Max

by Howard Fast

  In Max’s case, there was no sexual innocence to be titillated. For months now, he had been in effect a theatre ticket agent for prostitutes, and he had encountered them in all stages of dress and undress. The female anatomy held no erotic secrets for him to explore as a voyeur, and when he cranked the handle of the kinetoscope, his attitude was more critical than appreciative. When Smith asked him how he liked it, he shrugged.

  ‘They don’t really move,’ Max said.

  ‘What do you want for a cent, the folly boojare?’

  ‘Not some stupid machine that’s kidding you into believing you see pictures that move.’

  ‘You’re a tough little son of a bitch, Max, ain’t you?’

  ‘Maybe. But I don’t piss my money away.’

  ‘That’s a fact. I’ll tell you something, sonny. They tell me Thomas Edison’s working on the real thing, that he’s got a peep show you look into and they really move. So when we get some of those machines in here, I’ll blow you to another show.’

  ‘Sure,’ Max said. ‘Sure, why not?’

  [ T W O ]

  In 1897, on a fine afternoon in March, Max and Suzie Brinkerhoff were having dinner together in the Empire Dairy Restaurant on Second Avenue. Although they served an excellent table d’hôte dinner for thirty cents, economy was not what drew Max there. It was the potato soup. As he explained to Suzie, ‘I am not a gourmet, believe me – hey, I pronounced that right, didn’t I?’

  ‘You got me. What does it mean?’

  ‘Having class when it comes to food. I mean, my mother is a lousy cook, the world’s worst, so I developed a taste for good food. Does that make sense?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘And the potato soup here – Well, I don’t know, maybe if you set it up at Delmonico’s they’d hold their noses, but by my judgment, it’s the tops, absolutely the tops.’

  Suzie shook her head and smiled affectionately. ‘You’re a funny kid, Maxie. Sometimes you make me feel that you got a lot of class, not just about food but about other things, too. Three or four of the girls, we was talking about it, and they all agreed that if you’d get a place, we’d all rather work for you than for anybody else. It wouldn’t have to be any kind of great, fancy place, just a place –’

  Max shook his head. ‘No, forget it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m not a pimp. I hate pimps. I never knew a pimp. I didn’t want to kick his face in.’

  ‘That’s only because pimps are rotten people.’

  ‘So? And you want me to be a pimp?’

  ‘You’re different.’

  ‘No, no, not in a hundred years, Suzie. Forget it.’ He rose, took out his wallet, and dropped a dollar on the table. He enjoyed that; he liked being a large tipper. Waiters remembered him, and he liked that, too. They scrambled to serve him when he came in.

  ‘Where you rushing to?’ Suzie asked him. ‘I thought we had a date.’

  ‘We got a date, but it’s showtime. You want I should pass you in? You sit through the show, and then afterward, me and you and Bert, we’ll go out for coffee and cake.’

  ‘I seen the show, and your friend Bert I can live without.’

  ‘We got a new routine for tonight, two new jokes.’

  ‘You know, Maxie, you set up with me and two or three of the girls, you can make yourself maybe three, four hundred a week. That ain’t hay. That is big, big money.’

  ‘I told you no!’

  ‘O.K., O.K., don’t get sore. Thanks for the dinner.’ She turned on her heel and started away.

  ‘Hey, where are you going?’

  ‘I’m a working girl, Maxie. I don’t improve my income sitting in that flea-bitten Bijou and watching you tell dumb jokes.’

  The Bijou, which was located on West Broadway between Prince Street and Spring Street, was a music hall, which meant that it was the workingman’s theatre and that it catered more to the English-speaking population than to the immigrants. It had been built in 1823, and its footlights had once been candlelights. Now they were gaslights. The style and manner of the Bijou’s entertainment – and, incidentally, the entertainment of most of the other music halls in New York City – had been lifted originally from the British music halls and then adapted to fit the local taste. The evening of entertainment consisted of a mixture of what would someday be called vaudeville and what would be known as burlesque, except that the acts were never overtly lewd or obscene. The meat and potatoes of music hall comedy was a kind of vulgar double-entendre, which the less prurient-minded could pretend not to understand, and the songs were mostly ballads, some brought over from London and reworked, since there was no international copyright protection at that time. The Bijou had five hundred and forty seats, and it played two shows every evening, double matinees on Monday and Wednesday, and two matinees and three evening shows on Saturday. For the comedy routine which he did with his partner, Bert Bellamy, Max and Bert were paid forty-four dollars a week, twenty-two dollars each. It was good pay. There were music halls that paid a lot less for their acts.

  Max had met Bert Bellamy at Rowdy Smith’s penny arcade four years before. Bellamy was fifteen at the time, a year older than Max, tall, freckled, with a small snub nose and gray eyes. He worked at the arcade evenings between eight and ten, which were the heaviest hours of business, and he had been taken on by Smith after worsening arthritis had diminished the amount of hours Mrs Smith could put in. Bellamy was given an apron with huge pockets filled with pennies, and each night he wandered through the place making change and looking for cheaters.

  He and Max became friends. Indeed, he was the only friend Max made in all the years of his clawing his way out of childhood into the beginning of maturity. Max was fascinated with Bert Bellamy. He came from a background as poor as Max’s; as with Max, childhood with its supposed carefree joys had slipped by him unnoticed, and like Max he was a survivor who survived through his wits and street-wise cunning. But unlike Max or any other kid within Max’s limited world, Bert Bellamy was a white Protestant American – Presbyterian – and the product of over ten generations of American-born white Protestants. Every other kid Max had ever known or fought with was either Jewish or Catholic and always the child of an immigrant. Bellamy was something else and from elsewhere, another place, planet, and culture – or so Max saw him and understood him. Actually, Bert Bellamy was the son of an alcoholic father and a mother he could not remember. The mother had disappeared when Bellamy was two years old. The father, a carpenter, drank himself to death when Bellamy was sixteen, after which Bert gave up the basement residence that could hardly be called an apartment and spent his nights in a tiny storeroom behind the penny arcade.

  But because he had been on his own, more or less, ever since he could remember, the death of his father made little difference. He and Max had a great deal in common: they were both products of the streets; they were both tough and tough-minded, survivors, and cunning in the paths and ways of survival; and they both had the gift of mimicry. They were both skinny, wiry, long-limbed, and they were well coordinated. They could pick up any dance step in minutes. When Max was sixteen, Bert talked him into working out an act and began to drag him around to the music halls. They never paid to go in. They would tell the stage door keeper that they had a date with the manager to show him a gig, and even when they were thrown out, they usually had enough time in the wings to watch the acts. They got their first tryout after practicing for almost a year, and by now they were reasonably successful as a song, dance, and joke team.

  Bert was made up and waiting for him when Max came in this evening, and petulant over the fact that it was only eight minutes to curtain.

  ‘Take it easy,’ Max said soothingly. ‘I took Suzie out to dinner.’

  ‘You still hanging around with that big floozie? Come on, come on, change.’ Bert was already dressed in the oversized checked trousers, the loose celluloid collar, pink waistcoat, and black tailcoat that made up his costume. Max climbed into green pants and pu
rple jacket.

  ‘She’s my friend.’

  ‘Do you get it from her? What do you get, Max? I offer you some of the nicest ass in little old New York, and you turn your nose up at it.’

  ‘I don’t sleep with her, and what you consider nice ass, I don’t.’

  ‘Right. You listen to a different drum.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing. I read it in a book or something. I wanted to go through that new routine, and now we ain’t got time. We’re on.’

  Applying makeup quickly, Max said, ‘Go on, go on, we’ll wing it.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I’m sure.’ He gave Bert a friendly shove. ‘Go on, go on. I’m not playing high and mighty, old buddy, I just got a nightmare thing about getting a dose.’

  ‘Never been there myself,’ Bert said. ‘Just lucky.’ He did a soft-shoe out of the tiny room to face the manager, who whispered hoarsely, ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘Way down upon the Suwannee River,’ Bert sang.

  ‘Funny, funny.’

  Bert was onstage. A ripple of applause from behind the gaslights; no one expected very much from a two-man song and dance team. They were just part of the scene.

  Bert bowed. ‘Bellamy and –’ He looked around him, non-plussed. ‘Bellamy and –’ He began again. Still he was alone on the stage. The repeated double-take drew some laughter from the audience. ‘Well, here I am,’ Bert said, spreading his arms in despair, ‘the only one-man two-man song and dance team in New York.’

  It was a new opening. Bert could see Joe Guttman, the manager, standing in the wing, chewing on an unlit cigar. He was drawing it out too much, and in another moment it would go flat. Where the hell was Max? Why did he always allow himself to be talked into things by that smartass little Yid? Then Max appeared, shuffling out onto the stage, the very picture of dejection and rejection. Bert was not acting when he snapped at him, ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘A man wants to be loved for himself –’

  ‘Can that! Here I am on the stage of the Bijou Music Hall, trying to introduce a song and dance team, of which I am a part, and I say, “Introducing Bellamy and –” and what?’ Past Max, Bert saw the scowl on Guttman’s face. He was taking it straight, with no idea that they were doing a new opening. The man was a fucken cretin, but they should have anticipated that and warned him, and now he could just drop the curtain on both of them. ‘And nothing,’ Bert said desperately.

  ‘So I was late. You know what happened to me?’

  ‘How do I know? I’m here at the Bijou.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you what happened to me. Just calm down. I’ll tell you what happened to me. Two blocks away, right on the corner of West Broadway and Canal Street, I’m stopped by a beautiful girl.’

  ‘Beautiful girl. What was her name?’

  ‘How the hell do I know her name? We wasn’t introduced. I wasn’t taking her home. I was stopped by her.’

  ‘You were stopped by her. Canal and Broadway. Go on.’ Bert breathed a sigh of relief. The rhythm of their patter had gotten through to Guttman even as he was moving to drop the curtain. He paused and turned to listen.

  ‘I said, “Lady, I don’t do that kind of thing.”’

  ‘That’s a lie. What did she say?’

  ‘She says, try it. Otherwise, you’ll never know what you’re missing. So I tell her I’d like to, but I’m on my way to work.’

  Bert licked his lips. ‘So she says, “What a coincidence! We can work together.”’

  ‘How do you know that was what she said?’ Max demanded.

  ‘Was that what she said?’

  ‘I said that was what she said. Then she says, “Let’s work together.’”

  ‘And you’re not even beautiful.’

  ‘That’s what I told her. She said it don’t matter.’

  ‘Did you tell her you don’t know up from down, boys from girls?’

  ‘I told her. She said it don’t matter.’

  ‘Well, what happened, what happened?’

  ‘I told her I didn’t have no money.’

  ‘You told her that? What did she say then?’

  ‘She said, “Get out of here, you lousy little bum, or I’ll call a cop.”’

  There was a long moment of silence, and then the audience applauded. It was strong applause. The new opening worked.

  Whenever Max saw a school, either a public school or a high school, he experienced a sense of loss, a sadness without definition, a dejection that placed him on the defensive. Like a reunion with an old lost love who loved no more, it provided no space for understanding or accommodation, and his love-hate of school was too complex for him to unravel. He could have been given to introspection; he had enough imagination and instinct; but introspection was too threatening. It interfered with a simple, workable credo: he did whatever he had to do.

  Today he had to go to school because there was a note from Ruby’s teacher asking Mrs Britsky to come to see her and discuss certain difficulties she was having with Reuben Britsky. Reuben was now fourteen years old, in the eighth grade of public school. Describing his brother succinctly, Max read the letter and said, ‘He’s a little bun. He always has been.’

  ‘What use to say that?’ Sarah asked him, speaking in Yiddish. ‘When you’re home he’s at school, and when he’s here you’re working.’

  ‘So it’s my fault?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. Only, no one disciplines him. He’s too big, and he don’t listen to me.’

  ‘He’ll listen to you. I’ll break his goddamn neck. You can be sure he’ll listen to you.’

  ‘I can’t go to school.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Max, what do you want from me?’ she asked him. ‘I can barely speak English. You want me to go to a school and speak to a teacher? How can I? If your saintly dead father –’

  ‘All right, I’ll go!’ He could not bear hearing his father described as saintly. ‘I’ll go!’ He stamped out of the kitchen in anger. It was the same kitchen, the same roach-infested tenement flat, the same stinking smell of urine in the hallway outside the apartment door, the same filthy, noisy street outside – all the same, all stinking to high heaven of misery and poverty. Nothing changed, not even the public school, the same school he had attended through the sixth grade.

  A block from the school, across the street but with the school in full view, Max paused and studied it, realising that for years he had detoured around it, refused to face it. Now he faced it, a four-story red brick building, standing there in Clinton Street as it had for the past half-century. Max could visualise the place precisely without setting foot in it. The building had been turned into a hospital for Civil War soldiers soon after its completion, and the kids still called it sickbay, a nickname that had stuck through the years. The schoolrooms on the second floor of the building all had sliding walls, and when assembly took place, all the schoolroom walls were rolled back, turning the entire second floor into an assembly hall. The walls were on rollers, each section eight feet wide and ten feet high, and four kids were assigned to roll each section. During his last term in school, Max had won an assignment to a section. With some disdain, he recalled his pride at the achievement. Big deal, he said to himself. The privilege of pushing a wall. Then he crossed the street and entered the school.

  The office was on the main floor, and on a bench outside the door to the office, three kids sat, staring sullenly at the floor. It was a time when the free public school was a sort of holy place, the teacher’s word accepted as law, the whole system and structure sacrosanct in the eyes of the immigrant children and their parents. There were few breaches of discipline, and when they occurred, the school itself was turned into a jail of sorts, with the offending child kept sitting in his classroom for hours after closing time, writing the nature of his offense over and over. Yet this was not the source of order and obedience in the schools; rather, it was the fact that the immigrants themselves, the Irish a
nd the Jews and the Italians who composed the bulk of the parents, regarded the free school as a shrine, an incredible and unbelievable gift to their children. Whatever they themselves suffered and endured, the filth, the poverty, the cold and hunger, there was the school as a promise for their children. And within this system, the offender was sent to the office, as these three kids had been, sitting on the bench outside and awaiting their turn and fate.

  Max paused to glance at them. At least today Ruby wasn’t among them. Inside the office, a matronly woman looked at him inquiringly.

  ‘I have a letter from Miss Sally Levine to come here,’ Max explained.

  ‘You’re too young to be a parent,’ she said suspiciously.

  ‘Yeah,’ Max agreed. ‘That’s right. It’s about my brother Ruby. He’s in Miss Levine’s class. My mother got a letter, she should come. Well, my mother can’t come.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She’s sick,’ Max said, choosing the shortest explanation.

  ‘I’m sorry. Yes, I suppose you ought to talk to Miss Levine. You’ll find her in Room Three twenty-two. That’s up two flights, and when you come out of the staircase, you turn right.’

  Max nodded and left, pausing outside to grin at the three sinners. ‘Mind your manners, little bastards,’ he said softly. On his way up to Room 322, he silently vented his anger against Ruby. ‘Little son of a bitch, making me come to this stupid place!’ Yet he too was in the grip of the place, directed and constrained by the mythology that permeated the old building. He opened the door of Room 322 gently and tentatively.