The Telephone Booth Indian

by A. J. Liebling

  George says there was nothing wrong about his conduct. “That manager hired me to box with that boy,” he says. “He didn't hire me to hurt him.”

  There isn't much money in the sparring business, George concedes, but there doesn't seem to be much in anything else, either. The prospect of injury doesn't bother him, because he seldom takes a punch solidly. He “gets on it” before it develops power, or else he takes it on his forearms or shoulders, or at worst “rolls away” from it as it lands. “I like the old word for boxing,” he once said. “The manly art of defense. And I don't fear no man. Now, that Joe, he really can punch. He can really punch. What I mean, he can punch, really. Yet he ain't never no more'n shook me. And when I feel myself getting punchdrunk I'm going to quit. I'm going to look me up a profitable business somewhere that's a profit in it.”

  Nicholson was in his chair at Pompton Lakes when he made this declaration. The chairs at his left and right were occupied by Jim Howell and another large colored man named Elza Thompson. Each of the three had his left leg crossed over his right knee. After a long interval they recrossed their legs in unison, this time with the right on top. There was no spoken word to suggest the shift, just telepathy. Undisturbed by the musical sigh of Nicholson's voice, Howell and Thompson were apparently asleep. Yet the triple movement was perfectly synchronized, like something the Rockettes might do, but in slow time.

  At the phrase “punchdrunk” Howell had opened one eye.

  “How you going to know you punchdrunk, George?” he inquired. “A man punchdrunk, he don't know he punchdrunk. That the sign he punchdrunk.”

  Nicholson thought this over in deep gloom for a while.

  Then he said, “Sometime when I boxing with a fellow that hit me right on the button, and I know he ain't got no right to hit me on the button, and I boxing with him again and he hit me on the button again, then I going to quit.”

  After this the three sparring partners all fell asleep.

  • The Jollity Building •

  I—Indians, Heels, and Tenants

  n the Jollity Building, which stands six stories high and covers half of a Broadway block in the high Forties, the term “promoter” means a man who mulcts another man of a dollar, or any fraction or multiple thereof. The verb “to promote” always takes a personal object, and the highest praise you can accord someone in the Jollity Building is to say, “He has promoted some very smart people.” The Jollity Building—it actually has a somewhat different name, and the names of its inhabitants are not the ones which will appear below—is representative of perhaps a dozen or so buildings in the upper stories of which the smallscale amusement industry nests like a tramp pigeon. All of them draw a major part of their income from the rental of their stores at street level, and most of them contain on their lower floors a dance hall or a billiard parlor, or both. The Jollity Building has both. The dance hall, known as Jollity Danceland, occupies the second floor. The poolroom is in the basement. It is difficult in such a building to rent office space to any business house that wants to be taken very seriously, so the upper floors fill up with the petty nomads of Broadway—chiefly orchestra leaders, theatrical agents, bookmakers, and miscellaneous promoters.

  Eight coinbox telephone booths in the lobby of the Jollity Building serve as offices for promoters and others who cannot raise the price of desk space on an upper floor. The phones are used mostly for incoming calls. It is a matter of perpetual regret to Morty, the renting agent of the building, that he cannot collect rent from the occupants of the booths. He always refers to them as the Telephone Booth Indians, because in their lives the telephone booth furnishes sustenance as well as shelter, as the buffalo did for the Arapahoe and Sioux. A Telephone Booth Indian on the hunt often tells a prospective investor to call him at a certain hour in the afternoon, giving the victim the number of the phone in one of the booths. The Indian implies, of course, that it is a private line. Then the Indian has to hang in the booth until the fellow calls. To hang, in Indian language, means to loiter. “I used to hang in Fortysixth Street, front of Variety,” a small bookmaker may say, referring to a previous business location. Seeing the Indians hanging in the telephone booths is painful to Morty, but there is nothing he can do about it. The regular occupants of the booths recognize one another's rights. It may be understood among them, for instance, that a certain orchestra leader receives calls in a particular booth between three and four in the afternoon and that a competitor has the same booth from four to five. In these circumstances, ethical Indians take telephone messages for each other. There are always fewer vacancies in the telephone booths than in any other part of the Jollity Building.

  While awaiting a call, an Indian may occasionally emerge for air, unless the lobby is so crowded that there is a chance he might lose his place to a transient who does not understand the house rules. Usually, however, the Indian hangs in the booth with the door open, leaning against the wall and reading a scratch sheet in order to conserve time. Then, if somebody rings up and agrees to lend him two dollars, he will already have picked a horse on which to lose that amount. When an impatient stranger shows signs of wanting to use a telephone, the man in the booth closes the door, takes the receiver off the hook, and makes motions with his lips, as if talking. To add verisimilitude to a long performance, he occasionally hangs up, takes the receiver down again, drops a nickel in the slot, whirls the dial three or four times, and hangs up again, after which the nickel comes back. Eventually the stranger goes away, and the man in the booth returns to the study of his scratch sheet. At mealtimes, the Telephone Booth Indians sometimes descend singly to the Jollity Building's lunch counter, which is at one end of the poolroom in the basement. The busiest lunch periods are the most favorable for a stunt the boys have worked out to get free nourishment. An Indian seats himself at the counter and eats two or three pastrami sandwiches. As he is finishing his lunch, one of his comrades appears at the head of the stairs and shouts that he is wanted on the telephone. The Indian rushes upstairs, absentmindedly omitting to pay for his meal. Barney, the lunchcounter proprietor, is too busy to go after him when he fails to return after a reasonable time. An Indian can rarely fool Barney more than once or twice. The maneuver requires nice timing and unlimited faith in one's accomplice. Should the accomplice fail to make his entrance, the Indian at the counter might be compelled to eat pastrami sandwiches indefinitely, acquiring frightful indigestion and piling up an appalling debt.

  Morty, the renting agent, is a thin, sallow man of forty whose expression has been compared, a little unfairly, to that of a dead robin. He is not, however, a man without feeling; he takes a personal interest in the people who spend much of their lives in the Jollity Building. It is about the same sort of interest that Curator Raymond Ditmars takes in the Bronx Zoo's vampire bats. “I know more heels than any other man in the world,” Morty sometimes says, not without pride. “Everywhere I go around Broadway, I get 'Hello, how are you?' Heels that haven't been with me for years, some of them.” Morty usually reserves the appellation “heel” for the people who rent the fortyeight cubicles, each furnished with a desk and two chairs, on the third floor of the Jollity Building. These cubicles are formed by partitions of wood and frosted glass which do not quite reach the ceiling. Sufficient air to maintain human life is supposed to circulate over the partitions. The offices rent for $10 and $12.50 a month, payable in advance. “Twelve and a half dollars with air, ten dollars without air,” Morty says facetiously. “Very often the heels who rent them take the air without telling me.” Sometimes a Telephone Booth Indian acquires enough capital to rent a cubicle. He thus rises in the social scale and becomes a heel. A cubicle has three advantages over a telephone booth. One is that you cannot get a desk into a telephone booth. Another is that you can play pinochle in a cubicle. Another is that a heel gets his name on the directory in the lobby, and the white letters have a bold, legitimate look.

  The vertical social structure of the Jollity Building is subject to continual shifts. No
t only do Indians become heels, but a heel occasionally accumulates $40 or $50 with which to pay a month's rent on one of the larger offices, all of them unfurnished, on the fourth, fifth, or sixth floor. He then becomes a tenant. Morty always views such progress with suspicion, because it involves signing a lease, and once a heel has signed a lease, you cannot put him out without serving a dispossess notice and waiting ten days. A tenant, in Morty's opinion, is just a heel who is planning to get ten days' free rent. “Any time a heel acts prosperous enough to rent an office,” Morty says, “you know he's getting ready to take you.” A dispossessed tenant often reappears in the Jollity Building as an Indian. It is a life cycle. Morty has people in the building who have been Telephone Booth Indians, heels, and tenants several times each. He likes them best when they are in the heel stage. “You can't collect rent from a guy who hangs in the lobby,” he says in explanation, “and with a regular tenant of an unfurnished office, you got too many headaches.” He sometimes breaks off a conversation with a friendly heel by saying, “Excuse me, I got to go upstairs and insult a tenant.”

  As if to show his predilection for the heels, Morty has his own office on the third floor. It is a large corner room with windows on two sides. There is a flattering picture of the Jollity Building on one of the walls, and six framed plans, one of each floor, on another wall. Also in the office are an unattractive, respectablelooking secretary and, on Morty's desk, a rather depressing photograph of his wife. The conventionality of this decor makes Morty unhappy, and he spends as little time as possible in his office. Between nine o'clock in the morning, when he arrives and dejectedly looks through his mail for rent checks he does not expect to find, and sixthirty in the evening, when he goes home to Rockaway, he lives mostly amid the pulsating activity outside his office door.

  The furnished cubicles on the third floor yield an income of about $500 a month, which, as Morty says, is not hay. Until a few years ago, the Jollity Building used to feel it should provide switchboard service for these offices. The outgoing telephone calls of the heels were supposed to be paid for at the end of every business day. This system necessitated the use of a cordon of elevator boys to prevent tenants from escaping. “Any heel who made several telephone calls toward the end of the month, you could kiss him goodby,” Morty says. “As soon as he made up his mind to go out of business he started thinking of people to telephone. It was cheaper for him to go out of business than settle for the calls, anyhow. The only way you can tell if a heel is still in business, most of the time, anyway, is to look in his office for his hat. If his hat is gone, he is out of business.” A minor annoyance of the switchboard system was the tendency of heels to call the operator and ask for the time. “None of them were going anywhere, but they all wanted to know the time,” Morty says resentfully. “None of them had watches. Nobody would be in this building unless he had already hocked his watch.” There are lady heels, too, but if they are young Morty calls them “heads.” (Morty meticulously refers to all youngish women as “heads,” which has the same meaning as “broads” or “dolls” but is newer; he does not want his conversation to sound archaic.) Heads also abused the switchboard system. “One head that used to claim to sell stockings,” says Morty, “called the board one day, and when the operator said, 'Five o'clock,' this head said, 'My God, I didn't eat yet!' If there had been no switchboard, she would never have known she was hungry. She would have saved a lot of money.”

  As a consequence of these abuses, the switchboard was abolished, and practically all the heels now make their telephone calls from three open coinbox telephones against the wall in a corridor that bisects the third floor. The wall for several feet on each side of the telephones is covered with numbers the heels have jotted down. The Jollity Building pays a young man named Angelo to sit at a table in a small niche near the telephones and answer incoming calls. He screams “Who?” into the mouthpiece and then shuffles off to find whatever heel is wanted. On days when Angelo is particularly weary, he just says, “He ain't in,” and hangs up. He also receives and distributes the mail for the heels. Angelo is a pallid chap who has been at various periods a chorus boy, a taxi driver, and a drummer in one of the bands which maintain headquarters in the Jollity Building. “Every time a heel comes in,” Angelo says, “he wants to know 'Are you sure there isn't a letter for me that feels like it had a check in it?… That's funny, the fellow swore he mailed it last night.' Then he tries to borrow a nickel from me so he can telephone.”

  Not having a nickel is a universal trait of people who rent the cubicles, and they spend a considerable portion of the business day hanging by the thirdfloor telephones, waiting for the arrival of somebody to borrow a nickel from. While waiting, they talk to Angelo, who makes it a rule not to believe anything they say. There are no booths in the corridor because Morty does not want any Telephone Booth Indians to develop on the third floor.

  Morty himself often goes to visit with Angelo and terrifies the heels with his bilious stare. “They all say they got something big for next week,” he tells Angelo in a loud, carrying voice, “but the rent is ‘I'll see you tomorrow.’ “ Morty's friends sometimes drop in there to visit him. He likes to sit on Angelo's table with them and tell about the current collection of furnishedoffice inhabitants. “Who is that phonylooking heel who just passed, you want to know?” he may say during such a recapitulation. “Hey, this is funny. He happens to be legitimate—autos to hire. The heel in the next office publishes a horse magazine. If he gets a winner, he eats. Then there's one of them heels that hires girls to sell permanent waves for fifty cents down, door to door. The girl takes the fifty cents and gives the dame a ticket, but when the dame goes to look for the beauty parlor it says on the ticket, there is no such beauty parlor at that address.

  “We got two heels writing plays. They figure they got nothing to do, so they might as well write a play, and if it clicks, they might also eat. Then we got a lady heel who represents Brazilian music publishers and also does a bit of booking; also a head who is running a school for hatcheck girls, as it seems the hatcheck profession is very complicated for some of the type of minds they got in it. Those heads who walk through the hall are going no place. They just stick their potato in every office and say, 'Anything for me today?' They do not even look to see if it is a theatrical office. If they expected to find anything, they would not be over here. What would anybody here have to offer? Once in a while a sap from the suburbs walks into one of the offices on this floor thinking he can get some talent cheap. 'Sure,' some heel says, 'I got just the thing you want.' They run down in the lobby looking for somebody. They ask some head they meet in the lobby, 'Are you a performer?' They try the other little agents that they know. The whole date is worth probably four dollars, and the forty cents' commission they split sometimes four ways.”

  Morty's favorite heel of the current lot is a tall Chesterfieldian old man named Dr. Titus Heatherington, who is the president of the AntiHitlerian League of the Western Hemisphere. Dr. Heatherington for many years lectured in vacant stores on sex topics and sold a manual of facts every young man should know. “The line became, in a manner of speaking, exhausted,” Dr. Heatherington says, “because of the increasing sophistication of the contemporary adolescent, so I interested myself in this great crusade, in which I distribute at a nominal price a very fascinating book by Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., and everything in it must be exactly as stated, because otherwise Hitler could have sued Mr. Vanderbilt for libel. Incidentally, I sell a lot more books than I have for years. I do particularly well at Coney Island.”

  Heels are often, paradoxically, more affluent than the official lessees of larger offices. Many fellows who rent the big units take in subtenants, and if there are enough of them, each man's share of the rent may be less than the $10 a month minimum rent a heel has to pay. One twodesk office on the fourth, fifth, or sixth floor may serve as headquarters for four theatrical agents, a band leader, a music arranger, a manager of prize fighters, and a dealer in pawn tick
ets. They agree on a schedule by which each man has the exclusive use of a desk for a few hours every day, to impress people who call by appointment, and the office is used collectively, when no outsiders are present, for games of rummy. All the fellows in the office receive their telephone calls on a single coinbox machine affixed to the wall. Subtenants often make bets among themselves, the amount of the wager corresponding to each bettor's share of the rent. The loser is supposed to pay double rent, the winner nothing. This causes difficulties for Morty when he comes to collect the rent. The official lessee always protests that he would like to pay on the dot but the other boys haven't paid him. Subtenants who have won bets consider themselves absolved of any responsibility, and the fellows who are supposed to pay double are invariably broke. Morty makes an average of fifteen calls to collect a month's rent on an office, and thus acquires a much greater intimacy with the tenants than the agents of a place like Rockefeller Center or River House.

  Desk room in a large office has the advantage of being much more dignified than a cubicle on the third floor, but there is one drawback: Morty's rule that not more than two firm names may be listed on the directory in the lobby for any one office. Callers therefore have to ask the elevator boys where to find some of the subtenants. If the elevator boys do not like the subtenant in question, they say they never heard of him. Nor will the implacable Morty permit more than two names to be painted on any office door. Junior subtenants get around the rule by having a sign painter put their names on strips of cardboard which they insert between the glass and the wooden frame of the door or affix to the glass by strips of tape. “You cannot let a tenant creep on you,” Morty says in justification of his severity. “You let them get away with eight names on the door, and the next thing they will be asking you for eight keys to the men's room.”