“Good morning, Sam,” the cashier replied.
“How are we doing?” he asked.
She looked down at her sheet. “Not bad. Seventy admissions.” She looked at him. “The pickets didn’t show this morning.”
He looked up and down the street. “Maybe it’s too hot for them.”
“It seems strange without them,” she said. “They always brought me coffee from the store on the corner.”
He looked down the street again. She was right. The pickets had become a fact of life, and the theater entrance seemed naked without their red and white painted signs. “I’ll check on them when I call downtown with the morning figures,” he said.
“Don’t take too long. I’ve been in this booth since nine thirty and I need some relief.”
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he promised.
Old Eddie, the ticket taker at the door, smiled at him. “Good morning, Mr. Benjamin. Seventy tickets this morning.” His voice was as pleased as if he owned the theater.
“Morning, Eddie.” He went on in. The soothing dark flowed over him and he heard the voices coming from the screen.
The feature was on. He took one look and stopped, entranced. This was his favorite scene.
The little Jewish man with the long, flowing beard and wide, black, flopping hat walked up to the taxicab parked at the curb and in Yiddish asked directions to the synagogue.
James Cagney turned his map-of-Ireland face to the man and, in equally perfect Yiddish, gave him directions. An appreciative murmur of laughter came from the audience. Sam laughed with them.
Sam went up the steps toward the balcony. The manager’s office was on a small landing about halfway up. He opened the door and went inside.
The pimply faced young man, the boss’s second cousin, now the assistant manager, looked up at him. “Good morning, Sam.”
“Good morning, Eli. Anything in the mail?”
“The usual,” Eli said in a bored voice. “Just the press books for next week’s pictures. A couple of bills. The ice company won’t deliver tomorrow unless we pay up. I told them you would call them.”
“How many did they bring in this morning?”
“Four cakes.”
“We’ll need more before the day is out if this heat keeps up,” Sam said. “You go down and relieve Marge. I’d better call them now.”
He picked up the telephone and got the manager of the ice company. They agreed to send over two more cakes of ice at four o’clock in the afternoon after he promised to pay them something on account.
He put down the telephone and looked at the press book for next week’s feature. It was an MGM picture and the book was elaborate. They always did the best job. They had the best of everything. Stars, stories, directors. He began to turn the pages wondering how many accessories and lobby cards the front office would send him. There were always stingy with supplies even if they only rented them from National Screen instead of buying them as the downtown theaters did. He heard the door open behind him and turned around.
It was Marge. She looked at him reproachfully. “You didn’t even call last night.”
“It was late,” he said. “I didn’t get out of here until after one o’clock in the morning. I thought you’d be asleep.”
“I told you I would wait up.”
He began to feel annoyed. That was the trouble with being nice to them. Bang them twice and they began to feel that they owned you. “I was tired,” he said.
She closed the door carefully behind her. “Are you still tired?”
He smiled suddenly. “Not that tired.”
She turned the key in the lock and came toward him. She was a big girl, almost a head taller than he. He liked big girls and she was big everywhere. Big tits. Big ass.
He got to his feet and she came into his arms. She leaned back against the desk so that she would not tower over him as they kissed. His fingers fumbled at the buttons of her blouse.
She laughed lightly, sure of herself now. Quickly she undid her blouse and the big breasts heavy in their brassiere, pushed forward. He fumbled with the catch and uncovered them. With an almost animal cry he buried his face against them.
She held his head tightly against her with one hand and with the other she pulled open the buttons of his trousers. He sprang swollen into her hand, moistening her with his lubricious fluid.
“Do you have something to put on?” she whispered.
He stared at her. “Here? I didn’t expect—”
She pulled her hand back as if she had touched a hot poker. “We better stop then,” she said. “I can’t take any chances. It’s too close to my period and that’s the most dangerous time.”
“Oh Christ!” He was angry. “You’re not going to stop now. I’ll pull out before I come.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“I don’t want to have a baby,” she said, dropping her skirt and stepping out of it. She stood there a moment, looking around. “Where are we going to do it?”
She was right. There wasn’t even enough room in the small office to stretch out on the floor. “Turn around,” he said, roughly placing her hands on the desk, so that she was half bent over.
He let his trousers fall around his ankles and entered her from behind, his arms reaching around her, cupping and holding her breasts.
“Oh God! You’re going right through me!” she cried.
He held her tightly, thrusting himself against her. He went soaring off into a world all his own. Filled with tremendous breasts and buttocks and lubricious cunts. He closed his eyes.
At first the roar seemed to be in the distance, almost a part of their coupling, then the explosion hit and the force threw them back against the wall of the office and to the floor.
The desk upended and the chair splintered in the corner. He lay there for a moment, gasping for breath, her weight full on him. Then he moved.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I think so,” she said hesitantly. “What happened?”
He knew the answer instinctively, almost before he heard the cries from the theater. He pushed her away and got to his feet, pulling up his trousers. Now he knew why the pickets didn’t show up this morning. “Better get dressed,” he said. “I think the theater’s been bombed.”
He was out of the office and down the staircase before she could answer. The glass at the back of the lobby was shattered. Old Eddie was standing next to a twisted door, blood streaming from a cut on his forehead.
“I saw them, Mr. Benjamin,” he cried. “They threw it from a car. A black car that stopped in front of the theater.”
Sam looked out. The lobby was destroyed and almost impassable with broken glass. A wave of people came from inside the theater. They pushed against him. “Eddie, open the side doors,” he said. “Okay, folks,” he shouted. “Nothing to worry about. You’ll all get refunds.”
The side doors swung open, spilling the white daylight into the theater. Fortunately there was no panic.
The customers filed out slowly. He went over to Eddie. “Where’s Eli?”
“I haven’t seen him,” the old man replied.
Suddenly a sick feeling came over Sam. He turned and ran through the broken glass in the lobby. The young man was still in the box office. That is, what was left of him. Apparently the box office had taken the full brunt of the bomb.
In the distance he heard the sirens of the fire engines. It was just luck that it wasn’t he who was in the booth. Pure blind fucking luck.
CHAPTER FIVE
He sat there uncomfortably in the back of his father’s tailor shop off Southern Boulevard as the old man went about the business of closing up for the evening. Every now and then his father would glance at him and shake his head, murmuring, “What will I tell your mother?”
He was thirty-five years old then and his parents still had the ability to make him feel a child. That he was an assistant manager of the Roxy Theater downtown didn’t ma
tter. Nor did it matter that his salary was ninety dollars a week, more than anyone else in the neighborhood. All that mattered was his latest mishegoss.
His father turned the final key and they stood outside in the street. “Button up,” his father said. “The wind will give you your death.”
Sam looked at the bent old man, then buttoned his coat. They began walking along the street toward the apartment.
His father stopped him suddenly and looked up into his face. “I didn’t say anything, did I, when you said you didn’t want to be a lawyer after all the money we spent putting you through college, did I?”
Sam shook his head.
“When your mother hollered, didn’t I say, let him? He’s a man, he must find his own way? Even when you went to work in that crazy business, the movies, did I say no? I said good luck to him. If it makes him happy, good luck.”
Sam didn’t answer.
“When you didn’t want to get married to that Greengrass girl, did I fight with you, even if her rich father said he would give you twenty thousand dollars to open your own law office? No. I said an American boy has a right to decide for himself who he wants to marry. As long as he don’t come home with a shiksa, it’s okay. This is not the old country.”
Sam held his tongue.
“But this is too much,” his father said. “This I can’t give my okay to. This I can’t say to your mother: let him. This is stupid.”
They were at the apartment house now and went inside. The hallway was filled with the many odors of his youth. It was Friday night. Chicken soup. They began to climb the stairs to the apartment.
“It isn’t as if you were a kid. You don’t have to go. Before the draft gets to you, you’ll be overage.”
“That’s just it, Pa,” Sam said. “If I don’t get in now, it’ll be too late. They’ll never take me.”
“Oho, and that will be such a tragedy?” his father said, stopping on a landing and poking him in the chest to emphasize his words. “And what will you be missing? A chance to get your head shot off or maybe worse? Just because we named you Samuel? Leave the fighting to the goyim. They’re good at it. You stay home where you belong and mind your business.”
“That’s just it, Pa,” he said. “I am a Jew and this is my business. If we’re not the first to want to stop Hitler, who else is there to do it for us?”
“But your job at the Roxy? How do you know they’ll keep it for you after the war?”
“It doesn’t matter, Pa,” he said. “I was about ready to quit anyway.”
They reached the apartment door. His father took out his key. Before opening the door, he turned to Sam. “Does this mean you’ll have to give back the Roxy pass?”
Sam smiled. It all came down to that. The one thing his mother had to lord it over the neighbors was the right to get into the Roxy for nothing anytime she wanted. “I don’t think so, Pa,” he said. “I’ll make arrangements to take care of it.”
***
He wanted war, he got it. He didn’t have to wait until they reached the battlefields of Europe. For him it began his third day of basic training at Fort Bragg.
It was six o’clock in the morning and they had been formed up in the freezing wet rain of the early spring morning for almost an hour. Finally they were dismissed for breakfast. They broke ranks and began to hurry through the rain to the mess hall. About to go in he was pushed aside.
“Move, Jew boy,” the cracker voice said in his ear. “It’s enough we’re goin’ to fight your war for you. Let us in for breakfast.”
He stopped, blocking the doorway, and turned to look at the man who had spoken. There were three GI’s behind him. He recognized the look on their faces. He hadn’t spent his life in the East Bronx for nothing. “Which one of you said that?” he asked in a tight voice.
They glanced at each other and the tallest pushed forward. His voice was an icy challenge. “I did, Jew boy.” He never finished speaking.
Sam never gave him a chance. He jerked his knee into the soldier’s balls. The GI gasped and bent forward, clutching at himself. Sam clasped his two hands together in a clenched, joined mallet and brought them viciously down on the soldier’s neck just behind his ear. The man pitched forward and again Sam brought up his knee, catching him in the chest. The soldier looped backward into the mud and lay there face up, out cold.
It happened so quickly the others were still standing there watching. Sam turned to them. “Anybody else want to do my fighting for me?”
“What’s holding up this damned line?” an authoritative voice shouted.
They snapped to attention as a lieutenant came toward them. He stopped and looked down at the fallen soldier.
“What the hell’s goin’ on here?”
They were silent, still at attention.
“At ease,” he snapped. “What happened?”
No one spoke up. He turned to Sam. “You. What happened?”
Sam met his gaze. “He slipped on the step, sir. I think he hit his head against it.”
By now the GI on the ground was beginning to move. His friends went to help him. The lieutenant looked at them. “Get him down to the dispensary,” he said. He turned back to Sam. “What’s your name, soldier?”
“Benjamin, sir. Samuel Benjamin.”
“You report to me in thirty minutes,” he said, swiveling on his heel and leaving before they had a chance to salute again.
A half hour later Sam was standing in front of his desk. “At ease, soldier,” the lieutenant said.
Sam relaxed.
“Where did you learn to fight like that?”
Sam looked down at him. “Sir, I was brought up in a tough neighborhood.”
The officer looked at the papers on his desk. “What are you doing out there with those rednecks? Why didn’t you put in for OCS? According to your Form 20 you’ve got all the qualifications.”
“Sir, I thought this was the quickest way to fight Germans.”
The lieutenant nodded. He looked down at the papers again, then back up at Sam. “You’re a fucking idiot,” he said. He made a few notes on the sheet of paper in front of him, then stamped it and pushed it over to Sam. “Sign that.”
Sam looked at him. “What is it?”
“I’m approving your request for Officer’s Training,” the lieutenant said. “You don’t think I’d send you back out there after what just happened? Those rednecks’ll kill you long before you ever get to fight Germans.”
In less than two hours Sam was on a bus leaving camp. He felt a sense of relief. Three days in the Army had convinced him. Being a private was not the thing to be.
A little more than three months later he came home on a pass. The second lieutenant’s gold bars gleamed on his tailored uniform.
His mother took one look at him and burst into tears. “What have they done to you?” she cried. “You’re so thin.”
He was hard and chunky and solid muscle. He weighed one hundred and seventy pounds, the least he had weighed since he was twenty years old. And the least he would ever weigh in his lifetime.
He spent three years overseas and never saw a German, never carried a gun, never fired a shot. Somewhere along the line they had found out he knew how to run a projector. And he spent the entire war showing films to battle-weary troops in rest and recreation areas.
CHAPTER SIX
“So you’re a hero,” his father said, pulling down the lever on the big pressing machine and letting a cloud of steam escape over the trousers blocked on it. “So what good is it? You ain’t got a job.”
Sam sat there uncomfortably, looking at his father. The old man’s face was red with heat. “I’m not a hero,” he said.
“With all those ribbons on your jacket, you’re a hero.” There was finality in his voice that ended the argument.
Sam gave it up. He had explained too many times they were only service ribbons that denoted various theaters of the war. North Africa, England, Sicily, Italy, France. Their colors shone brightly on his
chest.
“First we got to get you looking good again,” his father said. “You look terrible.”
“I’ll be all right once I catch up on my sleep,” Sam said.
“You’ll never catch up.” The old man took the pants from the press and put them on a hanger. “Not until you stop running around every night with those shiksas. You think I don’t know why you don’t want to come home to live when we have your room all nice and fixed up for you? No, you’d rather live in that little room of your own downtown where the only thing you got to look out on is traffic and noise.”
“It’s not a little room, Pa, it’s an apartment.”
“You call it an apartment,” his father said. “I call it a closet.” He took a jacket from the hanger and put it on the press and gave it a burst of steam as he looked up at the clock. “That damn schwartzer,” he swore. “Eleven o’clock already and still he’s not here. And then they wonder why they can’t keep a job. Treat them good and they shit all over you.”
He left the press open and walked to the front door and looked out. He came back to Sam. “He’s not even on the street yet.” He slammed down the press angrily. “So what are you going to do?” he asked. “You won’t get a job, your old job at the Roxy you don’t want, you won’t come home to live, you’re breaking your mother’s heart. You’re almost forty years old, you’re not a baby anymore, what do you want?”
“I’m tired of working for someone else,” Sam replied. “I’m looking to buy my own theater.”
“Oho, a fluchenshiesser!” His father stopped the press and looked at him. “A big shot I got for a son. Tell me, big shot, what are you going to use for money?”
“I’ve got some money saved up,” Sam said.
“You got some money?” the old asked in a doubtful voice. “How much?”
“About ten thousand dollars,” Sam said grudgingly.
“Ten thousand dollars?” The press hung open, spouting steam as the old man forgot to close the value. Sam could see his father was impressed. “Where did you get that much money? You didn’t do anything they’ll put you in jail for?”
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