Jimmy and Fay (20 page)

The girl who answered the door was not what I expected. She was young and dark and tall and slender. She wore gauzy harem pants and an unbuttoned gold lamé vest with nothing underneath either of them. She had a silver chain with jangly coins around her hips and silver rings on her toes. The thick smell of hashish explained her dark pupils and pleasant smile.

She said hello in a dopey kind of voice, and I said we were looking for Oscar Apollinaire.

Her brow wrinkled for a second, then she smiled and twisted around, saying, “Baby, there's some people here to see you.”

When she turned, the vest swung open. Connie frowned and blushed and looked down.

A man's voice came from another room. “Who is it, Honeybunch?”

Without answering, she strolled away from us and we could see the room. At first, all I could make out were the bright colors, orange, red, and yellow, in the flickering light. I thought it was from a fireplace like the one I'd just seen in the grand library, but this came from an electric fixture with a revolving colored shade. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that the room looked like the inside of an Arab tent, a Hollywood Arab tent with big pieces of silk hanging from the ceiling and the floor covered with carpets and cushions.

Honeybunch said over her shoulder, “
Entrez vous
, and please take off your shoes.”

Connie and I
entrez
ed. She took off her shoes. I didn't.

As Honeybunch settled on a pillow and picked up her hash pipe, a man came in from the back. “Who is it?” he repeated, sounding suspicious and worried. He was bald and brown from the sun with a thick black Vandyke. Dress slacks, suspenders, and a starched white shirt. No shoes, no tie.

He took a long slow look at Connie before he turned to me. Then he said, “Jimmy Quinn, long time, no see,” and held out a hand. I almost recognized the voice.

When he smiled, I saw the gap between his front teeth and remembered him.

“Well, I'll be damned. Bobby Colodny.”

Chapter Seventeen

The first time I met Bobby Colodny, I couldn't have been more than ten or eleven. I can't remember what I was doing that morning over on the west side near Tenth Avenue, and it's not important anyway. They still called Tenth “Death Avenue” around there, not because it was such a tough neighborhood but because there was a freight train that ran on street-level tracks. It went real slow, but kids goofed around and ran in front of it, and a few years before, one of them had slipped and the wheels cut off his head. So I was careful around there. But I wasn't prepared when I went around a corner and found a horse standing across the sidewalk in front of me.

There was a boy on its back, turned out to be Bobby. He yelled out in a loud voice, “Hey, kid, this is the Dummy Boys' street, and if you want to walk on it, you pay us a nickel.” A bunch of kids behind him yelled at me to get the hell out of there.

Now, I don't know if they were real Dummy Boys. Yeah, the Dummy Boys were a gang that rode horses, but a lot of people had horses then. You saw about as many of them as cars on the streets.

Anyway, I was so surprised I stepped back, and I think they expected me to run away. But I didn't. I figured,
Okay, it's his street and I need to use it. I'll give him five cents
.

So I dug a fistful of pennies out of my pocket, counted out five, and held them up to him. He reached down, kind of surprised, and I went around the horse. The guys behind him didn't know what to do and just stood there as I hurried through them. I was past them when a big kid heaved himself up from a stoop and stood in my way.

He was a few years older, fat and wide, and he was holding an empty bucket of beer. By the way he smelled, it wasn't his first of the day.

“Hey, Colodny,” he yelled. “Did this kid pay?”

The kid on the horse said I did, and they all looked at each other. I guess nobody paid them before.

The drunk kid said, “What're you doing here?”

I said I had business.

The kid called Colodny, still on the horse, said, “Ain't you the kid that works for the Brain?”

That's what some people called A. R. in those days. But not me. Truth is, though, I was kind of proud to be recognized that way. I didn't know the word had got around.

I answered by shrugging like it was nothing because I didn't really know what to say, and I had been taught not ever to say anything about A. R.'s business.

The big kid laughed real nasty and said, “The Brain, huh, well, what're you gonna do if we take your nickel and kick your little ass off our street anyway?” The other boys laughed with him then, but not Colodny. I saw that I had a clear street behind me, so I yelled back at the big kid, “It'd mean you won't get any more money off me, so that would be pretty damn stupid, you fat tub of lard.”

The other guys laughed harder, making the big kid so mad he threw his empty bucket at me. By then, I was halfway down the block. In those days, when I ran, nobody caught me. I sure wasn't worried about a fat drunk kid.

The next time I saw Bobby Colodny was a few weeks later on the same street. I stopped at the corner and was ready to take another route if those guys were still there, but the sidewalk was empty, no guys, no horse, no fat boy on the stoop. So I went on and I hadn't got far when somebody yelled my name. That stopped me because I didn't know anybody there. It was the kid I'd seen before, Colodny, without the horse. I was ready to run as he crossed the street. I saw that he was a few years older than me and a lot taller, with curly brown hair under a newsboy's cap. He had a wide gap between his front teeth.

He said, “You're Jimmy Quinn, ain't ya? Yeah, I thought so. Look, Delmar was outta line the other day, acting like he did, and you oughta know he ain't any kind of boss around here. He don't call no shots. Anything Mr. Rothstein needs in this neighborhood, you just talk to me. I'm Bobby, by the way, Bobby Colodny.”

We might have said something else then, but I don't remember. That's when I first began to figure out that because I worked for A. R., other boys looked up to me, even older boys. When you're a short kid, that means a lot, but I didn't understand it well enough to let it swell my head.

The next time I saw Bobby was at the movies, and from then on, that's where I always saw him. Almost always. You see, he was like me, wanting to be the first to see the new pictures the first day they opened. We must have run into each other a dozen times in theater lobbies over the next few years. We usually didn't say much to each other because Bobby had a girl on his arm as often as not. When we did talk, we figured out that we liked the same kind of pictures and the same stars. And for Bobby, I remember it was always the women in the movies. I'd be lying if I didn't admit that was a lot of the attraction for me, too, but when Bobby talked about them, this dreamy look came over him and you could tell he was a man in love. Bobby was one of those guys, puberty hit him like a falling piano. He'd make a move on any girl who didn't run away from him and some who did. He told me once that he thought it was some kind of compulsion, he couldn't control himself. “Yeah,” he said, “I get slapped plenty, but I get my ashes hauled plenty, too.” He even snaked a girl away from me and knocked her up. He was just one of those guys who'd do that and not see anything wrong with it.

In the years after that, we'd run into each other in the penny arcades, too. By then, I was helping to move slot machines and pinball machines in and out for repair. Bobby was doing the same thing with peep show machines, the racy kind from the back rooms where they kept some of the slots, too.

That's what he did during the day. At night, he hung around the girls' dressing rooms at Minsky's and Eltinge's burlesque houses. He told me he did favors for them, buying them cigarettes, booze, marijuana, cocaine, soft drinks. Anything they needed, he'd find it. Any time I wanted, he said, he'd get me into the late show downstairs. That's where the real action was.

I'd have taken him up on it, but by then I was working with Lansky, Luciano, and Longy Zwillman stealing cars and driving liquor. After a while, when I hadn't seen him for a long time, I asked around and heard Bobby had left town and gone into the movie business.

That didn't surprise me. I mean, I liked the movies. Give me a couple of hours on my own, I'd duck into the closest theater and watch whatever was playing. But Bobby loved the movies, loved them as much as he loved girls, and maybe for him they were the same thing or close to it. Where moving pictures were concerned, he wanted to know everything.

So I guess it was about ten years later that I was seeing Bobby again in this crazy room that could've belonged to Rudolph Valentino. He didn't look like I remembered him, but a lot of that was due to the cue ball head.

He took a long look at me and I could tell that he was judging the price of the suit and he knew it wasn't cheap. His mouth widened into a sly gap-toothed half smile, and he said, “So it's Jimmy Quinn, the famous gangster.”

I shook my head.

“Hell, if I know you, you're famous.”

“But I'm not a gangster. I run a respectable gin mill.”

He didn't care to argue the point and turned to Connie. There was no mistaking the wolfish look on his face. “And who is this lovely young lady?”

“She's Connie Nix. Connie, this is Bobby Colodny. He's from my old neighborhood, or close to it, anyway.”

“Then who's Oscar Apollinaire?” she said as he took her hand in both of his.

“Yeah, Bobby, who's Oscar Apollinaire? That's who we came up here to see.”

“You've heard of me, that's wonderful! It's my
nom de plume
or
nom du cinema
. Oscar Apollinaire is an
artiste
of the
avant-garde
.” Sounded like Bobby had picked up a lot of French since he'd been away. He told us to have a seat and ushered Connie onto a low chaise where she almost had to lie down as she tucked her skirt under her legs. I took a chair. He sprawled across three big pillows on the floor.

He said, “I thought you lived here, too, and I've been meaning to look you up, but my work keeps me very busy.”

“So I've heard,” I said, and his eyes narrowed.

“What'd you mean?”

“We'll get to it by and by. First you've gotta tell me where you've been. I mean, for a while there, it seemed like I was seeing you every week or so at the pictures or the arcades, and then you were gone. What happened?”

“It's a long story. But where are my manners? Honeybunch, did you offer our guests a turn at the pipe?”

I said no thanks, and Connie shook her head.

“Gage? Cocaine? I've got some of Captain Spaulding's finest. No? You never were one for the hard stuff, were you? Afraid I don't have any booze that's up to your standards.”

“No, we're fine. Somebody told me you got into the moving-picture business.”

He laughed and said, “Yeah, that's what I did all right, but not like you think. Did you ever hear of the Projectionists?”

Now, I've always found that people enjoy talking about themselves, and Bobby sure did. He left out some things that I was able to fill in, and it seemed like he couldn't decide whether he should tone it down to keep from offending Connie or if he should be racy to get her worked up. Not that it mattered, he was flirting like I wasn't there, anyway, and for a while Connie loved it. Honeybunch was more interested in her hash pipe and the music from the Victrola.

Bobby didn't mention his work with the naughty peep shows in the arcades, but that must have been how he met the Projectionists, Dieter and Gus. They were two older guys whose territory went to upstate New York and Connecticut and Rhode Island and down into Pennsylvania. They drove a Ford truck and showed stag movies to men's groups—lodges, veterans, unions, fraternities. Depending on what the guys wanted and the product they had on hand, they'd set up a screen and projector and run one-reelers for two or three hours. They got a hundred bucks, some warm beer, cold sandwiches, bad liquor, cheap cigars, and, if they were lucky, a place to stay for the night. When they were on the road, they slept outside. They never worried about the cops because the boys in blue were always invited. Bobby said in some towns, the preachers and priests didn't give them any trouble because they figured the pictures took some of the pressure off the local wives to do what their husbands were wanting to see.

At first, Bobby loved it even though Dieter and Gus piled the grunt work on him—changing tires, repairing broken films, cleaning up, and all that—while they got drunk. The way it worked was, the Projectionists would go out on the road for a few months and follow their circuit, bringing them back to New York when they learned that a new supply of pictures had arrived. Most of them came from South America and Mexico, with a few from France, Bobby said. They'd buy all they could afford, and then approach a few collectors in the city, rich guys who would shell out serious money for copies of the best stuff. Then they'd hit the road again.

After he'd been with them for almost two years, Bobby decided that he'd learned everything he could about that side of the business, all the things that could go wrong when you went to show a moving picture on a screen, from not having the right film to a tear in the screen to a balky projector. And, he said, by then the pictures they were showing had lost something.

“I mean, how often can you watch some fat hairy spic slipping the sausage to a blowsy broad when they're poorly photographed with the wrong lighting by some guy who has no idea of where to put the camera or what to do with it?”

That was all Connie could handle. As long as Bobby was just talking, she was fine but when he got specific, I saw the first flush spread across her cheeks and throat. She struggled up from the low chaise and said, “I'm sorry, Mr. . . .”