by Max Shulman
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Sleep till Noon
A Novel
Max Shulman
AMENDED DEDICATION
The first edition of this book was dedicated to Dan, Bud, Pete, and Nick. This requires a word of explanation.
At the time the first edition went to press my wife and I had three sons—Dan, Bud, and Pete. We were expecting a fourth child who, we assumed, of course, would be a boy, and for whom we had chosen the name Nick. Hence the dedication.
As it turned out, however, the fourth child was a girl. “Well,” I said to my wife, “we will have to call her Nick.”
“We will not,” replied my wife with a rush of feeling.
So we called her Martha, and this edition is dedicated to Dan, Bud, Pete, and Martha.
Sorry, Nick.
CHAPTER 1
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Four shots ripped into my groin, and I was off on the biggest adventure of my life …
But first let me tell you a little about myself. My name is Harry Riddle, and I am a sensitive, retiring person. Even as a boy this was true. I remember numerous times when the neighborhood children would say to me, “Come on, Harry. We’re going out and hold up a filling station,” and I would answer, not unkindly, “No, thanks, fellows. I’m going to stay home and read.”
I suppose I missed a great deal by not participating in these normal activities of childhood. Certainly I should have been better prepared for the hurly-burly of later life. But somehow I could not find it in myself to join my young colleagues in their robust games. Occasionally I would try. Once, I recall, I let myself be persuaded to accompany my friends on a purse-snatching expedition. I seized the handbag of an elderly lady, but she tripped me with her crutch and held me by the collar until the police came—a matter of forty minutes.
On that occasion, I remember, my mother knocked me insensible. My father said nothing, but I could tell he was displeased.
My father and I are a great deal alike, he, too, being a sensitive, retiring person. He, in fact, retired in 1924, a victim of technological unemployment. Dad, as I like to call him, is a capmaker by profession. When men unaccountably stopped wearing caps after the Coolidge election, he was thrown out of work and has not worked since. He has not, however, lost hope that this current hat fad will pass.
Dad and I are, as I said, a great deal alike, but Mother (my mother) is a horse of a different color, she should excuse the expression. She is a hale, extroverted woman, given to bursts of temper. Many is the time Dad and I have fled, laughing, from the house with great, running welts on the backs of our heads.
Mother always carried a darning egg in the toe of a long black stocking, and she would hit us with it when she grew angry. A short while ago, when I was visiting her, I twitted her good-naturedly about the darning egg, and she hit me with it again. They had to take stitches.
It must not be supposed that my home was a scene of continual violence. No indeed. At night, when Mother went downtown to scrub floors, Dad and I would sit and have long, tranquil discussions. Even as a boy my thoughts were of a cosmic nature. Whither are we drifting? I would wonder. What is the world coming to? Is there hope for mankind? What can I best do to fulfill my destiny as an American and a human being? All these questions would tumble from my lips as Dad listened patiently, rocking back and forth in his chair. (The chair, incidentally, was not a rocker; its two front legs were missing.) “What is the answer?” I would demand. “What must I do?”
“You must do like I tell ya,” he would reply. His speech was rough; he had had no education except in what I like to call the School of Hard Knocks. “Get rich, boy,” he would say, filling his corncob pipe with cigarette butts I had collected for him during the day. “Get rich, boy. Then sleep till noon and screw ’em all.”
I have often thought of having a small volume of Dad’s aphorisms printed. When good vellum is available again, perhaps I shall.
Far into the night Dad would speak to me, and I would listen intently, grasping, in spite of my tender years, the full import of his wise advice. When Dad told me to get rich, he meant that I should accumulate large sums of money. Boy though I was, I understood that.
We would talk and talk until Dad dozed off and toppled from his chair. I would carry him to his pallet and tuck him in. Then I would retire to my own pallet and think about getting rich until my little eyelids grew heavy and closed in sleep. Sometimes I would read a book on how to increase your income. Up Your Bracket, it was called.
And in the mornings there was school. School! Here I came into my own. Positions were reversed; I was the leader, not the laggard, among the other children. In neighborhood games like Squish (dropping safes on policemen) they were admittedly better than I, but in school it was different. I read better, drew better, sang better. I knew all the answers to all the questions. I got the highest marks. All this was a great satisfaction to me, and not one whit lessened by the fact that the other children took off my trousers and threw them on top of a passing bus every day after school.
Almost as much as I am beholden to my father for guidance, I am in the debt of Miss Spinnaker, my sixth-grade teacher, whom I credit with instilling in me my great thirst for learning. Let me hasten to state that all my other teachers were also fine, upstanding women, and they taught me a good deal in their classes. But they were inclined to be abrupt with me when I dropped in at their homes in the evening to discuss the day’s lessons.
Not so Miss Spinnaker. She welcomed me with great enthusiasm whenever I called. On each visit we would take up a different topic: names of state capitals, deciduous trees, game fish of North America, the decimal system, the lyric poems of Longfellow, and similar subjects. She would ask me questions, holding me on her lap and fondling me with innocent abandon as I recited. In accordance with her wishes, I fondled her too. Afterward, hot and tired, we would have tall glasses of ginger beer.
My mother broke in on us one night and hit us both with her darning egg. I never went to Miss Spinnaker’s home again, although we remained the best of friends and fondled one another amicably when we met in the corridor at school.
I was graduated high in my class at grammar school, and I finished with equal distinction at high school. Then I went out to look for a job. At this time I was eighteen years old, slender, fair, and, in all modesty, not unattractive. My clothes were patched but clean, and my appearance was of a type to inspire confidence in a prospective employer. You may be sure that I soon found a responsible position: bus boy in an all-night cafeteria.
The years I worked in the cafeteria, I can honestly say, are among the most cherished of my life. Although my pay was niggardly, I was immeasurably enriched by the contacts I made. It was at the cafeteria that I met two men who deserve places alongside my father and Miss Spinnaker as people who shaped my life. One was Walter Obispo; the other was George Overmeyer.
Obispo was a silver-haired man of sixty, an attorney who had been disbarred for some trifling offense. He used to sit in the cafeteria all night, explaining that he preferred it to the huge town house where he lived alone. I understood, for I, too, have been lonely. Who has not? Eh? Who has not?
As often as I could take time off from my various duties, which included clearing tables, washing dishes, mopping floors, emptying garbage, ejecting drunks, and adding benzoate of soda to the tainted meat which made it possible for us to sell our meals so reasonably, I would bring a fresh cup of coffee to Obispo and we would talk. I would listen breathlessly as he told me of his experiences as a lawyer—how he had bribed jurors, suborned perjury, stolen state exhibits, and leaped on the backs o
f ambulances going as rapidly as sixty miles an hour. He never tired of telling his stories, nor I of listening to them.
George Overmeyer was much younger than Obispo. He was, I would say, in his late twenties—a thin man with pinched features and intense, blazing eyes. He, too, used to spend his nights in the cafeteria, but not in conversation. He would bring in heavy tomes on sociology and economics and history and sit reading and making notes. Often he would just sit and think—or, rather, worry. An expression of such great concern would come over his face that the heart within me would ache. One night, when he looked particularly distressed, I made bold to speak.
“Excuse me, friend,” I said. “Would you care to tell me what worries you?”
“Oh, nothing much,” he replied. “The world, mankind, civilization, social justice, democracy, human rights …”
I nodded understanding, for I, too, used to worry about these very topics until Dad had provided me with the answer. “I can help you,” I said.
“Oh, peachy,” said George.
“The thing to do,” I said, “is to get rich. Then sleep till noon and screw ’em all.”
He leaped up. “Good God, man, that’s it!” he cried. He wrung my hand gratefully. “How can I ever thank you?”
“The knowledge that I have helped you is thanks enough,” I said simply, and we shook hands again, silently this time, not trusting ourselves to speak.
“Get rich,” he mused. “Now why couldn’t I think of that?”
“Sometimes,” I said, “one gets so involved in a problem that one can’t see the trees for the forest.”
“What a striking phrase!” he exclaimed. “Mind if I jot it down?”
I waved my hand graciously and he made the entry in his notebook.
“I take it that you are rich,” he said. “Just working here for a lark.”
“Well, no,” I confessed, “but it’s only a matter of time.”
“Perhaps you’ll have me over for tea sometime when you get your mansion.”
“Happy to,” I said cordially. “I’m not the kind of person who’s going to forget poor wretches like you just because I’m rich.”
“Commendable,” he murmured.
“No, sir,” I said. “I’m going to do good works when I get rich. I’ve already got a few charities in mind—free Muzak for nursing mothers, relief tubes for indigent aviators, and lots of other greathearted plans.”
“This makes me very happy,” said George. “I’m so glad to hear that money will leave you as sweet and imbecilic as you are today. Money, you know, sometimes has a tendency to corrupt.”
“It does?” I said with some alarm. This, indeed, was an aspect that had not occurred to me. I wanted to be rich, yes, but not if it meant being corrupted. There is no price high enough, I always say, to pay for a man’s integrity.
“Yes, there have been scattered cases of people being corrupted by money,” he said. “But don’t worry about it.”
But I did worry about it. In fact, I could not get it out of my mind. Was it, I kept thinking, worth the risk? Was getting rich worth taking the chance of becoming corrupted, of losing my sterling honesty, my profound humaneness, the saintliness that made me such a rare man among men? The question stayed with me waking and sleeping.
One night while I was grinding hamburger in the kitchen of the cafeteria and thinking about my problem, I inadvertently stuck my hand into the grinder. I must have cried out, because in an instant the kitchen was filled with people, among them the proprietor who gave me a waiver of damages to sign with my good hand. At this moment Obispo leaped forward with a full-throated cry, wrenched the waiver from me, and announced that he was representing me. I had time to give him a grateful smile before I fainted.
A few days later Obispo came to the hospital and gave me one thousand dollars, which he said was my share of the five-thousand-dollar settlement he had received for my accident. For a moment I could not speak. One thousand dollars and all mine! It was overwhelming. I blinked back my tears and smiled wanly at my benefactor.
Then suddenly an idea sprang full-blown into my brain. Here was the answer to my great problem. All at once I knew how to get rich and yet stay uncorrupted: I would become a lawyer.
It was so obvious. Lawyers helped people. For helping people they got large sums of money. Consider Obispo: he had done me an immense kindness in getting a thousand dollars for me. At the same time he had earned four thousand dollars for himself. So, in a single operation, he had performed an act both lucrative and eleemosynary.
And I, as a lawyer, would do the same. Become rich by earning large fees. Remain uncorrupted by doing good deeds for people. And do both at the same time, that was the beauty part.
I hastened to tell Obispo of my decision to become a lawyer. I said I would use my thousand dollars to go to college and read the law. But he had a much better idea. There was no need for me to go off to college, study for six years, and then perhaps fail to pass the bar. I could give him the thousand dollars and read the law in his office. It would take only a few months, and he would guarantee that I passed the bar. My throat was too filled with tears to speak; I could only nod in grateful agreement.
So upon my discharge from the hospital I started to report every day to Obispo’s office in the back of the High Life Billiard Parlor to read his law library. This did not take very long, since his library consisted of only one book—City Ordinances of Winnipeg. Within six months I became possibly the world’s foremost authority on the municipal statutes of Winnipeg and also a middling expert at Kelly pool, which I played with my tutor during his informal lectures. Obispo believed strongly that relaxation was the key to learning. He considered playing pool during lectures an excellent means of relieving tension. Nor were his lectures crammed with abstruse and difficult legal data. Usually, in fact, they were not about the law at all, but about women. He was quite inventive in the love-making line, and in later years I spent many pleasurable hours approximating those of the conformations he had described to me that were not beyond my agility.
Beguiling though my days were with Obispo, I sometimes was troubled about the casual way my education was proceeding. “Do you really think I’ll be ready for the bar examination?” I asked him frequently, and he always replied, “Don’t worry about a thing.”
He was right. When the time came to take my bar examination, I passed with flying colors—that is to say, Mr. Weatherwax did. (I should explain that Mr. Weatherwax was the man Obispo hired to take my bar examination for me.)
I could hardly wait to rush home and show Mother and Dad my law diploma. “Mother! Dad!” I cried as I burst into our squalid quarters. “Come see my diploma. I’m a lawyer. No more working in a cafeteria for me!”
“Don’t give me that crap,” said Mother. “You quit that job and I’ll knock you through the wall.”
Dad sprang to my defense. “You leave him be,” he said. “Harry’s gonna be a big man someday, like I’da been if I had his education.”
“The only way you’d be a big man,” said Mother, “is if somebody blew you up.”
“Darning eggs and stones will break my bones,” said Dad, “but names will never hurt me.”
This was a brave little lie on Dad’s part, for he was the most sensitive of men, and Mother’s thoughtless allusions to his lack of initiative injured him far more than her frequent blows. Mother did not really mean to be unkind. Underneath her bluster I knew there was a genuine affection for Dad. I must admit, though, that she concealed it perfectly.
The argument raged on. Mother flailed me with her darning egg until my head looked like a Hubbard squash, but I was adamant. The following week I put a down payment on some office furniture, rented an abandoned streetcar, and hung out my shingle. I got the shingle free from a friend of mine who worked at a roofing company, and I lettered it myself.
HARRY RIDDLE
ATTORNEY AT LAW
Specializing in City Ordinances of Winnipeg
proclaimed
the shingle.
I was in business.
CHAPTER 2
It would be idle to pretend that I was a successful lawyer from the start. The first case I pleaded, in fact, turned out very badly. Although I conducted the defense with much zeal, my client was given five years at hard labor. This sentence reflects little credit on me when you consider that he had only been charged with overtime parking.
Honesty compels me to admit that I fared no better in my second case. I was representing a man whose unscrupulous relatives wished him adjudged insane so they could get control of his fortune. After the third day of the hearing the judge ruled against my client, remarking dryly that only a lunatic would have retained me as counsel.
For a long time after that I had no cases. I tried for a while to earn my living as an income-tax consultant, but only one client came to me, and he took his business elsewhere when he learned that I had computed his taxes to be 30 per cent more than his gross income.
It is always darkest before the dawn, I like to say. Certainly circumstances could have been no more unpromising than they were at the moment I received the assignment that led to my present exalted position. I had been evicted from my streetcar for non-payment of rent. My furniture had been repossessed. Also my suit. I had a concussion from my mother’s darning egg. In the midst of all this blackness, like a ray of light, a message arrived: Judge Ralph Schram wanted to see me.
I was in his chambers at the appointed hour, my hair neatly brushed, my clothes patched but clean, a deferential smile on my lips.
“Wipe that stupid smirk off your face,” said the judge in greeting.
I was not deceived by his gruffness. I felt sure that he was basically a kindly man and that the story about his spending every Sunday at the state prison gloating over the inmates he had committed was apocryphal.
“Listen carefully,” he continued, “because I haven’t got much time. It’s Saturday afternoon and I’ve got to catch a train up to the state prison so I can spend Sunday gloating over the inmates I have committed.”