Bad Boy (8 page)

Back in Washington, he dished out considerably more boorishness than a certain party girl cared to take. She retaliated vigorously and effectively.

Her attack didn’t quite kill him, more’s the pity. But being concentrated on the area which the Marquis of Queensberry held sacrosanct, it did the next best thing.

Briefly, while the lobbyist may still be interested in women, he has nothing to interest them.

Noblesse oblige!

A
fter leaving the
Press
, I found brief employment on
Western World
, an oil and mining weekly. I had no regular hours, being summoned for work only during certain rush periods when extra help was needed. Neither did I have any regular duties. I did a little of everything, from addressing envelopes for the subscription department to reading copy to running errands to rewriting brief items. Occasionally, when there was space to fill, I also wrote poems—very bad ones, I fear—of the Robert Service type.

My pay was a magnificent three dollars a day, but I never knew when I would be called to work, having to hold myself in readiness at all times. And the times that I was called seemed constantly to conflict with my family’s plans and schedules. Also, or so I imagined, my adult colleagues were not treating me with proper respect but consistently took advantage of their age and my youth to heap me with indignities.

They were all my bosses. All had the privilege of sending “kid Shakespeare” and “young Pulitzer” after coffee or carbon paper, and they invariably chose to do so at the worst possible moments. As surely as there were visitors in the office, as surely as I was in the throes of epic composition, frowning importantly as I addressed my typewriter, there would be a cry of, “Hey kid,” followed by the suggestion that I wake up or get the lead out and busy myself with some quasi-humiliating errand or task.

This was probably all for my own good. A writer who cannot take it may as well forget about writing. But I had taken and was taking so much elsewhere, actually or in my imagination, that I could take little more. And finally, after a wild scene in which, to my horror, I very nearly bawled, I stormed out of the office and returned no more.

I went into a kind of decline during the next few months. I could not muster the slightest interest in the several part-time jobs I secured—in a grocery store, a bottling plant and on an ice wagon—and was soon severed from them. To all practical intents and purposes, I ceased to look for others. I was not unwilling to work, but I was not going to work for nothing—“nothing,” being the standard rate of pay as I saw it. Moreover, I was not going to work at something that “didn’t make any sense”—a category as generally standard as the rate of pay.

I played hooky more and more often, spending my school hours in burlesque houses. To finance these expeditions, I put in an occasional day at the golf course.

A photograph of this period reveals me as a thin, neat, solemn-faced young man, surprisingly innocuous-looking at first glance. It is only when you look more closely that you see the watchfully narrowed eyes, the stiffness of the lips, the expression that wavers cautiously between smile and frown. I looked like I hoped for the best, but expected the worst. I looked like I had done just about all I was going to do to get along and others had better start getting along with me.

I found people who met this last requirement at one of the smaller burlesque houses which soon received my entire patronage. It opened around ten in the morning, and except for interludes of cowboy pictures the stage shows were continuous. The performers saw me a dozen times a day, always applauding wildly. They began to wink at me, to nod, and soon we were greeting each other and exchanging brief pleasantries across the footlights.

There was an amplitude of seats during the hours of my attendance, so the manager-owner-bouncer made no objection to my semi-permanent occupancy of one of them. In fact, amiable man that he was, he came to profess pleasure over my patronage and alarm at my absences. He said he felt kind of funny opening the house without me, meanwhile sliding a pack of cigarettes into my pocket or asking if I’d had my coffee yet. He pressed me constantly to come clean with him, to tell him what I honestly thought of his shows. And he seemed never annoyed nor bored with my consistently favorable reviews.

I became sort of a fixture-without-folio around the place, showing up when I could, making myself useful when I chose. I relieved the ticket-taker. I butched candy (Getcha Sweetie Sweets, gents—a be-ig prize in every package!). I assisted backstage with such widely assorted tasks as firing blank cartridges and hooking brassieres.

I drew no pay, but I was never in want. On the contrary, I ate and smoked much more amply than I had on my salaried jobs. The impression had become prevalent, somehow, that I needed looking after, and everyone took it upon himself to do so. Through the medium of the Friday “amateur shows” I was even provided with substantial amounts of spending money.

Perhaps you remember these shows, three-sided contests between the audience, the amateur and the implacable hook? Some totally talentless but determined wretch would stand stiffly center-stage reciting, say, Dan McGrew or singing Mother Machree. And the louder he talked or sang the louder became the howls and boos of the audience. He would persist, poor devil, even hurling back the squashy vegetables which were hurled at him. But his evil destiny would not be denied. The dreaded hook—a long pole with a shepherd’s crook at the end—suddenly fastened around his neck, a stagehand yanked vigorously and the hapless amateur literally soared into the wings.

Lest nasty suspicions arise in the minds of the spectators, I could only appear on the show every two or three weeks. But I did very well at that, usually receiving the five-dollar grand prize, or at least the three-dollar second prize. And, yes, the judging was completely fair. My friend, the manager, held the various prizes over the various participants’ heads. The amount of applause one received determined the size of his prize, if any.

I had a half-dozen very corny and completely unoriginal routines worked out with the assistance of the show’s regular comics, but my act was usually confined to two which seemed to delight the audience more each time they saw them.

In one I dashed onto the stage with a prop bundle of newspapers under my arm, madly shouting such nonsense as “seven shot in a crap game,” “ten found dead in a graveyard,” “woman killed—Dick Ramsay’s wife,” “big disaster at soup factory—vegetables turnip and pea”—and so on for a matter of three or four minutes.

The second act, and the most popular of the two, was somewhat more elaborate. I strolled out of the wings, clad only in a lace baby cap and a diaper, and with a simulated chaw of tobacco in my cheek. Then, taking exaggerated aim at the props about the stage, I spat—the pit drummer providing suitable sound effects. And with every simulated expectoration a chair fell apart, a picture shattered, a milk bottle exploded or a table was shorn of a leg.

That was all there was to it, but the audience loved it. It was almost always the winner of the grand five-dollar prize.

One evening, following my act, when I was lounging backstage in my diaper, a man in puttees and a checkered coat suddenly appeared as from nowhere and virtually hurled himself upon me. I was, of course, guilty of all sorts of crimes, from truancy to smoking on streetcars, and I was sure the total had long since equaled a capital offense. Thus I could only believe that this man was a detective and his rapid-fire babble an indictment. I neither heard what he said nor was able to reply. It was left to the performers to interpret to me and respond for me, which they repeatedly and enthusiastically did. But even after he had left, with a savagely jocular slap at my diaper, I remained in a trembling daze.

Me, an actor? A
motion picture
actor?

It just couldn’t be.

It was, however, as I found out the following morning when I reported at what had been the office of a one-time lumber yard. The check-coated, putteed man was the director-producer of a brand-new picture company dedicated to the production of two-reel comedies. And I was to act in those comedies, starting as of right now. I had what it took, he assured me. (“Chaplin, kid, that son-of-a-bitch’ll have to
swim
back to England.”) He had been in the business for years and he was never wrong about these things.

I have since learned enough about picture-making to know that scenes are shot out of sequence, and they appear to be a meaningless jumble to one unfamiliar with the story involved. But knowing nothing of the kind, then, I became as bewildered as I was dazed. I moved in an all-too-apparent stupor, which no amount of shouting from the director-producer could snap me out of. My mind found much to feed its suspicion that I was the butt of a cruel joke.

In rapid order, I was costumed as a cowboy, a baker, a conductor (streetcar), a policeman, a lifeguard and a blind beggar. I was impelled to dive through windows, fall down steps and stumble into mud holes. I was knocked down, walked on, booted and tossed. I was hit with pies, crockery, salami, baseball bats and beer barrels. And once a live bull snake was hurled at me so that it twined around my neck.

The more I went through of this, the less I became accustomed to it. I performed like a zombie of the Piltdown era. Finally, his aggravation having increased by the fact that a blemish on my chin loomed monstrously large in the rushes, the director profanely discharged me.

I was one goddamned thing, he said, that he
had
been wrong about.

Naturally, having put him to so much trouble and expense, I received no pay.

The aforementioned blemish turned out to be the opening salvo in an attack of barber’s itch, so for more than three weeks I was confined to the house, brooding over my recent failure and the many failures preceding it.

Actually, as I eventually learned, I had lost nothing. The picture company had begun operations on a shoestring, hoping to obtain financing via stockselling. Failing to do this, it had been unable to finish even that one first picture. It was never released, and the producer-director skipped town owing everyone.

I recovered from my malady and returned to the burlesque house. But I was no longer happy there as I had been. Everyone was nice to me, and everyone tactfully avoided the mention of motion pictures. Yet I was moody and restless. I felt that I had to do something—I simply
had
to. Something to rid me of the ugly stigmata of failure. Why, good God, I was almost sixteen years old and I had been a success at nothing!

Every night as I brooded wakefully in bed, I swore that I would make the following day different from the one just spent. But the following day found me spending it exactly as I had the previous one. I would be back at the burlesque house relieving the ticket-taker, butching candy, romping backstage with the chorus girls—wasting the golden hours which, once gone, would never come again.

Late one afternoon, a vaguely familiar-looking young man purchased a box of candy from me. He was both casual and brisk about it, first fumbling interminably for the necessary dime, then whipping out a five-dollar bill and impatiently demanding his change.

I counted it out to him. Just as I finished, his hand came out of the pocket with the dime he had been looking for.

“Here,” he said, crisply. “Here’s your dime. Let’s have the five back.”

I gave it to him—rather, I allowed him to withdraw it from my hand. I wandered absently on down the aisle, absorbed with the problem of doing
something
. And a full five minutes passed before it dawned on me that I had been done out of four dollars and ninety cents.

It was too late then, of course, to do anything about it. My fives artist would have skipped the show immediately and gone in quest of another sucker.

Nonetheless, I dashed back up the aisle looking for him. And there he was, still in the same seat, grinning at me and holding up the five.

“Just keeping in practice,” he said, innocently. “You weren’t worried, were you?”

I
had first seen Allie Ivers in police court, where he appeared on a charge of swindling a storekeeper and I appeared in the interests of the Fort Worth
Press
. He was thin, blond and pale, with the most innocent blue eyes I have ever seen. He looked about sixteen years old the first time I saw him. He still looked sixteen, ten years later. Our paths crossed and recrossed during those years, and he often referred to me as his best friend (a reference which I often found debatable). I knew him far better than anyone else. Yet throughout our association, I never knew where he lived, I never learned anything about his background or antecedents, and I was never sure of how he would behave from one day to the next.

About all you could be sure of with Allie was that he would almost always do the unexpected—particularly if it was illegal—and to hell with the consequences.

Once, in an unusual moment of confidence, he gave me a hint of his philosophy. “I’d dive off a thousand-foot cliff,” he said, “to get to a drowning man. After that, I don’t know. Maybe I’d save him. Maybe I’d hang an anchor around his neck.”

“First stealing his shirt,” I suggested.

“Well,” said Allie reasonably, “what would a drowning man need with a shirt?”

That was as close as I ever got to really knowing Allie. He remains the most imponderable of the strange characters who, throughout my life, have gravitated to me like filings to a magnet.

The judge took one look at him that day in police court and decided that no such demure youth could have “mitted” twenty dollars from the grocer’s cash drawer, then short-changed him with his own money. He rebuked the arresting officer and dismissed Allie. I followed him outside.

Identifying myself as a reporter, I asked him to tell me the truth. Was he guilty or not?

Now, Allie’s favorite reading was the penal code and his knowledge of law was something to turn a supreme-court justice green with envy. So, after a momentary start, he widened his wide blue eyes and confessed his guilt.

“That’s not all,” he said. “I stole a package of peanuts on my way out of the store.”

I made a note of this, and Allie went on to recite other crimes. His regular occupation, he said, was stealing fur coats from whores. “They’ve all got them,” he explained. “I don’t know why they sock so much dough in coats when they spend nine-tenths of their time in bed.”

I asked Allie about his
modus operandi
. He said it was simple. Having gained entry to the whore’s room in the guise of a customer, he asked for a complete examination of the merchandise before purchasing. Then, with the deluded woman in the altogether and hence unable to pursue him, he grabbed her coat and fled.

“It’s nice clean work,” said Allie. “I’m going to get back to it as soon as the market gets better. Right now I’ve got all the pawnshops overstocked.”

Allie said that next to stealing fur coats he liked to steal baggage. And this too was simple, he added modestly, involving little more than the ownership of a red cap and a badge. Also, he went on, he had done very well for himself by dividing the city into districts and assigning them to pickpockets on a percentage basis.

“My big trouble,” said Allie, in conclusion, “is that I’m too restless. I keep jumping around from one racket to another. As soon as I get one going good, I move on to something else.”

I was as preposterously naïve in some ways as I was sophisticated in others. But I would like it made clear, lest I appear a bigger dunce than I was, that I believed Allie’s story because it
was
true. Every word of it. This selfish young man had not only stripped whores of their hirsute habiliments and trusting travelers of their luggage, he had also defrauded some supposedly shrewd denizens of the underworld itself. In fact, as he confided to me later, he was never happier than when engaged in taking the takers. They put him on his mettle, added zest to existence in a way that the yokels never could.

In the case of the pickpockets, for example, Allie had visited Houston and Galveston, convincing a coterie of dips that the fix was in in Fort Worth and that, for a percentage of their take, he was prepared to assign them choice districts wherein they might “run wild.” They fell for it—a number of them at least—and descended upon Fort Worth. Allie began collecting his percentage. The pickpockets began landing in jail.

To the run-of-the-mill operator, the incarceration of the first pickpocket would have been a signal to skip town. But Allie Ivers definitely was not run-of-the-mill. As one after another of the pickpockets was knocked off, Allie went around to the others and explained that the guy had been gypping him on his percentage and had thus lost his license to steal. He sternly advised them to take heed and to make no errors in arithmetic while calculating his due. Understandably alarmed and anxious to retain his good will, the dips gave him his agreed on cut and more besides.

Within a very few days, of course, the true state of affairs became known, i.e., they had been paying for a fix which did not exist. But while there was an intensive search for him for a time, Allie also seemed not to exist. And the eventual opinion in police circles was that the pickpockets had created him, a fictitious fall guy, in the hope of excusing their own misdoings.

Allie spent the winter in Miami. “For my health,” he explained, succinctly.

Well, though, to get back to the confession he had made to me, the truth or the falsity of it made not the slightest difference to a libel-conscious newspaper. True or false—and my editor called it a hop-dream on paper—it was a yarn such as to invite mayhem on the reporter who submitted it.

Being a man of exquisite courtesy and kindness, my editor merely folded and refolded it, forming it into a plug which he held in shape with a rubber band. He handed this to me.

“That hole in your head,” he said. “Take care of it.”

…Allie and I met outside the burlesque house, and he insisted on taking me to dinner. He said he had thought about me many times—worried about that story he had given me. He had meant no harm by it and hoped it had played no part in my descent to my present position.

I was pretty short with him, at first, but he seemed so genuinely interested in my welfare that I swiftly thawed. We had dinner in a very good restaurant, and I brought him up-to-date on my activities. He laughed a great deal, but softly and sympathetically. There was the look in his eyes of a bored child who has stumbled upon a strange and intriguing toy.

“We’ll have to do something about you,” he kept saying. “Yes, we’ll certainly have to do something.”

“What kind of—uh—work are you doing now?” I asked.

“Bell-hopping,” he said. “I’m down at the H—— Hotel. It’s not quite as good as stealing, but it’s a change. I was getting pretty bored with the con.”

“That’s a pretty swell hotel,” I said.

“I’ve been in worse,” Allie shrugged. “They’ve got very good locks on the doors.”

“Could I”—I hesitated—“Do you suppose I could—?”

“Why not? Why don’t you ask?”

“Aw, I guess I better not,” I said. “I have to go to school. I’ve been laying out a lot, but I have to go.”

“That’s all right,” said Allie. “You can work at night. They have a hard time keeping boys on the night shift.”

“I—I guess not,” I said. “I—they wouldn’t hire me. My folks wouldn’t want me working at night, and—”

“Kind of lost your nerve, huh?” Allie nodded wisely. “Afraid to try anything for fear you won’t make it. That won’t do. Drink your coffee, and let’s get going.”

We went, with me lagging behind and protesting that I’d better not. At the side door of the hotel, Allie drew me up to the leaded panes and pointed to a paunchy, pompous-looking man with a carnation in the buttonhole of his black broadcloth coat.

“That’s the man you see, the assistant manager on this shift,” said Allie. “Now you go in there and tell him he either gives you a job or you’ll piss in his hip pockets.”

“Aw, for—” I tried to break loose.

“Do it your own way, then. I’m going to stand right here and watch you.”

“Huh-uh, Allie,” I muttered. “I don’t look good enough, and—and I got a pain in my stomach, an’ he’ll think I’m crazy asking for a job in a place like—”

Allie’s hand closed around my forearm in a grip that was surprisingly and painfully strong. “You get in there,” he said, firmly. “If you don’t, I’ll yell for the cops. I’ll say you made me an indecent proposal.”

Something told me he would do exactly that.

I went in.

The assistant manager glanced at me wearily as I began a jumbled application for a job on nights. Then, while I was still mumbling he murmured a word which sounded like “hate” and which, I was sure, summarized his feelings about me, and strolled away.

Relieved that he had not had me arrested, I turned and tottered toward the door.

I had taken only a few steps when a swarthy, slick-haired young man with C
APTAIN
emblazoned across his wine-colored jacket appeared at my side.

“You’re going the wrong way, Mac,” he said smoothly. “The tailor shop’s back this way.”

“T-tailor shop?” I said.

He grinned and took me by the elbow. “Couldn’t understand Old Mushmouth, huh? You’ll get used to him. Now, let’s get you fixed up with a uniform.”