The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [28]
Performers, when they arrive at the Jollity Building looking for work, usually take an elevator straight to the floor on which the agent who most often books them is located. After leaving this agent, they make a tour of the other agents' offices to see if anyone else has a job for them. Only when rendered desperate by hunger do they stray down to the third floor, where the people Morty calls the heels hold forth in furnished offices each about the size of a bathroom. Since the heels constitute the lowest category of tenant in the building, no proprietor of a firstclass chopsuey joint or roadhouse would call on them for talent. “The best you can get there,” performers say, “is a chance to work Saturday night at a ruptured saloon for bubkis.” “Bubkis” is a Yiddish word which means “large beans.”
One of the most substantial agents in the building is Jerry Rex, a swarthy, discouraged man who used to be a ventriloquist. He has an unusually large oneroom office, which was once the studio of a teacher of Cuban dancing. The walls are painted in orangeandblack stripes, and there are several fulllength wall mirrors, in which the pupils used to watch themselves dance. Mr. Rex sits at a desk at the end of the office opposite the door, and performers waiting to speak to him sit on narrow benches along the walls. Rex has an assistant named Dave, who sits on a couch in one corner of the room. Rex always professes to be waiting for a call from a theater owner in, for example, Worcester, Massachusetts, who will want four or five acts and a line of eight girls. He urges all the entertainers who drop in at his place to sit down and wait with him. “Also, a fellow who owns the biggest night club in Scranton is going to pop up here any minute,” he tells the performers confidentially. “You better wait around.” The man from Worcester never calls up, but the performers don't mind killing a halfhour with Jerry. “It rests your feet,” one woman singer has said, “and also you meet a lot of people you know.” Jerry leaves Dave in charge of the office when he goes out. “If Georgie Hale pops up here looking for me,” Jerry always says in a loud voice as he is leaving, “tell him that Billy Rose pulled me over to Lindy's for a bite.” Then he goes downstairs to the lunch counter, where he may try to talk Barney, the proprietor, into letting him charge a cup of coffee. Rex, when he is not attempting to impress performers or rival agents, is a profoundly gloomy man. “You got only three classes of performers today,” he sometimes says. “Class A, which means, for example, like Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor; Class B, like the Hartmans, for instance, or Henny Youngman, that can yet get a very nice dollar, and Class Z, which is all the little people. Smalltime vaudeville is definitely out. All you got is floor shows, fraternal entertainments, and in the summer the borsch circuit. An entertainer who can average thirty dollars a week all year is Class Z tops. There ain't no such entertainer. A husbandandwife team might make it.”
Jerry does not consider his large office an extravagance, because he lives in it twentyfour hours a day, which is a violation of the building laws, and saves the price of a hotel room. He sleeps on the couch, while Dave, a bluechinned young man with the mores of a tomcat, sleeps on one of the wall benches. Jerry occasionally buys a bottle of beer for the porter who cleans the offices. The grateful porter always does Jerry's first, so the agent can get a good night's rest. Every morning, Jerry washes and shaves in the men's room on his floor. Dave often contents himself with smearing face powder