The Telephone Booth Indian

by A. J. Liebling

  Morty's parents were named Goldberg, and he was born in the Bensonhurst region of Brooklyn. He almost finished a commercial course in high school before he got his first job, being an order clerk for a chain of dairyandherring stores. In the morning he would drive to each of these stores and find out from the store managers what supplies they needed from the company's warehouse. Since he had little to do in the afternoons, he began after a while to deliver packages for a bootlegger who had been a highschool classmate and by chance had an office in the Jollity Building. The name on the door of the office was the Music Writers Mutual Publishing Company. About a quarter of the firms in the building at that time were fronts for bootleggers, Morty recalls. “Repeal was a terrible blow to property values in this district,” he says. “Bootleggers were always the best pay.” Seeing a greater future in bootlegging than in dairy goods and herring, Morty soon went to work for his old classmate on a fulltime basis. The moment Morty decided that his future lay on Broadway, he translated his name from Goldberg into Ormont. “‘Or’ is French for gold,” he sometimes explains, “and ‘mont’ is the same as 'berg.' But the point is it's got more class than Goldberg.”

  By diligent application, Morty worked his way up to a partnership in the Music Writers Mutual Publishing Company. The partners made good use of their company's name. They advertised in pulp magazines, offering to write music for lyrics or lyrics for music, to guarantee publication, and to send back to the aspiring song writer a hundred free copies of his work, all for one hundred dollars. The Music Writers Mutual agreed to pay him the customary royalties on all copies sold. There never were any royalties, because Morty and his partner had only the author's hundred copies printed. They kept a piano in their office and hired a professional musician for thirtyfive dollars a week to set music to lyrics. Morty himself occasionally wrote lyrics to the tunes clients sent in, and had a lot of fun doing it. At times the music business went so well that the partners were tempted to give up bootlegging. There were so many similar publishing firms, however, that there was not a steady living in it. “But you would be surprised,” Morty says now, “how near it came to paying our overhead.” The volume of mail made it look bona fide. They built up a prosperous semiwholesale liquor business, specializing in furnishing whisky to firms in the Garment Center, which used it for presents to outoftown buyers. “The idea on that stuff was that it should be as reasonable as possible without killing anybody,” Morty says. “It was a good, legitimate dollar.” The depression in the garment industry ruined the Music Writers Mutual Publishing Company's business even before repeal and left Morty broke.

  The Jollity Building belongs to the estate of an old New York family, and in the twenties the trustees had installed as manager one of the least promising members of the family, a middleaged, alcoholic Harvard man whom they wanted to keep out of harm's way. Morty had been such a good tenant and seemed so knowing a fellow that the Harvard man offered him a job at twentyfive dollars a week as his assistant. When the manager ran off with eleven thousand dollars in rents and a head he had met in the lobby, Morty took over his job. He has held it ever since. The trustees feel, as one of them has expressed it, that “Mr. Ormont understands the milieu.” He now gets fifty dollars a week and two per cent of the total rents, which adds about two thousand a year to his income.

  The nostalgia Morty often feels for the opportunities of prohibition days is shared by the senior tenant in the building, the proprietor of the Quick Art Theatrical Sign Painting Company, on the sixth floor. The sign painter, a Mr. Hy Sky—a name made up of the first syllable of his first name, Hyman, and the last syllable of a surname which no one can remember—is a bulky, redfaced man who has rented space in the Jollity Building for twentyfive years. With his brother, a lean, sardonic man known as Si Sky, he paints signs and lobby displays for burlesque and movie houses and does odd jobs of lettering for people in all sorts of trades. He is an extremely fast letterer and he handles a large volume of steady business, but it lacks the exhilaration of prohibition years. Then he was sometimes put to work at two o'clock in the morning redecorating a clip joint, so that it could not be identified by a man who had just been robbed of a bank roll and might return with cops the next day. “Was that fun!” Hy howls reminiscently. “And always cash in advance! If the joint had green walls, we would make them pink. We would move the bar opposite to where it was, and if there was booths in the place, we would paint them a different color and change them around. Then the next day, when the cops came in with the sap, they would say, 'Is this the place? Try to remember the side of the door the bar was on as you come in.' The sap would hesitate, and the cops would say, 'I guess he can't identify the premises,' and they would shove him along. It was a nice, comfortable dollar for me.”

  Hy has a clinical appreciation of meretricious types which he tries unsuccessfully to arouse in Morty. Sometimes, when Hy has a particularly preposterous liar in his place, he will telephone the renting agent's office and shout, “Morty, pop up and see the character I got here! He is the most phoniest character I seen in several years.” The person referred to seldom resents such a description. People in the Jollity Building neighborhood like to be thought of as characters. “He is a real character,” they say, with respect, of any fascinatingly repulsive acquaintance. Most promoters are characters. Hy Sky attributes the stability of his own business to the fact that he is willing to “earn a hard dollar.” “The trouble with the characters,” he says, “is they are always looking for a soft dollar. The result is they knock theirselves out trying too hard to have it easy. So what do they get after all? Only the missmeal cramps.” Nevertheless, it always gives Hy a genteel pleasure to collaborate, in a strictly legitimate way, with any of the promoters he knows. The promoter may engage him to paint a sign saying, “A new night club will open soon on these premises. Concessionaires interested telephone SoandSo at suchandsuch a number.” The name is the promoter's own, and the telephone given is, as Hy knows, in a booth in the Jollity lobby. The promoter, Hy also knows, will place this sign in front of a vacant night club with which he has absolutely no connection, in the hope that some small hatcheck concessionaire with money to invest in a new club will read the sign before someone gets around to removing it and take it seriously. If the concessionaire telephones, the promoter will make an appointment to receive him in a Jollity cubicle borrowed from some other promoter for the occasion and will try to get a couple of hundred dollars as a deposit on the concession. If successful, he will lose the money on a horse in the sixth race at an obscure track in California. The chances of getting any money out of this promotional scheme are exceedingly slight, but the pleasure of the promoter when the device succeeds is comparable to that of a sportsman who catches a big fish on a light line. Contemplation of the ineffectual larceny in the promoter's heart causes Hy to laugh constantly while lettering such a sign. A contributory cause of his laughter is the knowledge that he will receive the only dollar that is likely to change hands in the transaction—the dollar he gets for painting the sign.

  Musicians are not characters, in Hy's estimation, but merely a mild variety of phony. As such, they afford him a tempered amusement. When two impressive band leaders in large, fluffy overcoats call upon him for a communal cardboard door sign, toward the cost of which each contributes twentyfive cents, he innocently inquires, “How many of you are there in that office?” One of the band leaders will reply grandiosely, “Oh, we all have separate offices; the sign is for the door to quite a huge suite.” Hy laughs so hard he bends double to relieve the strain on his diaphragm. His brother, Si, who lives in continual fear that Hy will die of apoplexy, abandons his work and slaps Hy's back until the crowing abates. “A suite,” Hy repeats weakly at intervals for a halfhour afterward, “a huge suite they got, like on the subway at six o'clock you could get.” Hy also paints, at an average price of twentyfive cents, cardboard backs for music racks. These pieces of cardboard, whose only function is to identify the band, bear in bright letters its
name, which is usually something like Everett Winterbottom's Rhumba Raiders. When a Jollity Building band leader has acquired a sign for his door and a set of these lettered cardboards, he is equipped for business. If, by some unlikely chance, he gets an engagement, usually to play a week end in a cabaret in Queens or the Bronx, he hurries out to the curb on Seventh Avenue in front of Charlie's Bar & Grill, where there are always plenty of musicians, and picks up the number of fellows he requires, generally four. The men tapped go over to Eighth Avenue and get their instruments out of pawn. A musician who owns several instruments usually leaves them all in a pawnshop, ransoming one when he needs it to play a date and putting it back the next day. If, when he has a chance to work, he lacks the money to redeem an instrument, he borrows the money from a Jollity Building sixforfiver, a fellow who will lend you five dollars if you promise to pay him six dollars within twentyfour hours. Meanwhile, the band leader looks up a fellow who rents out orchestra arrangements guaranteed to be exact, illegal copies of those one or another of the big bandsmen has exclusive use of. The band leader puts the arrangements and his cardboards under his arm and goes down to Charlie's to wait for the other musicians to come back from the hock shop. That night Everett Winterbottom's Rhumba Raiders ride again. The only worry in the world the Raiders have, at least for the moment, is that they will have to finish their engagement before a union delegate discovers them and takes away their cards. Each man is going to receive three dollars a night, which is seven dollars below union scale.

  II—From Hunger

  It is likely that when the six story Jollity Building, so called, is pulled down, it will be replaced by a oneor twostory taxpayer, because buildings along Broadway now derive their chief incomes from the stores at street level, and taxpayers, which earn just as much from their stores, are cheaper to operate. When the Jollity Building comes down, the small theatrical agents, the sleazy costumers, the band leaders in worn camel'shair overcoats, the aged professors of acrobatic dancing, and all the petty promoters who hang, as the phrase goes, in the Jollity Building's upper floors will spill out into the street and join the musicians who are waiting for jobs and the pitchmen who sell selfthreading needles along the curb.

  Meanwhile, day after day, smalltime performers ride the elevators and wander through the grimy halls of the Jollity Building looking for work. Jack McGuire, who in the evening is a bouncer in Jollity Danceland, on the second floor, thoroughly understands the discouraged performers. “They're just like mice,” he says, “they been pushed around so much.” Jack is a heavyweight prize fighter who recently retired for the fortyeighth time in the last five years. He still looks impressively healthy, since few of his fights have lasted more than one round. “It was the greatest twominute battle you ever seen,” he said a while ago, describing his latest comeback, against a local boy in Plainfield, New Jersey. “For the first thirty seconds I was ahead on points.” Jack's face is of a warm, soft pink induced by the prolonged application of hot towels in the Jollity Building barbershop, which is just off the lobby. Sprawled in the sixth barber chair from the door, he sleeps off hangovers. His shoulders, naturally wide, are accentuated by the padding Broadway clothiers lavish on their customers. Among the puttycolored, sharpnosed little men and the thinlegged women in the elevators, he looks like an animal of a different breed. His small eyes follow the performers constantly. During the day, Jack is a runner for a great number of agents. He learns from them where there are openings for various types of talent—ballroomdancing teams, Irish tenors, singing hostesses, and so on—and then steers performers to the agents handling the jobs. He has strolled about the Jollity Building so long that he knows hundreds of them by sight. “Suchandsuch an agent is looking for a ballroom team,” he will tell a husbandandwife pair he knows. “A week in a Chink joint in Yonkers.” He gives them one of the agent's cards, on which he writes “Jack.” If the team gets the week, at forty dollars, it must pay a commission of four dollars to the agent, and another of two dollars to Jack. The second commission is entirely extralegal, since Jack is not a licensed agent, but Jack often steers performers to a job they wouldn't have had otherwise, so they don't kick. Agents are glad to have Jack work with them, because buyers of talent want instantaneous service and few acts can be reached by telephone during the day. Sometimes, when an act is held over for a second week and fails to pay the agent his additional commission, Jack is engaged to put the muscle on the unethical performer. When Jack encounters him, usually in Charlie's Bar & Grill or at the I. & Y. cigar store, which are both near the Jollity Building, he says, “Say, I hear your agent is looking for you.” The hint is enough ordinarily. When it is not, Jack uses the muscle.

  The proprietor of Jollity Danceland is the most solvent tenant in the building and he pays by far the largest rent. The dance hall has an entrance of its own on the street and is reached by stairway and elevators reserved for customers. Jack receives five dollars a night for bouncing there. At one time the proprietor planned to put the bouncers on a piecework basis, but he changed his mind, to Jack's lasting regret. “I would of bounced all the customers,” he says. “I would of made my fortune sure.” Between the hours of six and eight every evening, at a small gymnasium west of Tenth Avenue, Jack trains a few amateur boxers he manages. There is not much money in managing amateurs, who never earn more than sixteen dollars in a night, but Jack thinks that someday one of his proteges might show promise, and then he could sell the boy's contract to an established manager. With all these sources of income, McGuire would live in affluence, by Jollity Building standards, if it were not for his thirst, which is perpetual. When he drinks, he sometimes threatens to put the muscle on strangers who refuse to pay for his liquor. This detracts from his popularity at the neighborhood bars, and the bartenders resort to chemical expedients to get rid of him. Jack is proud of the immunity he has developed. “I got so I like those Mickey Finns as good as beer,” he often tells acquaintances.

  Although Jack has never paid any office rent, he is on familiar terms with Morty Ormont, the lugubrious renting agent of the Jollity Building, whom he encounters in the barbershop and at the lunch counter in the basement. He sometimes borrows a dollar from Morty, always giving him a hundreddollar check on a bank in Lynchburg, Virginia, as security. Morty, of course, knows that Jack has no account in the bank. In the Jollity Building, checks are considered not as literal drafts on existent funds but as a particularly solemn form of promise to repay a loan, since it is believed that the holder of a bad check has it in his power to throw the check writer into jail for twentyfive years. When Jack repays the dollar, usually in four installments, Morty gives the check back to him. Practically everybody in the Jollity Building carries a checkbook. Fellows who cannot borrow from Morty even by giving him checks sometimes ask him to vouch for them so they can borrow from sixforfivers, the chaps who lend five dollars one day and collect six dollars the next. “Will you O.K. me with a Shylock, Morty?” one of these suppliants will ask. “You know I'm an honest man.” “In what way?” Morty demands cynically if he does not know the man well. If the fellow says, “In every way,” Morty refuses to O.K. him, because he is obviously a crook.

  The prizefight managers who hang in the Jollity Building are, as one might expect, of an inferior order. The boys they handle provide what sports writers like to call the “stiff opposition” against which incubating stars compile “sterling records.” “When the Garden brings in some fellow that you never heard of from Cleveland or Baltimore or one of them other Western states, and it says in the paper he has had stiff opposition,” says a Jollity Building manager known as Acid Test Ike, “that means the opposition has been stiffs. In other words, the class of boys I got.” It is Acid Test who manages Jack in all of his comebacks. For each comeback, Ike and Jack go to some place like Lancaster, Pennsylvania, or Wheeling, West Virginia, where there happens to be a novice heavyweight, and Ike tells the sports editor of the local newspaper, “My man will give this kid the acid test.” Then Jack gets kn
ocked out. Naturally, Ike also has to manage smaller fighters who will get knocked out by middleweights and lightweights. “A fellow could make a pleasant dollar with a stable of bums,” he sometimes says, “only the competition is so terrific. There is an element getting into the game that is willing to be knocked out very cheap.” Acid Test Ike always wears a bottlegreen suit, a brickred topcoat, and an oysterwhite hat. “It don't take brains to make money with a good fighter,” he says rather bitterly when he feels an attack of the missmeal cramps coming on. “Running into a thing like that is just luck.”

  Performers, when they arrive at the Jollity Building looking for work, usually take an elevator straight to the floor on which the agent who most often books them is located. After leaving this agent, they make a tour of the other agents' offices to see if anyone else has a job for them. Only when rendered desperate by hunger do they stray down to the third floor, where the people Morty calls the heels hold forth in furnished offices each about the size of a bathroom. Since the heels constitute the lowest category of tenant in the building, no proprietor of a firstclass chopsuey joint or roadhouse would call on them for talent. “The best you can get there,” performers say, “is a chance to work Saturday night at a ruptured saloon for bubkis.” “Bubkis” is a Yiddish word which means “large beans.”

  One of the most substantial agents in the building is Jerry Rex, a swarthy, discouraged man who used to be a ventriloquist. He has an unusually large oneroom office, which was once the studio of a teacher of Cuban dancing. The walls are painted in orangeandblack stripes, and there are several fulllength wall mirrors, in which the pupils used to watch themselves dance. Mr. Rex sits at a desk at the end of the office opposite the door, and performers waiting to speak to him sit on narrow benches along the walls. Rex has an assistant named Dave, who sits on a couch in one corner of the room. Rex always professes to be waiting for a call from a theater owner in, for example, Worcester, Massachusetts, who will want four or five acts and a line of eight girls. He urges all the entertainers who drop in at his place to sit down and wait with him. “Also, a fellow who owns the biggest night club in Scranton is going to pop up here any minute,” he tells the performers confidentially. “You better wait around.” The man from Worcester never calls up, but the performers don't mind killing a halfhour with Jerry. “It rests your feet,” one woman singer has said, “and also you meet a lot of people you know.” Jerry leaves Dave in charge of the office when he goes out. “If Georgie Hale pops up here looking for me,” Jerry always says in a loud voice as he is leaving, “tell him that Billy Rose pulled me over to Lindy's for a bite.” Then he goes downstairs to the lunch counter, where he may try to talk Barney, the proprietor, into letting him charge a cup of coffee. Rex, when he is not attempting to impress performers or rival agents, is a profoundly gloomy man. “You got only three classes of performers today,” he sometimes says. “Class A, which means, for example, like Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor; Class B, like the Hartmans, for instance, or Henny Youngman, that can yet get a very nice dollar, and Class Z, which is all the little people. Smalltime vaudeville is definitely out. All you got is floor shows, fraternal entertainments, and in the summer the borsch circuit. An entertainer who can average thirty dollars a week all year is Class Z tops. There ain't no such entertainer. A husbandandwife team might make it.”