Fahrenheit 1600 (Victor Kozol) Read Online Free

med school. By the time his slid into the passenger’s
seat, he felt fairly confident, that is until he heard his father’s cheerful
greeting.
    “And how’s Dr. Kozol doing this fine spring
morning!”
    “I’m not a doctor yet, Dad!” Victor managed as the car
left the city headed for Route 81, the highway that ran northeast towards
Duryea.
    After asking about his father and the business
(good, plenty of business, i.e., death), Victor decided to work in his main
objective for this trip; convince his father that flunking out of the pre-med
program was a lifestyle choice and great career move.
    “You know, Dad, one of the reasons I really wanted
to be a doctor was to help people.”
    “Sure Victor, that’s a nice motivation.”
    “But, in today’s world a lot of people have more
mental and emotional problems. I think I might be more interested in helping
people this way.”
    “What, like as a psychiatrist?”
    “I was thinking of something more in the line of
therapy. I’ve been reading a lot about it.”
    “Yeah, but you don’t need to go to medical school
for that stuff.”
    “I guess that’s it. I’m thinking of switching my
major to psychology.”
    “What! Why even go to college! You’ll never get a
job with that!”
    “That’s not true, Dad. There are lots of ways you
can apply a psychology degree.”
    “I don’t know, in today’s economy …”
    In the back of Victor’s father’s mind, he had
resigned himself to Victor running the family business after all. And who was
to say that psychology wouldn’t be a good way to prepare for it. At least the
boy would have a college degree.
    Nothing was said to Victor’s mother over the Easter
weekend filled with her famous scalloped potatoes, ham, and pickled red beets.
Victor’s sister came home for the holiday and Victor was only too happy for the
distraction.

    Vic finished up the semester ingloriously by having
failed only one course, biochemistry. Of this Victor was proud. Since he lived
in an apartment and not a student dorm, staying in Wilkes-Barre for the summer
was not a problem. Victor found a job at a local market.
    So Vic went back to Wilkes, and as a sophomore was
able to stay in school as a C student, but he knew he would never get back into
pre-med. So he did what he always does, he went back to periods of lethargy
punctuated by bursts of energy in throwing and attending parties. Vic realized
he had to be more careful because Sophie was always vigilant from her
downstairs perch. He knows the days she went to her sister for a visit and
schedules his affairs accordingly. Vic actually skated through two more years
of college this way. But it was the end of his junior year when things came to
a head. Vic was spending even less time in a major he really had no interest
in. His grade point average plummeted to below a D and Vic was on his way to
being finished at Wilkes.
    If this wasn’t bad enough, someone left the water
running in the tub during a party, which was full of ice and beer. It
overflowed and started to leak down into Sophie’s apartment. By the time it was
noticed, a section of her kitchen ceiling collapsed into two trays of pierogis
she had just made. Sophie ordered Vic and his roommate out, but only after
presenting him with a bill for $2,000 to replace a section of the ceiling and
clean up the mess. How to keep this dual disaster from his father was going to
be the greatest challenge of Vic’s life.

Chapter 3
    The Family Business

    Victor’s father Albert was sitting on his back
porch admiring the wonderful summer scenes and taking in the fresh air all
around him. But his thoughts were elsewhere; he was thinking back eighty years
when his grandfather, Stanislas Kozlowski came to America to work in the then
booming coal mines in northeast Pennsylvania. His son Stanley, who liked to be
called Stash, shortened the family name to Kozol and began working for an
undertaker (as funeral directors were called back then). He found