The Telephone Booth Indian Read online

  Regulars who hang at Barney's counter may be identified by the manner in which, before sitting down, they run their hands under the counter. They are reaching for a communal dope sheet, a tencent racing paper giving the entries at all tracks. The regulars at Barney's chip in and buy one copy every day. This economy permits each of them to lose to bookmakers every week several dimes that would otherwise have been spent at newsstands. Barney has little contact with the pool players, although he does a good deal of business with them. A number of mulatto girls who rack up the balls on the pool tables also act as waitresses for the players. The girls pay Barney cash for all the cups of coffee they carry away. Presumably they collect from the players. “It is a pleasure they can have,” says Barney.

  One of the more conspicuous fellows who eat at the lunch counter and spend a good deal of time there between meals drinking coffee is called Marty the Clutch. Marty gets his name from his humorous custom of mangling people's fingers when he shakes hands with them. Strangers to whom he is introduced usually sink to their knees screaming before he releases their right hand. Casual acquaintances consider Marty a big, overgrown boy brimming with animal spirits. Only old friends really appreciate him. They know that when Marty has numbed a stranger's hand, he can often get a ring off the fellow's finger unnoticed. “It is very cute when you think of it,” says Acid Test Ike, who is a manager of punchdrunk prize fighters. “I once seen the Clutch get a rock off a ticket broker big enough to use for a doorstop. By the time the scalper noticed the ring was gone, he thought a bosko he knew had clipped him for it, so he busted her nose.” The Clutch is a big, squareshouldered man with a forehead barely sufficient to keep his hair from meeting his eyebrows. He used to be a prize fighter, but, he says, he worked with a gang of hijackers several nights a week and this interfered with his training, because he was always getting shot. Acid Test Ike considers this an amiable prevarication. “The Clutch never was a hijacker,” he says. “He just gives that as a social reference. Really, the Clutch is a gozzler.” This term means a fellow who gozzles people—chokes them in order to rob them. The gozzling business cannot be very good, because Marty is customarily as broke as most other patrons of the lunch counter. Every time Barney looks at Marty the Clutch, he rubs his throat nervously.

  To Barney, the most interesting people in the Jollity Building are the promoters, the fellows who are always trying to earn, in the local idiom, a soft dollar. This is a curiosity he shares with Hy Sky and Morty Ormont, and sometimes the three of them get together at the lunch counter and discuss, with happy chuckles, the outrageous swindles perpetrated by fellows they know. One mental giant of whom all three speak with awe is a chap known as Lotsandlots, or Lots for short, who is in the landdevelopment business. Lots's stock in trade is a tract of real estate in the Jersey marshes and a large supply of stationery bearing the letterheads of nonexistent land companies and the Jollity Building's address. Prospects are carefully selected; generally they are closefisted men with a few thousand dollars saved up. Each receives a letter informing him that he has won a lot in a raffle conducted by one of the land companies to publicize a new development. The winner, according to the letter, is now the owner, free and clear, of one building lot in some outoftheway district. With the lot goes an option to buy the lots on either side of it for a couple of hundred dollars apiece. The man receiving such a letter is distrustful. He knows that one house lot is not much use, and he suspects that the whole thing is just a dodge to sell him more land, so he doesn't even go out to look at his prize. In a week or so, Lotsandlots calls on the skeptic and says he hears that the man is the lucky owner of three lots in a certain undeveloped neighborhood. Lotsandlots says he represents a company that is assembling a site for a large industrial plant. He offers to buy the man's three lots for a good price, but begs him to keep the offer confidential, as publicity would interfere with his firm's efforts to pick up land. The lucky man of property always lets Lotsandlots think that he owns all three plots outright. He says that Lotsandlots should give him time to think the matter over and come back in a couple of days. Then, as soon as Lotsandlots leaves, the fellow hurries down to the land company's office in the Jollity Building to exercise his option on the two adjoining lots, which he expects to sell at a whacking profit. He pays four hundred dollars or five hundred dollars to the “office manager,” an assistant promoter in Lotsandlots' employ The manager gives him clear deed and title to two lots in a salt marsh. The man goes away happily, and then waits the rest of his life for Lotsandlots to reappear and conclude the deal.

  “The art in it,” Hy Sky says admiringly, “is the sap never knows Lots is running the land company. A good boy, Lots.” Lots is a humorist, too. When anyone asks him if he does much business, he says, “Lots and lots,” which is how he got his name. When he says it, he rolls his eyes so knowingly that Hy Sky, if he is around, suffers an attack of laughter resembling whooping cough.

  Another respected promoter is Judge Horumph, a bucolic figure of a man who wears a standup collar, a heavy giltiron watch chain with a seal ring on it, and high, laceless shoes with elastic sides. The Judge's face is tomato red marked by fine streaks of eggplant purple. Barney and his customers are disposed to believe Judge Horumph's story that he was once a justice of the peace in a Republican village upstate, a region in which about one man in every three enjoys that distinction. The Judge, when he is working, sits at a telephone all day, calling various business houses that like to keep on the good side of the law—particularly firms with large fleets of trucks, because such firms are constantly dealing with traffic and parking summonses, and they don't want to offend anybody. He says, “This is Judge Hrrumph.” The name is indistinguishable, but no layman knows the names of a tenth of the judges in New York, and it would be impolite to ask a judge to repeat. “I am giving some of my time to a little charitable organization called Free Malted Milk for Unmarried Mothers,” the Judge says. “I know that ordinarily it would be an imposition to bother you people, but the cause is so worthy …” Rather often, the owner or manager of the firm tells the Judge he will send five or ten dollars. “Oh, don't say 'send,' “ Judge Horumph booms jovially. “I know how prone we all are to forget these little things. I'll send a telegraph boy right over to get your contribution.” The Judge is a man of real culture, Morty Ormont says, but he has one failing, and that is strong drink. Judge Horumph's one serious runin with the law resulted from his throwing a whisky bottle at a Jollity Building wag who offered to buy him a malted milk.

  The hero of the best stories that Barney and Hy Sky and Morty Ormont sit around telling one another is a promoter named Maxwell C. Bimberg, who used to be known in the Jollity Building as the Count de Pennies because he wore a pointed, waxed, blond mustache just like a count and because he was rather stingy except about gambling and women. The Count was a tiny, fragile man with large, melting eyes and a retreating chin. “He was a little wizened man that didn't look like nothing at all,” Hy says, “but Maxwell C. Bimberg had a brilliant mind.”

  Hy recalls how he helped the Count de Pennies conduct a crusade against parimutuel betting in New York State in which the Count fleeced a prominent bookmaker who felt that his business was menaced by the movement to legalize the betting machines. The Count induced the bookie to finance a campaign of street advertising against the proposition, which was to be voted on at the polls. The Count was to have twenty signs painted, large enough to cover the side of a wagon. The signs were to say, “Mayor LaGuardia says vote ‘No’!” Then the Count was to hire ten wagons, put the signs on them, and have them driven around the center of town the day before the referendum. The bookie peeled several hundreddollar bills off his bank roll to pay for the operation. The promoter went to Hy Sky and ordered just two signs, allowing the painter a generous profit on them. He had the signs placed on a wagon that he hired for one hour. The wagon then drove a couple of times through the Duffy Square region, where the bookmaker hung, and returned to the stable. There the signs were shifted
to another wagon, which made the same circuit, and so on. The bookie saw several wagons during the day and was happy. Count de Pennies saved the price of eighteen signs and reduced wagon hire by ninety per cent. “Maxwell C. Bimberg had a brilliant mind!” Hy Sky repeats when he tells of this successful promotion.

  Morty Ormont's reminiscences about the Count are not all tender. “He was always borrowing a nickel for a telephone call, but one day he asked me for a loan of three dollars so he could get his teeth out of hock to con a sucker,” Morty says. “I loaned it to him, and the next day I saw him looking very happy, with his teeth in. As soon as he spotted me he started with a small mouth. 'I am sorry, Morty,' he says, 'but the sucker didn't show, so I haven't got the three bucks.' So I turned him upside down— you know how little he was—and six hundred dollars fell out of his left breech.”

  The Count's admirers in the Jollity Building generally speak of him in the past tense, although it is improbable that he is dead. Some detectives employed by a railroad are looking for the wizened man as a result of one of his promotions, and consequently he has not been seen for some time around the Jollity Building. The project which irritated the railroad was known as the Dixie Melody Tours. The Count sold bargainrate tour tickets to Florida which included train fare, hotel rooms, and meals. At the end of every month, the Count settled with the railroad and the hotels for the accommodations the tourists had bought through him. The tours were actually bringing the Count a fair income when, at the end of the third or fourth month, he decided to pay the railroad with a bad check. “It must have been a terrible temptation to him to stay honest,” Morty says, “but he resisted it.” “He always thought very big,” Barney recalls affectionately. “I said to him lots of times, 'Be careful, Count. Nobody can promote a railroad.' He would say, 'What do you mean? This is strictly legitimate.' But I could see in his eyes he was thinking of larceny. 'Already I promoted some of the smartest people on Broadway,' he was thinking. 'Why not a railroad?' He always thought too big.”

  The Count made his first appearance in the Jollity Building a dozen years ago, when he was the manager of the widow of a famous gunman. He rented a furnished office, about six feet square, on the third floor and pasted on the outer side of the door a card saying, “Maxwell C. Bimberg, Presentation of Publicized Personalities.” He booked the gunman's widow as an added attraction in burlesque theaters, and since that seemed to work out pretty well, he tried to sign up several acquitted female defendants in recent and prominent murder cases. The women were eager to sign contracts, but the Count found it difficult to make money with them. One reason, he said, was that “It is hard to write a routine for an acquitted murderess. If she reenacts the crime, then the public gets the impression that she should not have been acquitted.”

  One Wisconsin woman who had been acquitted of killing her husband with ground glass came to New York and rented an apartment to live in during her stage career under his management. She used to invite the Count to dinner every evening, and he had a hard time thinking of excuses which would not offend her. “Every time she says 'Home cooking,' “ the Count would tell Barney, “I feel like I bit into a broken bottle.” At last the life of the gunman's widow was violently terminated by one of her husband's business associates. An astute detective sat down next to the telephone in the murdered woman's flat and waited for the murderer to call up, which to a layman would have seemed an unlikely eventuality. The first person to call was the Count. He was phoning to inform his star that he had booked her for a week's engagement at a theater in Union City, New Jersey. The detective had the call traced. A couple of other detectives arrested the Count in the Jollity Building and pulled out his mustache one hair at a time to make him tell why he had killed his meal ticket. This experience cured the Count of his desire to make other people's crimes pay. After his mustache grew again, he decided to marry an elderly Brooklyn woman whom he had met through an advertisement in a matrimonial journal. The bride was to settle three thousand dollars on him, but the match fell through when she declined to give the Count the money in advance. “If you have so little confidence in me, darling,” he said, “we would never be happy.” “And also,” he told Morty Ormont subsequently, “I didn't want to lay myself open for a bigamy rap.”

  The Count next organized a troupe of girl boxers, whom he proposed to offer as an added attraction to the dance marathons then popular. “It was not that the idea was any good,” Morty Ormont says when he tells about the Count, “but it was the way he milked it. After all, what is there smart about selling a guy a piece of something that might make money? Smart is to sell a guy for a good price a piece of a sure loser. The Count went out and promoted Johnny Attorney, one of the toughest guys on Broadway, for a grand to pay the girls' training expenses and buy them boxing trunks and bathrobes. The Count trembled every time Johnny looked at him, but with him, larceny was stronger than fear. So he gives all the girls bus fare to Spring Valley, New York, and tells them he will meet them there and show them the training camp he has engaged. Then he takes the rest of the grand and goes to Florida.” When Morty reaches this point in the story, Hy Sky can seldom restrain himself from saying, reverentially, “Maxwell C. Bimberg had a brilliant mind!”

  “By the time the Count came back from Florida,” Morty says, “Johnny Attorney was running a night club on Fiftysecond Street. The Count walks into Johnny's joint as if nothing had happened, and in fifteen minutes he cons Johnny into making him a banquet manager. He booked a couple of nice banquets into there, but when Johnny would send the bill to the chairman of whatever club it was that held the banquet, the chairman would write back and say, 'I see no mention on your bill of the deposit I paid your Mr. Bimberg.' The Count had glommed the deposits. So after that he had to play the duck for Johnny for a couple of years. Whenever Johnny would get shoved in the can for assault or manslaughter, the Count would come back to town. That gave him quite a lot of time in town, at that.”

  Morty and Hy agree that the Count had a rare gift of making women feel sorry for him because he looked so small and fragile. “He made many a beautiful head,” Morty concedes with envy. “If I had met a refined, educated girl like you when I was still young, my whole life would have been different,” the Count would tell a head who might be a minor burlesque stripper. He would invite her to his tiny office in the Jollity Building to plan her Hollywood career. This office, he would assure her, was just a hideout where he could get away from the crowds of people who besieged him for bookings at his regular place of business. The Count always made a point of stopping at the switchboard which then served the furnishedoffice tenants, collectively known to Morty Ormont as the heels. “Did that girl from the Paradise Restaurant call me this afternoon?” he would ask the operator. “You know, the one I got a job for last week? And by the way, if Monte Proser calls up in the next halfhour, tell him I'm out. I'm going to be busy.” The mainsprings of feminine character, the Count used to tell his friends, were avarice and mother love. He would make extravagant promises of contracts in shows or moving pictures which he would tell every girl he was on the point of closing for her. Then he would say sadly, “Your success is assured, but I will never be happy. I am a Broadway roue, and no decent girl would look at me.” “Oh, don't say that, Mr. Bimberg,” a girl might beg, remembering she had not yet signed the contract. (The Count used to say, “You would be surprised how sorry a girl can feel for a man that is going to make a lot of money for her.”) “Oh yes, I cannot fool myself,” the Count would sob to the girl, and tears would flow from his large, protruding eyes as he grabbed for his protege's hand. If the girl put an arm around his narrow shoulders to steady him, he would work into a clinch. If she pulled away from the lead, the Count would sometimes fall to his knees and sniffle. “Why should I live another day?” he would wail. “Tomorrow your contract is coming through. If I lived through tonight, I could collect my tenpercent commission, which would amount to perhaps a couple of thousand bucks. Is that a reason to live?” Usually the g
irl would think it was a pretty good reason. The Count did not always succeed. “When a bosko wouldn't have nothing to do with him,” Hy Sky says, “Maxwell C. Bimberg became very emotional.” He once offered a female boxer forty dollars to let him hold her hand. The boxer declined, saying, “I would rather wake up in a hole with a snake than in a room with Count de Pennies.” The Count was very discouraged by her remark and hated to hear it quoted.

  An enterprise which the Count's admirers remember with considerable pleasure was the Public Ballyhoo Corporation, Ltd. To launch this concern, the Count spent a couple of weeks promoting a bookmaker known as Boatrace Harry. The Count kept on telling Boatrace Harry about the great incomes that he said were earned by publicity men like Steve Hannagan, Benjamin Sonnenberg, and Richard Maney. Then he allowed Harry to invest a couple of thousand dollars in Public Ballyhoo, Ltd. He had letterheads printed saying that Public Ballyhoo, Ltd., would supply “anything from an actress to an alligator” for publicity stunts. The Count became so interested in his idea that he forgot to duck with Boatrace Harry's money. The manager of a theater showing the first run of a picture called Eskimo asked the Count to secure a genuine Eskimo to pose on top of the marquee with a team of huskies. The Count made a good try. He found in the telephone directory some kind of society for the preservation of the American Indian and obtained from it the addresses of two alleged Eskimos. One turned out to be a Jewish tailor in Greenpoint; this was obviously a wrong listing. The other, who lived in Bay Ridge, was a real Eskimo who had a job in a foundry. He turned down the job, however, and begged the Count not to give his secret away, because his girl would make fun of him.