The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis Read online

  At 7:30 on the night of the dance I was in the gymnasium disconsolately hanging bunting. Dewey was sitting on the bandstand with his chin in his hand. Boyd had gone down to the railroad station to pick up Happy Stella Kowalski and her Schottische Five, who were due to arrive at eight o’clock. Suddenly a large, purple-faced man came running wildly into the gymnasium—Mr. Hammer, Pansy’s father.

  He spied me on top of the ladder. “You!” he roared and shook me down like a ripe plum. “What have you done with her?”

  “Hello, Mr. Hammer. Nice to see you. Done with whom?”

  “You know very well who. Where’s Pansy? Her aunt told me you saw her in New York. Now where is she?”

  “Isn’t she in New York?”

  “Gillis, I’ll strangle you,” he yelled, lunging at me.

  Dewey thrust himself hastily between us. “What’s wrong, Mr. Hammer?” he asked.

  “Pansy disappeared from her aunt’s apartment in New York two days ago. Gillis engineered the whole thing. He’s got her hidden someplace. I’m calling the police. I’m charging him with abduction.” All this delivered in a deafening bellow.

  Dewey turned to me. “Dobie, tell the truth. Do you know anything about this?”

  “So help me, Dewey,” I cried earnestly, “not a thing.”

  “You’re lying, you kidnaper,” screamed Mr. Hammer. “I’m calling the police. Where is she?”

  “Mr. Hammer, be reasonable,” said Dewey. “Dobie’s been here for more than a week. How could he have kidnaped Pansy?”

  “He’s got accomplices. He’s a fiend. I knew he should have been locked up the minute I laid eyes on him. I’m calling the police.”

  At this point Boyd came walking in with Stella Kowalski and her Schottische Five. They were dressed in motley dirndls about the size of pyramidal tents. On their heads they wore hideous hats with ratty plumes. Under their arms they carried washboards, pipes, pots, plungers, and assorted hardware. Their front teeth were blacked out.

  We stood and stared at them, even Mr. Hammer. Then suddenly I saw that the Schottische Five were six, and the sixth one was not a huge, gross cow moose of a woman. She was slender and fair and beautiful even with blacked-out teeth. She was Pansy!

  “Pansy!” The cry escaped my lips.

  “Aha!” roared Mr. Hammer. “Caught you red-handed.” There was a telephone on the wall nearby. He seized it. “Police!” he shouted into the mouthpiece. “Send the patrol wagon. Send the riot squad. Send everything you’ve got!”

  Happy Stella strode over and grabbed Mr. Hammer by the lapels. “What’s with you?” she said dangerously.

  “You’ll find out when you’re behind bars,” replied Mr. Hammer, trying vainly to loose himself.

  “Oh, you must be the old man,” said Happy Stella. “Shame on you.” She shook him until his eyes rolled freely in their sockets.

  “Assault and battery,” mumbled Mr. Hammer. “Kidnaping plus assault and battery. That’s what I’m charging you with.”

  Pansy stepped forward. “There was no kidnaping,” she said firmly. “I went to Happy Stella and asked her to take me with her. I thought Aunt Naomi might catch me if I tried running away alone.”

  “Don’t say anything, Pansy,” warned Mr. Hammer. “They’ve probably got you drugged.”

  “I am not drugged,” said Pansy, stamping her foot. “I have never thought so clearly in my life.”

  She walked over and took my arm. “Daddy,” she said with as much dignity as a girl can muster who has blacked-out teeth, “I love Dobie and I’m going to stay with him. If you send me to New York again, I’ll run away again. I don’t care where you send me, I’m not going to be kept apart from Dobie.”

  “Whatsa matter with you, hey?” demanded Happy Stella, giving Mr. Hammer another shake. “Can’t you see these kids wanna be together? So what if Dobie is a little screwy? Who ain’t?”

  Mr. Hammer opened and closed his mouth several times, carp-fashion. “All right,” he snarled at last. “All right. But, Pansy, you keep that maniac out of my house, do you hear? And if, God forbid, you should ever marry him, I don’t want to hear about it.”

  Suddenly the street outside the gym was filled with the scream of sirens. The police Mr. Hammer had called were arriving. Car after car pulled up in front of the gym with a horrific screeching of tires. Dozens of cops with drawn guns came pouring into the gym. And behind the police came a mob of students, pressing in to see what the excitement was.

  Dewey leaped up as though he had been stung. “Dobie, Boyd!” he yelled with wild excitement. “Get to the door. Don’t let any students in unless they buy tickets. Here’s how we save Ski-U-Mah.”

  We rushed forward and threw ourselves across the door. “Two dollars!” shouted Dewey to the mob. “Two dollars to come inside. Hurry, hurry, hurry!”

  The students in the front ranks started to dig in their pockets for money, but the mob behind them surged forward. It looked for a moment as though Dewey, Boyd, and I would be swept aside. But Happy Stella came running to our aid with her Schottische Five. Buttressed by the musical Amazons, we were able to hold fast until the crowd got their money out. Then we stood aside and let them rush through, throwing currency at us as they passed. The money showered over us, piled up on the floor around us.

  It is difficult to describe what was happening inside the gym. I was not on the sinking Titanic or at the Battle of Gettysburg, but these, I think, are fair comparisons. All I can remember is humanity flooding in, filling the gym to the walls, and cops yelling and brandishing guns, and Mr. Hammer trying vainly to make explanations over the din, and Dewey cackling hysterically as he counted money.

  It took about an hour before the cops left, casting foul looks at Mr. Hammer as they went. Then Dewey got up and made an announcement to the assemblage, telling them that they were at a dance. There was a little sullen muttering, but most of them took the news calmly. Then Happy Stella and her Schottische Five started to mount the bandstand.

  “Miss Hammer,” I said with a courtly bow to my true love, “may I have the honor of the first dance?”

  “The second dance,” she said. “I’m playing a washboard solo for the first dance.”

  She gave me a loving, black-toothed smile and joined the musicians.

  Love Is a Fallacy

  Cool was I and logical. Keen, calculating, perspicacious, acute and astute—I was all of these. My brain was as powerful as a dynamo, as precise as a chemist’s scales, as penetrating as a scalpel. And—think of it!—I was only eighteen.

  It is not often that one so young has such a giant intellect. Take, for example, Petey Bellows, my roommate at the university. Same age, same background, but dumb as an ox. A nice enough fellow, you understand, but nothing upstairs. Emotional type. Unstable. Impressionable. Worst of all, a faddist. Fads, I submit, are the very negation of reason. To be swept up in every new craze that comes along, to surrender yourself to idiocy just because everybody else is doing it—this, to me, is the acme of mindlessness. Not, however, to Petey.

  One afternoon I found Petey lying on his bed with an expression of such distress on his face that I immediately diagnosed appendicitis. “Don’t move,” I said. “Don’t take a laxative. I’ll get a doctor.”

  “Raccoon,” he mumbled thickly.

  “Raccoon?” I said, pausing in my flight.

  “I want a raccoon coat,” he wailed.

  I perceived that his trouble was not physical, but mental. “Why do you want a raccoon coat?”

  “I should have known it,” he cried, pounding his temples. “I should have known they’d come back when the Charleston came back. Like a fool I spent all my money for textbooks, and now I can’t get a raccoon coat.”

  “Can you mean,” I said incredulously, “that people are actually wearing raccoon coats again?”

  “All the Big Men on Campus are wearing them. Where’ve you been?”

  “In the library,” I said, naming a place not frequented by Big Men on Campus.


  He leaped from the bed and paced the room. “I’ve got to have a raccoon coat,” he said passionately. “I’ve got to!”

  “Petey, why? Look at it rationally. Raccoon coats are unsanitary. They shed. They smell bad. They weigh too much. They’re unsightly. They—”

  “You don’t understand,” he interrupted impatiently. “It’s the thing to do. Don’t you want to be in the swim?”

  “No,” I said truthfully.

  “Well, I do,” he declared. “I’d give anything for a raccoon coat. Anything!”

  My brain, that precision instrument, slipped into high gear. “Anything?” I asked, looking at him narrowly.

  “Anything,” he affirmed in ringing tones.

  I stroked my chin thoughtfully. It so happened that I knew where to get my hands on a raccoon coat. My father had had one in his undergraduate days; it lay now in a trunk in the attic back home. It also happened that Petey had something I wanted. He didn’t have it exactly, but at least he had first right on it. I refer to his girl, Polly Espy.

  I had long coveted Polly Espy. Let me emphasize that my desire for this young woman was not emotional in nature. She was, to be sure, a girl who excited the emotions, but I was not one to let my heart rule my head. I wanted Polly for a shrewdly calculated, entirely cerebral reason.

  I was a freshman in law school. In a few years I would be out in practice. I was well aware of the importance of the right kind of wife in furthering a lawyer’s career. The successful lawyers I had observed were, almost without exception, married to beautiful, gracious, intelligent women. With one omission, Polly fitted these specifications perfectly.

  Beautiful she was. She was not yet of pin-up proportions, but I felt sure that time would supply the lack. She already had the makings.

  Gracious she was. By gracious I mean full of graces. She had an erectness of carriage, an ease of bearing, a poise that clearly indicated the best of breeding. At table her manners were exquisite. I had seen her at the Kozy Kampus Korner eating the specialty of the house—a sandwich that contained scraps of pot roast, gravy, chopped nuts, and a dipper of sauerkraut—without even getting her fingers moist.

  Intelligent she was not. In fact, she veered in the opposite direction. But I believed that under my guidance she would smarten up. At any rate, it was worth a try. It is, after all, easier to make a beautiful dumb girl smart than to make an ugly smart girl beautiful.

  “Petey,” I said, “are you in love with Polly Espy?”

  “I think she’s a keen kid,” he replied, “but I don’t know if you’d call it love. Why?”

  “Do you,” I asked, “have any kind of formal arrangement with her? I mean are you going steady or anything like that?”

  “No. We see each other quite a bit, but we both have other dates. Why?”

  “Is there,” I asked, “any other man for whom she has a particular fondness?”

  “Not that I know of. Why?”

  I nodded with satisfaction. “In other words, if you were out of the picture, the field would be open. Is that right?”

  “I guess so. What are you getting at?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” I said innocently, and took my suitcase out of the closet.

  “Where you going?” asked Petey.

  “Home for the week end.” I threw a few things into the bag.

  “Listen,” he said, clutching my arm eagerly, “while you’re home, you couldn’t get some money from your old man, could you, and lend it to me so I can buy a raccoon coat?”

  “I may do better than that,” I said with a mysterious wink and closed my bag and left.

  “Look,” I said to Petey when I got back Monday morning. I threw open the suitcase and revealed the huge, hairy, gamy object that my father had worn in his Stutz Bearcat in 1925.

  “Holy Toledo!” said Petey reverently. He plunged his hands into the raccoon coat and then his face. “Holy Toledo!” he repeated fifteen or twenty times.

  “Would you like it?” I asked.

  “Oh yes!” he cried, clutching the greasy pelt to him. Then a canny look came into his eyes. “What do you want for it?”

  “Your girl,” I said, mincing no words.

  “Polly?” he said in a horrified whisper. “You want Polly?”

  “That’s right.”

  He flung the coat from him. “Never,” he said stoutly.

  I shrugged. “Okay. If you don’t want to be in the swim, I guess it’s your business.”

  I sat down in a chair and pretended to read a book, but out of the corner of my eye I kept watching Petey. He was a torn man. First he looked at the coat with the expression of a waif at a bakery window. Then he turned away and set his jaw resolutely. Then he looked back at the coat, with even more longing in his face. Then he turned away, but with not so much resolution this time. Back and forth his head swiveled, desire waxing, resolution waning. Finally he didn’t turn away at all; he just stood and stared with mad lust at the coat.

  “It isn’t as though I was in love with Polly,” he said thickly. “Or going steady or anything like that.”

  “That’s right,” I murmured.

  “What’s Polly to me, or me to Polly?”

  “Not a thing,” said I.

  “It’s just been a casual kick—just a few laughs, that’s all.”

  “Try on the coat,” said I.

  He complied. The coat bunched high over his ears and dropped all the way down to his shoe tops. He looked like a mound of dead raccoons. “Fits fine,” he said happily.

  I rose from my chair. “Is it a deal?” I asked, extending my hand.

  He swallowed. “It’s a deal,” he said and shook my hand.

  I had my first date with Polly the following evening. This was in the nature of a survey; I wanted to find out just how much work I had to do to get her mind up to the standard I required. I took her first to dinner. “Gee, that was a delish dinner,” she said as we left the restaurant. Then I took her to a movie. “Gee, that was a marvy movie,” she said as we left the theater. And then I took her home. “Gee, I had a sensaysh time,” she said as she bade me good night.

  I went back to my room with a heavy heart. I had gravely underestimated the size of my task. This girl’s lack of information was terrifying. Nor would it be enough merely to supply her with information. First she had to be taught to think. This loomed as a project of no small dimensions, and at first I was tempted to give her back to Petey. But then I got to thinking about her abundant physical charms and about the way she entered a room and the way she handled a knife and fork, and I decided to make an effort.

  I went about it, as in all things, systematically. I gave her a course in logic. It happened that I, as a law student, was taking a course in logic myself, so I had all the facts at my finger tips. “Polly,” I said to her when I picked her up on our next date, “tonight we are going over to the Knoll and talk.”

  “Oo, terrif,” she replied. One thing I will say for this girl: you would go far to find another so agreeable.

  We went to the Knoll, the campus trysting place, and we sat down under an old oak, and she looked at me expectantly. “What are we going to talk about?” she asked.

  “Logic.”

  She thought this over for a minute and decided she liked it. “Magnif,” she said.

  “Logic,” I said, clearing my throat, “is the science of thinking. Before we can think correctly, we must first learn to recognize the common fallacies of logic. These we will take up tonight.”

  “Wow-dow!” she cried, clapping her hands delightedly.

  I winced, but went bravely on. “First let us examine the fallacy called Dicto Simpliciter.”

  “By all means,” she urged, batting her lashes eagerly.

  “Dicto Simpliciter means an argument based on an unqualified generalization. For example: Exercise is good. Therefore everybody should exercise.”

  “I agree,” said Polly earnestly. “I mean exercise is wonderful. I mean it builds the body and everythin
g.”

  “Polly,” I said gently, “the argument is a fallacy. Exercise is good is an unqualified generalization. For instance, if you have heart disease, exercise is bad, not good. Many people are ordered by their doctors not to exercise. You must qualify the generalization. You must say exercise is usually good, or exercise is good for most people. Otherwise you have committed a Dicto Simpliciter. Do you see?”

  “No,” she confessed. “But this is marvy. Do more! Do more!”

  “It will be better if you stop tugging at my sleeve,” I told her, and when she desisted, I continued. “Next we take up a fallacy called Hasty Generalization. Listen carefully: You can’t speak French. I can’t speak French. Petey Bellows can’t speak French. I must therefore conclude that nobody at the University of Minnesota can speak French.”

  “Really?” said Polly, amazed.” “Nobody?”

  I hid my exasperation. “Polly, it’s a fallacy. The generalization is reached too hastily. There are too few instances to support such a conclusion.”

  “Know any more fallacies?” she asked breathlessly. “This is more fun than dancing even.”

  I fought off a wave of despair. I was getting nowhere with this girl, absolutely nowhere. Still, I am nothing if not persistent. I continued. “Next comes Post Hoc. Listen to this: Let’s not take Bill on our picnic. Every time we take him out with us, it rains.”

  “I know somebody just like that,” she exclaimed. “A girl back home—Eula Becker, her name is. It never fails. Every single time we take her on a picnic—”

  “Polly,” I said sharply, “it’s a fallacy. Eula Becker doesn’t cause the rain. She has no connection with the rain. You are guilty of Post Hoc if you blame Eula Becker.”

  “I’ll never do it again,” she promised contritely. “Are you mad at me?”

  I sighed. “No, Polly, I’m not mad.”

  “Then tell me some more fallacies.”

  “All right. Let’s try Contradictory Premises.”

  “Yes, let’s,” she chirped, blinking her eyes happily.