The Last Holiday by Gil Scott-Heron

Author:Gil Scott-Heron [Scott-Heron, Gil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857863027
Publisher: Canongate Books

21

If you don’t believe in the Spirits—and I didn’t understand what they were at the time—then let’s just say I was “lucky” that I didn’t mail my application to Johns Hopkins University, where I had decided I wanted to go for a master’s degree in writing; lucky that I didn’t go down to the school on a day when the head of the writing seminars was not there; lucky I didn’t go down without taking my accomplishments with me; and lucky I didn’t take no for an answer. That last one almost played me, however.

It was not a day I’ll ever forget, but I had long since started a habit of writing about days when things I thought might be important happened. Believe me, the day I was to apply to Hopkins was one of them. Aside from the fact that I was delivering the application personally and would need some kind of receipt noting their having gotten it, I felt like taking the trouble to go down there might make a better impression. And yeah, I didn’t have a lot of faith in tossing books or LPs in the mail and just hoping it would get all the way through. There was no reason for me to supply a mailroom or mailman or secretary or whoever-the-fuck with The Vulture or Small Talk or Pieces of a Man.

I had actually heard about the Hopkins fellowship program during my first year at Lincoln. My roommate during the second semester that year was Stevie Wilson, and he had a friend, a drinking buddy, who had been his counselor at a summer program Lincoln ran to prepare high schoolers for college. This counselor, a Baltimore guy, had graduated from Lincoln and gone on to the Hopkins writing program. His reputation on campus said that he was a great writer with a tremendous catalog of things he had written. I was impressed because Stevie was impressed—and Stevie wasn’t easy to impress.

Stevie and I had gone down to Hopkins once that second term of freshman year to see “B. More” Franklin. Stevie wanted to go because he would rather go anywhere than go to class, and because I had stolen a bottle of Jack Daniels Black on our most recent trip to the Conowingo Liquor Warehouse. Actually, I had stolen a fifth of Bell’s scotch, a bottle of Ballantine’s scotch, and a fifth of Jack, but that had been Friday and it was Wednesday when Stevie and I decided we should share that last bottle with another writer.

Stevie had already painted a picture for me of B. More, told me a few things about their adventures and what he thought about Hopkins and Baltimore and everything else. I was a little intimidated and a whole lot of curious about this guy that Stevie would drive fifty-odd miles to drink something with that he could otherwise drink alone. I was also curious because this guy must have been good. He was in the Hopkins graduate school and Stevie had endorsed him.

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