Max

by Howard Fast

  Thus, balancing one need against another, Max made his approach directly and specifically. He went into Sal Marietta’s shoe repair place and said, ‘How about the tickets for them showcards in your window? I’ll buy them.’

  Sal had neither the time nor the inclination for the English-speaking theatre. ‘I hear your poor mama pass away.’

  ‘My papa.’

  ‘Worse, terrible.’ In Italian, he observed that this place stank, that life was an oversized outhouse, and that the poor ate shit. Max nodded in agreement, his wide blue eyes moist and vulnerable. ‘I give you this,’ Sal said, offering Max a dollar. ‘Helps, maybe.’

  ‘I don’t want money,’ Max said. ‘Thanks, Sal, but that ain’t what I want. I want the tickets for the showcards.’

  ‘What for? Your mama’s dead, you go see shows?’

  ‘My papa. I buy the tickets. Two bits a pair.’

  He left Sal’s with two pairs of tickets, one for a performance of Devil May Care, starring Lucy Demar, and the other for a rerun of The Mikado, by Gilbert and Sullivan, which had a triumphant opening in New York some six years before.

  He explained to Sal what he intended to do with the tickets, feeling that Sal would not screw him. Even then, Max was a fair judge of human nature. Sal promised to save the tickets for him in the future. In some way, Max understood the barrier between these hard-working storekeepers and the uptown world of the theatre, of glowing gaslights, of fine restaurants, of men in dinner clothes and ladies in their evening gowns. The nearest theatre center was on Fourteenth Street, which was either a mile away or a continent away, depending upon who you were, and the newer theatre centers in the Twenties and in the Forties were even more unapproachable. It would never have occurred to Sal Marietta to go to the theatre, even as it would never have occurred to Max.

  Max’s mother, Sarah, had been born in 1856, transported at the age of sixteen to the Lower East Side of New York City. Years later, Max would remember and try to comprehend what life had been for Sarah. She was only thirty-five years old when her husband died, but already worn and defeated, the juice of life squeezed out of her, the fragile bit of youthful beauty she had once possessed gone forever. She was boxed into a room with no exit; she was beyond planning or hoping or dreaming, and the thought that this strange, alien, skinny boy could provide for her and her family was untenable. The ability to love had also been squeezed out of her, replaced by fear and rage and frustration. Left to her own devices, she might well have waited for death or extinction. A woman in her situation in another ethnic group might well have killed herself and her children; Sarah might have allowed life to perform the execution at a slower rate.

  But Max brought in money, and they survived. It was an affront to the normal monstrousness of life, and instead of being grateful, Sarah snapped and whimpered and raged at her son. Strangely enough, Max understood this.

  But his understanding and acceptance of his mother lay buried deep in his unconscious, almost animal-like; as a despised dog clings to loyalty, Max clung to Sarah. He never asked himself whether he loved this shrike of a woman because in some strange way he was wise enough to understand her. He was guilty of denying her the horrible extinction that would revenge her on life and circumstance. He gave her a preposterous gift – continuing existence – and incredibly, yet naturally, this was something she could not forgive him. He denied her the small, terrible logic of her impending fate and doom. Explicitly, neither of them actually comprehended this; but in the process of living, it became central to their relationship to each other. With his brothers and sisters, it was another matter.

  Max never separated himself from the six human beings who depended upon him. Their survival was his survival; their fate would be his fate. It was a fact, not of compassion or duty, but of reality, because he was unaware of any other reality; and as he accepted this, he also accepted his mother’s anger and irritation. He tried to protect her. He wrote notes for his sister Freida, thirteen months younger than he, to bring to school, and he lied to his mother about his truancy. When it caught up with him after a visit from the truant officer, he accepted his mother’s slaps and her tongue-lashing.

  ‘You’re a bum,’ she told him. ‘You’re a little bum.’ But her rage was weakening; she was emerging from the miasma of despair. Days and weeks had gone by since her husband’s death, and still they survived and there was food on the table.

  ‘I do what I got to do,’ Max told her. ‘I’m not a bum, Mama.’

  ‘Twelve years old with whores!’

  ‘I don’t do nothing with whores, Mama. I sell them tickets.’

  ‘Mr Greenbaum says you pimp for them.’

  ‘He’s a liar! I’m not a pimp.’ He hated the word. He had understood the finances of pimping and prostitution since he was eight years old. It was all part of the streets, and even if he had been less than clear about the emotions and desires that went with the oldest profession, all of it existed within walking distance of his home, where pimps and prostitutes abounded. Once he had guided a customer to Suzie Brinkerhoff, but only once, and Suzie had given him a dollar. Suzie was a large, voluptuous woman in her mid-thirties, with peroxide-dyed blond hair. She was sentimental. She knew the story of Sarah Britsky and her six children, and she adored Max. She was so sentimental that her eyes brimmed with tears every time Max approached her with tickets, for in her eyes Max was not a scrawny little boy but the image of the thoughtful and selfless lover she had never known as well as the wonderful child she had never given birth to. She was indifferent to his ragged clothes and his gutter speech; she clothed him in her own fantasies. And she always bought whatever tickets he offered, cheerfully paying two dollars for a pair. When other prostitutes made obscene remarks to Max, Suzie told them to keep their lousy mouths shut, and she said to Max, ‘Stay away from them lousy whores, because they stink with social disease.’ Then she proceeded to deliver an explicit lecture on the nature of syphilis and gonorrhea, leaving nothing out and describing the prognosis of both diseases with fervor and color.

  In a way, she adopted Max. ‘He is my mascot,’ she told the other whores, and the market for his showcard tickets broadened. At the same time, he added to his bagel business. Most of the loft factories were barred to him, but he did manage to find two more places to add to his clientele, Garden Dresses and Birdie Blouses. In each instance he had to bribe the janitor, yet within months after his father’s death, Max was selling a thousand bagels a week, which yielded him, expenses deducted, a net profit of about eight dollars. The first week after his father’s death, leaving aside the income from the stolen watch, he presented his mother with nine dollars. The second week, it had increased to twelve dollars, and the third week, he brought home fourteen dollars and sixty cents, more than his father had ever earned – and with this, retaining his capital for the bagel business. Not every week was so profitable, yet from week to week, the six Britsky children and Sarah, their mother, managed to eat and pay their rent.

  Sarah relented. The incomprehensible miracle of a skinny, wiry twelve-year-old boy keeping them from death and starvation had to impress her. She shouted at Max less frequently, and her slaps and anger were directed toward the other children. And once, with tears in her eyes, she managed to say to Max, ‘Thank you, thank you.’

  Yet Max had seen her, on many occasions, showing the love and tenderness that one would expect from a mother, but directing it toward his brothers and sisters. There was no way in the world that Max could comprehend what was taking place, nor could he conceivably ask her why she was kind to the others and so dismally unkind to him, nor could he speculate that having replaced her husband as a provider, he was not only denying her own role of motherhood and caring but abandoning his own position as one of her children. None of these thoughts or conclusions were possible for the skinny little boy, and therefore, when his mother made her feeble gesture of gratitude, Max failed to respond.

  His lack of any response, either pleasure or annoyance, did not
indicate a lack of human equipment. Only saints continue to love where no love is returned, and Max was hardly a saint. What he felt for his mother and his brothers and sisters was a sort of tribal bondage, a clannish binding, not love, not even emotion, but a glue of circumstances that he never tried to evade. That his mother managed to swallow her bitterness and resentment long enough to thank him meant nothing; his only satisfaction came from her reduction as a nuisance. When he thought about her, it was only to express a desire for her to leave him alone, not to get off his back – they were all of them on his back forever – but to leave him alone.

  The kids Max knew – a bit older, a bit younger – all of them worked, some more, some less. There was no happy, easy childhood of carefree play on the Lower East Side. The kids sold papers, delivered packages, collected tinfoil and sold it, found bits and pieces of work at the East River fishing docks, opened the doors of hansom cabs downtown for penny tips, collected junk for the junk dealers, all of this after school hours, these and a hundred other odds and ends of work; and if there was a dollar a week to be made, it was good pay. And other kids stole things, and there was not much more than a dollar a week in that either. They existed in a teeming, squalling, turbulent, overcrowded world of rotten jerrybuilt tenements and garbage-strewn, pushcart-lined streets through which an endless procession of horses dragged carts, wagons, trucks, hansoms, fire engines, black Marias, vans, even an occasional carriage, lost or detoured, and all of the horses pissing until the gutters ran with an endless yellow flow, defecating the food of thousands of sparrows and pigeons who made this enormous eddy of human-kind their natural habitat.

  It was not for Max. He spent each day until he was ready to drop from fatigue, but he sold his labor to no one. In his pragmatic philosophy, there were two approaches. You sold your strength for a dollar a week, or you sold other things and used your brains. But when you used your brains, you provoked other people to thought, and that could hurt. If this kid was willing to pay twenty-five cents for showcard tickets, he would also pay thirty-five cents and fifty cents. There was no endless flow of honey out of this particular hive, and not until a year later would Max begin to organise other kids as bagel distributors and add hot coffee to his menu. In the time between, he wandered farther and farther afield in his search for showcards.

  That way, he came to Rowdy Smith’s penny arcade, on Second Avenue just south of Fourteenth Street. In New York, a few blocks made a neighborhood, and ten blocks could be a universe apart; and while on one or two occasions, Max had wandered as far north as Fourteenth Street, it was well out of his usual world. He had a vague image in his mind of Rowdy Smith’s place, but only that, and now to his delight he discovered a dozen showcards lined up in the wide windows of the penny arcade. None of the many and varied delights in the penny arcade attracted Max, not the cheap gambling wheels, the carny games, the miniature bowling, or the kinetoscopes. Yet they were there and they registered, and as Max put it long, long afterward, ‘I went in there and I changed the world. Don’t make any mistake about that, because that’s where it began, back there in Rowdy Smith’s penny arcade.’ But that was long after, when the penny arcade had disappeared and Rowdy Smith had been taken to his ancestors.

  But in 1891, Rowdy Smith was very much alive, a big, white-haired Irishman of sixty or so, his face as red as fire from enough whiskey to float a battleship, his paunch enormous from enough beer to float a fleet. He stood in his cage at the entrance to the arcade, collecting a two-cent fee from those who were persuaded to enter and share its many delights and occasionally thundering through a megaphone in a voice that could be heard blocks away. His wife, almost as large as he, paraded back and forth through the place with an apron full of pennies. Smith’s own pale blue eyes met Max’s, whose chin barely cleared the counter of the cage, and something in the waif’s orbs of innocence made Smith smile with pleasure.

  ‘What can I do for you, boyo?’ he asked. ‘Either you got two cents to come in or you got to watch from outside.’

  ‘All them showcards in your window,’ Max said. ‘What do you do with the tickets?’

  ‘And what’s that to you?’

  ‘I’ll buy them. I’ll give you two bits a ticket.’

  ‘And then sell them for twice that?’

  ‘Nah. I make a nickel or a dime on each. But I find the customers.’

  ‘It’s an old game. Get on line, sonny.’ He waved Max away. ‘Stand aside. Paying customers behind you.’ Two customers paid their fee and entered, then Max was back at the cage.

  ‘Still here,’ Smith said. ‘How old are you, boyo?’

  ‘Twelve.’

  ‘It’s two o’clock. Why ain’t you in school?’

  Max studied Smith thoughtfully, then he told him the truth. Smith laughed and shook his head. ‘That’s a lot of horseshit, sonny. You know that. You telling me you support your mother and five other kids? How long now?’

  ‘Since September.’

  Smith’s wife came over to the cage. Business was slow during the day. He told her Max’s story.

  ‘Poor lad,’ she said.

  ‘If he’s telling the truth.’

  ‘What’s he after, money?’

  ‘He wants to buy the showcard tickets.’

  ‘Oh?’ She turned to Max. ‘And what for, if you’re that miserable?’ ‘I sell them.’

  ‘And how much would you pay?’

  ‘A quarter each.’

  ‘Sell him the damn tickets!’ she snapped at her husband. ‘You give them to any bum who asks you.’

  ‘Yeah, and don’t I save them for your sister’s husband?’

  ‘He’s the worst bum of all. Sell them to the lad.’

  After that, Max returned to Rowdy Smith’s place each week. Smith and his wife took a liking to the boy, which was somewhat strange, since Max was not the most likeable of children – indeed, if the word ‘child’ could be applied to him at all. In the years that followed, the concept of childhood remained cloudy in Max’s perception, a land he had never truly entered or departed from and from his point of view a fostered illusion. Smith had a mixed-breed street dog that he kept in his cage with him, and if he made an image of Max on his mind, it was as a sort of human counterpart of the dog – tough, shrewd, street wise, and capable of viciousness if pushed too far. He watched in silent and objective interest once, when Max was cornered just outside the penny arcade by two Irish kids, both of them older and larger than Max. Max did not merely fight back; cornered and provoked by their anti-Semitic slurs, he went at them like a wild animal, driving an elbow into the groin of one boy and leaping onto the other, arms around his neck, teeth biting through an ear. There was a kind of mad yet calculated frenzy in the way Max fought, not the way a kid fights, but drawing blood and exacting pain. The two boys pulled loose and ran, and shaking with his effort, Max came into the arcade and faced Smith’s inquiring look.

  ‘No fucken mick’s going to call me a Jew bastard,’ Max said.

  ‘You’re absolutely right,’ Smith agreed.

  It was about two months after Max had first come to the arcade when Smith said to him, ‘You’re too damn serious for a kid, Max. Why don’t you try some of the pleasures here? It’s a place for fun.’

  ‘I ain’t got money to spend on fun,’ Max said.

  ‘Go on, go on, you’re a kid.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Go on, try the kinetoscope. It’s a wondrous thing.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It’s only a penny.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Here’s a penny,’ Smith said, pushing the coin toward him. ‘Go on, try it.’

  Rowdy Smith had received his kinetoscope machines only a few months before he encountered Max, and already the business was such that he had ordered a sign reading KINETOSCOPE PARLOR, to be put in place over his penny arcade entrance. Actually, the machines he rented were not the famed kinetoscope of Thomas A. Edison, but one of a half a dozen imitators that had come on the market. Some fo
ur years earlier, Edison had set himself the task of creating a machine that would enable people to look at photographs that moved. In his workshop, a contrivance was put together, but he came up against the need for a proper carrier to feed in pictorial images. Concurrently, George Eastman, working in Rochester on a means of improving his Kodak camera, found a new material to put on the roll, a material that Edison was able to restructure for his kinetoscope. It was a boxlike structure, twelve by twelve by forty inches. There were eyeholes, and when one put one’s eyes to the holes and cranked the handles, an image inside the box took on the illusion of motion. Once Edison had created the little machine, he lost interest in it; later, when a promoter, Tom Lombard by name, talked him into allowing the manufacture of ten of the peep shows for the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Edison first agreed arid then regretted his involvement in what he felt. was a cheap carnival gimmick. However, without infringing on his patent, imitations of the peep-show machine began to appear. The simplest type was the machine in Rowdy Smith’s penny arcade. When the handle was cranked, a series of photographs on cards were flipped in rapid succession, giving a jerky illusion of what, in most cases, was the process of a woman undressing to get into her bath, or being undressed by a lover, or some variation of the same. Always, the process stopped short of full disclosure, and since the whole thing lasted only ten seconds, actual prurience was for the most part avoided. Nevertheless, for the price of a penny, the novelty of motion combined with a suggestion of pornography was very enthralling, especially to the younger set.