Friendships died fast in 1930, and that was bad. Far worse, however, was the way they were buried. Natie Farkas and I never again spoke a word to each other. Not because he had seen the ad in the Times before I had, and he had hot-footed it uptown without telling me. That was bad enough, but that could have been repaired with almost any sort of lie, because I would have accepted any sort of lie, and so would Natie. What killed the friendship was something that, in 1930, nobody on God’s green earth could have repaired. Not in New York City in that strange year when Natie Farkas and I were growing up: I got the job.
Not because I could take a hundred and twenty words a minute. I think I got the job for the same reason a lot of people get jobs: the man who had the power to give me the job had obviously reached the point where he was sick and tired of interviewing people for it. Also, I think, because I was tall for my age, and I’ve always looked stronger than I am.
What Maurice Saltzman wanted was not a male secretary. He wanted an office boy, a valet, a bodyguard, a chauffeur, a receptionist, a janitor, and an apprentice accountant who could also, when it became necessary, stake a letter in shorthand and type it neatly. I don’t know how Mr. Saltzman knew I could perform any of these duties. He put me through no tests. All he did, after staring at me with a small frown for several minutes, was ask how much I expected to be paid. I took a long chance, hoping my greed would not cause him to throw me out of the office, and said, “Twelve dollars a week, sir.”
“We’ll see,” said Mr. Saltzman. He meant, I learned six days later when I opened my first pay envelope, eleven dollars a week.
This was more than I expected. It was almost more than I needed. The funny thing about growing up in The Great Depression was that while money was the most important factor in your life, because without money you didn’t eat, it wasn’t really money you worried about. What you worried about was what you were going to be, what you were going to do with your life, and whether, by doing what you were doing now, you were on the right track.
Speaking for myself, I had grave doubts. My guess is that I wouldn’t be far wrong if I spoke for any young man of seventeen who had started work at that time in the offices of Maurice Saltzman & Company. The company dealt in disaster.
Mr. Saltzman and his “Company,” a man named Ira Bern, had a number of clients whose books their staff audited for a fee every month. The main income of the firm, however, came from its bankruptcy work.
When it became clear in those days that a businessman was foundering, the people to whom he owed money would get together, form a creditors’ committee, and hire a firm of accountants to audit the unfortunate man’s books. If the audit indicated that there were enough assets to pay the creditors a respectable fraction of their debts—in 1930, thirty cents on the dollar was considered very respectable—the creditors’ committee would liquidate the business and divide up the proceeds. If the audit revealed even a hint of fraud on the part of the unfortunate businessman, or merely that there were not enough cents on the dollar worth distributing, the creditors’ committee would resort to the law and throw him into bankruptcy. The entire process of hunting down assets would then be repeated by a government receiver, with one significant exception: if there actually was fraud, and if it violated a federal law—let’s say the poor sap had sent his financial statement through the mails, for instance—he could be prosecuted, he usually was, and he went to jail.
There was, in all this, a great deal of work for accountants. The size of their fees depended on the number of men assigned to perform the audit. I cannot remember ever hearing a member of a creditors’ committee or a receiver’s staff question the skill or experience of a man working on an audit. I don’t think they cared. All they wanted was a finished report, and they wanted it fast. Maurice Saltzman & Company was noted for its speed. This was undoubtedly the reason why they got so much of this work.
It was also the reason why Mr. Saltzman and Mr. Bern—when I was not out having rubber heels put on their shoes, sweeping their offices, bringing them hot pastrami sandwiches, or typing their letters—sent me along on so many of these bankruptcy audits. It didn’t matter that when I went to work for them I did not know a debit from a credit. The more men they put on the job, the bigger the bill they could send the referee. Besides, a boy who had been valedictorian of his class couldn’t be totally hopeless. The chances are I would learn. I did.
The first thing I learned is that “bankruptcy” is one of those words, like “war,” that you have heard all your life and think you understand until you actually become involved with the process the word is intended to identify. When the shock begins to recede, you begin to wonder about the value of the dictionary as a preparation for life.
Before I went to work for Maurice Saltzman & Company, in my circle—which in those days did not extend very far beyond my schoolyard, the Troop 224 meeting room, and a couple of street corners—the word “bankruptcy” had always had humorous overtones. It was always used in connection with some sharp character out of the tabloids—a spendthrift movie actress, a notorious gigolo—who had run up enormous bills, usually for immoral purposes, and then thrown himself on the mercy of the foolishly merciful government to escape paying them. How this was done I didn’t know, and neither did the person who was telling the story about the sharp character. It never occurred to me to ask. What I was interested in were the details of the debaucheries that had cost so much money, and that’s what the narrator was interested in, too. In all these stories, the word bankruptcy was no more than a punch line. Get ready, now: this is where you laugh. I always did.
Why not? There was always in these stories of the shrewd manipulator who managed in the end to thumb his nose at the law-abiding world some element—perverted, it is true—of the last coming out first. You had to admire a man who could do that. You had to chuckle at the discomfiture of those who had so much money that they were foolish enough to lend some of it. Even the euphemism for bankruptcy sounded funny. It was known as “taking the bath.”
So many people were doing it in 1930 that I must have had a lot of laughs during those early days with Maurice Saltzman & Company. If I did, I don’t remember them. What I remember is my first bankruptcy audit. Associated Leather Arts Corporation, somewhere down on Leonard Street. Manufacturers of wallets, handbags, belts, and briefcases. “A big one,” was the word in the offices of Maurice Saltzman & Company. “A big one” meant liabilities of over a hundred thousand. The receiver was in a hurry. To do the audit Mr. Saltzman sent six men, led by our best senior, Mr. Jablow. I had finished my chores in the office, so Mr. Saltzman sent me along as a junior.
Juniors went down on the bill to the receiver at thirty-five dollars a day. At a salary of eleven dollars a week for a six-day week, Mr. Saltzman was paying me $1.83 a day. For anybody who has trouble with simple arithmetic, I will do the subtraction. A dollar eighty-three from thirty-five dollars leaves $32.17 profit to Mr. Saltzman on my mere physical presence in the Leather Arts Corporation loft on Leonard Street. No wonder I was excited. I had never before realized how valuable I was. I couldn’t wait for the custodian to unlock the door and admit us to the otherwise deserted premises.
Mr. Jablow and the more seasoned members of the staff went directly to the bookkeeper’s office to sort out the books and records. But I had never before been in a manufacturer’s loft. Disregarded by Mr. Jablow and the others, I moved on across the salesroom into the factory. It was a huge room, dotted with sewing machines and cutting tables. Not surprisingly, it smelled strongly of leather. I was staring about, trying to imagine what the room looked like when people were working at the machines and tables, when Mr. Jablow came up behind me.
“What are you looking for?”
“Nothing,” I said. Then, because even to me that sounded foolish, I said, “I mean I was looking for the can.”
“Then what are you standing around in the middle of the room for?” Mr. Jablow said irritably. “You’re old enough to know they always bu
ild those things up against a wall.”
The premises of the Associated Arts Leather Corporation were no exception. Except in one respect. When I opened the door, I did something that still makes me blush. I let out a scream. Just like a frightened girl. Not because the man hunched up in a crooked squatting posture on the tiled floor was sitting in a pool of his own blood. I had seen blood before. I had seen dead people, too. On East Fourth Street privacy was a difficult enough state even for the living to achieve. What I had never seen before was a slit throat. The accounts of suicides and murders I had read in newspapers and books all seemed to indicate that the process was neat. Why shouldn’t it be? The word “slit” sounds neat. On my first bankruptcy audit in 1930 I learned it isn’t. Things stick out.
I learned a great many other things, among them that bankrupts don’t always solve their personal problems with a razor, and I learned fast. By the time the DuValle’s Men’s and Boys’ Pants Corporation took the bath, I had been working for Maurice Saltzman & Company for less than four months, but I had picked up enough to make my boss feel he could get away with listing me on the bill to the receiver as a semi-senior, fifty dollars a day. This was not quite as crooked as it sounds.
The DuValle Men’s and Boys’ Pants Corporation had been inconsiderate enough to attract the annoyed attention of its creditors when the staff of Maurice Saltzman & Company was already spread dangerously thin on three other audits. But Mr. Saltzman could not turn down a job that promised a nice fat fee. The DuValle Men’s and Boys’ Pants Corporation was a “real big one.” Real big ones meant liabilities of over two hundred thousand.
“We’ll do like this,” Mr. Saltzman said to his partner, Ira Bern. “You take the kid, here, and you go down and get started. I’ll try to skin off some men from the other audits.”
This was a common practice, and when I first heard Mr. Saltzman use the phrase, I thought he meant “skim off.” But I was wrong. The verb “to skin,” in 1930, meant “to cheat.” Perhaps it still does. Anyway, Mr. Bern and I took a taxi to the DuValle quarters on Lafayette Street, near Astor Place. In 1930, as I recall, the only people who took taxis were Howard Hughes and accountants who were ordered not to lose a minute in completing a bankruptcy audit.
The DuValle loft was a dreary place, cramped, poorly lighted, and dirty. It was difficult for me to imagine creditors trusting to the tune of more than two hundred thousand dollars anybody who functioned in such disreputable quarters. The creditors had done just that, however, and as Mr. Bern and I worked away at the books in the deserted office, it soon became apparent that they had done more. The DuValle liabilities were probably closer to three hundred thousand.
“Boy, oh, boy,” Mr. Bern said in mid-afternoon. “I wish we could skin off some of the other guys for this job. Looks like we’re on a sockdologer, kid.”
Mr. Bern’s wish was not granted. On the contrary. Shortly before four o’clock he was himself skinned off, by a phone call from Mr. Saltzman. Before he hurried off uptown, Mr. Bern said, “Keep going till you got the cash payments schedule wrapped up, then you can knock off for the day. Don’t forget to lock up, and I’ll meet you here in the morning.”
I had the cash payments schedule wrapped up by five o’clock. I got out the ring of keys left in our charge by the referee’s custodian and started trying to figure out how to use them. It seems to me everything was complicated in 1930, even locking up a loft on Lafayette Street. I was just getting the hang of the two steel crossbars, which one of the keys released on a heavy spring, when a fist hammered on the outside of the door.
“Anybody in there?”
The voice sounded familiar. I pulled open the heavy door, and saw why. Facing me was Pinny Slater, who had been in my and Natie Farkas’ class at Jefferson High. He was clearly just as surprised to see me as I was to see him.
“What the hell you doing here?” he said.
I pointed to the referee’s notice the custodian had pasted on the door. “This place is bankrupt,” I said.
“I know that,” Pinny said impatiently. “Don’t you think I can read? What I’m asking, what’s that got to do with you?”
“I’m doing the audit,” I said. “For the receiver.”
This was not strictly true, of course. But I had never liked Pinny Slater, and this was the first time I had ever had a chance to say anything to him that would cut through the snooty attitude that had made me not the only guy at Jefferson High who hated his guts. It worked. Pinny’s good-looking features, always arranged in a pattern of supercilious elegance that made you want to punch it off his face, rearranged themselves in a commonplace, even a proletarian, look of astonishment.
“You’re doing what?” he said.
“I work for a firm of accountants,” I said. “Maurice Saltzman & Company, up on Thirty-fourth Street. They got hired by the Receiver in Bankruptcy to audit the books of this firm.”
“And you’re doing it?” Pinny said. “Alone?”
“No, of course not,” I said. “Nobody can do an audit this size by himself. My boss sent down a whole staff, the way he always does on a big audit, but they got called off on some other emergency job, so the boss left me down here to finish up on my own.”
Without asking permission, Pinny came in across the threshold. That, too, was typical. He was the sort of cocky bastard to whom the word please was a one-way street: a syllable other people used to him, never the other way around. I think it’s only fair to say at this point that my reasons for disliking Pinny were many, but they all grew out of a single, hard economic fact: Pinny Slater was a rich kid. There were quite a few at Jefferson High.
It was one of the oldest public high schools in the city. As a result, it had accumulated the sort of scraps of reputation that often are the result of nothing more than longevity but are frequently interpreted as traditions. One of these was that you couldn’t get a better secondary school education in New York City no matter how much money your father was willing to pay for it. Frankly, I had always believed this. In 1930 I certainly felt as well educated as any kid who had attended an expensive prep school. This conviction may have been based on the fact that I had never known a prep school kid. But I had known Pinny Slater and a few others at Jefferson High who, according to locker room gossip, sat down every night to meals served by servants. I never quite believed this about the others, but I believed it about Pinny Slater.
He was delivered at the front door of Jefferson High every morning in a long black car driven by a man in uniform. I think what impressed us most was not the uniformed chauffeur, but the glass window that separated the driver on the front seat from Pinny on the back. I seem to recall an explanation for the manner in which Pinny came to school. His family lived at Seventy-second Street and Central Park West, and Jefferson High was located at Fifty-ninth Street and Tenth Avenue. There was, the explanation went, no form of public transportation between these two points, and Pinny was too lazy to get out of bed in time to walk. The chauffeur and the car were on hand anyway, waiting to deliver Pinny’s father to his office downtown, around nine-thirty, so why not run Pinny over to school an hour earlier? The only person to whom this could make any difference was the chauffeur, and all you had to do was watch Pinny in action for a while to realize that nobody in the Slater family was going to lose any sleep over that chauffeur’s extra hour of work. What I mean is this: while I don’t remember how the other rich kids at Jefferson High handled being rich, you could never forget how Pinny Slater handled it. He rubbed it in.
Watching him wander around the deserted loft of the DuValle Men’s and Boys’ Pants Corporation, peering at things as though he owned the joint, a pain that was still fresh nudged me into a bitter summation of my feelings: Pinny Slater would never lose a friend the way I had lost Natie Farkas.
“I didn’t know you were an accountant,” Pinny said.
“I guess there are a lot of things you don’t know.”
My attempt at sarcasm went over his head. Either that, or P
inny hadn’t heard it. That irritatingly handsome face was creased in a puzzled scowl so deep that I suddenly had the feeling Pinny was surrounded by an invisible fence, something he had put up to keep away outside noises while he concentrated on working out a difficult problem inside his head.
“Listen,” he said abruptly. “What makes a man go bankrupt?”
“What?” I said.
Pinny flipped out his hand irritably in a large scooping gesture, as though he were gathering up the entire loft to support his question.
“A place like this,” he said. “It goes along for years, grinding out money for the man who owns it. Then one day, boom. It stops. How come?”
At once I forgot that I hated his guts. Indeed, I had a sudden feeling of affection for him. By asking a question I could answer, Pinny had handed me a small piece of something he’d had all his life: the gift of superiority.
“There’s all kinds of reasons,” I said. “A guy overexpands, and his sales don’t keep up with what he laid out. Or the thing he’s been selling goes out of style. People stop buying it.”
“Don’t tell me people have stopped buying pants,” Pinny said.
“No, those two reasons, they don’t apply in this case,” I said. “This outfit, DuValle, what knocked this firm out of the box was rowboats and canoes.”
“Rowboats and what?” Pinny said.
I liked the quick interest in his voice. I enjoyed the way he was looking at me, as though he was seeing me for the first time.
“A man’s got a business,” I said. “Say like this one, DuValle. He draws a certain amount of money out of it regularly. Enough to live a certain way, let’s say. Then the way he lives, that changes suddenly. He needs more money.”
“What do you mean changes?” Pinny said. “How?”
“Say he starts gambling heavily,” I said. “Maybe in the market. Maybe at the track. Or he starts keeping a chorus girl. Or he goes into some other racket on the side. A secret venture, sort of. Like maybe he’s backing a night club for his chorus girl and he doesn’t want anybody to know about it. Like his wife, for instance. Whichever one it is, all these things cost more money than our man has been drawing out of his business up to now, so he starts drawing out more. Naturally, he doesn’t want anybody to know he’s drawing out more, especially if he has partners, so he covers it up by having the checks drawn to phony names or phony things. After a while he’s drawn off more than the business can stand, and the business can’t pay its bills, so his creditors throw him into bankruptcy.”
Fourth Street East Page 20
