by Jim Thompson
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?”
17
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 CAPTAIN 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.”
18
It was a weird, wild and wonderful world that I had walked into, the luxury hotel life of the Roaring Twenties. It was a world which typified rugged individualism at its best—or worst, a world whose urbane countenance revealed nothing of the seething and sinister turmoil of its innards, a world whose one rule was that you did nothing you could not get away with.
There was no pity in that world. The usual laws governing rewards and punishments did not obtain. It was not what you did that mattered, but how you did it.
Nominally, there were strictly enforced rules against such things as getting drunk on duty, intimacy with lady guests and forcing tips from the stingy. But the management could have knowledge that you were guilty of all those crimes, and as long as you did them in such a way as not to give rise to complaints or disturb the routine of the hotel, nothing would be done. Rather, you would be regarded as a boy who knew his way around and was on his toes.
And this attitude, I suppose, was not nearly so strange as it seems.
It was the bellboy who was always in the closest contact with this hurly-burly world, a world always populated by strangers of unknown background and unpredictable behavior. Alone and on his own, with no one to turn to for advice or help, he had to please and appease those strangers: the eccentric, the belligerent, the morbidly depressed. He had to spot the potential suicide and soothe the fighting drunk and satisfy the whims of those who were determined not to be satisfied. And always, no matter how he felt, he had to do those things swiftly and unobtrusively.
Briefly, he had to be nervy and quick-thinking. He had to be adequate to any emergency. And a boy who was inadequate in his own emergencies was also apt to be so in those concerning the hotel. In a word, he wasn’t “sharp.” He didn’t “know his way around,” and thus, axiomatically, did not belong around.
In the indictments lodged against bellboys in the hotel “growler,” the rough equivalent of a ship’s log, one word appeared over and over—caught. A boy was fired or fined or turned over to the police because he had been caught in an offense, not merely because he had committed one.
There was no day off in the hotel world. The night shift worked seven days a week, from eleven at night until seven in the morning. The day shifts were also on the job seven days, but their hours were adjusted to the then universal long-day, short-day of the hotel world. One of the two shifts came on at seven in the morning, quit at noon, returned at six and worked until eleven at night. The
following day it came to work at noon and quit at six P.M., the other shift working the double-watch long-day.
One night, when there was an unexpected flurry of business, a day boy was held over onto the night shift. It was his second holdover of the day, and he had been on duty since seven in the morning. So, after the business had been taken care of, he claimed the “late” boy’s privilege of a room, and fell exhausted into bed.
Unfortunately, he had not rid himself of his cigarette before going to sleep. When he awakened a couple of hours later he was on the point of being incinerated and asphyxiated. Almost strangled, he got the windows open. Then he dragged the mattress and bedclothes into the bathroom and put them under the shower.
Scorched, but not seriously harmed, he got the fire out. But the expensive blankets, spread and box-mattress were ruined. Being caught in a mess like this would bring down the direst punishment which the hotel could devise.
The boy considered every angle of the seemingly hopeless situation. Then, he went downstairs, confessed his crime to the night clerk, and proposed a way of extricating himself with honor and profit. All he needed, he said, was the use of the emergency key (used in opening doors locked from the inside) and the assistance of one of the lobby porters.
Being exceedingly sharp himself, the night clerk flatly refused. Under no circumstances would he involve himself in the matter.
“I’m going into the coffee shop for a bite to eat,” he said. “And I had better not hear of you using the emergency key or the porters while I am gone.”
“I understand,” the boy nodded. “I see what you mean.”
Now, one of the more or less regular residents of the hotel was a more-than-regular drinker, a man who passed out early and stayed passed out. It was his misfortune to be a guest of the hotel on this particular night.