Copy Boy

by Shelley Blanton-Stroud

  That stretch of Clay was swank. Nice old houses, fresh paint in pastel colors, respectable homeowners, flowers blooming in matching pots on stone stoops. No smell of piss, no tents, no trash can fires. Even the air was cleaner and brighter here than Van Ness, near the radio station and opera. Hard times hadn’t made it to this Gold Coast block, which raised the question again of how the girls afforded it. Jane didn’t understand money or class, only that she was at the bottom of both systems and planned to climb up. But she did know that the one with the dough had the power, and in this flat that was Rivka. She needed a job so Rivka would accept her and she could stay in this place. Selling herself as a city boy at the party would be a start.

  Down the block two men approached, and, judging from how the downstairs neighbor peeked out her lacy curtains, they were hardly welcome. The shorter of the two, walking with his right foot on the sidewalk and his left in the street, said, “Oppie, I can’t walk much more. Can’t we just find a diner?” He stopped as he said this, lifting his fedora and smoothing dark hair that stood up in tufts. His cheeks were splotchy red and his glasses tilted.

  The other guy, Oppie, was tall and thin, in a blue work shirt with a pack of Chesterfields sticking out of his top pocket and faded blue jeans with a big silver buckle. He walked with his feet turned out, like he was getting ready to dance. His bright blue eyes and wild brown hair made him look deranged.

  “Please.” Oppie stopped and pointed bony yellow fingers and a cigarette into Splotchy’s face. “Quadruple digits, divisible by seven. 1428, 2128, 2821 . . . Ignore the landscape, focus on the math.” A soft humming sound filled the space between his words.

  “How many divisible-by-seven numbers before we reach the ocean?”

  So 3528 is divisible by seven, Jane thought, as if she might need to know later, as if this information could be key to not failing.

  Her fingers trembled. But when she saw their ridiculous wobbling, she figured these might be the best two to practice on. Besides, she was the jump-in sort, not a wader, so long as she suspected the water was lower than the top of her head, which she determined was the case just now.

  “Howdy, mathematicians.”

  “Physicists.” Oppie drew it out. “Theoretical physicists.”

  “Looking for Rivka and Sweetie?”

  “Huzzah!” he cried, punching his pal in the arm, causing Splotchy to drop his hat. “We must not live in the emotions, brother, but in analysis.”

  He turned to Jane. “Do you see what I did there?”

  “Physics,” she answered, remembering eleventh grade, a test she’d studied for by Studebaker headlights.

  “Brilliant!”

  “Go on up. They’re cooking.”

  Oppie flicked invisible dust off her shoulders and head, placed Splotchy’s fedora on top of her cap and passed, saying, “Ich danke Ihnen, door boy.”

  “Thank God they don’t live in the Sunset,” Splotchy said. “My feet couldn’t take it.”

  Lord almighty, she thought as they passed inside, her heart pounding from this first brief trial.

  She worried the next guests would be a tougher sale, but then by the looks of it, nearly everybody was arriving drunk, so maybe she’d been given an easy first night. In twos and threes they dribbled in, Jane taking notes as they did, filling in their names throughout the party as she eavesdropped, thinking she might need flash cards.

  Haakon, the leftist French professor, his wife, Barbara, an interior designer with an idea cabin at Willow Camp in Marin, and Harry, the charismatic Australian longshoreman leader, were dropped off by a driver with a broken nose and a black eye. A wild Armenian writer from Fresno named Bill and symphony conductor Pierre arrived by cab. Clarinetist and bandleader Artie came in a jitney with political lawyer and lumber heir Leland Sutter and Yolanda, a hatcheck girl who’d graduated from Pomona and was researching the red-throated loon on a small, private grant. The Examiner gossip columnist Victor Beauchamp arrived dripping copy boys, eager-faced kids about the same age as Jane. There were others, lots of others. With most of their arrivals she practiced a nonchalant nod or a tip of the hat, just to see if they registered shock or disgust at the sight of her, some kind of pretend-boy circus freak invited as a joke. But she hadn’t yet gotten the raised brow or dropped jaw she feared.

  The guests offered her a world of new physical details to study, the ways they walked, their dismissal of Jane when they approached, their city accents. She longed for a big, beet-stained notebook. Her moleskin was tiny, forcing her to compress even more than before. She nearly filled it that night with cramped information about San Franciscans, her impressions, what she should do to fit better with this jumbled crowd—“Jut pelvis out to look like cocky guy. Frown when I smile, to look more experienced/judgmental. Smirk, don’t laugh, to seem bored of simple jokes.” It went on for pages. She liked to break an impossible thing down to its doable parts, list making as an optimistic art.

  She grew more confident as she stood in the foyer, near the open door—an escape route. From that spot she witnessed their many small embarrassments, a joke no one laughed at, a story the intended audience walked away from in the middle of its telling. Everybody failed a little. She studied how they recovered.

  “Get in here,” Sweetie hissed. “The point is to be inside.”

  Looked like she was unable to resist the drama of the situation.

  Jane pulled the cap off, slipped outside to toss it into a bush, and settled Splotchy’s fedora on top of her head. As she adjusted her posture, stretching to her full height, a silver V6 Cadillac convertible screeched up, parallel parking in rumbling jerks in front of the flat.

  “He’s here! The editor, H. R. MacDonald,” Sweetie said, close to Jane’s ear. “Call him Mac. Only been here a couple months, but he’s discovered Rivka. Won’t remember me.” Her mood ticked upward even so.

  “How could he not remember you? It’s your party.”

  “It’s Rivka’s. His type likes the Rivkas. Secret restaurants, dive bars. They get sax’ed rubbing elbows with real creatives. Ups their credibility.”

  “You’re creative,” Jane said, in a kind of apology.

  Sweetie smiled, grudgingly, tucking her arm into Jane’s, pulling her close. “They should make a guidebook to explain it to us immigrants,” she said. Jane couldn’t see a thing about Sweetie that would mark her as an outsider.

  The buzz-cut editor jogged across the street and up the steps, his skin steaming like he’d run in from downtown, some fresh animal.

  “Hello, Sweetie!” Mac hugged her hard, lifting her off the ground, and she squealed, her cheeks turning bright. He remembered her.

  “Come in,” she said.

  Sweetie’s hair shone, coppery.

  They stepped inside, and the editor scanned the crowd.

  Sweetie tugged on his sleeve. “Meet our new lodger.”

  “Benny Hopper,” Jane said, nodding like a puppet.

  His eyes swept up and down her, a grin on his face. “How old are you, fella? Looks like your mother was a rail tie, your father a redwood.”

  This was starting already.

  “Ha! Yeah!”

  Mac stepped away, into the crowd.

  She’d made a regrettable first impression—“Ha! Yeah!”— but she didn’t despair. Looking straight at her, Mac hadn’t said, “It’s a girl” or, “Why’d you invite an Okie?” No. He’d met her close up and come away with the brilliant conclusion that Benny Hopper was tall. The ordinariness of that observation made her giddy. He wasn’t too high to climb.

  Five foot ten with a sprinter’s build, he was like a mountain lion prowling the party. White cotton shirt, cuffs rolled up on thick forearms, brown tie loose and swinging as he roamed, group to group. A half-dozen ladies quick-cut their eyes at him while they carried on conversations with other, less eligible guys, causing Jane to think, If I wanted to get his attention I’d stand there, just off-center, in the parlor . . . But then she pulled herself back—How should Be
nny get his attention?

  At every conversation he interrupted, he said to call him Mac. “Goddamn reporters, calling me Boy Wonder! No dignity!” He roared and slapped backs.

  With his arrival, the party’s tone shifted, became more boisterous, his presence seeming to give them permission to push edges. Three guys moved couches into the entry, rugs against the walls, piano into the middle of the parlor. The doors to the other parlor were tied shut with a ribbon. Sweetie asked them not to scratch the floorboards, batting her eyelashes, but Rivka just kept cooking, sipping a clear drink with a baby onion at the bottom, stirring boiling pots as her guests took over. She didn’t seem to care if things got scratched, which Jane thought strange—that someone would pay for things they wouldn’t then protect.

  Artie pulled out his clarinet, and Rivka’s radio friends produced their instruments too. Rivka waved them off with a wooden spoon when they demanded she sit at the piano, and so instead they played along with a girl named Jim at the keyboard. The rest of the party danced to “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” “Dark-town Strutters’ Ball” and “Tiger Rag.” Sweetie scooted into the mob, wiggling her round rear end and swinging a damp dish towel over her head near the corner where Mac stood talking to two other guys, the three of them admiring Sweetie’s dance.

  Rivka kept her back to the party, stirring the sauce.

  Jane opened the living room windows to the cool because the air was getting thick and she was feeling dizzy. She’d started drinking beer a half hour before to calm her nerves, and somehow beer tasted more potent here.

  Then a short guy who looked like he’d just climbed out of a boxcar—hair like a thistle—sat next to Jim on the piano bench and played his guitar, singing “Motherless Children” all by himself.

  Everybody got quiet while he sang that song in a voice so ugly Jane’s eyes began to leak. Daddy had sung that song, but this guy sang it better, more talky. That music in this place, right under the green tractor painting. Jane’s chest tightened. The way he sat among them, wearing the Okie clothes, singing the Okie song, but acting like something else, like he had some kind of right. Like Sweetie, acting like a starlet. Jane looked around the room. Did Daddy have this effect? Was he a lesser version of this guy?

  When he finished singing, they all clapped. Jim yelled, “Amen!” and others repeated it, others who’d likely never said “amen” before, even Mac. That hobo seemed above them. How’d that work? Was it something in him? Something about his audience here that made them more receptive to his roughness?

  The group went back to dance music.

  Mac took the singer aside, lit him a cigarette and poured him a whiskey from a bottle he got from the top shelf of a cabinet near the door. Mac knew where to find the good stuff.

  Jane sat a few yards away with Oppie on the back of a couch in the crowded entry, nursing a beer and smoking one of Oppie’s Chesterfields. He was very drunk and acted like he knew Jane—Benny, that is—which made her feel somewhat confident at his side.

  “Why does Rivka look so dyspeptic in your direction?” he asked. “What’s your crime?”

  She stiffened at “crime ” but then calmed herself, inspecting Rivka through the open kitchen door, chopping parsley on a butcher block, barelegged, in a black skirt and a threadbare white cotton blouse. She still wore the ankle bracelet and she’d put on red lipstick, but she didn’t appear to dress a thing up unnecessarily.

  It was true. Rivka did look at Jane with a cold eye, the eye of science: How’s my experiment going? Is my subject failing? She couldn’t explain that to Oppie, so she said, in her deepest voice: “She thinks I’m some kind of horse thief. In a bad way.”

  “She should talk.” He blew smoke rings.

  “She’s made it. I’m on my way up.”

  The boy’s clothes made her more openly opinionated, more sure of herself, less polite. “What do you mean, she should talk?”

  “Doesn’t it seem odd she would have this place, these parties, on a musician’s wages?”

  “What are her wages?” she asked. “And why do you care?”

  “I don’t. Just interested. Probably some old country connection.”

  “Old country?”

  “Anyway, it seems disingenuous for her to judge. That’s all I’m saying.” He puffed. “But then, people do forget where they were and what they did after they’ve passed through it.”

  I will. I’ll pass through it and forget everything, Jane thought.

  “I always say, when you see something you want to do, do it. Figure out what to do about it afterward.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Dust will settle.”

  “Focus on the future,” she added, glad at their philosophical connection.

  They each took a drag on their Chesterfields.

  “Huzzah,” he answered, blowing smoke. “But perhaps I ought to refine that, given you plan to be a journalist.”

  She’d told him she was a writer—all those notebooks qualified—and that she was aiming to do it at the Prospect, the idea gelling as she said it with her sense that things happen for a reason—that she’d lost her shot at the Swale because she was meant to write at the Prospect.

  “As someone who has in the past been treated unfairly by the press, as someone who knows something about it, I think I am permitted to ask if you are comfortable writing about other people’s private lives as part of your work. Does it bother you what might happen to these people after you tell their stories? I mean, does it make you uncomfortable to use their lives for your own advancement?”

  She thought, He doesn’t even see I’m a girl. Because he’s drunk? Or am I that good?

  And because that thought boosted her confidence, she challenged him.

  “That’s dumb. If you say, ‘Go ahead and do it’ about your job, you have to say, ‘Go ahead and do it’ about my job too.”

  “I guess it’s a question of one’s sense of the consequences.”

  Hogwash, said the voice in her head.

  She’d swallowed two and a half cans of Acme Beer by now, as well as smoking four cigarettes without coughing, and the professor was blurring, even boring her a little. She’d tried Daddy’s beer and hooch and cigarettes before, from age twelve on, same as the other picker kids, but that was nearly always around a campfire, near her pallet, where she could pass out without any trouble, not standing in costume at a party where she needed to keep her wits. She was proud of how she was doing at this new test, being a boy, not an Okie, not falling-down drunk on beer.

  “New mascot?” asked a deep voice behind her.

  “House pet. Belongs to the girls,” Oppie answered.

  She turned and saw Mac, his golden eyes trained on her throat.

  “Have we met?” he asked, leaning against the wall, crossing one ankle over the other.

  “On the porch.” She wiped her hand on her thigh before extending it. “Benny Hopper.”

  She’d practiced for this, several times over, squeezing Rivka’s hand hard as a boy would, numbing her own palm.

  Mac gripped and squeezed with his right hand while slapping her shoulder with his left, pinching the slim muscle hard. He looked at her mouth. Throat, grip, muscles, lips. He suspected. She couldn’t run away.

  “I’m the new lodger.”

  “Breaking rules already.”

  She cooled, scalp to sternum.

  “Blocking the liquor cabinet.”

  Maybe because her blood had drained so quickly from her brain to her gut, she felt she’d just gained a strategic advantage. While she stood between Mac and what he wanted—the store-bought liquor Rivka kept, maybe on his behalf—she had his attention. She wouldn’t waste it.

  “I’ll be a reporter for you soon.” She said it with the blunt confidence of somebody right at the sweet spot in the timeline of beer consumption.

  “I can tell a story.” She said that with the confidence of a guy blocking the liquor cabinet.

  “Ahhh...” Mac smirked and rocked up onto his toes, then down, look
ing over her shoulder at the bottles behind glass.

  “I’d be glad to start in your advertised position, as copy boy, sir.” She straightened—a boy was better off tall. “If that ain’t too rude to say.” She heard ain’t right after she said it and felt hot all over at the mistake, her emotions so volatile, turning always on the success of the thing she’d said or done last.

  “Mac. I said to call me Mac.” He’d missed the ain’t.

  He drained the last drops of his icy drink and looked at her.

  “City’s a ship, boy.” He tilted his glass in her direction, his voice loud. “Water’s choppy, yes. Things are not so good, the poor and all. But those of us in charge, we need to flush out the old, the tired old guys. Focus on the positive, the new. Speak up, man, speak up and make plans! See the possibilities!”

  Daughter of Abraham, she had experience judging degrees of drunkenness and saw right now she was standing at an unlatched shed.

  “I can take this city, Mac. I can write!”

  Her face felt hot, but she knew he didn’t see her clearly enough to judge. This was the time to say things, a narrow opening through which she could make an impression uncoralled by logic, his or hers.

  He rubbed his hand down his forehead and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m sick of pussyfooting. I don’t know what’s wrong with everybody, so afraid something bad’ll happen.” He wobbled. “Take risks. Take the right risks. You sound good to me, man. You should move ahead, full steam, Bob!”

  “Ben,” she said, “Benny.”

  “Benny, yeah. The lodger? Yes? Well, blaze trails, you know. I’ve always done that. I understand a boy like you. I started with nothing, too, nothing.” He spilled ice on the linoleum, as his red, muscled-up arms slashed through all the somethings he’d had nothing of. “I was the bastard child of an aging beauty and a titled Englishman. He died before he knew me. She deserted me. I raised myself.” He took a big breath in preparation. “I was a farmer, a coal miner, a logger, a prospector, a sports shop owner, a golf pro, and a banker—I learned it out of a book!” He said this all in a singsong, like a monologue memorized for class—the Gettysburg Address or something—delivered out of context. Though, she thought, its being rote didn’t mean it wasn’t true.