baltimore from 1995 to 1997.

In 1962, the Arena hosted a boxing match between Joey Giardello and Johnny Morris.

In 1963, the arena was the host of a professional tennis match.

Also in 1963, the arena became the home of the Baltimore Markers, who would not play there until 1973.

The Beatles performed at the arena on September 13, 1964.

On April 3, 1965, defending WWWF champion Bruno Sammartino defeated Gene Kiniski in a return title match. Just months later, in January 1966, Kiniski would win the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) title.

In 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “gives a speech,” Race and Church, “before a meeting of Methodist clergy at the Baltimore Civic Center.” [5]

NBA All-Star Game was played in the arena in 1969.

Place also hosted Led Zeppelin several times prior to the early 1970s. A couple of scenes from Led Zeppelin’s concert film The song remains the same were filmed backstage.

The performance of the Grateful Dead in September 17, 1972 was recorded and later released as Dick’s Sampling Volume 23. It contains the full version of the concert, except for an encore, which was “Another Saturday Night”. It contains the longest CD version of “The Other One” to date, clocked at around 40 minutes long.

In 1974 World Team Tennis (WTT) Baltimore Banners played their home matches there. The world’s number 1 Jimmy Connors was on this team. After Connors defeated Ken Roswall at Wimbledon they played each other in the arena as a Wimbledon rematch. Billie Jean King played and coached the Philadelphia Freedoms of the WTT. John Newcomb also played there in the WTT.

Civic Center was the host of the 1974 and 1975 MEAC Men’s Basketball Tournament.

In 1975, the professional basketball player returned briefly from the Baltimore Claws of the American Basketball Association (ABA).The Memphis Sounds moved to Baltimore following the 1974–75 ABA season and was first called the Baltimore Hustlers, before changing their name. Alarming financially from the start, claws folded after three road show matches. [6]

1980-1990s

Baltimore Arena has been the home of the Major League Futsal Baltimore Blast since they arrived in the 1980-1981 season until the league folded in 1992. Blast won its only championship in the ’83 -’84 season in which over 11,200 fans took part.The new version of the team is playing in the now 1st Mariner Arena. Explosion, regardless of incarnation, is now the longest tenant in arena history.

In 1986, the arena was hosted by the popular Italian opera singer Luciano Pavarotti.

Baltimore Arena was the home of the Premier League Lacrosse League (Mill) and then the National Lacrosse League (NBL) Baltimore Thunder from 1987 to 1999. Thunder won the first mill championship. Notable players include Gary Gait, Tom Gravante (head of the Men’s Lacrosse coach at Mount St.Mary) and Hugh Donovan.

Baltimore Arena was considered the cornerstone location for NWA / WCW wrestling, its northern capital, so to speak. The Great American Bash pay-per-view took place in the arena eight times during the life of the promotion, and by the time WCW was bought by the WWE, the Great American Bash had been in Baltimore for four of the previous five years. He also hosted Superbrawl V in 1995. Sting defeated Rick Fleur to win his first NWA World Championship in 1990 The Great American Bash, and Ron Simmons upset Vader in 1992 for the WCW title, becoming the first African American to hold a major world title.NWO was reformed in 1999 at the Baltimore Arena with Bret Hart, Kevin Nash, Scott Hall and Jeff Jarrett.

Arena has also hosted many World Wide Wrestling Federation / World Wrestling Federation / World Wrestling Entertainment / WWE events over the years. Notably 1994 King of the Rings, No Mercy (2003), No Way Out 2006, Backlash 2008, Extreme Rules (2010), and TLC :! Tables, Ladders and Chairs (2011), and Several Raw and SmackDown / ECW Fences. Major title changes taking place in the arena include Superstar Billy Graham over Bruno Sammartino in 1977 for the WWWF Championship, Tito Santana over Greg “Hammer” Valentine in 1985 for the WWF Intercontinental title in a steel cage match.

In 1989, the arena was the host of the American National Figure Skating arena. Three years later, in 1992, the International Olympic Committee hosted the US Artistic Gymnastics Trials there. In 1995, the arena was host to the NCAA men’s basketball division 1 games (rounds 1 and 2).

KISS were scheduled to perform during their Hot In The Shade Tour on October 28, 1990, but the show was canceled for unspecified reasons.

NBA Washington Bullets played several home games at the Baltimore Arena in the 1990s.Their final arena game was a victory over the Dallas Mavericks 94-87 on March 29, 1997.

2000s

Logo used 2003-2013. During this time, the arena was named 1st Mariner Arena. The

Arena was also a staple on the PBR’s Built Ford Tough series of bull riding tour. It first visited the Arena from 2001 to 2003, then returned again from 2008 to 2010. He will return again in 2012. (Note: In 2001 and 2002, the tour was called the “Bud Light Cup” tour).

In July 2004, the arena was the venue for the US debut of Japanese rock band L’Arc-En-Ciel, as part of the Otakon anime and East Asian culture convention.

On 3-4 December 2004, the 1st Mariner Arena hosted the last Vans Triple Crown freestyle motocross event in history. Vans From FMX recently stopped to host FMX on the Dew Tour, and a similar FMX event course Vans can be found at IFMA Freestyle Motocross or the Vans Invitational circuit.

On February 1, 2006, the arena hosted the first concert of The Rolling Stones, in Baltimore, since 1969, which was in the arena.

On February 19, 2006, the WWE PPV No Way Out took place in Baltimore, their first since 2003’s No Mercy. Kurt Angle defeated Undertaker to retain the World Heavyweight Championship.

It was selected as the venue for the 2006 Miss USA Pageant, for live broadcast.

On February 11, 2008, the arena also hosted a rally for presidential candidate Barack Obama.

On April 27, 2008, WWE PPV Luft was held in Baltimore. Triple H defeated Randy Orton to win the WWE Championship.

On November 20, 2009, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed in the arena, recreating the entirety of their landmark album Born to Run; it was their first tour stop in Baltimore since 1973.

Several country pop music acts have made tour stops at the arena, including Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift.

2010s

Shogun Fights, the first promoter to bring professional mixed martial arts to Maryland, held its second event, Shogun Fights 2, on March 27, 2010.

On April 25, 2010, the arena hosted WWE Extreme Rules. It then hosted Monday Nights Raw on June 20, 2011. This episode was titled Power to the People. He hosted the WWE tables, Ladders and Chairs 2011 on December 18, 2011.

Colonial Athletic Association announced that they will be moving their men’s basketball tournament into the 2014 arena on contract after a 24-year run at the Richmond Coliseum for three years. [7] This is the first time the tournament will be held outside Virginia.

Naming transaction with 1st Mariner Bank, resulting on 1 August 2013. From that time on, the arena was simply known as the Baltimore Arena.

Substitution at Baltimore Arena

On October 16, 2004, the Baltimore Sun revealed that formal arrangements were made to replace the arena, then 42 years old. The Maryland Stadium Authority began soliciting proposals for a feasibility study for the construction of an arena in downtown Baltimore, in connection with November 1, 2004. According to the RFP, which was sent out, the new arena will be built on the same 1st Mariner Arena and “will have less seating capacity than would be required for an NHL or NBA team,” but this does not determine the specific capacity.[8]

May 15, 2007, Baltimore Sun It is reported that a feasibility study that began in 2004 has been released publicly and the study stated that the current arena has “fulfilled its useful life” and that Baltimore must build a new arena or face the risk of loss The study rejected a proposal to renovate the arena’s aging systems, citing an estimated cost of $ 60 million, and instead suggested that the city demolish the 1st Mariner Arena and build a new arena at the same or different location in Baltimore.Notably the proposed new arena will only seat 15,000 – 16,000 people, studies have suggested that Baltimore will never be successful in recruiting an NBA team in the future, which will require at least 18,000 – 20,000 seats (an NHL team will still be viable, as evidenced by arenas 15,000-seater, such as the Barclays Center and the MTS Landing Center for NHL franchises in the early 2010s), however the city is still open to the idea. Presumably, the new arena could be successful in attracting an arena football team and / or a minor hockey league team, resulting in over 200 new jobs and generating up to $ 1 million in additional tax revenue.City officials said the private sector would have to bear the brunt of the estimated $ 162 million in construction costs for the new arena, as the city is also considering giving up ownership of the arena. Baltimore Development Corporation (BDC) said it will begin seeking interested developers for the project by June 2007. BDC President Manchester United “Jay” Brody said it was a “miracle” that the current books arena as many events as it does in its current state. City officials said the location of the new arena will depend on what the developers are proposing.Officials said they are equally comfortable with maintaining the current arena, building a new arena in a new location, then demolishing the current arena, or encouraging the development of a multi-functional in the current arena location. Defenders of the city, including the Downtown Partnership and the West Side Renaissance, want a new arena to stay downtown. [9]

On November 18, 2007, WJZ 13 reported that seven sites have been submitted to NMP in the new arena and the selection will be narrowed by the spring of 2008. [10]

On 24 July 2008, it was reported that a new arena would be built on the same site as the current one, with a capacity to go upwards of 18,500.It was unknown at the time what would happen with concerts and events while construction kicks off, or who would develop the new arena. However, there has been talk of building a temporary facility for events. The arena was scheduled to be completed over a three-year period. [11]

August 27, 2008 Baltimore Sun It is reported that developers were looking for designers to build an apartment building and open shopping malls to be part of the new 1st Mariner Arena. In addition, the developers announced that they did not accept all design proposals until November 26, 2008, and that, by the summer of 2009, they planned to make the final design decision.

December 17, 2008 Examiner Baltimore It is reported that Baltimore Development Corporation has received 4 proposals for the first replacement of Mariner Arena, which could take “serious entertainment” for Baltimore to “4 years” and the estimated price of $ 300 million, but may be more depending on from additional shopping and hospitality applications. The arena is reported to be an 18,500-seat venue built at the same site of the current 1st Mariner Arena. Four sentences were:

ESmith Legacy and Garfield Traub Development: ESmith Legacy was a team led by former NFL player Emmitt Smith, who has offices in Baltimore.This offer included the following features in addition to the larger arena:

7-screen movie theater 20,000 square feet of retail space 1,000 concert hall seats

Streuver The Eccles & Rose Brothers: Well known Baltimore property developer. This offer is included:

43,000 300-room hotel SF retail space

Cormony Development and Harrison Development: Accordingly, Rockville and Baltimore-based development firms have been involved since 2007.This offer includes:

A & R Development, Jay Street Development Co., and Accent Development Co.: A Baltimore-based partnership with R and Washington based J Street and Accent Development titled Arena development. This offer includes:

Up to 100,000 sf of retail space

The Baltimore examiner advised that BDC may decide on a developer as soon as mid-2009.[12]

July 8, 2009, Arena Digest. com reported that Baltimore City officials had postponed their plans to build a new arena, in part due to struggling economies, and the decision to split officials between building either an 18,500-seat arena for a possible NBA or NHL franchise, or building a mid-size concert venue. family events and Minor League sports. [13]

However, on November 12, 2010, with the recession recovering, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake announced that the city is considering new venues for a new arena.The plan calls for the 1st Mariner Arena to remain open while the new arena is being built. While Rawlings-Blake believes that the new arena is likely to be set up in the city’s West Side, the Baltimore Committee Big will propose building an arena as an expansion at the Baltimore Convention Center to help redevelop Inner Harbor. [14]

Cost will range from $ 750 to $ 930 million, as it will include an 18,500-seat arena, 40,000 square feet (3,700 m2) expansion of the Baltimore Convention Center, an underground garage, and a new 500-room Sheraton hotel; The proposed arena is the site where the current Sheraton hotel rests.[15]

Transport

1st Mariner Arena is directly adjacent to the University Center / Baltimore Street stop on the Baltimore Light Rail. Metro station Charles metro center and many bus lines are also nearby.

The article has been automatically translated. Source: Wikipedia

Peace from Garp

Garp’s mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for injuring a man in a movie theater.This happened shortly after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. People then were very sympathetic to the soldiers, because everyone felt like a soldier at heart, but Jenny Fields was an exception: her intolerance to the behavior of men in general and soldiers in particular remained the same. In the cinema hall, she had to change seats three times, but some soldier stubbornly moved closer and closer to her. Finally she was almost at the very wall, rather filthy, and right in front of her was some kind of stupid column, blocking the screen.Jenny decided that she would not move anymore, and the soldier moved again, perched very close.

Jenny was twenty-two at the time. She dropped out of college, barely enrolling there, but in the nursing courses she had no equal – this profession came to her liking. Jenny had an athletic figure and always a good complexion, dark shiny hair and a gait that her mother called masculine (she waving her arms when walking), and her bottom is small and firm, which made her look like a boy from the back.She herself believed that her breasts were too large: such dimensions, in her opinion, gave her an overly “accessible” look.

Meanwhile, Jenny’s distinctive feature was her inaccessibility. Actually, she left college just because she had a suspicion – suddenly her parents, sending her to Wellesley [1], really only cared about how to find her a worthy fiancé. This college was recommended by the older brothers, who assured their parents that Wellesley alumni had an excellent reputation for being potentially good wives.Upon learning of this, Jenny decided that her studies would be like preparing a heifer for an artificial insemination procedure.

She majored in English literature in college, but after making sure her classmates were solely concerned with the art of treating men in a refined manner, she switched literature to medicine without any regrets. In Jenny’s eyes, the profession of a nurse had a purely practical meaning, and her study was not associated with any secret intentions (later, in her famous autobiography, she wrote with regret that nurses love to flirt with doctors, but that was only later, when she parted with medicine ).

She liked a simple, no nonsense form: a loose blouse concealed the splendor of her breasts, comfortable shoes were quite consistent with her fast gait. During the night shift, she had the opportunity to read – reading was one of her few addictions. She did not suffer from the absence of students – their manner of assuming gloomy disappointment if the girl refused them, or, conversely, pompous complacency, if, succumbing to momentary weakness, gave in, disgusted her. In the hospital, for the most part, she had to deal with soldiers and working guys who were simpler and sincere in courtship: these, at least the next day, did not turn up their noses, if on the eve of their claims were, so to speak, not completely rejected.Then, all of a sudden, everyone became soldiers with the self-conceit of students, and Jenny Fields decisively cut off all communication with men.

“My mother,” Garp wrote, “was a lonely she-wolf.”

The shoe industry created the Fields family’s wealth, although Mrs. Fields contributed in the form of a dowry. The family was doing so well that for a long time none of the Fields were personally involved in shoe making. They lived in a large house on the shores of Dogs Head, New Hampshire. Jenny always came home on weekends, mainly to please her mother, who was convinced that her daughter was “burying herself alive in the hospital,” and to prove to her that she was moral and cultured.

Jenny met the brothers frequently at Gare du Nord and traveled home by train with their company. As was customary at the Fields, they sat on the right when traveling from Boston, and on the left when returning back. This was the desire of Fields Sr., who, although he admitted that the view from this side was especially unattractive, nevertheless insisted that all family members be sure to contemplate the source of their independence and well-being, no matter how unattractive it may be. On the right side of the train from Boston, and, accordingly, on the left, if you go in the opposite direction, you can see the Fields shoe factory in all its glory, as well as a huge panel depicting a shoe confidently striding towards you.The panel towered over the railway depot and was reflected countless times in the windows of the factory building. The inscription under the menacingly advancing boot read:

Take care of your feet
Both in the workshop and on the road,
Fields will help you with this.

Among other things, the factory produced shoes for nurses; and every time Jenny came, Mr. Fields gave her a new pair. As a result, a real shoe warehouse was formed at her home. Mrs. Fields, who predicted the darkest future for her daughter who left Wellesley, gave her a beautifully packaged heating pad every time.Jenny knew what kind of gift it was only from her words, since she had never looked into the package. At the same time, my mother always asked the same question: “Daughter, is that hot-water bottle that I gave you on your last visit, is it safe?” Jenny painfully remembered where she was doing – whether she forgot on the train, or threw it away, and answered something like this: “I probably lost her, I really don’t need her.” Then Mrs. Fields took out another heating pad, still in the pharmacy package, and almost forcibly handed it to her daughter with the words: “Jennifer, please watch yourself.Use, for God’s sake, a heating pad. ”

From a professional point of view, Jenny saw no use in heating pads; for her it was a cute old-fashioned object, more of a psychological nature. But some of the bags did end up in her little room near the Boston hospital. Untouched, they were kept in a cabinet filled with shoeboxes.

Jenny clearly felt like she was being cut off. It seemed strange to her that, having paid so much attention to her in childhood, the parents at some prearranged hour seemed to turn off their love and began to pin certain hopes on her.Her life was divided into two segments – during the first, very short, she was supposed to absorb an abundant portion of their love, and the entire second, longer and more important, – to pay bills. After leaving college and becoming an ordinary nurse, Jenny seemed to have broken the thread that connected her with those close to her; and they, in turn, began to move away from her, even against their will. By family beliefs, Jenny would be supposed to become a doctor, or at worst, marry a doctor, and until then, stay in college.Every time the whole family gathered, mother, father, brothers and she herself experienced feelings of increasing alienation.

It usually happens in families, Jenny Fields thought. She will love her own children (if, of course, they are born to her) at any age, because for twenty-year-olds, the love of parents is perhaps more important. Indeed, how much does a two-year-old baby need? In the hospital, babies were the most compliant patients. The older the children, the more they require attention and the less they are tolerated and loved.

Jenny had the feeling that she had grown up on a big ship, never having looked into the engine room, much less figured out how it worked. She liked that in the hospital it all boiled down to the simplest questions: who ate what, whether what was eaten was good, and whether it was well absorbed. As a child, she never saw dirty dishes: to tell the truth, Jenny was sure that the maids, after removing the plates, simply threw them away (even she was not allowed into the kitchen for a long time). And when milk was brought in by truck in the mornings, Jenny was sure that dishes and food were brought along with the milk, since the clink of bottles was very reminiscent of the sounds that were heard outside the kitchen door, where the maids performed their mysterious manipulations with the dishes.

At the age of five, Jenny Fields visited her father’s dressing room for the first time. One morning she found her by the smell of her father’s cologne. There she saw a shower – very modern by the standards of 1925, a mirror, as well as a long row of all kinds of flasks that were so different from her mother’s bottles that Jenny decided: in front of her was the secret lair of a man who had been quietly living in the house for many years. In fact, she was right.

At the hospital, Jenny knew where everything was going, and gradually she received the most prosaic answers to the question of where what came from.In the Dogs Head of her childhood, all family members had separate bathrooms, separate rooms, separate doors with mirrors on the inside. In the hospital, there was no intimacy at all, there were no secrets: if you need a mirror, ask your sister.

The most mysterious things that little Jenny was allowed to explore on her own were the cellar and the huge earthen pot, which was filled with edible shellfish every Monday. In the evenings, their mother sprinkled them with cornmeal, and in the morning they were rinsed with fresh sea water from a pipe running through the masonry to the sea.By the end of the week, the mollusks had become fat, without a single grain of sand in the folds. They no longer fit in the shells, their long, hideous necks fluttering in the salt water. On Fridays, Jenny helped the cook sort them; dead molluscs would not retract their necks if touched.

Jenny demanded a book on shellfish. She studied them up and down, learned how they feed, how they reproduce, how they grow. These were the first living beings that became absolutely clear to her – their life, reproduction and death.In Dogs Head, people were not so accessible to study. And only in the hospital Jenny began to catch up and gradually realized that people, in general, are not much more mysterious and more attractive than shellfish.

“Subtle differences,” Garp wrote about his mother, “were not her part.”

Of course, Jenny could have noticed one obvious difference between shellfish in humans, namely that most people have a sense of humor, but Jenny herself was completely devoid of it. At that time, a joke was very popular with nurses in which Jenny did not see anything funny.The joke played on the name of one of the Boston hospitals. The hospital where Jenny worked was called Boston Mercy Hospital, or Boston Mercy for short. The city also had a Massachusetts General Hospital, or “Public Mass”. And there was also a hospital called “Gnarled Peter” (nicknamed its founder).

The joke was like this. One Boston taxi driver was stopped by a man who was crawling on all fours from the sidewalk to the car. He gasped, his face red with pain.The taxi driver opened the door and dragged him inside. The passenger was huddled on the floor along the back seat, knees pressed to his chest.

– To the hospital! – he barely squeezed out.

– “Gnarled Peter”? – the taxi driver called the nearest hospital.

– If only crooked, – moaned the patient. “I think Molly bit it off!

Actually, Jenny Fields rarely liked jokes, but there’s nothing to say about this one: jokes about “Peter” were not for her. She had the pleasure of seeing what trouble people sometimes got into because of poor Peter.The children were clearly not the worst thing.

Of course, she met women who did not want to have children and were very worried about pregnancy. Such women, thought Jenny, should by no means give birth, although she felt much more sorry for the children themselves. There were, of course, those who wanted children, and looking at them, she, too, was imbued with a similar desire. Someday, thought Jenny Fields, she would give birth to a baby – one. The problem was that she really didn’t want to deal with “Peter”, and indeed with men.

The soldiers’ Piters suffered the most. Penicillin began to be treated only in 1943. And this miracle medicine found widespread use only two years later. At Boston Mercy, in 1942, sulfonamides and arsenic were used. Against gonorrhea – sulfamethasole with a huge amount of water. Against syphilis – neoarophenamine. This is how absurd, according to Jenny, sex has brought a man; in order to purify human biochemistry, arsenic was introduced into this biochemistry.

Another procedure was used to treat the Piters, which also required a lot of water.Jenny often assisted with her, as the patient was usually a lot of trouble: sometimes he had to be held. The procedure was very simple – up to one hundred cubic centimeters of fluid was passed through the penis and urethra, which was then poured back. I must say that for all its simplicity, it acted on the nerves of all its participants. The device for flushing was invented by a certain doctor Valentin and, accordingly, received the name “Valentina’s irrigator”. Over time, this irrigator was replaced by a more perfect device, but the sisters of the Boston Mercy called this procedure the “Valentine’s Treatment” for a long time.A suitable punishment for sinners in love, Jenny Fields thought.

“My mother,” Garp wrote, “was by no means a romantic nature.”

As the soldier in the theater began to move towards her, Jenny Fields thought he could use the Valentine’s Cure. Unfortunately, she did not carry an irrigator with her. In addition, this operation requires at least the consent of the patient. But what she had with her was a scalpel; she never parted with him. Its very tip was chipped off: either it was dropped on the floor, or in the sink, in a word, it was not suitable for complex operations.The scalpel was very sharp and constantly cut through the silk pockets in the bag. Then she found a case from a thermometer and closed the blade with the upper half, like the cap of a fountain pen. It was this cap that she took off when the soldier sat down beside her and casually leaned his elbows on the armrest, which was – that’s what nonsense! – one for two chairs. His long arm, hanging from the armrest, quivered like the sides of a horse chasing flies away. Jenny held the scalpel in one hand at the bottom of the bag, while the other held the bag tightly to her.She imagined that the nurse’s dress sparkled like a sacred shield, and that it was the whiteness that attracted this predatory pervert.

“My mother,” wrote Garp, “spent her entire life in constant readiness to repulse those who attempted to attack her purse or something, in her opinion, more valuable.”

Then, in the cinema, the soldier was clearly not interested in the bag. His hand fell on her knee.

– Get your filthy hands off, – Jenny said these words out loud, so that some of the audience turned around.

“Come on,” the soldier moaned passionately and quickly climbed under her skirt: her knees were tightly squeezed, and at the same instant his entire arm, from shoulder to wrist, was cut open like a ripe melon. The scalpel, directed by Jenny’s skillful hand, passed through the tunic and shirt and neatly cut the skin and muscles so that the bone at the elbow was exposed. “If I wanted to kill him,” she later told the police, “I would slash him on the wrist. I am a nurse and I know how people bleed. “

The soldier was yelling good obscenities. Jumping to his feet, he moved his good hand over Jenny’s ear with such force that her head began to ring. With a reciprocal wave of the scalpel, she cut from his upper lip a piece that resembled the shape and thickness of a thumbnail. “I didn’t want to cut his throat,” she later told police. “I aimed to cut off my nose, but I missed.”

Screaming in pain, the soldier crawled on all fours to the aisle and in the same manner moved on to the saving light of the foyer.In the hall, a woman screeched with fear.

Jenny wiped the scalpel on the seat, dropped it into her bag, and carefully slipped the thermometer case onto the blade. Then she went to the foyer, from where the heartbreaking screams and the call of the administrator, addressed to the darkness of the auditorium: “For God’s sake, is there a doctor here?”

The nurse, at least, was in the hall, and she in good faith hastened to provide the victim with first aid. Seeing her, the soldier immediately fainted, and not because of blood loss.Jenny knew how facial cuts bleed; they always look very dangerous, although in reality there is nothing particularly scary. A much deeper cut on the arm, of course, required immediate treatment, but the soldier was not threatened with death from blood loss. Of course, none of those present except her understood this, since there was a lot of blood, especially on her white uniform. So it didn’t take long to guess whose hands it was. The administrator of the cinema did not let her approach the soldier who was lying in a swoon, and someone even took her bag away from her.Mad Nurse! Mad Ripper! Jenny Fields, however, remained completely calm. She believed that as soon as the law enforcement officers appeared, everything would fall into place. However, the police did not show proper understanding either.

– Have you been dating this fellow for a long time? One of them asked on the way to the police station.

And a little later, another asked an equally meaningful question:

– What makes you think that he was going to attack you? According to him, he just wanted to meet.

“This is a serious weapon, honey,” the third policeman told her. “I don’t advise you to carry such things with you. It can end badly.

As a result, Jenny had to wait for the brothers to settle the matter. Both were law students at Cambridge Law School, across the river. One studied and the other taught law.

“Both,” wrote Garp, “shared the opinion that legal practice is a vulgar occupation, while the study of law elevates and ennobles.”

Upon arrival, the brothers were in no hurry to console her.

“You will bring your mother to the grave,” said one.

– And why didn’t you stay in Wellesley ?! Exclaimed another.

“A lonely girl must be able to defend herself,” Jenny said. – What could be more natural?

Then one of the brothers asked if she could prove that she had no relationship with the victim.

“Only confess to us,” the second defender whispered in her ear, “have you been dating him for a long time?

The situation was cleared up when the police found out that the soldier was from New York, where he had a wife and a child.In Boston, he was on leave and more than anything in the world was afraid that this story would reach his half. They agreed that it would be terrible for everyone, and as a result, Jenny was released in peace. When she began to demand that the police return the scalpel to her, her younger brother said:

– For God’s sake, Jennifer, can’t you grab another one?

– I didn’t steal it! Jenny declared.

“You ought to make friends,” the elder advised.

“Wellesley students,” the brothers repeated in chorus.

“Thanks for coming,” Jenny thanked.

– What are we talking about, we are relatives! One answered.

“Blood is not water,” another added and immediately mixed: Jenny’s uniform was covered in blood stains.

– Jennifer, – said the older brother, who in childhood was an example for her in everything. His voice sounded very serious. – I do not advise you to mess with married men.

“I’m a decent girl,” she said.

“We won’t tell mom anything,” the younger reassured.

– Father, of course, too, – summed up the first line. In a clumsy attempt to add family warmth to their meeting, he winked at her, twisting his face, and Jenny for a moment had the impression that her first ideal in life was suffering from a nervous tic.

Next to the brothers was a poster of Uncle Sam. A tiny soldier, all in brown, stood in Uncle Sam’s big palm and prepared to jump onto the map of Europe. There is an inscription under the poster: “Support our guys!” The older brother glanced at Jenny, who was studying the poster.

“And never mess with the soldiers,” he added, not suspecting that in a few months he would become a soldier himself, one of those who would not be destined to return from the war. And he will break his mother’s heart, he, not Jenny, as everyone in their family thought.

The second brother will die much later after the war, drown on a yacht a few miles from their family nest, in Dogs Head Cove. Jenny’s mother will say about his inconsolable widow: “She is still young and attractive, and the children are quite tolerable – for now, anyway.The prescribed period of mourning will end, and she will find herself a life partner. I am absolutely sure of that. ” By the way, a year after this unfortunate event, her brother’s widow turned to Jenny for advice if she knew if the due date had ended and if it was time to think about a new life partner. She was afraid of offending Jenny’s mother, she was afraid of the condemnation of others: what if she was supposed to mourn her husband’s death longer?

– If you no longer feel sorrow, why do you need mourning? Jenny asked her. And in her biography I noticed: “This poor thing had to be prompted what to feel when.”

“According to the mother,” wrote Garp, “she has never met a stupider woman. Incidentally, the younger brother’s widow was a Wellesley graduate.

But then, having said goodbye to the brothers already in her room, which she rented a stone’s throw from the hospital, Jenny was in such confusion that she could not really get angry. In addition, everything hurt her – both the ear, on which the soldier drove, and the back, which did not allow her to sleep. Most likely, she pulled some muscle when these insolent people in the cinema pounced on her in the foyer and wrung her hands behind her back.Jenny recalled that a heating pad is recommended for muscle pain; she got out of bed, walked over to the closet, and took one of her mother’s gift bags.

It was not a heating pad. The mother used a euphemism because she did not dare to talk to her daughter about such sensitive topics. The package contained a syringe. Both mother and daughter knew her purpose. Jenny often had to teach her patients how to use her. True, in the hospital they were used not to prevent pregnancy immediately after intercourse, but to maintain personal hygiene and for sexually transmitted diseases.For Jenny Fields, the syringe was a more convenient and less crude analogue of the Valentine’s Irrigator.

Jenny opened all the packages one by one. There were syringes everywhere. “For God’s sake, use it!” – the meaning of these persistent requests immediately became clear: the mother was guided by good intentions and did not doubt that her daughter was leading a promiscuous sex life “after leaving Wellesley.” After Wellesley, in her opinion, Jenny walked “without knowing the restraint.”

That evening Jenny Fields went to bed with a syringe of hot water under her back between her shoulder blades.She hoped that the clamps on the rubber tube would not leak, but just in case she squeezed the tube in her hands, thrusting the tip with small holes into the glass. Jenny lay awake all night listening to water dripping from the syringe.

“In this dirty world,” she thought, “you are either someone’s wife or someone’s whore; and if not, you will soon become this or that. If you are not a wife and not a whore, everyone is vying to assure you that not everything is all right with you. ” But she was sure that everything was all right with her.

In these hours, undoubtedly, the idea of ​​the book was born, which after many years brought Jenny Fields fame. In a fair, but not very elegant expression, biography eliminated the gap between the literary merits of the work and its popularity, although, according to Garp, his mother’s work had no more literary merits than the Sears catalog [2].

What pushed Jenny Fields to a step that does not fit into any framework, a step that will be discussed a little below? Not her highly educated brothers, not the guy who flooded her uniform with his blood in the cinema hall.Not even the maternal syringes that eventually got Jenny out of the apartment. The landlady (a scandalous lady who, for some mysterious reason, saw in every woman a potential whore) found nine syringes in Jenny’s tiny room at once. In the fevered imagination of the hostess, this could only mean a panic fear of infection – of course, quite reasonable – and, of course, testified to their use on a fantastic scale, which confirmed her worst suspicions.

What she thought of a dozen new pairs of nursing shoes remained a mystery. But to Jenny, the whole situation seemed just absurd. In addition, the mother’s prudence aroused in her the most unequivocal emotions, and she, without going into any explanations, moved out.

But all this has nothing to do with her, stunned everyone, step. Paradoxically, brothers, parents and mistress – all of them thought that she was almost obsessed with sex. Jenny decided not to prove anything to anyone: they will still think that they are justifying themselves, and rented a small apartment.This triggered another avalanche of syringes from my mother and boxes of shoes from my father. She was amazed at the very train of their thoughts: if her daughter was destined to be a whore, let her be a whore clean and well equipped.

The war to some extent distracted Jenny from the bitter thoughts of misunderstanding on the part of her family, from bitterness and excessive self-pity; however, Jenny never had a penchant for introspection. She was a good nurse, and her work continued to grow. Many of the sisters went to serve in the army, but Jenny had no desire to change uniforms and sail across the sea; she found it difficult to get along with people, and she did not want to lose her familiar environment.In addition, the observance of the chain of command annoyed her even at Boston Mercy, and she, not without reason, believed that it would be even worse in a military field hospital.

And, of course, she would not have enough children there. In general, because of this, she remained in the hospital, despite the fact that many of the sisters left. She really liked helping mothers with newborn babies, especially since suddenly too many children appeared, whose fathers were either far away, or died, or disappeared. Jenny tried her best to comfort single mothers.Deep down, she envied them. For her, the situation would be ideal: alone with a newborn, her husband is killed somewhere in France. A young woman with her own baby, their whole life is ahead, and they don’t need anyone else. Almost Immaculate Conception. In any case, you can no longer think about any “peters”.

Of course, these women were not always happy with their lot. Many mourned their dead husbands, many were abandoned by their husbands; there were also those who were not very happy with the baby. But most dreamed of a husband and father for their little one.Jenny Fields, consoling them, acted as a passionate preacher of loneliness, inspired that they were very lucky.

– You’re a good mother! She said. The women agreed.

– Isn’t your baby lovely? – Again, many did not mind.

– But what about your father? What was he like?

– Loafers, which are few, – answered almost all.

– Deceiver, rude, worthless, vile, lost type. But he is no longer there! – others sobbed.

“See how lucky you are,” Jenny summed up.

She managed to convert some to her faith, but for this she lost her place in the maternity ward. In the hospital, fatherlessness was discouraged.

“Old Jenny has a Virgin Mary complex,” the nurses said. – The usual way of getting a child does not suit her. We’ll have to call for the help of the Lord God.

In her autobiography, Jenny wrote: “I wanted to work and live alone. I was deemed obsessed with sex.I also wanted a child, but I was not going to give my body and my life to someone for him. And as a result, this opinion of me was confirmed. ”

This is what pushed her to a step that shocked everyone. Hence the famous title of Jenny Fields’ autobiography “Obsessed with Sex”.

She found that by shocking others, you gain more respect than trying to live quietly, but in your own way. And Jenny publicly declared that she needed a partner from whom she would get pregnant the first time, after which they would part forever.The situation in which one call is not enough is excluded, she explained to the nurses. Those, of course, rang out such valuable information to all their acquaintances. Very soon Jenny had a dozen proposals and was faced with a choice: either to immediately back down on the pretext that all this is gossip, or to disregard moral principles and fulfill her plans.

A medical student offered his services to her on the condition that he was given at least six attempts over three weekends.Jenny refused him for the reason that she could not entrust such a responsible task – the conception of a child – to a person who was not confident in his abilities.

Another candidate – an anesthesiologist – even offered to pay for the education of his offspring, including college, but in response he heard that his eyes were set too close and his teeth left much to be desired: she did not want such “decorations” for her child.

A friend of one of the nurses decided to take the bull by the horns, handing her a glass in the hospital cafeteria, almost filled to the brim with a cloudy liquid.

“Sperm,” he announced, nodding toward the glass. – All at once – I don’t waste my time on trifles. If you want it in one try, you can’t find me better.

Jenny picked up the awful glass and studied it coolly. Only God knows what it really was. The nurse’s buddy continued agitating:

– The high quality of my sperm is evident. See, she’s teeming with semen.

Jenny emptied the glass into the flower pot.

“I only need one child,” she said.- I don’t need a tribal plant.

Jenny knew that she was condemning herself to a difficult life. Little by little, she got used to such jokes and learned to fight back.

According to those around her, Jenny Fields has gone too far. Joke as a joke, but she was clearly overdoing it. Either it’s a game that she didn’t want to give up out of sheer stubbornness, or worse, it’s really her intention. Colleagues at work could neither laugh with her at her venture, nor drag her into bed. Garp wrote: “The mother’s trouble was that she thought herself superior to her colleagues, and they felt it.As you might expect, they didn’t like it. ”

In the end, everyone decided: it was time to put Jenny Fields in her place. For this, administrative measures were applied, of course “for her own benefit,” and Jenny was separated from her newborn babies. By all accounts, she was obsessed with children. From now on, no obstetrics. You shouldn’t let her get close to the maternity ward – her heart is too soft, and possibly her brains.

And Jenny had to part with her charges. The authorities explained their decision by the fact that her high qualifications are needed in the department for the most difficult.He was well aware that the nurses working there quickly recover from all sorts of stupidity. Of course, Jenny perfectly understood the background of the translation, she was just annoyed that those around her had such a low opinion of her. Although her desire seems strange, this does not mean that she cannot be trusted at all. Truly, thought Jenny, people are completely devoid of any logic. But nothing, she is not overdone, she will still have time to get pregnant. So, in general, nothing terrible happened.

There was a war. In the department for seriously ill patients, she was especially felt.The hospitals on duty referred the most difficult patients to them, and among them – the most hopeless. There were old people on their way, victims of car accidents and accidents at work; the injuries of the children were especially dire. But most of all they brought in seriously wounded soldiers.

Jenny came up with her own classification of the wounded, dividing them into groups:

1. Burn victims (mainly sailors): the worst were sent from the sea hospital in Chelsea. But there were also burned pilots and tankers.Jenny called them outside.

2. She called a soldier with cavitary wounds “cavity”.

3. Those wounded in the head and with injuries to the spine caused a mystical feeling in Jenny. Some were paralyzed, others were just quiet idiots. They had already renounced everything earthly, and Jenny called them “detached”.

4. Some of the excluded had burns and other severe injuries. The whole hospital called them the same: “hopeless”. They made up Jenny’s fourth group.

“My father,” Garp wrote, “was“ hopeless ”. According to the mother, this was a huge advantage. All threads are broken. ”

Garp’s father was a tower gunner caught in the skies over France.

“The tower gunner,” Garp wrote, “was one of the most vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire of the bomber crew.”

The pilots called this fire “flack”; To the arrow, such a “flack” often seemed like an upward jet of ink that spread across the sky like ink on a blotter.The little man (only small ones fit in the circular tower), bent over in three deaths, sat with his machine guns in this nest, as in a cocoon, resembling an insect under a glass cover. The circular tower was a metal hemisphere with a glass porthole that protruded from the fuselage of the B-17, like a swollen navel. Under the tiny dome were two 50-caliber machine guns and a small man, whose unhappy duties included catching an enemy fighter in a machine-gun sight.The tower revolved, and the shooter revolved with it. At his disposal were wooden handles with a button at the end for firing; the tower shooter, clinging to these levers, resembled some formidable embryo in an easily permeable shell, which protruded from the mother’s womb to protect her. The handles also served to rotate the tower – it turned to a certain dead center, beyond which there was a danger of hitting its own propeller.

“Feeling the sky under my feet, the shooter in a capsule taken out,” wrote Garp, “felt especially uncomfortable.Before landing, if the mechanism was triggered, the circular tower was pulled inward. If it didn’t work, the circular tower would strike a sheaf of sparks from the runway no worse than a car braking at full speed. ”

Technician Sergeant Garp, a tower gunner who looked into the eyes of death, served in the Eighth Air Regiment, the formation that bombed the continent, based in England. Prior to his appointment as a tower gunner, Sergeant Garp managed to fight both as a bow gunner on the B-17C and as a fuselage gunner on the B-17E.

Garp did not like the fuselage shooting on the B-17E. Two shooters were squeezed into the airplane’s body, their embrasures were opposite each other, and as a result, Garp received a blow in the ear every time his partner turned his machine gun at the same time as Garp. It is for this reason that in the later models of the B-17E the embrasures were bent at an angle. But Sergeant Garp did not find these transformations.

His baptism of fire was the B-17E daytime raid on the French city of Rouen on August 17, 1942.The operation went without loss. Technician-Sergeant Garp, acting as a fuselage gunner, once received from his comrade on the left ear and twice on the right. The matter was aggravated by the fact that the second gunner was much taller than Garp, due to which his elbows were just at the level of the sergeant’s ears.

The place in the circular tower on that first day above Rouen was occupied by a guy named Fowler, who was even smaller than Garp. Before the war, Fowler was a jockey. He shot better than Garp, but Garp nevertheless aimed at his place.He was an orphan and, apparently, loved solitude. And the partner’s elbows were an unpleasant neighborhood. Of course, like many, he dreamed of a fiftieth combat sortie, after which there was a transfer to the Second Air Regiment – a training unit for training bomber crews, from where he could safely retire as a shooting instructor. Before the death of Fowler, Garp envied him: the former jockey had an individual nook where there was no one but you. “The stench in this nook is terrible, especially if you fart a lot,” Fowler said.He was a consummate cynic with a bad reputation with the field hospital nurses.

Fowler died during an emergency landing on a dirt road. The released landing gear hit a pothole, they were cut off like a sickle: having lost the landing gear, the bomber rode on its belly, crushing the circular tower with the same ease as a falling tree grape. Fowler, who, he said, trusted machines more than horses and people, was at that moment in the tower, and the plane landed directly on him.The fuselage gunners, including Sergeant Garp, saw bloody debris flying from under the sliding bomber. The head of the squadron’s personnel section was the closest to the landing site, he had the pleasure of watching all this, as in slow motion, and he vomited right in the jeep. The squadron commander did not have to wait for the official conclusion on the death of Fowler to replace him with the smallest shooter after him: the short man Garp had long dreamed of a circular tower. And in September 1942, his dream came true.

“My mother was always interested in details about the patients who came to her,” Garp wrote.

When a wounded man was brought to the hospital, Jenny Fields was the first to find out from the doctor how and where he was wounded, and put him in the appropriate column. To better remember the surname and diagnosis, she came up with rhymed clues: Private John – a ringing in his head, Midshipman Chick – a puff of a leg, Corporal Glenn – a torn off member, Captain Maxlen – no skin at all. But Sergeant Garp puzzled her. During his thirty-fifth sortie over France, the little turret gunner suddenly stopped firing.The pilot drew attention to the lack of machine gun fire from the circular turret and decided that Garp was wounded. He himself did not feel the blow in the underbelly of the plane and hoped that Garp was not badly injured. As soon as the plane landed, Garp was hastily transferred to the sidecar of a special motorcycle, as there was no ambulance nearby. And the little technician sergeant, to everyone’s amazement, took up his cock. The stroller was equipped with a tarpaulin cover in case of bad weather, and the pilot hurried to cover Garp with it. In the cap there was a window through which the pilots, mechanics and the doctor saw the wounded sergeant.His cock seemed too big for such a small man, and he treated him clumsily, like a child – at least worse than a monkey in a zoo. At the same time, Garp, well, just like the aforementioned monkey, now and then looked from his cage at the faces of the people watching him.

“Garp,” the pilot called out uncertainly. Garp’s forehead was covered in caked blood, but at first glance there was no damage.

– Garp! The pilot shouted. In the metal sphere, where the machine gun used to be, there was now a gaping hole; the anti-aircraft shell, as you can see, hit the machine gun body; At the same time, Garp’s hands did not hurt, but they were doing their job now poorly.

– Garp! The pilot shouted again.

“Garp,” the technician-sergeant repeated. He mimicked the pilot like a parrot or a talking starling. “Garp,” he said again, as if he had just learned the word. The pilot nodded his approval and Garp smiled. – Garp! – he exclaimed again, as if greeting those around him. Instead of “Hello!” – “Garp!”

“My God, Garp,” the pilot said. Holes and cracks were clearly visible in the window of the circular tower. The doctor opened a window on a canvas hood and looked inside.Something was wrong with Garp’s eyes: they rotated in different directions, each on its own. Probably, it seemed to Garp that the world was floating on him, then receding; if, of course, he saw anything at all, the doctor thought. Neither the doctor nor the pilot knew that several sharp, thin fragments of the anti-aircraft shell damaged one of the nerves in Garp’s brain; this nerve transmits a motor impulse to the muscles of the eyeball. But the rest of his brain also received many cuts, as is the case with very careless brain surgery.

The “operation” on Sergeant Garp’s brain was done very badly, and the horrified doctor did not even try to pull off the blood-soaked helmet that had stuck to his head and slid down on his forehead to the point where an elastic shiny bump grew right before our eyes. They rushed to look for the motorcyclist who was carrying the doctor, but he was turned inside out somewhere, and the doctor decided that he would put someone else in the carriage with Garp, and the motorcycle would drive himself.

– Garp? – Garp turned to him, repeating the only newly acquired word.

– Garp, – the doctor confirmed. With a contented air, Garp continued to serve his impressive cock with both hands, until he finally successfully completed such an important task.

– Garp! He shouted. His voice was filled with joy and surprise at the same time. He rolled his eyes, as if trying to persuade the world that was eluding him in the end to stop. He did not seem to quite understand whether he would succeed.

– Garp? He said uncertainly.

The pilot patted him on the arm and nodded to the crew members and the ground brigade who were standing nearby, as if to say: “Guys, let’s support the sergeant, let’s calm him down.”And all those around, respectfully observing the process of ejaculation that had just taken place, having recovered from the shock, said in unison: “Garp! Garp! Garp! ” This chorus was supposed to satisfy even the most fastidious.

Garp nodded his head happily, but the doctor took his hand and whispered passionately:

– Never move your head! O \ ‘kay, Garp? Please don’t move your head.

Garp’s eyes swept past the pilot and doctor, patiently awaiting their return.

– Quiet, Garp, – the pilot whispered, – sit quietly, oh \ ‘kay?

Garp’s face radiated a serene calm.Continuing to squeeze the falling member with both hands, the little sergeant sat with the air of a man who had done everything that was required of him at that moment.

There was nothing they could do to help Sergeant Garp in England. But he was fortunate enough to return to his native Boston long before the end of the war. The senator helped him in this. An article appeared in one of the Boston newspapers, accusing the Navy of not sending all the wounded to their homeland, but only the sons of influential families. To refute such outrageous slander, one US senator said: “If there is an opportunity to send home the seriously wounded, the chances are equal for everyone, even if you are an orphan.”A commotion arose in the army, they began to look for a wounded orphan so that the senator would not be reproached for disinformation. Fortunately, the orphan was quickly found.

But Technician Sergeant Garp was not only an orphan: he was a complete idiot with a one-word vocabulary who could not even make press statements. And most importantly, in newspaper photographs, the shooter Garp always smiled.

When the freaky sergeant was taken to Boston Mercy, Jenny didn’t know which group to assign him to.He was clearly “detached”, more obedient than a child, but what else happened to him was impossible to understand.

– Hello! How are you? She asked as the grinning Garp was wheeled into the room.

– Garp! – he reported.

The oculomotor nerve was partially restored, and now his eyes jumped rather than rotated, but his hands were in gauze mittens; In the hospital compartment of the transport ship, a fire accidentally broke out, and Garp decided to play with fire in the literal sense of the word.Seeing the fire, he stretched out his hands to it, the flames licked his face and, in addition, burned his eyebrows. Jenny thought he looked a lot like a shaved owl. Because of the burns, she assigned him to a special group of “outwardly detached”. But there was something else with Garp. The scorched palms were so thickly bandaged that he could not engage in masturbation, which he indulged in often and with success, but always unconsciously, as was recorded in his medical history. And the doctors who watched him on the ship after the fire began to fear depression – after all, he was deprived of the only entertainment available to him, at least until his hands were healed.

It is possible that Garp’s internal organs were also damaged. Many small fragments were stuck in his head, some of them settled in the areas of the brain inaccessible to the scalpel, and there was no way to extract them. The insane lobotomy performed on his brain could only be the beginning of his troubles, the process of internal destruction of brain tissue, most likely, progressed.

“We are already degrading rather quickly,” wrote Garp, “and without the help of anti-aircraft fire”.

In the hospital, even before Sergeant Garp appeared, there was a wounded man with similar head injuries.For several months he felt quite tolerable, talked to himself, and occasionally wet his bed. Then hair began to fall out, speech disorders appeared, and before his death, mammary glands began to grow.

Based on all the information available, as well as the X-rays, Jenny Fields concluded that Garp was apparently hopeless.

But she found him very cute. The former tower shooter was a small, graceful man, innocent and spontaneous, like a two-year-old child.He shouted: “Garp!” When he was hungry or was happy about something; pronounced “Garp?” with an interrogative intonation, when he was puzzled by something or talking with a stranger, and calmly said “Garp”, recognizing the interlocutor. Usually he did everything that was told to him, but it was impossible to rely on him entirely: he quickly forgot everything. In addition, he acted either like an obedient six-year-old child, then like a curious two-year-old toddler.

He fell into depression, judging by the medical history, every time he got a member.At such moments, he clutched his poor grown up “Peter” with bandaged hands and cried. He cried because the gauze did not give him the pleasure imprinted in the twisted brain that the palms did, and besides, any careless movement caused severe pain in his hands. At such moments, Jenny Fields came to his aid. She scratched his back between his shoulder blades until he began to squint like a cat, and all this time she talked to him, changing intonations to keep his elusive attention.Usually the nurses talked to the patients in an even, soothing voice, but Jenny understood that Garp did not need sleep at all. He was a small child and bored; it means he needs to be entertained. And Jenny did her best. She turned on the radio, but some of the programs upset Garp; why – no one could say. From others, his penis instantly rose; as a result – another depression and so on. Once from some transmission Garp had a wet emission; this surprised and delighted him so much that from then on he enjoyed just looking at the radio.But alas! Jenny could not repeat that transmission, and no other had the same effect. She knew that if she could connect poor Garp to the “emission” program, it would make her job much easier and brighten his life. But, unfortunately, easy paths in life rarely fall out.

She tried for a long time to teach him new words, but nothing came of it. When she fed Garp and saw that he liked the food, she would say:

– Good! It’s good!

– Garp, – he agreed.

And when he spat food on the bib, making a terrible grimace, she said:

– Bad! This is bad, right?

– Garp! Was the standard answer.

The first sign of his worsening condition for Jenny was the disappearance of the sound “g” in a single word. One morning he met her with a joyful “Arp”.

“Garp,” she told him sternly. – Garp.

– Arp, – he repeated. And Jenny knew the end was near.

His age seemed to be decreasing every day.In a dream, he was now waving with clenched fists, his lips were pulled into a tube, his cheeks moved as if sucking, his eyelids trembled. Jenny talked with babies for a long time and therefore knew: the tower shooter sucked her mother’s breast in a dream. She even thought about taking a pacifier in the maternity ward, but she did not have the slightest desire to appear there: the jokes of the midwives now annoyed her. (“And here our Virgin Mary appeared for a nipple for her child. Jenny, who is a happy father?”) She watched Sergeant Garp suck in his sleep, and imagined the last stages of his life: quietly, serenely he would return to an embryonic state and will stop breathing lungs; then his soul will happily split in two – one will be forgotten by the dreams of the egg, the second – by the dreams of the sperm.And, in the end, it just won’t be.

In general, this is where it all went. The infant stage was so intense that Garp woke up to feed every four hours; he even cried now, like a baby: his face turned red, tears rolled down and dried up immediately, as soon as Jenny spoke or turned on the radio. Once she scratched his back and he vomited. Jenny broke down and burst into tears. She sat at his head and prayed to God that he would grant him a quick, painless road to the mother’s womb and further into nothingness.

If only his hands would heal, she thought; then he could suck his thumb. When he woke up, he began to demand a breast, Jenny gave him her own finger, he grabbed it with his lips and began to suck. And although he had quite strong adult teeth, he never bit her: obviously, in his infant perception, his gums were toothless. This pushed Jenny to breastfeed him one night. He sucked on her empty breast with lust, and Jenny felt that if she went on like this, she would have milk.One day she felt a strong impulse in her womb, filling her with an unknown feeling, maternal and sexual at the same time. Her imagination played out, and for a moment she seriously believed that she could get pregnant simply because the “chest” tower shooter would suck her breast.

So everything went, but it turned out that the shooter Garp had not yet turned into a baby. One night while he was sucking her, Jenny noticed that his cock had lifted the sheet; with clumsy bandaged hands Garp rubbed him, sobbing with frustration and not letting go of his chest.Then Jenny decided to help him: she took the source of his torment with her cool, talcum powder hand. Garp immediately stopped sucking and just started poking her breasts.

– Ar, – he moaned. Now the “P” is gone.

First “Garp”, then “Arp” and now only “Ar”; she knew he was dying. There is only one vowel and one consonant left.

When he finished, his cum, wet and hot, filled her palm. Under the sheet it smelled like summer in a greenhouse; it was the smell of unheard-of fertility, indomitable and boundless: whatever you plant, it will blossom.It is enough to throw it into the greenhouse, and the children will grow like mushrooms.

Jenny gave herself exactly one day to think about it.

– Garp! Jenny whispered.

She unbuttoned her dress and bared her breasts, which all her life she had considered too big. “Garp?” She whispered in his ear; his eyelids flinched, his lips pulled towards her. From the rest of the room they were fenced off by a drawn curtain that enveloped Garp’s bed in a white shroud. On one side lay the “outer”; the poor fellow was hit by a flamethrower.All slippery from the ointment, bandaged from head to toe, he was also without eyelids, which made it seem that he was constantly watching everyone; in fact, he was blind. Jenny took off her sturdy nursing shoes, unbuttoned her white stockings, and kicked off her dress. And pressed her finger to Garp’s lips.

On the other side of his bed lay a patient from among the “cavities”, gradually turning into a “detached”. He did not have nearly the entire lower intestine and rectum; the kidney had recently started to fail, and the pains in the liver were driving him crazy.At night, he had nightmares: he was forced to urinate and defecate, although these departures remained for him in the distant past. Now they passed unnoticed, the body was emptied through tubes connected to rubber bags. He often moaned, but unlike Garp, he uttered whole words at the same time.

– Shit! He moaned.

– Garp, – Jenny whispered. She took off the slip, panties, bra and pulled off the sheet.

– Lord, – whispered “outside”; his lips were blistered from burns.

– Damn shit! – shouted “detached”.

– Garp, – said Jenny Fields and took his erect member in her hand.

– Aaaa, – said Garp. Now the “R” has already disappeared. To express the entire gamut of feelings, he had one single vowel.

– A-ah-ah, – he repeated when Jenny brought his cock into herself and sank down on him with all her weight.

– Garp, – she called. – All okay, Garp? You feel good?

“Okay,” he said clearly.The word came up from the depths of his crippled memory the instant he came inside her. Jenny’s first and last real word from Garp. As soon as his penis fell, he again held out his “ah-ah”, closed his eyelids and fell asleep. Jenny wanted to give him a breast, but he didn’t even move.

– My God, – said the “outside”, barely moving his burnt tongue.

– Piss! – shouted “detached”.

Jenny Fields washed Garp, washed herself with soap, pouring warm water into a white enamel basin.Of course, she did not douch, she did not have the slightest doubt – a miracle had happened. She felt like a rich, fertile soil; Garp watered her generously, as if spilling life-giving moisture on a dying flower bed.

It was only once. No more. What for? She didn’t get any pleasure. From time to time she helped him with her hand; when he cried, he gave a breast. And after a month his flesh finally stopped tense.

It’s time to take off the bandages from your hands; it turned out that even the healing process is scrolling in the opposite direction; I had to bandage them again.He no longer asked her for breasts. Jenny believed that he began to have dreams that dream of fish. He had already, as it were, returned to his mother’s bosom, lying in the middle of the bed in a fetal position, pulling his knees up to his chest. And he didn’t make any more sounds. One morning his little leg jerked once or twice, as if it were kicking something. And Jenny clearly felt soft shocks inside her. The term, of course, is short, but she did not doubt: the life conceived in her would soon declare itself.

After a short time, Garp stopped kicking.True, he was still breathing: a clear example of the adaptability of the human body. But he ate nothing; he had to be fed intravenously, so he regained a kind of umbilical cord. Jenny anxiously awaited the end. Will there be a desperate struggle in the end, like that of a sperm seeking copulation? Or will the protective shell disappear by itself and the naked egg will quietly wait for its death? And will little Garp’s soul split at the end? But Jenny didn’t get to see the final stage.The technician sergeant died one of her days off.

“It couldn’t have been otherwise,” Garp wrote. “She wouldn’t have let him go so easily.”

“Of course, when he was gone, something stirred in me,” wrote Jenny Fields in her famous autobiography. – But after all, everything that was best in him was preserved in me. You couldn’t imagine any more beautiful thing: he prolonged his life in the only possible way for him, I got pregnant in the only possible way for myself. And let others consider my act immoral.This proves once again that very few people respect the rights of the individual in our country ”.

It was 1943. Jenny’s pregnancy soon became visible and she was fired from her job. Of course, her family was not surprised, they did not expect anything else from her. Jenny has long been desperate to find understanding from her parents. She wandered like a shadow along the long corridors of her native nest in Dogs Head, although she was quite pleased with herself. Her imperturbable calmness inspired them with alarm, and they stopped tormenting her. And Jenny was just happy, she just forgot to come up with a name for the unborn baby, although all her thoughts were occupied exclusively with him.

This was discovered when a lovely nine-pound boy was born, and Jenny didn’t know what to call him. The mother asked the baby’s name, but Jenny, having just exhausted herself and taking sleeping pills, was not very talkative.

“Garp,” she said shortly.

Her father, the shoe king, thought she had hiccupped, but her mother whispered to him:

– She says his name is Garp.

– Garp? He asked. They still hoped to find out from their daughter who the child’s father is.Jenny, of course, left them in the dark about this.

– Ask her, is this the name or surname of the son of a bitch? The father said in his wife’s ear.

– Is that a first or last name, dear? – asked the mother.

Jenny was almost asleep.

“Garp is Garp,” she said. – And that’s all.

“It seems to me that this is a surname,” the mother said to her father.

– What is his name? My father asked angrily.

“I don’t know,” Jenny muttered. And it was true.

– She doesn’t even know his name! – roared the father.

“For God’s sake, daughter, he must have a name,” the mother said conciliatingly.

– Technician Sergeant Garp, replied Jenny Fields.

– Some lousy soldier, I had no doubt, – my father was indignant.

– Technician Sergeant? – asked the mother.

– TS, replied Jenny Fields. – T. S. Garp. That is my boy’s name. – And with these words she fell asleep.

Jenny’s father was beside himself.

– T. S. Garp! – he went broke. – What a name for a child!

“That’s his name,” Jenny told him the next day.- His own wonderful name!

“It was a pleasure to go to school with that name,” Garp wrote. – The teachers asked what the initials mean. I tried to explain to them that these initials mean nothing. But they didn’t believe. Then I said: “Call your mother and ask her.” They did just that. Old Jenny would come and fix their brains. ”

This is how TS Garp made the world happy with his appearance; born a good nurse with an independent temper and a small tower shooter – his last shot.

2. In blood-blue tones

TS Garp always thought that early death would be his lot. “I think I will not be mistaken if I say that I, like my father, have a craving for brevity,” he wrote, “I hit the target with one shot.”

As a child, Garp safely escaped the impending danger of imprisonment in a girls’ boarding school, where his mother was offered a position as head nurse. Jenny Fields foresaw in time the terrible consequences that threatened her son, if she agreed to this job (she and her child were offered an apartment in the girls’ dormitory): from childhood, Garp would see only women around him.She imagined the first sexual shocks of her son, for example, the imaginative scenes in the laundry room, where the girls for fun dipped the boy in a silky heap of women’s underwear. As a matter of fact, if not for concern for Garp, Jenny was fine with boarding work, but she turned it down and went to nurse at the famous Styring High School. There she and her son were accommodated in a cold hospital wing with barred prison windows.

Jenny’s father was annoyed that she had decided to make a living herself.The family had money, and the old man wanted his daughter to hide her shame in her own nest on the shores of Dogs Head Bay. And there the fledgling child will grow up imperceptibly and leave somewhere. But he was reconciled with the Stiring School.

– If a child has brains by nature, he will eventually end up in this school anyway. You can’t find a better place for a boy, – he pronounced his verdict at a general meeting of the family.

Speaking about the presence of Garp’s “brains by nature”, Jenny’s father hinted at the child’s dubious heredity.At the time, only boys were admitted to Styring School, where Jenny’s father and then her brothers studied. Jenny firmly believed that she was doing the greatest good for her son, dooming herself to a voluntary imprisonment in a men’s school. This is to make up for her father’s absence, her parent said.

“It’s a strange thing,” wrote Garp, “my mother, knowing well that she would never have agreed to join her life with a man, suddenly decided to live under the same roof with eight hundred boys.”

So, Garp’s early years were spent in the hospital wing of the school where his mother worked.It cannot be said that the schoolchildren treated him in the same way as the teaching sons, who were contemptuously called “professors’ children.” This is understandable, because the school nurse occupies a very modest place in the school staff. Jenny Fields, among other things, didn’t even bother to invent a decent legend about Garp’s origin. Let’s say, come up with a husband and thus, as it were, legitimize the birth of a child. Jenny bore the name Fields and always introduced herself that way. Her son was Garp, and she did not see anything shameful in this.“This is his own name,” she said.

The whole school, of course, understood what was what. In Styring, it was not only not forbidden to turn up your nose, but was even encouraged on special occasions. But, of course, everything requires measure and tact. One was supposed to be proud of what was really worth being proud of, some undeniable achievement. While observing the politeness. But Jenny did not understand such subtleties.

“My mother, a simple soul,” wrote Garp, “was never deliberately proud, only under the influence of circumstances.”

Yes, pride was welcomed in Stiring. But Jenny Fields was proud of the illegitimate child! Maybe she shouldn’t have sprinkled ashes on her head because of this, but in her position it was better to keep more modest after all.

Jenny was not just proud of Garp. She was proud of the way she got it. The world did not yet know its history; Jenny has not yet written her autobiography or even started it. She waited for Garp to grow up to appreciate her life.

The son knew only what Jenny could tell the first person he met, who dared to ask her about it.The answer would be three simple phrases:

1. Garp’s father was a soldier.

2. He died in the war.

3. Who thinks about marriage formalities when there is a war?

The mysterious understatement of the plot could be interpreted in the most romantic spirit. Garp’s father could well be a hero. And Jenny Fields be a nurse in a field hospital. They fell in love with each other, but their love was doomed. Garp’s father, foreseeing his fate, decided to fulfill his last duty to humanity – to leave behind posterity.However, such a melodrama did not fit in with Jenny’s whole appearance and behavior. She was clearly pleased with her loneliness and did not surround the past with mystery. She was never seen in a bad mood, she devoted herself entirely to work and caring for little Garp.

The Fields were, of course, well known in Styring. The famous shoe king showed unwavering generosity to his alma mater; he even served on the school’s board of trustees, although few people knew about it. The Fields were not among the oldest families in New England, but of course their capital did not appear yesterday.Jenny’s mother came from the influential Boston Wicks family, who were more respected at the school than the Fields: teachers who had worked at Stiring for many years remembered the time when the name Weeks flashed annually on the alumni list. But Jenny Fields, by all accounts, did not inherit the respectability of both families. She was beautiful, everyone agreed with this, and nothing more; her uniform was the white nurse’s uniform, and she could afford something a little more smart. A nurse, who also loves her job – that was very strange, given the social status of the family.Taking care of the sick is perhaps not a very suitable occupation for the Weeks or Fields.

In dealing with people, Jenny showed that straightforward seriousness, which made people more frivolous just feel uncomfortable. She read a lot, no one knew better than her what treasures were hidden on the shelves of the school library. If the book you were looking for was not there, rest assured that the book was on Sister Fields’ card. Jenny answered the phone politely and often offered to hand over the book to the reader herself as soon as she finished it.She read books very quickly, but never discussed them with anyone. A person who borrowed a book from the library only to read it, without intending to discuss it later, looked like a black sheep in school. Indeed, why then take books at all?

But Jenny was even more weird — she attended lectures in her free time. According to the school charter, employees, as well as their wives, had the right to listen to lectures free of charge, having received permission from the teacher. But tell me, could anyone refuse a nurse who is interested in Elizabethan [4], the Victorian novel, the history of Russia until 1917, an introduction to genetics, the history of Western civilization? As the years passed, Jenny Fields moved from Caesar to Einstein, bypassing Luther, Lenin and Erasmus, mitosis [5] and osmosis [6], Freud and Rembrandt, chromosomes and Van Gogh; from Styx [7] to Thames, from Homer to Virginia Woolf, from Athens to Auschwitz.Jenny was the only woman in class. She invariably came to class in a white uniform, sat down at the table and listened so attentively and quietly that her presence was forgotten; the educational process went on as usual, and the frozen figure in a white coat eagerly listened to every word of the teacher; it was a silent witness of what was happening, most likely benevolent, but perhaps creating his own judgment.

Her time has come – Jenny received exactly the education she dreamed of. But her craving for knowledge was fueled not only by selfish interest.She tried to understand what and how they teach in Stiring, so as to help Garp with practical advice as needed. Gradually, she learned everything about school: which lessons are a waste of time, and which are worth their weight in gold.

She had many books, which soon became cramped in her small apartment. After working at the school for ten years, she accidentally discovered that students and staff members were entitled to a 10 percent discount at the school’s bookstore. She was very angry because the salespeople kept it from her. She did not spare her own books, so they stood on the shelves and in the gloomy wards of the isolation ward.When there was no room there, the books migrated to doctors’ offices, to the waiting room, and even to the X-ray room. First, they squeezed out the newspapers and magazines that were gathering dust on the tables, and then completely replaced the press. Those who happened to fall ill at school were imbued with special respect for Jenny. Still, here in the hospital, not some empty reading and various medical rubbish. In the queue to the doctor, for example, you are offered to look through “Autumn of the Middle Ages” [8], and while you are waiting for the test results, your sister brings an interesting guide to fruit flies.Well, if you find something serious and you need to go to the clinic for a long time, then consider that you have a lucky chance to master Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. Especially for boys with broken limbs and in general for those who got injured in training or sports, there were adventures and stories about heroes: for example, instead of “Sports Illustrated” – Conrad and Melville, and instead of “Time” and “Newsweek” – Dickens , Hemingway and Mark Twain. Oh, this longed-for dream of reading lovers is to get sick and end up in a school isolation ward.Here it is, a place where you can finally read to your heart’s content.

After Jenny Fields worked at Styring for twelve years, school librarians developed a habit of sending readers to the hospital building if the required book was not available. And in the bookstore, the buyer could be told: “Go to the detention center of Sister Fields, she probably has this book.”

Hearing the request, Jenny, straining her memory, frowned and said something like: “I think this book is in the twenty-sixth ward at McCarthy’s.He’s lying with the flu. As he reads, he will immediately give it to you. ” Or: “I just saw her in the water treatment room. I’m afraid the first pages are a little damp. ”

It is impossible to assess Jenny’s influence on the learning process at Stiring. But she never forgot the insult she had been inflicted on her in the bookstore – for ten whole years buying books without a discount!

Garp wrote: “My mother thoroughly supported the school bookstore trade. The fact is that nobody read anything in Stiring. ”

When Garz was two years old, the school management renewed Jenny Fields’ contract for another three years.She knew her business perfectly, no one argued with this. Garp was like all children, except that he sunbathed in the summer stronger than others. In winter, his face took on a yellowish tint, and he was all plump, rounded, like an Eskimo hidden in a hundred clothes. Young teachers who had been in the war said that the baby’s figure resembles the smooth outlines of a bomb. However, what to say, children are children, even illegitimate ones. And Jenny’s own weirdness caused a slight hurtful irritation.

So she signed a three-year contract.She went to lessons, improved and, most importantly, paved the way for her son. Her father said that the education at Stiring was given first-class, but Jenny wanted to be convinced of this for herself.

When Garp was five years old, Jenny Fields was appointed older sister. Young, energetic nurses were not eager to work at school. Not everyone will agree to endure the violent pranks of young gentlemen. Few people were attracted by life with them under one roof. Jenny seemed to be fine with everything.And in the end, she replaced many of her mother. She would meekly rise in the middle of the night, when some boy, waking up and jumping up, broke his water glass or called his sister with a bell. It happened to her to put things in order when dispersed tomboy raged in a dark corridor, and then suddenly, riding wheelchairs and hospital beds, they staged gladiator fights. Jenny’s watchful eye could not escape secret negotiations with the girls – the teachers’ daughters – through the cast-iron bars of the windows; she also prevented the sick from sneaking out of the ward through the window along the old brick wall entwined with ivy.

The isolation ward itself was connected to the outpatient wing by a not very wide underground passage through which it was possible to carry a wheelchair, and there was still room on the sides for two slender sisters. The “bad” boys loved to play the ball in the tunnel. The pounding of feet and the kicks of the ball echoed to Jenny’s apartment, located in the farthest part of the wing. It seemed to her then that the laboratory rabbits living in the basement room grew up to gigantic proportions at night and rolled trash cans, trying to drive them with their muzzle as deep as possible underground.

When Garp was five years old, the school audience began to notice some oddities in him. It is difficult to say what is so unusual about a five-year-old child. True, the boy’s head resembled the dark, glossy head of a seal, and looking at his miniature build, one could not help but recall the old conversations about his heredity. By the nature of the child, apparently, went to the mother; tenacity was combined in him with a complete lack of sentimentality, while he was as if on alert all the time.For five years he was clearly too small, but in behavior and conversation he seemed older. His imperturbable calm made me feel a little uncomfortable. Stocky, strong, he stood firmly on the ground and struck a badger or raccoon with his heavy agility. Mothers of other children noted with dismay that the boy could climb anywhere. It cost Garp nothing to run up the children’s slide, pull himself up on high rings, climb the upper stands of the stadium, the most dangerous trees.

One evening after supper Jenny suddenly missed her son.Garp was allowed to enter the wards, run around the outpatient wing and talk to the boys. She usually called him home, saying only two words on the selector: “Garp, home.” He knew perfectly well what he could and what was not: for example, under no circumstances should he look into the wards where infectious patients are lying, and pester those who do not feel well. Garp was very worried about sports injuries. He loved to look at the bandages and splints, listen to the stories of the victims many times. Garp was the son of his mother, a sister of mercy by calling; he spent whole days near the sick, fulfilling various requests, passing on notes, and slowly bringing food into the ward.And then one evening – he was then five years old – he did not respond to the usual “Garp, home.” Jenny’s voice was heard in every ward, it resounded throughout the hospital wing, reaching those rooms where Garp was strictly prohibited from appearing: the laboratory, the operating room, the X-ray room. Jenny knew for sure: if Garp does not respond, it means that either he is not in the building, or he is in trouble. She hastily assembled a search party from the walking patients.

It was a damp, foggy evening at the beginning of spring.Some guys were ransacking the territory, looking for Garp in the wet thickets of bushes and in the parking lot. Others walked around the house, not missing a single dark corner, not a single storage room, access to which was strictly prohibited. At first, Jenny had the most monstrous assumptions, she ran to the linen dump, which was a smooth pipe, which, “propelling” through all four floors, went into the depths of the basement. Garp was not even allowed to approach him, let alone throw underwear there.Below, under the hole in the metal pipe, Jenny found nothing but a pile of dirty linen spewed out of the pipe onto the cement floor. Then she rushed into the boiler room, looked into the huge cauldrons of boiling water, but Garp was not there either. Then she went down to the first floor of the hospital wing: what if Garp, violating the ban, played on the stairs and fell into the flight? The most terrible suspicions were not confirmed. And a new fear began to torment her: what if Garp became a victim of a sexual pervert lying in her isolation ward? At the beginning of spring, the chambers are overcrowded, can you keep track of everyone? And she does not know them enough to suspect someone of unnatural inclinations.On this first truly spring day, there were desperate heads who ventured to swim, despite the snow that had not yet melted; someone was lying with a cold – in the spring resistance to disease was weakening, and someone – with sports injuries.

One such patient, Hathaway, is now calling from a room on the fourth floor, calling for Jenny. While playing lacrosse [9], he severely injured his knee. Two days after he was splinted and sent on crutches, he managed to take a walk in the pouring rain.On the top of the long marble staircase of the cinema, he slipped, the crutches parted, and he fell, breaking his other leg. Now Hathaway lay, awkwardly spreading his long legs in plaster casts on the bed, and not letting go of the precious racket clutched in his thick hands. He was placed on the fourth floor, where he was lying all alone because of this stupid habit of hitting the ball against the wall. Thrown across the room, the hard, bouncing ball bounced off the wall, and Hathaway would pick it up into the cross net [10] and then send the ball back to the wall.Jenny did not cost anything to put an end to this entertainment, but she herself had a son, and she, like no one else, understood that boys of five years old, like Garp, or seventeen, like Hathaway, just need to do mindless physical exercises from time to time. Jenny noticed that they seemed to be giving out the accumulated energy.

One thing pissed her off – the awkwardness of Hathaway, who was always losing the ball. She did what she could for him, placed him where he did not interfere with other patients with his knocking.But every time Hathaway lost the ball, he started ringing with might and main – suddenly someone hears will come and give him the ball. But help was rare, although the lift went up to the fourth floor. Seeing that the elevator was busy, Jenny instantly ran up the stairs and rushed into the room breathless and angry.

– You don’t have to explain what your game is for you, Hathaway, – Jenny declared from the doorway. – But understand, Garp is lost, now I have no time to look for your ball.

Hathaway was, on the whole, a good-looking fellow, although he was not particularly smart.A lock of reddish hair fell on her smooth, almost devoid of vegetation, completely covering one bright eye. He had a habit of shaking his head, throwing the hair from his face, and for this reason, looking into his face, you often looked into his wide nostrils, especially since he was growth, God forbid.

“Miss Fields,” he called.

Here Jenny noticed that he had no racket in his hands.

– What do you want, Hathaway? She asked. – Sorry, I’m in a hurry. I tell you Garp is lost.I’m looking for Garp.

– A-ah-ah, – handed Hathaway. – It’s a pity, I don’t know how to help you. He looked helplessly at his legs, which were in a cast.

Jenny tapped her bandaged knee lightly with her fingers, as if knocking on the door of a room that might have been asleep.

“Please don’t worry,” she said and waited until he remembered why he called her, but Hathaway seemed to have forgotten why he raised such a ringing.

– So what did you want? She asked and patted her knee again, this time as if checking to see if there was anyone at the door.- Have you lost the ball?

– No, – he replied, – a racket.

Then both of them, as if by agreement, looked around the room, and he continued:

– I was sleeping. I woke up – I saw she was gone.

Jenny’s first thought was: this is Mekler, a thunderstorm on the second floor. This guy with a brilliant ironic mind was in the hospital for three or four days every month. At sixteen, he was a heavy smoker, edited dozens of school publications and twice won first place in a competition in classical literature.Mekler despised dining at the table and drank coffee and egg sandwiches at Buster’s Diner. It was there that all his wonderful works were born, which he never submitted on time. Bringing himself to such a life to physical and nervous exhaustion, he got to the hospital bed every month. In the isolation ward, the resourceful Mekler played the most vile tricks, but Jenny still could not catch him red-handed. Once, for example, boiled tadpoles appeared in a teapot with tea brought to the laboratory, and laboratory assistants complained later that the tea gives off fish.The next time he chipped off something cleaner: filled a condom with egg white and tied it to the doorknob — the door led into Jenny’s room. Only later, having found egg shells in her purse, Jenny realized that the contents of the surprise presented to her were harmless. And that it was Mekler who was responsible for the quiet insanity that hit the third floor of the hospital several years ago, she had no doubts. Why else would the guys who got chickenpox suddenly all as one began to engage in masturbation, and then, holding their precious moisture in their hand, rushed to the laboratory to check under a microscope whether the terrible consequences of the disease threatening them with infertility were already noticeable …

If this were Meckler’s handiwork, Jenny thought, he would probably have punched a hole in the net stretched over the flat end of the cross and left the useless racket in the arms of the sleeping Hathaway.

“Here’s what: Garp has your racket,” Jenny said. – We’ll find him, and the racket will be found.

And for the umpteenth time she suppressed the desire to reach out and toss away a lock of hair that covered one of the boy’s eyes. Instead, she gently squeezed the big toes that protruded from Hathaway’s cast.

But if Garp was really going to play lacrosse, Jenny wondered, where did he go? Outside? No, it’s unlikely. It was already dark, the ball would be easily lost. Perhaps the only place in the entire building where the selector is not audible is the underground passage connecting the isolation ward with the hospital building.You can’t think of a better place to kick the ball. Jenny knew the guys played there often. Once, after lights out, she herself sent a whole company to sleep – they arranged a sort of heap of small ones there. Jenny took the elevator down to the basement floor. Hathaway is a great guy, she thought. If Garp grows up like this, it will be good. Although it can turn out to be something better.

As slow-witted as Hathaway was, the thought worked for him. And he began to think. God grant that nothing terrible happens to little Garp.What a pity that he cannot go to look for the baby himself. Garp visited Hathaway frequently. A mutilated athlete, both legs in a cast, can you compare him with anyone? Hathaway let Garp paint the plaster splints, and soon, next to his friends’ autographs, round faces and all kinds of monsters born of Garp’s fantasy appeared on his feet next to the autographs of his friends.

Hathaway looked at these childish scribbles, and suddenly a feeling of uneasiness came over him. He saw his ball lurking between his knees.Hathaway could not feel it through the plaster. He felt funny for a moment – he was also a brood hen hatching an egg. Okay, what about Garp? Couldn’t he have gone to play without the ball?

Pigeons cooed loudly outside the window. And it dawned on Hathaway: pigeons, of course, pigeons! Garp had no intention of playing lacrosse. How many times has he complained to Garp that the pigeons do not let him sleep, they wake him up in the middle of the night with their damn cooing, fussing on the cornice and in the gutter under the peaked roof covered with slate. Pigeons interfered with sleep not only for those who were lying on the top floor of the isolation ward, but for the entire school.The birds felt like real masters here. The workers covered the ridge of the roofs and the eaves with wire, but the birds continued to nest in the gutter in dry weather, found refuge in the potholes under the roof, in the weaves of old, stiff ivy. There was no way to keep them away from the school buildings. If not for their continuous cooing! How tired Hathaway is! He even mentioned to Garp that if he had at least one leg intact, he would have gotten to the pigeons. “How?” – asked then Garp, and he replied that pigeons do not like to fly in the dark.He learned useful information about the habits of pigeons from a series of lectures on biology. (Jenny took the course herself.) He told little Garp the following literally:

– At night – it is important that there is no rain – I will climb onto the roof and take them warm right in the gutter. They sit there all night and rustle.

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