Bluto, parts 3524 - 3527

3524. Bluto continued with his explanation, “You see Albert, when Mrs. Hagner hears the word ‘Italian,’ she does not think of Galileo or Columbus, da Vinci and Michelangelo do not come into her mind. No, when she hears the word Italian she thinks of Al Capone and a machine gun.”

3525. “But Bluto,” I protested, “how could I be confused with Al Capone?” “That’s easy to explain,” he replied, “the criminal start out as a juvenile delinquent, and that is what you are.”

3526. Look at you with the Vaseline in your hair and your collar turned up, with your engineer boots and your belt with the buckle on the hip. All that is pure juvenile delinquent and there is no escaping it.

3527. It was true, Bluto was correct, I looked exactly like a juvenile delinquent, but it was just a question of the style, it came from the movies and James Dean, but it didn’t actually mean anything.

Bluto, parts 3520 - 3523

 3520. Apparently Bluto, Mrs. Hagner, and everybody else assumed that I was Italian, or to be more specific, that I was a wop, to use the slang that was popular at the time. They thought this because I had a name that ended in a vowel. 

 3521. Bluto explained it all to me right there while I was half in and half out of the truck. 

 

3522. According to Bluto, everything in the world was owned by a people whom he called the “Anglo-Saxons.” These Saxons were originally from England, were Protestant, and had blond hair and blue eyes.

 

 3523. All the other people in the world were classified by the Saxons as a form of cheap labor, except for the Jews and the Italians, which for some reason unknown to the Saxons, seemed to find ways to avoid being exploited. That’s what Bluto said. It sounded like one more of his hair-brained explanations, but for me there was a certain sense to it.

Bluto, parts 3516 - 3519

 3516. “She is an old witch, just like the ones I had for teachers when I was going to the Bleeker Street School, they are all the same. If you flunk seventh grade, do you think it is your fault? What is her job Albert, what is she paid to do?”

 3517. She is supposed to teach you math and science, and if you don’t learn those things then she is to blame for it. If you flunk it is because Mrs. Hagner is the opposite of a teacher.

 3518. But there is a reason that she hates you, and singles you out for special punishments and abuse, and I can bet you have no idea what the reason is. She hates you because you are Italian, that is the reason.

3519. “But I’m not Italian,” I said.  

Bluto, parts 3512 - 3515

 3512. What we were apparently doing was robbing banks in a very round about way, taking advantage of the fact that they were ignorant of the conditions of the many buildings they had repossessed.

3513. And what about the banks? It seemed that they were institutions eminently deserving of being robbed. That was what Bluto and The Prune thought.

 3514. Bluto stopped the truck at the corner of my street to drop me off for the day. He had been unusually silent all day but before I got out of the truck I found out what was agitating his mind.

3515. It was Mrs. Hagner, she turned out to be more evil than even the banks and the bankers in his mind. All day long, unbeknownst to me, he had been building up a raging hatred of her, and before I got out of the truck I found out all about it.

Bluto, parts 3508 - 3511

 3508. The situation of the building was simple enough for me to understand, but what mystified me was the degree of contempt with which Mr. Prune and Bluto spoke of the bank in question, and banks in general.

  3509. They used the work “Bank,” as if it was an obscenity. To Bluto and The Prune, banks were evil institutions, as evil as the Nazis, something like smallpox or tuberculosis. What was so striking about their attitude though, was that to them the evil of the banks was something perfectly obvious and beyond dispute or discussion.

 3510. And yet, never in my life had I heard anyone talk about the banks in that way. It struck me as inexplicable; as if someone was claiming that the Post Office, or the train station contained some evil force out to destroy the world.

3511. We left the scrap metal yard. Bluto was driving and I was on the soda box. Only one thing was clear to me at that moment; Bluto was a bank robber, and I was a bank robber’s assistant.

Bluto, parts 3504 - 3507

 3504. The two of them looking at me in disbelief and what I said did not seem to register with either of them. After a moment they continued talking as if I was not there, and as if anything I said was not worth responding to. 

 3505. The crux of their conversation was the warehouse on Broad Street from which we had removed the copper pipe. At one time it belonged to an old man who ran a printing establishment. For some reason or other he was arrested, tried for something or other, and went to prison.

 3506. In prison he died and since he had no family his building became an orphan. For two years the mortgage and the taxes went unpaid and finally a bank assumed control of the property and prepared to list it for sale. 

3507. The building had not yet been put on the market because the paperwork for the transfer of the property was incomplete. In that situation there was nobody who knew the condition of the building, and nobody bothered to look after it.  

Bluto, parts 3500 - 3503

 3500. According to Mr. Prune, all the troubles of the world could be traced to a group of men he described as leeches, who went around buying up all the raw materials of the world, waiting a few days, and then selling them again.

 3501. Sometimes when these men purchased gold or silver, or paper scrap they made money, and sometimes they lost money, but all the time they were looking to drive the price of their holdings up. They did this mostly by trying to spread rumors, and create fear and panics. If they could get prices to go up, they would unload their holdings and re-invest in something else.

 3502. What angered the Prune, and Bluto was the fact that these investors never had any use for the gold or silver they bought or sold, never even looked at the tons of paper scrap they owned for a number of days. Their only involvement was to make money on the transaction, and this struck the two men as an unforgivable kind of sin.

 3503. I ventured to make a comment in the middle of their discussion, I said, “It seems to me that both of you are engaged in buying and sells copper to make some money, and neither of you are plumbers, and neither of you has any use for broken refrigerators or the aluminum siding from old houses. So aren’t you just like the leeches.”