What Makes Sammy Run?

by Budd Schulberg

  He took this without a sign of embarrassment. Ability to absorb insults and embarrassment like a sponge was turning out to be one of his greatest accomplishments.

  “Oh,” he said, “I would have told you only I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

  “Don’t be so goddam thoughtful,” I said. “If you didn’t want to see the show, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t find out until the last minute that I couldn’t go,” he explained. “So instead of wasting them I gave them to Osborne.”

  “There was nothing wrong with that,” I said. “Except for one little detail. You didn’t give those tickets to Osborne. You soaked him four bucks for them.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” Sammy said. “On the other hand you could say I saved him the three and a half more he’d’ve had to pay at the box office.”

  “You could say it,” I said, “but you’re the only one who could say it. Why, there’s even a law against profiteering on complimentary tickets. You could go to jail for this.”

  Sammy found this threat merely amusing. “All right, mister,” he said. “Don’t shoot. I’ll come quietly.”

  “You’ve taken four bucks from Osborne just as sure as if you’ve picked his pocket,” I said sternly. “Why don’t you be a good kid and pay him back? He’s having his troubles, too.”

  “Sure, I’d give him his lousy four bucks back,” Sammy said. “Only it’s too late now. I spent it.”

  I didn’t notice him looking down at his shoes as he spoke, but I guess he must have because I found myself staring at them too. They were brand new the way only shoes can be new, stiff and shiny and still in the window. They were a highly polished yellow-brown leather that made up in gloss what it lacked in quality, small neat shoes that came to a point too stylishly narrow for everyday use.

  “So those are the shoes I gave you,” I said.

  “They were on sale down at Hearns,” he said, with no hint of apology. In fact, he seemed really proud of what he had done. He looked down at his shoes, reveling in their newness and added, “You know what, Mr. Manheim, these are the first brand-new shoes I ever had. It’s about time, too. I was fed up with wearing my brother’s hand-me-downs.”

  “Sammy,” I said, “for Christ’s sake, if you needed shoes that bad you could have told me. I’m not exactly Rockefeller, but I’m always good for a little touch if it means going without shoes.”

  “Thanks,” Sammy said, “but you never find me going in for favors. I found out long ago that was a sucker’s trick. It leaves you wide open. This way you’re sore for a while and I don’t owe you nothing.”

  “Don’t owe me anything,” I said. “When are you going to learn two negatives cancel each other? If you don’t owe me nothing that means you do owe me something.”

  “O.K.,” Sammy said agreeably, “so I don’t owe you anything.”

  I gave up. It was like trying to convince Capone to exchange his machine guns for water pistols. I simply became resigned. It was just as if a wildcat were loose in the office and if I happened to see it crouching on the water cooler I would say to myself that new copyreader certainly looks queer. Only Sammy Glick was a much more predatory animal than any wildcat. For a long time I thought that the phenomenon of Sammy Glick was my own little secret, but after a while I began to find that the whole office was afraid of him. I know that sounds wacky. Hardened newspapermen being afraid of a snot-nosed little office boy? But that’s really what it added up to. Even Osborne, the Christ-like rewrite man who always had a good word for everybody, confided to me one day, “I don’t know what it is about that kid, he’s a hard worker and I think he’s good to his mother but he gives me the creeps.”

  And the managing editor who carried on the tradition of hard-boiled journalistic bosses to the best of his loud-mouthed and soulless ability put it this way:

  “I’d kick his little ass for him—if he’d only leave it in one place long enough.”

  “If he gripes you that much why don’t you can him instead of wanting to hand him a raise?” I said heartlessly, though I knew my conscience wouldn’t keep me up nights because there must have been thousands of kids in the city waiting to step into his job and I had seen enough of Sammy not to have to worry about his ever starving to death.

  But the managing editor just smiled and said, “No, I hate his guts just as much as you do, but I’m not running a popularity contest; I’m running a business office and Sammy’s strength as a copy boy is as the strength of ten.”

  “You’ve got me wrong,” I said. “I don’t hate his guts. He’s just another worm you haven’t got the heart to step on. What the hell makes you think he’s big enough to make me waste my time and energy hating him?”

  “If he matters that little, why in hell are you getting your bowels in an uproar?” he asked me, and I had to admit that the logic of that stopped me cold.

  Since Sammy burst into the office over a year before, I had tried every method I could think of to overcome him. I had tried fatherly criticism. I had guided him with the impersonal and professional tolerance the master craftsman shows the apprentice. I had humored him. I had patronized him with sermons on the goodness of man. I had insulted him. I had given him the silent treatment. I had smothered him with kindness. I had used psychology and I had resorted to frenzied ridicule. Once I had even taken a poke at him. And after twelve months of Sammy Glick I was still behind the eight ball. I can’t exactly explain it, but every time I looked at him now I got a crazy helpless feeling, the way you feel in drunken dreams when the Phantom of the Opera is coming after you and the faster you try to get away from him the more you run toward him. I couldn’t understand it. In the first place I hadn’t even figured him out, and in the second place I couldn’t understand why I felt I had to figure out an inconspicuous little copy boy, and in the third place I couldn’t figure out why I gave a damn in the first two places. I know that sounds nuts now but that’s the condition I was in when Sammy was running my tail into the ground.

  But the wear and tear of our relationship was entirely one-sided. Sammy seemed to be absolutely blooming. Without giving an inch in the personal tug of war he was waging with the world, he was coming into maturity. Only it wasn’t what is generally thought of as maturity. It was his own special brand, Sammyglick maturity. No mellowing, no deepening of understanding. Maturity to Sammy merely meant a quickening and a strengthening of the rhythm of behavior that was beginning to disconcert everybody who came in contact with it. Because he seemed to escape all of the doubts, the pimpled sensitivity, the introspection, the mental and physical growing pains of adolescence, he was able to throw off his youth and take on the armor of young manhood with the quick-changing ease of a chorus girl. His alert little ferret face began to take more definite form, the thin neat lips permanently set, the nose growing larger but still straight and sharp, giving the lie to the hook-nosed anti-Semitic cartoons, a nose that teamed up with the quick dark eyes and the tense, lined forehead to give an impression of arrogance and a fierce aggressiveness, which, when you included the determination of the pointed, forward-thrust chin, produced a face that reminded you of an army, full of force, strategy, single will and the kind of courage that boasts of never taking a backward step.

  The first sure sign I had of Sammy’s growing up was when he came to me with the announcement that he now felt himself ready to conduct the paper’s radio column. Of course, the fact that the paper had never had a radio column didn’t seem to discourage him in the least.

  “And just what makes you think you’re prepared to be an expert on matters Marconi?” I said.

  “What made you think you were an expert on the theater?” he said.

  That made me pause.

  “That’s got absolutely nothing to do with it,” I said. “I had plenty of reasons.”

  “Name one,” said Sammy.

  I don’t know why the hell I was letting a twelve-buck-a-week half-pint bulldoze me, but there I was. “Well,
for one thing,” I said, “I always liked the theater. I’ve seen lots of plays.”

  “Well, I’ve listened to the radio plenty too,” Sammy said.

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “Everybody listens to the radio.”

  “That’s why there oughta be a radio column,” Sammy said.

  It struck me funny. Here was this office boy applying for the job of writing a radio column that didn’t exist, and he actually had me on the defensive.

  “Listen,” I said, “do you realize you have one hell of a nerve interrupting me in the middle of my work to ask me a thing like that?”

  “O.K.,” Sammy said, “go ahead and put your own selfish interest ahead of the paper’s good.”

  It made just enough sense to exasperate me into going on. That was getting to be one of Sammy’s favorite tricks. He could go so far that your curiosity was pricked because you wouldn’t believe anybody could get that brazen.

  So instead of simply giving him his walking papers the way I should have, I accepted the challenge. “What are you talking about, the good of the paper?” I said. “What’s the good of the paper got to do with it?”

  “You know the paper needs a radio column,” Sammy said. “But you’re such a dog in the manger you’re afraid it might cut into your column and that’s why you’re against it.”

  “What’s the good of fighting with me about a radio column?” I said. “Everybody knows the old man doesn’t want it because he says why should we plug a setup that’s cutting our advertising.”

  “But millions of people are listening in all day long,” Sammy argued. “That’d mean new readers for the Record. And I’ll bet the column would land us plenty of radio ads. So if you’d put in a good word for me with the boss …”

  “Listen, Sammy,” I said. “That is, if you ever do listen, which I doubt. In the first place, I don’t care about radio columns, and in the second place, there are half a dozen boys I could name in this office I’d give the job to before you, and in the third place, even if you were the radio master mind of the century I’d be damned if I’d help you get it, and in the fourth place—or have you had enough places?”

  “I don’t know,” Sammy said. “I guess if you’ve heard one place you’ve heard them all.”

  Three or four weeks later I was sitting around in Bleeck’s one night with the boys after turning in my column.

  The telephone rang and Henry answered it and said it was for me. “It’s your pal, Sammy Glick,” Henry said.

  “Good evening, young man,” I said, feeling mellow on four or five highballs.

  “It’s a good evening for me all right,” Sammy said. “But I don’t know about you, Mr. Manheim.”

  I didn’t like the tone of that “Mr. Manheim.”

  “What’s up?” I said.

  “Your dinner,” Sammy said, “when you hear what’s happened.”

  For a moment or two it was touch and go as to whether or not I burst a blood vessel right there in front of all my friends.

  “Come on, spill it, you punk,” I said. I was so sore I was talking like a gangster in the movies.

  “The boss says your column is two sticks short,” Sammy said.

  “For Chri’sake I haven’t even finished it,” I said. “I just came down to grab a couple of drinks before wrapping it up. Tell him he can stop worrying. I’ll be right up.”

  “He’s not worried a bit,” Sammy said. “And you don’t have to either. Everything’s under control. I took care of it.”

  “You?” I said. “You?” I repeated. “What do you mean you?” I said stupidly. I knew he had me. I could tell.

  “Sure, Al,” he said, just as if he had always called me Al. “I dashed off a four-inch radio column to fill, and the boss liked it.”

  “Oh, he’s seen it already!” I said. “Then why the hell did you bother to call me? Why the hell don’t you just take over my column? Why the hell …?”

  “I just wanted to help you,” Sammy said simply.

  “Sure,” I said, “Joe Altruist,” and I hung up.

  That night I dreamt about Sammy Glick. I dreamt I was working in my office, minding my own business and peacefully writing my column, when all of a sudden I looked up and screamed. Everybody in the office looked like Sammy Glick. There must have been thirty or forty of them, and every time one of them passed me he’d say, “Hello, Al, I’m the new drama editor”; or “Hello, Al, I’m the new city editor”; or “Hello, Al, allow me to introduce myself, your new publisher, S. Glick,” and, finally, when I couldn’t stand it any more, I started to run, with all the Sammy Glicks behind me and I got into the elevator just in time and heaved a sigh of relief when, so help me God, who do I see driving the elevator but Sammy Glick, and when I finally get out onto the street, sure enough there’s nobody but Sammy Glick waiting for me, thousands of Sammy Glicks all running after me.

  It was a relief to wake up, because I figured that nothing that ever happened between me and Sammy could top that one. From now on Sammy Glick was sure to be an anti-climax and I was saved. That just goes to show you how little I still knew about my friend Glick.

  The pay-off began next morning when the managing editor hovered over my shoulder just after I had started my column.

  “From now on write it thirty lines shorter all the time,” he said in the same tone of voice he’d ask for a stick of gum.

  “What do you mean thirty lines shorter?” I said.

  “I mean,” he explained, “that from now on it should be thirty lines not as long as you’ve been writing it.”

  “This is a little sudden,” I said, “but it’s O.K. by me if you can give me one good reason why this amputation’s necessary.”

  “Listen closely and hold on to your seat,” the city editor said. “From now on we’re using Sammy Glick’s radio column.”

  “You mean Sammy Glick the copy boy?” I said.

  “No, I mean Sammy Glick the radio columnist,” he said. “His stuff looked all right today.”

  “I read it,” I said. “Maybe you’d like to know he copied that first paragraph from Somerset Maugham?”

  “Maybe that’s where you need to go for your stuff,” he said.

  So that’s how Sammy got his start. It was hard to believe, but you didn’t have to pinch yourself to know you weren’t dreaming. All you had to do was turn to the amusement page of the Record, and there we were, side by side, “Down Broadway” by Al Manheim and “Sammy Glick Broadcasting.” I always suspected that Sammy sold the editor that title so his name could be in fatter type than any by-line could possibly be. That may not be one of the things you or I would think of doing but it meant plenty to Sammy.

  The funny part of it was the kid’s stuff wasn’t bad. He was just smart enough never to crib from the same writer twice. He was glib. When it came to wisecracks he rolled his own. I had gone through so many emotions with Sammy that I felt as if I had to have my emotional valves ground but now I was reaching the stage of loathing him so much I was beginning to admire him. Every other copy boy in the place was just a nice guy. At least if you bent over, they’d ask you to stand up and turn around before stabbing you. But Sammy Glick was teaching me something about the world. Of course, I hadn’t found out what made him run, and, lucky for him, I had no idea just where he was running. And if I had, I suppose I might have spent the rest of my life serving time for committing premeditated mayhem. And I suppose there’s no use kidding myself. Somehow Sammy would have capitalized on that as he did everything else. It looked as if Sammy Glick had the drop on this world.

  As a columnist, Sammy had no scruples about printing what he overheard. He always managed to get on the inside with the key secretaries. He had a well-developed talent for squeezing news out of victims by pretending he already had it. He had no qualms about prominently featuring what he knew to be lies and then printing the truth a day or so later in an inconspicuous retraction at the bottom of the column.

  He even found a way of turning thos
e retractions into a good thing. For instance, if some big shot happened to demand a correction, Sammy would call him by some private nickname and say, “Sorry, Jock,” or “Pudge” or “Deac, thanks for the help.” He learned to play all but the most complex and suspicious minds like a harp. He pumped and he promised and he did small favors. He managed to get near the best of them and he picked up much of his hot news from the worst. He overcame the fact that he had absolutely no literary ability whatsoever by inventing a lingo which everyone mistook for a fresh and unique style when it was really plain unadulterated illiteracy. But all of these achievements were overshadowed by one stupendous talent; his ability to blow his own horn. He blew it so loud, so long, and so often, that nobody believed all that sound could possibly emanate from one person and so everyone really began to believe that Sammy Glick’s name was on everyone else’s lips.

  There was the occasion of Sammy’s birthday party which was also (though I always suspected him of tying these together conveniently to make a better story) the anniversary of “Sammy Glick Broadcasting.”

  I hadn’t been on exactly chummy terms with Sammy for quite a time now but one afternoon he came up to me at Bleeck’s and, without taking his ten-cent cigar out of his mouth (this was a new addition to the evolving personality of Sammy Glick), he said, “Hello, Al, can I buy you a drink?”

  I didn’t like the idea of his buying me a drink, so I offered to play him the match game to see who got the check and I lost. There’s no use making myself out a hero about this. I was pretty generally considered the King of the Match Game down at Bleeck’s and I didn’t like the way Sammy was starting to beat me.

  After I finished my drink I started to edge away, but Sammy was too quick for me.

  “Say, Al,” he said, “next Monday is my birthday, and since you sorta gave me my start I thought maybe you’d like to have dinner with me and my girl, at the Algonquin.”

  “Gave you your start!” I said. “I did everything I could to get you canned.”

  “No kidding, Al,” he said, just letting that roll off him. “I know birthday parties are old-fashioned, but I want you with us at dinner Monday night.”