The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [21]
The vertical social structure of the Jollity Building is subject to continual shifts. Not only do Indians become heels, but a heel occasionally accumulates $40 or $50 with which to pay a month's rent on one of the larger offices, all of them unfurnished, on the fourth, fifth, or sixth floor. He then becomes a tenant. Morty always views such progress with suspicion, because it involves signing a lease, and once a heel has signed a lease, you cannot put him out without serving a dispossess notice and waiting ten days. A tenant, in Morty's opinion, is just a heel who is planning to get ten days' free rent. “Any time a heel acts prosperous enough to rent an office,” Morty says, “you know he's getting ready to take you.” A dispossessed tenant often reappears in the Jollity Building as an Indian. It is a life cycle. Morty has people in the building who have been Telephone Booth Indians, heels, and tenants several times each. He likes them best when they are in the heel stage. “You can't collect rent from a guy who hangs in the lobby,” he says in explanation, “and with a regular tenant of an unfurnished office, you got too many headaches.” He sometimes breaks off a conversation with a friendly heel by saying, “Excuse me, I got to go upstairs and insult a tenant.”
As if to show his predilection for the heels, Morty has his own office on the third floor. It is a large corner room with windows on two sides. There is a flattering picture of the Jollity Building on one of the walls, and six framed plans, one of each floor, on another wall. Also in the office are an unattractive, respectablelooking secretary and, on Morty's desk, a rather depressing photograph of his wife. The conventionality of this decor makes Morty unhappy, and he spends as little time as possible in his office. Between nine o'clock in the morning, when he arrives and dejectedly looks through his mail for rent checks he does not expect to find, and sixthirty in the evening, when he goes home to Rockaway, he lives mostly amid the pulsating activity outside his office door.
The furnished cubicles on the third floor yield an income of about $500 a month, which, as Morty says, is not hay. Until a few years ago, the Jollity Building used to feel it should provide switchboard service for these offices. The outgoing telephone calls of the heels were supposed to be paid for at the end of every business day. This system necessitated the use of a cordon of elevator boys to prevent tenants from escaping. “Any heel who made several telephone calls toward the end of the month, you could kiss him goodby,” Morty says. “As soon as he made up his mind to go out of business he started thinking of people to telephone. It was cheaper for him to go out of business than settle for the calls, anyhow. The only way you can tell if a heel is still in business, most of the time, anyway, is to look in his office for his hat. If his hat is gone, he is out of business.” A minor annoyance of the switchboard system was the tendency of heels to call the operator and ask for the time. “None of them were going anywhere, but they all wanted to know the time,” Morty says resentfully. “None of them had watches. Nobody would be in this building unless he had already hocked his watch.” There are lady heels, too, but if they are young Morty calls them “heads.” (Morty meticulously refers to all youngish women as “heads,” which has the same meaning as “broads” or “dolls” but is newer; he does not want his conversation to sound archaic.) Heads also abused the switchboard system. “One head that used to claim to sell stockings,” says Morty, “called the board one day, and when the operator said, 'Five o'clock,' this head said, 'My God, I didn't eat yet!' If there had been no switchboard, she would never have known she was hungry. She would have saved a lot of money.”
As a consequence of these abuses, the switchboard was abolished, and practically all the heels now make their telephone calls from three open coinbox telephones