by Saul Bellow
That he showed up in the poolroom was a surprise to me too, in view of what he had formerly said about my tie-in with the Einhorns. But the explanation was the same—because it was a dull time, because he was broke; he soon kept company with bear-eyes Sylvester in his pamphlet-armed war with the bourgeoisie and took lessons in pool from Dingbat. He became good enough at it to win some in rotation at a nickel a ball, staying away from the deadeyes who made their career in the parlor. Occasionally he played craps in the back room, and his luck at this was pretty fair, too. He kept clear of the hoodlums, torpedoes, and thieves on their professional side. In that regard he was smarter than I, for I somehow got to be party to a robbery.
I ran with Jimmy Klein and Clem Tambow much of the time. Toward the last high-school terms I hadn’t been seeing a lot of them either. Jimmy’s family was hard hit by the unemployment—Tommy lost his job at City Hall when the Republicans were pushed out by Cermak—and Jimmy was working a great deal; he was also studying bookkeeping at night, or trying to, for he was no good at figures or at any head work for that matter. Only he had much determination to get ahead for the sake of his family. His sister Eleanor had gone to Mexico, by bus the entire journey, to see whether she could make a go of it with the cousin there, the one that had started Jimmy’s interest in genealogy.
As for Clem Tambow, his contempt of school was extreme, and he passed as much time as he could get away with in bed, reading screen news, going over scratch sheets. He was developing into a superior bum. Through his mother, he carried on a long-term argument with her second husband, who didn’t have a job either, about his habits. A neighbor’s son was working as a pin boy in a downtown alley for thirty cents an hour; why, therefore, did he refuse to look for work? They were all four living in the back rooms of the infants’-wear shop that the ex-Mrs. Tambow ran by herself. Bald, with harsh back-hair, Clem’s stepfather, in his undershirt, read the Jewish Courier by the stove and prepared lunch of sardines, crackers, and tea for them all. There were always two or three King Oscar cans on the table, rolled open, and also canned milk and oysterettes. He was not a fast-thinking man and didn’t have many subjects. When I visited and saw him in the cirrus-cloud weave of his wool undershirt, the subject was always what was I earning.
“Do stoop labor?” said Clem to his mother when she took it up with him. “If I can’t find anything better I’ll swallow cyanide.” And the thought of swallowing cyanide made him laugh enormously, with a great “haw, haw, haw!” big-mouthed, and shake his quills of hair. “Anyhow,” he said, “I’d rather stay in bed and play with myself. Ma”—his mother in her skirts and with feet of a dancer of Spanish numbers—“you’re not too old to know what I mean. You’re in the room next to mine, remember, you and your husband.” He made her gasp, unable to answer because of me, but staring at him with furious repudiation. “Put on with me, that’s okay—what should I suppose you got married for?”
“You oughtn’t talk to your old lady like that,” I said privately to him.
He laughed at me. “You should spend a couple of days and nights around here—you’d say I was going easy on her. Her pince-nez takes you in, and you don’t know what a letch she’s got. Let’s face the facts.” And of course he told me these facts, and it seemed even I figured in them, that she had made sly inquiries about me and said how strong I looked.
In the afternoon Clem took a walk; he carried a cane and had British swagger. He read the autobiographies of lords from the library and guffawed over them and played the Piccadilly gentleman with Polack storekeepers, and he was almost always ready to burst out haw-hawing with happy violence, decompression, big thermal wrinkles of ugly happiness in his red face. When he could cadge a few bucks from his father he bet on the horses; if he won he’d stand me to a steak dinner and cigars.
I was around people of other kinds too. In one direction, a few who read whopping books in German or French and knew their physics and botany manuals backwards, readers of Nietzsche and Spengler. In another direction, the criminals. Except that I never thought of them as such, but as the boys I knew in the poolroom and saw also at school, dancing the double-toddle in the gym at lunch hour, or in the hot-dog parlors. I touched all sides, and nobody knew where I belonged. I had no good idea of that myself. Whether I’d have been around the poolroom if I hadn’t known and worked for Einhorn I can’t say. I wasn’t a grind certainly, or a memorizing eccentric; I wasn’t against the grinds and eccentrics either. But it was easier for the gangsters to take me for one of them. And a thief named Joe Gorman began to talk to me about a robbery.
I didn’t say no to him.
Gorman was very bright, handsome and slim, clever at basketball. His father, who owned a tire shop, was well off, and there was no apparent reason for him to steal. But he had a considerable record as a car thief and was in St. Charles twice. Now he intended to rob a leather-goods shop on Lincoln Avenue, not very far from the Coblins’, and there were three of us for the job. The third was Sailor Bulba, my old lockermate who had stolen my science notebook. He knew I wasn’t a squealer.
Gorman would get his father’s car for the getaway. We’d break into the shop by the cellar window at the rear and clean out the handbags. Bulba would hide them, and there was a fence in the poolroom named Jonas who would sell them for us.
On one o’clock of an April night we drove to the North Side, parked beside an alley, and one by one slipped into the backyard. Sailor had cased the place; the half-size basement window had no bars. Gorman tried to open it, first with a jimmy and then with bicycle tape, a technique he had heard of in the poolroom but never tried. It didn’t work. Then Sailor rolled a brick in his cap and pounded out the pane. After the noise we scattered into the alley, but crept back when no one came. I was sick with the thing by now, but there was no getting out of it. Sailor and Gorman went in and left me as lookout. Which didn’t make much sense, for the window was the only way of escape, and if I had been caught by a squad car in the alley they’d never have gotten away either. Nevertheless, Gorman was the experienced one, and we took his orders. There was nothing to hear but rats or paper scuttling. Finally there was a noise from the cellar, and Gorman’s sharp, pale face came up below; he started handing out the bags to me, soft things in tissue paper, which I stuffed into a duffel bag I had carried under my trench coat. Bulba and I ran through backyards into the next street with the stuff, while Gorman drove the car around. We dropped Bulba at the rear of his house; he tossed the bag over the fence and vaulted after, swinging up with a wide flutter of his sailor pants and landing in cans and gravel. I walked home by a short cut, over lots, got the key out of the tin mailbox, and went into the sleeping house.
Simon knew I had come in very late and said that at midnight Mama had come in to ask where I was. He didn’t appear to care what I had been up to, or notice that I was, behind my casualness, miserable. I had stayed awake hours trying to figure out how I was to explain the twenty or thirty dollars my cut probably would amount to. I thought to ask Clem to say that we had won together on a horse, but that didn’t appear feasible. And it really wasn’t a difficulty at all, since I could give it to my mother bit by bit over a period of weeks, and besides, nobody, as in Grandma’s days, watched closely what I was doing. It was a while before I could think straight about it, having the shakes.
But I wasn’t afflicted long. From reasons of temperament. I went to school, missing only one period; I showed up for glee-club rehearsal, and at four o’clock went to the poolroom, and Sailor Bulba was sitting up in a shoeshine chair in his bell-bottomed pants, observing a snooker game. It was all right. Everything was already arranged with Jonas, the fence, who would take the stuff that night. I put the whole thing out of mind, and in this had the help of perfect spring, when the trees were beginning to bud. Einhorn said to me, “They’re having bicycle races over in the park. Let’s take them in,” and I willingly carried him out to the car and we went.
I had decided there wasn’t going to be any more robbery
for me, now that I knew what it was like, and I told Joe Gorman that he wasn’t to count on me for future jobs. I was prepared to be called yellow. But he didn’t take on and wasn’t scornful. He said quietly, “Well, if you think it isn’t your dish.”
“That’s just the way it is—it isn’t my dish.”
And he said thoughtfully, “Okay. Bulba is a jerk, but I could get along swell with you.”
“No use doing it if it isn’t in me.”
“What the hell for them? Sure.”
He was very mild and independent. He combed his hair in the gum-machine mirror, fixed up his streaming tie, and went away. Thereafter he didn’t have much to say to me.
I took Clem out, and we blew in the money together. But I wasn’t done with this matter by a long shot. Einhorn found out about it through Kreindl, who was approached by the fence to peddle some of the bags. Probably Kreindl and Einhorn decided that I should get a going-over for it. So Einhorn called me to sit by him, one afternoon in the poolroom. I saw from his stiffness that he was getting up an angry blow against me, and of course I knew why.
“I’m not going to sit by and let you turn into jailbait,” he said. “I partly consider myself responsible that you’re in this environment. You’re not even of age to be here, you’re still a minor”—so, by the way, were Bulba and Gorman and dozens of others, but nothing was ever made of it—“though you’re overgrown. But I won’t have you doing this, Augie. Even Dingbat, and he’s no mental giant, knows better than to get into robbery. I have to put up with all kinds of elements around here, unfortunately. I know who’s a thief or gunman or whore-master. I can’t help it. It’s a poolroom. But, Augie, you know what better is; you’ve been with me in other times, and if I hear of you on another job I’m going to have you thrown out of here. You’ll never see the inside of this place or Tillie and me again. If your brother knew about this, by Jesus Christ! he’d beat you. I know he would.”
I admitted that it was so. Einhorn must have seen the horror and fear in me as through a narrow opening. My hand lay where he could reach it; he put his fingers on it. “This is where a young fellow starts to decay and stink, and his health and beauty go. By the first things he does when he’s not a boy any longer, but does what a man does. A boy steals apples, watermelons. If he’s a wildcat in college he writes a bad check or two. But to go out as an armed bandit—”
“We weren’t.”
“I’ll open this drawer,” he said with intensity, “and give you fifty bucks if you’ll swear Joe Gorman didn’t have a gun. I tell you he had one.”
I was hot in the face but faint. It could be true; it was plausible.
“And if the cops had come he’d have tried to shoot his way out. That was what you let yourself in for. Yes, that’s right, Augie, a dead cop or two. You know what cop-killers get, from the station onward—their faces beaten off, their hands smashed, and worse; and that would be your start in life. You can’t tell me there’s nothing but boyish high-jinks spirits in that. What did you do it for?”
I didn’t know.
“Are you a real crook? Have you got the calling? I don’t think I ever saw a stranger case of deceiving appearances then. I had you in my house and left stuff in the open. Were you tempted to steal, ever?”
“Hey, Mr. Einhorn!” I said, violent and excited.
“You don’t have to tell me. I know you didn’t. I only asked if you have the real impulses from the bottom, and I don’t believe you do. Now, for God’s sake, Augie, stay away from those thieves. I’d give you twenty bucks for your widowed mother if you asked me. Did you need it so badly?”
“No.”
It was kindness itself of him to call Mama a widow when he knew she really wasn’t.
“Or were you looking for a thrill? Is this a time to be looking for a thrill, when everybody else is covering up? You could take it out on the roller coasters, the bobs, the chute-the-chutes. Go to Riverview Park. But wait. All of a sudden I catch on to something about you. You’ve got opposition in you. You don’t slide through everything. You just make it look so.”
This was the first time that anyone had told me anything like the truth about myself. I felt it powerfully. That, as he said, I did have opposition in me, and great desire to offer resistance and to say “No!” which was as clear as could be, as definite a feeling as a pang of hunger.
The discoverer of this, who had taken pains to think of me—to think of me—I was full of love of him for it. But I was also wearing the discovered attribute, my opposition. I was clothed in it. So I couldn’t make any sign of argument or indicate how I felt.
“Don’t be a sap, Augie, and fall into the first trap life digs for you. Young fellows brought up in bad luck, like you, are naturals to keep the jails filled—the reformatories, all the institutions. What the state orders bread and beans long in advance for. It knows there’s an element that can be depended on to come behind bars to eat it. Or it knows how much broken rock for macadam it can expect, and whom it can count on to break it, and whom it can expect for chancre treatments at the Public Health Institute. From around here and similar parts of the city, and the same in other places throughout the country. It’s practically determined. And if you’re going to let it be determined for you too, you’re a sucker. Just what’s predicted. Those sad and tragic things are waiting to take you in—the clinks and clinics and soup lines know who’s the natural to be beat up and squashed, made old, pooped, farted away, no-purposed away. If it should happen to you, who’d be surprised? You’re a setup for it.”
Then he added, “But I think I’d be surprised.” And also, “I don’t ask you to take me for your model either,” too well realizing the contradiction, that I knew about his multifarious swindles.
Einhorn had his experts who tinkered with the gas meters; he got around the electric company by splicing into the main cables; he fixed tickets and taxes; and his cleverness was unlimited in these respects. His mind was continually full of schemes. “But I’m not a lowlife when I think, and really think,” he said. “In the end you can’t save your soul and life by thought. But if you think, the least of the consolation prizes is the world.”
He continued, but my thoughts took their own direction. No, I didn’t want to be what he called determined. I never had accepted determination and wouldn’t become what other people wanted to make of me. I had said “No” to Joe Gorman too. To Grandma. To Jimmy. To lots of people. Einhorn had seen this in me. Because he too wanted to exert influence.
To keep me out of trouble and also because he was accustomed to have a delegate, messenger, or trusted hand, he hired me again for less money. “Don’t forget, old man, I’ve got my eye on you.” Didn’t he always have his eye on as many things and people as he could get in range? Conversely, however, I had my eye on him. I took closer interest in his swindles than when I had been not much more than house-boy and the Einhorn business was too vast for me to understand.
One of the first things I helped with was a very dangerous piece of work—taking in a gangster, Nosey Mutchnik. A few years before, Nosey Mutchnik, nothing but a punk, had worked for the North Side gang, throwing acid on clothes in dry-cleaning shops that wouldn’t buy protection and doing similar things. Now he had reached a higher stage, when he had money and was looking for investments, particularly in real estate. For, he said seriously to Einhorn, on a summer evening, “I know what happens to guys who stay in the rackets. In the end they get blasted. I seen it happen enough.”
Einhorn told him he knew of a fine vacant lot that they could buy as partners. “If I’m going into it with you myself, you don’t have to worry that it’s not on the up and up. I stand to lose if you do,” he said with sincere heart to Mutchnik. The asking price for the property was six hundred dollars. He could get it down to five. This was a perfectly just assurance, because Einhorn himself owned the lot, having acquired it from a buddy of his father’s for seventy-five dollars; and he now became its half-owner at a further profit. All this was done by
means of various tricks, and very coolly. It ended well, with Mutchnik finding a buyer for it, delighted to make a hundred dollars in a piece of legitimate business. But if he had found out he would have shot Einhorn or had him shot. Nothing simpler to do, or more natural in his eyes, in defense of his pride. I was in terror that Mutchnik might have taken a notion to investigate in the Recorder’s Office and find out that a relation of Mrs. Einhorn had nominally owned the lot. But Einhorn said, “What are you bothering your head about, Augie? I’ve got this man figured out. He’s terribly stupid. I keep suggesting angles to him for his protection.”
Thus, without risking a cent, Einhorn made more than four hundred dollars in this particular deal. He was proud, gleeful with me; this was what he really dug. It was a specimen triumph of the kind—only bigger and bigger—he wanted his whole history to consist of. While he sat still at his Twenty-Six baize board, the leather dice cup there, and the green reflected up to his face, his white skin and underpainted eyes. He kept the valuable ivory cue balls by him in a box, inside the nickel-candy case, and his attention to what went on in the establishment was keen and close. He ran it his own way entirely.
I never knew another poolroom where there was a woman permanently, like Tillie Einhorn, behind the lunch counter. She served very good chili con, omelettes, navy bean soup, and learned to operate the big coffee urn, even the exact moment to throw in salt and raw egg to make the coffee clear. She took to this change in her life energetically, and physically she appeared to become broader and stronger. She flourished, and the male crowd made her tranquil. There was a lot said or shouted that she didn’t know the meaning of, which was to the good. She didn’t soften things in the poolroom, or put a limit, like a British barmaid or bistro proprietress; here things were too harsh and ornery to be influenced; the clamor and fights and the obscene yelling and banging weren’t going to stop, and didn’t stop. Only she somehow became part of the place. By limiting herself to the chili, wieners and beans, coffee and pie.