The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [32]
The Jollity Building has at least a dozen tenants who teach voice, dancing, and dramatic art, and a few who specialize in LatinAmerican dance routines and acrobatics. The financial condition of the professors, which is solvent in comparison to that of the performers, musicians, and theatrical agents in the building, is a perpetual source of amusement to Morty Ormont. “The singers are from hunger,” he says; “the performers are from hunger, and every day we get saps in the building who pay for lessons so they can be from hunger, too.” Parents who believe their children are talented are the staple prey of the professional teachers. Seldom does a Jollity Building elevator make a trip without at least one bosomy and belligerent suburban woman, holding fast to the hand of a little girl whose hair is frizzled into a semblance of Shirley Temple's. Often several of the Shirleys and their mothers find themselves in a car together. The mothers' upper lips curl as they survey the other mothers' patently moronic young. The Shirleys gaze at each other with vacuous hostility and wonder whether their mothers will slap them if they ask to go to the bathroom again. All the Shirleys have bony little knees and bitter mouths and, in Morty's opinion, will undoubtedly grow up to be ax murderesses.
III—A Soft Dollar
Barney, who owns the lunch counter in the basement of the socalled Jollity Building, never turns his head away from his customers for a second while working. Even when he is drawing coffee from the urn, he keeps looking over his shoulder, and this, in the course of his eighteen years in business, has given him a nervous neck twitch. “I know their nature,” Barney says in explanation of this mannerism. “If I'll turn my head, they'll run away without paying.” With all his vigilance, Barney cannot foresee when a client will eat two pastrami sandwiches and then say, after fumbling in a vest pocket, “Gee, Barney, I thought I had a quarter in my pocket, but it turned out to be an old Willkie button.” Barney is a short, grayfaced man in his fifties who looks at his customers through thick, shellrimmed spectacles that are usually clouded with steam from the coffee urn or with dabs of cornedbeef grease. The customers see Barney against a background of cans of beans, arranged in pyramids. The cans, stacked on a shelf behind his counter, constitute a decorative scheme he never changes, except when he lays a fat, shiny stick of bologna across the can forming the apex of one of the pyramids.
Once, recently, Barney startled Hy Sky, the Jollity Building sign painter, and Morty Ormont, the renting agent, by announcing the return of prosperity. This was an event that neither of his listeners, confined for the most part in their associations to theatrical people, had suspected. “The taxi drivers who come in here are asking for sandwiches on thin bread, so they can taste the meat, and they are eating two sandwiches for lunch, usually,” Barney said. “From 1929 until very lately, everybody was asking for sandwiches on thick bread, one sandwich should fill them up.” The lunch counter is at one end of the Jollity Building's poolroom, and most of Barney's customers are either people who work in the building or pool players. The taximen are his only customers from the daylight world.
“The bookmakers in the building