I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [35]
“Huh?”
“You better, or you’ll sleep all night in your seat. We don’t get into Chicago till seven a.m. tomorrow.”
This must be what you’re supposed to do, the grown-up thing. “Okay. What’s it cost?” It was nineteen dollars and something cents. He took my twenty, and I received a train car and berth number with the change. How sophisticated I was, handling that decision in just the right way. But the forty cents left in my hand made me uneasy. Something was wrong.
A short time later, a bell rang and back came the porter, full of good cheer, announcing, “Lunch. First serving.” God, was I stupid. Not enough money to eat with, and about eighteen hours to go. “I’ll just look out the window and won’t think of food.”
The railbed through New Jersey and Pennsylvania and across Ohio and Illinois passes vistas of woods and farmland, creeks and swamps, then more woods, farmland, creeks, and swamps, and so on and on. I stared out the window and watched myself as Daniel Boone, dressed in buckskin and a raccoon-tail hat, running across the countryside, leaping over creeks and dodging trees, keeping up with the train. I was a “courier du bois” who had to keep running without sustenance the whole way to Chicago.
Bells ringing, the porter announcing, “Lunch. Second serving …” Dizzy with hunger, I was inventing menus, and salivating.
Once in a while, we would flash through a town, and occasionally make a scheduled stop at the larger stations. Naturally, vendors were selling food. Where was Eve? Someone to offer me an apple!
“Dinner. Last call!” The sun was setting, and my empty stomach groaned. “Go to bed early; don’t think about food.” In an upper berth, I rolled and flipped and twitched all night, too hungry to sleep. “Jerk. You could have been eating. So what if you’d slept sitting up. You’re not sleeping lying down.”
At first light, I was back at the window, suffering through the call for breakfast. Then we pulled into Chicago’s South Street Station. What if Paul wasn’t there, or we missed each other? Where would I go? What would I do? I had no money and was so hungry. But there he was on the platform. He’d spotted my window-pressed face and was awaiting me as I stepped off the train.
“How was the trip?”
“Great,” I grinned, too embarrassed to mention famine and sleeplessness.
“Come on. We’re walking. It’ll be good for you.” He took my bag.
It was over three miles to East Huron Street, and I thought I would die as I struggled to keep up. Paul was short, and he had short legs, but his fast-twitch muscles moved in a blur. In later life, he took up running with a passion, knocking off marathons.
Undistinguished tract houses, three or four stories high, lined the streets all over the neighborhood that bordered Lake Michigan. At last, we stopped our dash. I followed my brother up a few steps, through a door, down a hall, and to a little room with the one bed we would share. Several members of the cast had also rented rooms in this little town house, which had a bathroom in the back for all. In show business, when you had a job and earned a salary, you skimped and saved any way you could, sort of storing up potatoes for the winter.
On a little hot plate, my brother warmed a can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup. Oh, God! Was it delicious! A repast slurped down in seconds, and forever imprinted in the genetic makeup of my taste buds.
Paul and I snoozed, a quick nap, and then he had me up and race-walking several miles down Michigan Avenue and west to the Shubert Theatre. We arrived at the stage door just in time for the half-hour call for the matinee, and I was passed on to a stagehand, an older man with a potbelly. “Pete, this is my brother, Jacques. Call him Joebean,