What Makes Sammy Run?

by Budd Schulberg

She looked up at me, almost shyly, and grinned. “Or I’d be calling you.”

  That was all it needed and her lips seemed to be there waiting and I had a flash of that first moment we danced together when she had almost seemed to take the lead. It was the same struggle now, the impulses controlled so long finally pouring out in unexpected violence, and then suddenly she relaxed. “Feminine as hell,” I could remember her saying, and I could feel myself holding her, feel her body accept my hands.

  Then we were in the bedroom and I was fumbling impatiently with her dress but she stopped me, saying, “Don’t, Al. Let me do it. I’ll be right back.”

  I didn’t understand then, but I did a minute later when she returned, her body trim and cool and confident.

  “Hello,” she said in a half-whisper and we looked at each other as she switched off the main lights.

  There is always that fear of anti-climax, that it won’t click, but from the first moment both of us knew that was something we would never have to worry about. It was the way she went at a script, or fought for the Guild or played tennis.

  Then she stretched to turn on the lamp near the bed.

  “Hello,” I answered and we both smiled, our new, intimate smile. She reached over and laid her hand on my shoulder affectionately. Sammy may go through every girl in Hollywood, I thought, but this is another pleasure he will never know, the give-and-take companionship, the overtones. Slip ’em a lay, I could hear him saying. Sure, I get in three times a week, gratis.

  We must have been lying there a long time, for the electric lights had become part of the night before and the dawn was a pale blue canopy over our window.

  “Kit,” I said. “Maybe you were right. Maybe I would be calling you by the time I reached Needles. So why don’t you save us both a lot of time by coming along with me? We’ll get married when we get in.”

  She hesitated a long time, but I could tell she wasn’t thinking it over, just trying to find the words to let me down easy.

  “Al,” she said, “you could stay here and let me support you until this thing blew over, but you’d be miserable. You wouldn’t feel you had a place. That’s the way I’d feel if I left here now.”

  “But God knows you could find plenty to do around New York.”

  “Yes, but I’ve spent four years trying to be a screen writer and I’m just beginning to learn how to be a good one. Now that Jefferson is clicking, I’m getting assignments that really give me a chance to do something.”

  We were as much apart now as if a bundling board had been there between us. “This is what I was afraid of,” she said. “Starting something we can’t finish. I thought you’d understand.”

  “I wasn’t going to,” I said, “but, oh, hell, if you were just willing to trail me around and wait for me to come home for supper—I suppose that wouldn’t be you any more.”

  She clasped her hands in back of her head thoughtfully.

  “I’m going to miss you,” she said.

  I sat there in the diner looking out at the pink-brown desert and finishing my coffee in peace when the steward handed me a Los Angeles paper.

  I had caught the Hollywood habit of opening it straight to the film section. Sammy’s picture was in the lead column, denying the rumor that he and Rita Royce were secretly married. “I respect Miss Royce tremendously,” Sammy was quoted, “and we seem to have a great many mutual interests, such as the new play I’m writing for her.” The words read like an old refrain: “But we’re just good friends, very good friends.”

  And then I came to what Sammy would call the topperoo.

  Mr. Glick, the column cooed, is the young miracle man who has just signed a writer-producer contract with World-Wide. “Last night on the phone he would only laugh modestly when I asked him to confirm my tip-off from reliable inside sources that this new contract will begin at $2000 a week.”

  I could just imagine that modest laughter. Sammy could only have one kind of laugh for $2000 a week and I was glad I didn’t have to be around to hear it.

  I sat on the observation platform thinking of the evening when two thousand dollars a week had only been a terrible passion sizzling in his belly and it was consoling just to lean back and let the distance between us widen tie by tie. I listened to the sound of the wheels carrying on their endless conversation with the tracks. At first their rapid chatter sounded like nothing but metallic and monotonous double-talk. But later, as my ear became accustomed to their language, I realized that they were asking each other, over and over again, What Makes Sammy Run? What makes Sammy run what makes sammy run what makes sammy runwhatmakessammyrun …

  CHAPTER 9

  It may sound like sour grapes but it was good to get Hollywood and Sammy Glick behind me. The first day I hit New York I must have walked a couple of hundred blocks. It felt great even though I was broke and New York can be a lonely and ugly town for the guys without money. But I ran into some of the old gang right away, guys who were nicer to you when you needed it than when you didn’t, and pretty soon I was back in the old groove, pounding it out for the Record again, beginning to work Hollywood out of my system.

  I mean I was able to look at a guy without wondering whether he was a five- or a seventy-five-hundred man, and I could sit back in a movie and enjoy my fifty-five-cent dream without torturing myself with the knowledge that the best scene in the picture had gone the way of all censors or that the writing which was credited to a famous Broadway playwright because he had a sole screenplay credit clause in his contract was really the work of half a dozen busy little B-writers.

  But best of all I congratulated myself on getting Sammy Glick out of my life, or rather, getting myself out of his. Once in a while I couldn’t help reading about him, of course; one of the fan mags would name him on its list of Hollywood’s Ten Most Eligible Bachelors, or he was off to Hawaii for a much-needed rest, and I caught myself searching for his name in the columns from time to time, but on the whole I was able to conduct my life as if he had never been a part of it, settling down with the comforting thought that he would never be again.

  This thought persisted for almost four weeks. Then one night some of us were sitting around the office a trifle on the alcohol side and the conversation took a sudden turn for Sammy Glick. One of the boys had just seen a picture of his, Touchdown, Irish! a drama of Notre Dame’s Four Horsemen, with exactly the same plot as Hold ’em, Yale! Sammy’s football picture of the season before, and of course we began to swap anecdotes of his days on the Record, all told with a sense of indignation, humor and envy. And then we got to arguing, God knows why, about where he came from. There were votes for the Bronx and Washington Heights and the Lower East Side and the usual bets were made. We wondered how we could settle it, and then I had a brainstorm. Didn’t we used to keep a file on all our employees?

  Nobody knew, of course, so I yelled across to Osborne on the copy desk, “Hey, Oz, don’t we keep some sort of file on all the guys that work here?” and Osborne wasn’t sure, he had only been on the Record a couple centuries, and I could hear the question running through the room, “Hey, Jack, we got a personnel filing system in the joint?” and Jack saying he had heard of something like that, but he wouldn’t know where it was.

  We finally found a copy boy who had actually seen the file and he guided me to a remote part of the building where I was left to continue my quest for Sammy Glick. For this was part of the quest, though I was in no condition to realize it then as I thumbed foggily through the yellowing cards, thinking I was just ending a pointless, drunken argument when I was really stumbling onto the terrible mysteries of the child Sammy.

  The cards shuffled slowly through my fingers, Gang, Gifford, Glennon, and then I reached Golden and wondered how I had missed Glick so I went back more slowly and then I discovered why. I had hardly been reading the names, mostly searching for that one quick syllable and the cards went Glennon, Glessner, Glickstein, only this time it registered and I yanked the card out, vaguely annoyed with myself at the exc
itement that came with it.

  NAME…….SAMUEL GLICKSTEIN

  OCCUPATION…….Copy Boy

  ADDRESS…….136 Rivington St

  LAST OCCUPATION …….Western Union messenger

  PHONE…….none

  AGE…….17

  HT…….5’7”

  WEIGHT…….126 lbs.

  PARENTS’ NAME…….Mrs. Max Glickstein

  ADDRESS…….Same as above

  I wondered when he had dropped that “stein” from around his neck. Something that Sammy once said about his father came back to me and I wondered what had happened to Max. I thought, just for the hell of it, of copying off the card, but that was too much trouble so I just slipped it into my pocket.

  It seems to be a human failing to accumulate a great many things in our pockets, all of them absolutely useless, but which we transfer conscientiously from suit to suit. That is how I happened to reach into my pocket the following Sunday and find the card still with me. Now, psychologists may say that I purposely brought the card with me that Sunday because of a subconscious determination to trace Sammy back to his roots. And the psychologists may even be right. It is very hard to say. All I know is that when I went strolling through Central Park that morning my only conscious purpose was to watch the ducks and feed the pigeons and get a little air, and that it was a genuine surprise to find SAMUEL GLICK-STEIN, Copy Boy, 17, in my hand when I reached for a cigarette. And when I turned casually out of the park and began strolling down Fifth Avenue, it was without the slightest knowledge of where I was heading.

  But by the time I had walked down to 38th Street I was beginning to suspect. I thought of that scrapbook I had started. It was like putting a jigsaw puzzle together and some of the pieces were still missing. I was down to 34th Street, my mind trailing a ghost, the swift, fresh phantom of a pasty-faced copy boy, my body following foolishly after my mind.

  Half an hour later I was walking into the world of his childhood, a foreign world of clotheslines, firetraps, pushcarts and pinch-faced children that stretches for too many blocks along the East River. I walked down Avenue A, down Allen, down Rivington, wondering at the irony of the fascist charge that the Jews have cornered the wealth of America; for here where there are more Jews than anywhere else in the world, millions of them are crowded into these ghetto streets with the early American names.

  The Glicksteins lived between a synagogue and a fish store, in a tenement laced with corroded fire escapes and sagging wash-lines. It looked as if one healthy gust of wind would send its tired bricks tumbling down into the narrow street. The hallway gave off a warm, sweet and infinitely unpleasant odor of age, of decay, of too many uncleaned kitchens too close together. I found the name Glickstein on the mailbox, pressed the buzzer for 4C and started up the moldy wooden staircase that groaned protestingly as I climbed to the top floor.

  A frail round-shouldered young man with sick skin opened the door as far as the safety-latch would permit. He looked suspiciously at me through the crack.

  “Yes?”

  Suddenly I was overwhelmed with the ridiculousness of this visit. I had an impulse to turn and hurry off. But it was too late. I had already begun to explain who I was, why I had come. As if I knew, as if I could.

  “My name is Manheim,” I faltered. “I … I knew … I’m a friend of Sammy Glick’s from Hollywood.”

  “From Sammele!” I heard a woman’s voice cry out. “Israel, quick, open up the door!”

  As I entered, she rose from her seat at the window. The window was closed, so she could not have been sitting there for the air. After all these years she must have been still curious about what was going on down there in the street. The indoor complexion of her emaciated, wrinkled face was emphasized by the black lace shawl which she wore, peasant-fashion, over her head. My appearance seemed to frighten her, for she hurried over to me, looking up into my face with an anxiety that made me uncomfortable.

  “Oi weh’s mir, my little Sammele! Something has happened to him! Tell me, mister, please. He sent you to tell me, maybe?”

  “No, no, Mrs. Glickstein,” I said, wondering what had made me walk into this. “There’s nothing wrong with Sammy, absolutely nothing, he’s getting along fine.”

  “Please, I’m his momma—so if something’s wrong with my Sammele I want I should know.”

  “Believe me, Mrs. Glickstein,” I had to reassure her. “That’s not why I came. Sammy couldn’t be better.”

  “Ach,” she sighed, slowly regaining her composure. “Excuse me, please. When I hear you come from Sammele I get so excited …”

  “We haven’t heard from Sammy in so long that Momma’s been worried about him,” the sallow-faced Israel explained.

  “But Sammele’s a good boy,” Mrs. Glickstein added hastily. “Every month regular comes his check in the mail. Only he is all the time so busy he never has time for writing.”

  She looked at me and her face creased into the deeper wrinkles of a smile. “So maybe my son sent you, you should tell me something from him?”

  Here I go again, I thought. Sammy’s trusted friend bringing the message of devotion from the faithful son. Why do I always have to be defending the bastard?

  “He said to be sure and tell you how well he’s feeling,” I heard myself saying. “He said that even if he hasn’t much time to write he wants you to know he is always thinking of you.”

  In her excitement she had forgotten her customary hospitality.

  “This is his brother,” she said. “Israel.” Israel nodded like an aged Jew in prayer. He was like an old, bent man with a young face. “Izzy, go in the kitchen and make some tea, like a good boy.”

  I watched Israel as he quietly obeyed his mother’s orders. If physical similarity had anything to do with resemblance, he and Sammy would have looked very much alike. But I would never have recognized them as brothers, for Israel’s face seemed to reflect despair and bitterness and the gentleness of resignation, and it was strange to see how these qualities had molded his face to one so different from the forward thrust of Sammy’s.

  The small front room was cluttered with ugly furniture. The warm, sticky smell I had noticed in the hallway downstairs was only the faint essence of the odor that hung over this flat, the smell of rotting woodwork and too much living in one place.

  The street below vibrated with the harsh, raw noises of kids yelling at each other in a stoop-ball game, merchants driving their hard bargains, women shouting their gossip from stoop to stoop, radios turned up as loud as possible to drown each other out, automobile horns honk-honking to remind everybody that their marketplace, their playground, their social center, their arena, was still a street.

  Mrs. Glickstein, sensitive with the suffering of thousands of years, guessed what I was thinking.

  “Sammele wants we should move uptown,” she explained, “but it is better here with the synagogue right next door, so I don’t have to do no walking, and the Settlement House where Izzy works right around the corner, and everybody on the block I am such good friends with like in the old country.”

  Israel brought in the tea, in steaming glasses, and some salami and yellow bread. Mrs. Glickstein and Israel poured their tea into saucers and sucked it through the cubes of sugar they held between their teeth.

  Then she ceremoniously lifted a picture from the wall. It was a group photograph captioned Lower Grades, P.S. 15. “See if you can tell which one is him?” Mrs. Glickstein challenged me playfully.

  I looked across the rows of serious little faces, wondering whether I could pick him out. It was a cinch. My finger went right to him. He was on the left end of the first row, standing a little closer to the camera than anybody else. It looked weird to see that same intense ferret face on this little body in short pants and long black stockings wrinkled over the knees. “That’s him,” I said.

  “And also here,” Mrs. Glickstein said mischievously, pointing to the opposite side of the same row. I looked more closely. By God, there he was again, o
nly this time his face was distorted in a big grin. “He ran around behind the bleachers so he should beat the camera,” Mrs. Glickstein explained.

  I studied this second image. I had seen that same exultant look on his face before. The moment he watched his name flash on the screen for the first time, the night of his dramatic triumph when the flashlights flared around him and Rita Royce. His face told you that this was a triumph too. When the picture was posted on the school bulletin board Sammy’s achievement must have monopolized the comment, and the triumphant sneer on that dark little puss revealed that this had already become his goal.

  Mrs. Glickstein wanted me to tell her how much Sammy weighed and whether he was any taller and if he were a good boy and had he met any nice Jewish girls. And she went on talking about what a fine baby he had been and what a smart, hardworking boy, distilling the story of his youth with the unconscious censorship of a mother’s pride. In English she sounded awkward and ignorant, but when she discovered I understood Yiddish (though I had practically forgotten how to speak it) she became articulate with that mysterious sense of poetry all peasants seem to have.

  All the time we talked, Israel sat there hardly saying a word, noisily sipping his tea or chewing on the dry bread. But the twisted way he smiled at his mother’s naive account of her little Sammele, an occasional comment he could not resist, gave him away. When Mrs. Glickstein boasted of the regularity with which Sammy’s check arrived every week, Israel nodded scornfully, mumbled grimly, “Sure, sure, he’s very thoughtful.” I watched him more and more as Mrs. Glickstein talked, wondering how long this hate for Sammy had been fermenting. He was the one to talk, I thought, this was my man.

  At sundown we heard a new sound, a singsong chant of many low voices in weird cacophony. The Orthodox Jews were beginning their evening prayers in the synagogue next door. Israel rose to join them. I said I would like to come along. He nodded, flustered and pleased.

  When I left, Mrs. Glickstein blessed me again, asked me to look after her little boy, and pressed a paper bag into my hand. “Strudel,” she said, “still hot. I made it today. Sammele used to say I made the best strudel in the whole world.”