Bad Boy (7 page)

P
op’s luck went sour almost from the day he set foot in Texas. The fortune which I was to inherit shrank at the rate of almost four hundred thousand dollars a year. I naturally thought it was a hell of a note to be losing all that dough without so much as a soda to show for it, but I was more concerned with certain issues tangential to the main one. Briefly, as I discussed them with Pop, they were about as follows:

First of all, was a man who had made such a thorough screw-up of his own affairs a suitable mentor for me? (I did not think so.)

Second, with him losing money at the rate of a couple thousand dollars a week, was there any sense in my knocking myself out for a pittance on some part-time job? (I did not think so.)

Finally, since I apparently would have no dough to look after, wasn’t all this Spartan training I was undergoing pretty damned stupid? (I thought it was.)

I was not trying to be snide or facetious, and I was irritated and bewildered that Pop should think I was. I pointed out that if I wanted to be smart-alecky or nasty, I could do a heck of a lot better than that. (“Just ask anyone, Pop.”) But Pop was as near to being furious as I have ever seen him.

Addressing me as “sirrah,” he let it be known that I was pretty poor comfort for a man no longer young whose life’s gleanings were slipping through his fingers, never to be grasped again. He said that when he was my age he had done such and such and so and so, and all I could do was get into trouble and sass my betters. He said that I was completely irresponsible and out-of-hand, and that the remedy lay in work and more work. He had been too easygoing with me, he said, but now the old free and easy days were over.

I was to study every night from dinner until bedtime. Also, since I had chosen to quit my part-time job as a soda jerk, I would find “suitable” employment on the weekends.

The first ordinance did not bother me particularly. I was no more popular in the neighborhood than I was elsewhere and normally remained indoors at night for reasons connected with my health. I did not study, naturally, but the fact was difficult to prove. I was always writing something. I always had a half-dozen books spread in front of me. They never had anything to do with my lessons, but Pop would have been the first to argue the fact.
The Prince
, to his way of thinking, was a splendid and necessary adjunct to the study of civics. So also was there an indisputable relationship between Schopenhauer and sociology, Malthus and mathematics, and Lycurgus and commercial law.

It was easy, then, to meet Pop’s “study” requirements. But finding part-time work was something else again. Such employment was difficult to find in that day, and it paid very little when one did find it. It will seem incomprehensible to our contemporary youth, who sneer at offers of a five-dollar fee for mowing a lawn, but my wage as a soda jerk had been five dollars for an approximate thirty-hour week.

Pop was a firm believer in the adage that there is always work for those who want it, and when I found none in the time allotted me, he supplied it. He bought a ladder, brushes and a supply of paint and set me to work painting the house.

Now, while I showed little liking for useful employment, it does not necessarily follow that I liked useless work any better. And this was worse than useless. The house was only a few months old. It stood in need of paint much less than I. Disgusted and resentful, I did the job at the rate of a few inches a day, painting over and over the same places. The end effect, naturally, was that of a checker board, and the whole place had to be done over by professional painters.

We lived in an unincorporated suburb of Fort Worth. Like our neighbors—a meat packer, a steel magnate and another oil man—we had bought the lots surrounding ours, and our total land holdings were probably an acre. Pop now caused a barn to be built on this surplus land, and furnished it with two purebred Jerseys. And I, I was advised, was in the dairy business.

Since we were outside the city limits, our neighbors were without legal recourse. Mom, her frugal soul mollified by the prospect of free milk for the household, did no more than hint that Pop had become a hopeless lunatic. I protested, of course, bitterly, profanely and continuously. And knowing something of Pop you will know how little my protests accomplished.

I was to have full charge of the cows—“a free hand,” as Pop put it. The family would receive its milk free, the remainder would be distributed through a house-to-house milk route, which would be “no trouble at all” for me to establish. I would be allowed to keep any monies remaining—after the care and feeding of the cows had been paid for.

“It’s a wonderful opportunity for you,” said Pop. “You should be very grateful.”

I said something that sounded like “ship.”

Not that I gave a damn really, but there were no profits from the business. Jerseys are not the hardiest breed of cattle, and one visit from a veterinarian consumed the returns from a week’s sale of milk. Too, while customers were fairly plentiful in the beginning, they did not continue so. They seemed alarmed by a milkman who lost no opportunity to declare that he would be fried with onions sooner than touch a drop of that “blank blank triple-blank Jersey juice.”

I put up with the dairy until summer. Then, being told that I would have to keep the cows staked out during the day—move them around on a tether from one vacant lot to another—I went down to the railroad yards and caught a northbound freight.

I got as far as Kansas before I was apprehended and returned.

I waited a few days, then caught a freight southward.

I was brought back from Houston.

Pop sold the cows.

I was made to feel, of course, that I had behaved very badly. The family had been put to much expense and trouble, on my account, and the only return I would give them was insolence and shiftlessness.

I was bewildered by this attitude, and still am. Even more now than I was at the time.

I have three children, one a fifteen-year-old boy. I think they are pretty good kids, but honesty compels me to say that no one of them has ever made a bed, washed a dish or swept a floor without violent protest. Moreover, they commonly refer to their mother and me as “nuts” or “screwy” and they frequently suggest that we “turn blue” or “stop breathing” or otherwise end our patent misery.

You see, when these children were quite young we had an elderly man living with us. This man would not let the children lift a finger to any task, reproaching us scornfully and speaking darkly of “child slaves.” He would not let us reprove them, no matter what their misdeeds. He sternly ruled down the suggestions that treats should be withheld for bad behavior, and that allowances should be earned with household chores. Naturally, the kids got pretty spoiled.

Who was this man, you ask? Who was the man who encouraged our children in insolence, who constantly bawled us out for failing to swallow his dictum that kids were kids and should only be addressed with words of praise?

Who?

Pop.

W
e spent a large part of that summer at the fashionable Spa, in Waukesha, Wisconsin. The family lounged about the place “taking the waters,” and I found employment as a plumber’s helper. I did not mind it too much.

Jack, the plumber I was assigned to, was a prize goldbrick, a man who saw no virtue in work whatsoever. “I can lay right down aside a job and go to sleep,” he would boast. He seldom referred to work as such, apparently hating even the sound of it. He spoke of it rather with a kind of glum obliqueness as “the Killer.”

He struck me as being an extremely wise and discerning man, and I treated him with due deference. Under his earnest tutelage, I became almost as expert at stalling and loafing as he.

One morning, the morning after a day we had killed in repairing a leaky toilet trap, the boss plumber confronted Jack with considerable severity.

He said that he had put up with just about all he was going to, and that he would be “forced to take steps” unless Jack improved his ways.

Jack blinked at him stolidly. Then he reached into an inside pocket, took out a notebook and withdrew a sheaf of clippings from it.

“Read those,” he commanded.

The boss read them, perforce. They were all obituaries of people who had died while working.

“ ’At’s what you’re up to,” Jack would growl, at the conclusion of each clipping. “You tryin’ to kill me, maybe?”

There was obviously but one acceptable answer to the question, and the boss made it over and over. In fact, as Jack glowered and glared at him, his huge hands fondling a thirty-six-inch Stillson, our employer began to anticipate the gloomy inquiry. He could not stand it if anything happened to us, he babbled. We must take better care of ourselves and avoid over-exertion in the summer heat.

Jack finally allowed him to escape to his office. Whereupon, of course, my colleague placed his hands on his hips, spread his feet, sucked in his lungs, threw back his head, opened his mouth to its widest, and addressed the ceiling with a bellowed promise to kill that dirty son-of-a-bitch.

Along with obituaries of people who had succumbed to “the Killer,” Jack collected French postcards, and many was the hour we whiled away with these in the restfully cool sanctuary of bathrooms, basements and cess-basins.

“Looky at them,” Jack would say. “Now, ain’t that somethin’?”

“Now, ain’t that somethin’!” I would respond.

“Betcha they’s plenty o’ people’d give a thousand dollars to see somethin’ like that.”

“Betcha they
is
plenty.”

Jack felt there was an unreasonable and foolish prejudice against these “art studies” and that a fortune awaited the person who could overcome it.

“Everyone likes ’em themselves,” he said, “but they’re afraid to let on. Now, if you could get everyone to lookin’ at ’em all at the same time, out in the open like—”

“Yeah,” I frowned wisely. “All at the same time. Out in the open like.”

Jack was much impressed with the manner in which I held up my end of our discussions. He said I had a way of getting right to the point of a thing, and that I did wonders toward clarifying his own thinking.

We were installing guard rails in a local food-processing plant when the solution to the French-postcard-prejudice problem came to him. Generous man that he was, and grateful for the many times I had gotten to the point of things, he promised me a full half of his potential millions.

“Yes, sir, Jimmie,” he said, nodding to a conveyor belt. “That’s the way to do it. We hit the nail right on the head.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, blankly. “That’s the way to do it.”

“Them packages.”

“Them packages.”

“We slip ’em in there.”

“We slip—Hey!” I said. “What are we waiting for?”

It seemed odd that this triumphant moment should have marked the beginning of the end of a beautiful friendship. But I am forced to report that it did. For now instead of plunging forthright into the cause, and forging ahead to victory and riches, Jack held back in ultra-caution. We had to do the thing right, he said. And they was plenty of things to be worked out before we could do it right.

As the days passed, and two items appeared in the ranks of things-to-be-worked-out for each one I expunged, I became impatient with Jack, then suspicious of him. I declared that he was deliberately delaying operations until I had returned to Texas where I would be unable to reap my just dues as co-owner of the company.

Jack was placatory for a time. But I seemed to detect a certain lack of candor in his manner—a damning sheepishness. So my indictments continued, and finally he was brought to respond with hideous slurs. He said I was an eager beaver, willing and willful fodder for “the Killer.” He would bet money, he said, that I
liked
to work; he had had his doubts about me from the beginning, and my vigorous manner and unseemly impetuosity had now revealed the awful truth to him.

We stopped speaking after that.

We did not speak again until the eve of my departure for Texas, when we shook hands diffidently and exchanged stiff farewells.

More than thirty years have passed since that stilly evening in a Wisconsin plumbing shop. Thirty years, in which I have become the noninventing inventor of such things as story-book toilet paper, cigarettes with built-in matches, neckties which assume the hue of the gravy dropped on them and a tongue-shaped sponge for licking stamps. So I can understand Jack’s attitude now. I can see that the more beautiful a dream, the more hopeless its realization, that we have but to grasp to destroy it.

All I could see at the time, however, was that a venal and crafty man had taken sorry advantage of an innocent and trusting boy. And for months after our return to Texas, I searched for proof of Jack’s perfidy.

Every container of food that came into the house was carefully dissected by me—cartons, labels, wrappers, tax stamps. I even took apart the lids of catsup bottles and cracked open the stoppers to sauce carafes. Since I declined to explain this activity, mumbling only of a million dollars and people who thought they could kid me, the family was more than ever convinced that I didn’t have a brain in my head.

Which, I imagine, was a pretty fair statement of the case.

T
he school I attended was not too far distant from Glen Garden Country Club, so it was only natural that I should gravitate there in search of week-end employment. I found it, as a caddie, and I liked it. At least, I liked it better than the other types of work I had thus far encountered. There was something about receiving pay from play which pleased me very much. And, as a Glen Garden caddie, one had the privilege of playing on the course at certain hours.

You were out at the club at the crack of dawn, you and Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson, and all the other caddies who were ambitious to improve “their game.” There wasn’t a full set of clubs among the lot of you, but that didn’t matter. You formed into foursomes, according to your handicap. You strode down the dew-wet fairway, calling back and forth to one another, diagnosing each other’s drives and approaches as competently as any pro. Later in the day, when the jobs were being passed out, you would engage in profane and bloody struggle behind the caddie shack. But now all the niceties of etiquette were observed. All was politeness and consideration.

The game made you that way.

I thought it was pretty swell.

Well, though, caddies were paid sixty-five cents for eighteen holes, and there were more caddies than there were those who wanted them. On a good day, during a tournament for example, you might “get out” twice for a total of thirty-six holes. And if the tips broke right for you, you might make as much as a dollar seventy-five or two dollars. This was darned big money, of course, for a mere twelve or fifteen miles’ trudging with a fifty-pound bag on your back. But it was seldom that one enjoyed such great good fortune.

On an average, you were lucky to get out for eighteen. Or maybe a round and nine. And there were days when you waited around from dawn to sunset without ever getting out. Obviously, as Pop pointed out, caddying was neither dependable nor lucrative.

He did not forbid me to continue with it. In fact, although my habit of ellipsis may have made him appear otherwise, Pop very seldom ordered me or forbade me to do anything. Pop believed in “reasoning a thing through,” in “looking at a matter from all sides.” There were times, as I have indicated, when I preferred being proved an ingrate, idiot and all-around horse’s ass to giving in. But these times were infrequent. I didn’t particularly mind being an i., i. and h.a., but the process of establishing my status was just too damned wearying to be endured.

Pop spoke amusingly of “grown men, chasing a little white ball around a cow pasture.” He looked down his nose as I boasted of “breaking forty.” He himself had broken forty at my age, he said, forty acres of virgin land with only a one-horse plough.

I was spending two days a week at the golf course. Two days that once gone were lost to me forever. Two a week, one hundred and four a year—three hundred and twelve in three years.

Pop grew more eloquent with every word, and I grew older. When, at last, I retired to the bathroom for a smoke, it was with bent back and trembling, rheumatic legs. And I had to study myself in the mirror for minutes before I was convinced that I still had teeth and did not have a long gray beard.

Naturally, I retired from Glen Garden.

As I mentioned awhile back, I had sold several short squibs to magazines. This activity was not encouraged, since my puny sales were taken as proof that I lacked talent and was frittering away my time, but neither was it actively discouraged. I had ceased to write, except occasionally and in the greatest secrecy, out of fear of publicity. I had taken dreadful and prolonged razzing as the result of my writing, and I wanted no more of it.

Semaj Nosmot. How mellifluous the name had sounded when I invented it, and how hideous it became to me! Ah, vanity, vanity, what pitfalls dost thou mask. Semaj Nosmo…

I used that pen name only once, but unfortunately that once was on a return envelope. I returned home from school one evening to find myself addressed as Semaj and Nosmot, and I could see nothing at all funny about it—a fact which I was soon stating at the top of my lungs—but I was the only one who couldn’t. Mom and Pop soon called a halt, seeing that I was badly hurt and upset, but they could not restrain an occasional snicker and chuckle, nor were they very successful in restraining Maxine and Freddie.

Wherever I went in the house there were whispers of “nosmot” and “snotpot” and “semaj” and “messy jam.” And even as I started to flee the house, a chorus of catcalls drifted in from the street:

Maxine and Freddie had found the joke too good to keep. It had gotten into the public domain, all of which constituted enemy territory.

The above doggerel comprises but one of the jibes to which I was subjected in the ensuing weeks, and since there is no point in repeating it and the others are largely unprintable, I shall spare you further details of my ordeal. The point is that I had ceased to pursue writing for fear of being pursued by Nosmot.

But the furor had died down by now. The razzers had worn their material threadbare and were as weary of it as I was. It seemed safe enough to resume writing, but with the returns from magazines so small I tackled a new outlet. I gathered up the several invoices from my free-lance checks and exhibited them to the editor of the Fort Worth
Press
, modestly suggesting that in me there was at least the making of a star reporter.

He did not seem to look at me in quite that way. Or, for that matter, in any other way. With the ears beneath my pork-pie hat growing redder, he remained bent over his work for the space of perhaps ten minutes. And he appeared deaf to the jovial patter which poured more and more desperately from my lips.

My skin-tight Valentino pants suddenly seemed six sizes too large for me. There was a terrible lump in the vicinity of my Adam’s apple. Somehow, I gathered, I had erred grievously in my approach, but I could not think how it could have been. As a close student of Hollywood movies, I had become an expert on editor-reporter relations.

Reporters always sat down on the editor’s desk. They always kept their hats on their heads, and cigarettes in their mouths. They always addressed the editor as “Old Socks” or “Kiddo” and tossed off such bright remarks as, “Don’t pump me, Mac, I’m full of beer.” I had done all these things. It looked to me like this guy didn’t know his stuff.

At last, he looked up. Then he stood up. Silently, he plucked the hat from my head and the cigarette from my mouth. Then, he placed his palms against my shoulder and gently but firmly pushed me from his desk.

“Would you like to sit down?” he asked politely.

“Y-yes, sir,” I stuttered.

“Please do,” he said, gesturing to a chair.

I sank into it. He asked my age.

“Ffff-Fourfifteen,” I swallowed. “Almost fifteen.”

“Oh?” His face softened. “I’d have said you were older. These checks—they’re really yours? You’ve actually sold to those magazines?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s very good. I’ve never been able to sell as much as a two-line joke to a magazine. Why don’t you just keep on with it? Why do you want a job on a newspaper?”

I explained the situation pretty incoherently, I imagine, but he seemed to understand.

“Well,” he said, at last, “I can’t offer you a thing. You go to school, you say, until three-thirty in the afternoon?”

“Yes, sir. But—”

“Can’t offer you a thing. Nothing at all. Do you use a typewriter?”

“Yes, s—”

“Nope, it’s out of the question. Nothing I can do for you. Know the city pretty well?”

“Y—”

“Well,” he said casually, “I think we can probably work something out for you. But first—”

This was long before the founding of the American Newspaper Guild. Seasoned reporters drew twenty-five dollars and less for a work week of fifty and sixty hours, and youngsters breaking in frequently worked for no reward but the experience. So, for the times, the terms of my employment were more than generous.

I reported on the job at four in the afternoon (at eight
A.M.
on Saturdays), and remained as long as I was needed. For my principal duties as copy boy, phone-answerer, coffee-procurer and occasional typist, I was paid four dollars a week. For the unimportant stories I was allowed to cover, I was paid three dollars a column—to the extent that they were used in the paper.

Due to their very nature, my stories were usually left out of the paper or appeared in such boiled-down form that the cash rewards were infinitesimal. About all I could count on was my four dollars’ salary—which just about paid my expenses.

This circumstance, coupled with the fact that I was away from home to all hours, soon resulted in a series of conferences between Pop and me. The discussions ended several months later when I ended my employment with the
Press
.

As is apparent, I was a very perverse young man. I customarily headed myself in exactly the opposite of the direction which others tried to head me, and I resented all attempts at reforming me. With this kind of make-up, I had profited about as little personally from my experience on the
Press
as I had in cash. But the seeds of improvement had been sown through the medium of example. I had been shown and allowed to observe, instead of being told. And gradually the seeds sprouted.

I abandoned my Valentino pants and haircut. I ceased to smoke except when I actually wanted a cigarette. I became careful about such things as shined shoes and clean fingernails. I started to become courteous. I was still guarded and terse, ever on the lookout for slights and insults, but I did not ordinarily go out of my way to be offensive. As long as I was treated properly—and my standards in this matter were high—I treated others properly.

I would like to say, in this connection, that good manners and consistent courtesy toward others are the most valuable assets a reporter can have. I know, having worked on metropolitan dailies in various of these United States. In my time, I have interviewed hundreds of people, notorious and notable. Movie stars and murderers, railroad presidents and perjurers, princes, panderers, diplomats, demagogues, the judges and the judged. I have interviewed people who “never gave interviews,” who “never saw reporters,” who had “no statement for the press.”

I once interviewed a West Coast industrialist, third-highest-salaried man in the United States. Because of his morbid fear of kidnappers he had made his home into a virtual fortress, and he was almost hysterical when I, having got hold of his phone number, called him up. He had never given an interview, he had never had his picture taken, and he would not do so now.

I told him I could understand his feelings and we would forget about the story. But would he be kind enough to talk to me for my own personal benefit? I had made no whopping success of my own life, I said, and I would appreciate a few pointers from a man who had. Grudgingly, and after checking back to see that the call was bona fide, he consented.

I went out to his house in the morning and I stayed on through lunch and into the afternoon. Finally, as I was getting ready to leave, he said that he felt rather uncomfortable about withholding the story. I said he didn’t need to feel that way at all. I was in his debt for the privilege of talking to him.

“Oh, hell,” he laughed abruptly. “I’m probably a damned fool, but—”

I got the story. Also a picture. Soon after that, since no one tried to rob or kidnap him, the industrialist got rid of his guards and his armament, and began enjoying life and his income.

Only once in my experience as a reporter did courtesy and consideration fail to pay off. That was in the case of a Washington real estate lobbyist, an ill-mannered boor with an inflated head whom all-wise Providence has since removed from circulation.

This man had sent advance notice of his arrival in the city where I was working, and I and the opposition reporters were at the train to meet him. We were there at his invitation, understand. But he looked through us coldly. If we wanted to talk to
him,
he said, we could do it at his hotel. We followed him there, and still he had “no time” for us. Perhaps, after he had had his breakfast.

We waited while he had his breakfast. We waited while he got his haircut. We waited while he kidded interminably with the cigar-stand girl. He then advised us that he was going up to his suite for a nap, and that he would “probably” be able to see us in an hour or so.

The other reporters and I looked at each other. We went to the house phones and conferred with our editors. Their opinion of this character happily coincided with ours—that he was a pea-brain who needed a lesson in manners, and that the pearls of wisdom which he allegedly had for our community should be retained for shoving purposes.

I relayed this message to the lobbyist. He slammed up the phone, threatening to get “all you bastards and your editors, too.”

He got in touch with our publishers. He got in touch with our managing editors and our desk men. He threatened and blustered. He pleaded, he begged. He tried to bring outside influence to bear on the newspapers.

He called press conferences, and no reporters showed up. He addressed banquets and meetings, and issued a steady stream of press releases. Not a word of what he said or wrote appeared in the newspapers.

Now, the real estate interests are probably the most powerful bloc in any community. But the potential club they formed, and which our friend had waxed vain in swinging, could swing more than one way. And so he soon found out.

The local realty operators began to look at him askance. What kind of man was it, they wondered, who could so mortally offend three large newspapers? In how many other cities had he incurred similar displeasure? They and other groups around the country were paying for his activities. They were paying him to influence legislation, to make them look good to the public. Was this the way he went about it?

The lobbyist was in complete disfavor with his nominal supporters when, at week’s end, he sneaked out of town. But despite the all-around frost he had received, his manners remained virtually as bad as ever.