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By Root 529 0

are also eating regular,” Barney said, continuing his survey of business conditions, “and even a couple of prizefight managers recently came in and paid cash. With musicians, of course, is still the depression. Also with performers.” Barney takes it for granted that anyone connected with the stage is broke, and if he can detect a speck of theatrical makeup under a woman's chin or behind an ear, he will refuse to give her credit. He even declines to believe that any performers receive regular remuneration in Hollywood. “It is all publicity,” he says. “George Raft still owes me thirtyfive cents from when he used to hang here.” Musicians, although imperceptibly less broke, on the average, than actors or dancers, are almost as irritating to Barney. They sit at his counter for hours, each with one cup of coffee, and discuss large sums of money. Since most of the year musicians wear big, shaggy coats made of a material resembling the mats under rugs, they fill twice as much space as bookmakers or taxi drivers. Their coats overflow onto adjoining stools. “Three hours is average for a musician to drink a cup of coffee,” Barney says, “and then sometimes he says he hasn't got the nickel, he'll see me tomorrow. Tomorrow is never.”

Regulars who hang at Barney's counter may be identified by the manner in which, before sitting down, they run their hands under the counter. They are reaching for a communal dope sheet, a tencent racing paper giving the entries at all tracks. The regulars at Barney's chip in and buy one copy every day. This economy permits each of them to lose to bookmakers every week several dimes that would otherwise have been spent at newsstands. Barney has little contact with the pool players, although he does a good deal of business with them. A number of mulatto girls who rack up the balls on the pool tables also act as waitresses for the players. The girls pay Barney cash for all the cups of coffee they carry away. Presumably they collect from the players. “It is a pleasure they can have,” says Barney.

One of the more conspicuous fellows who eat at the lunch counter and spend a good deal of time there between meals drinking coffee is called Marty the Clutch. Marty gets his name from his humorous custom of mangling people's fingers when he shakes hands with them. Strangers to whom he is introduced usually sink to their knees screaming before he releases their right hand. Casual acquaintances consider Marty a big, overgrown boy brimming with animal spirits. Only old friends really appreciate him. They know that when Marty has numbed a stranger's hand, he can often get a ring off the fellow's finger unnoticed. “It is very cute when you think of it,” says Acid Test Ike, who is a manager of punchdrunk prize fighters. “I once seen the Clutch get a rock off a ticket broker big enough to use for a doorstop. By the time the scalper noticed the ring was gone, he thought a bosko he knew had clipped him for it, so he busted her nose.” The Clutch is a big, squareshouldered man with a forehead barely sufficient to keep his hair from meeting his eyebrows. He used to be a prize fighter, but, he says, he worked with a gang of hijackers several nights a week and this interfered with his training, because he was always getting shot. Acid Test Ike considers this an amiable prevarication. “The Clutch never was a hijacker,” he says. “He just gives that as a social reference. Really, the Clutch is a gozzler.” This term means a fellow who gozzles people—chokes them in order to rob them. The gozzling business cannot be very good, because Marty is customarily as broke as most other patrons of the lunch counter. Every time Barney looks at Marty the Clutch, he rubs his throat nervously.

To Barney, the most interesting people in the Jollity Building are the promoters, the fellows who are always trying to earn, in the local idiom, a soft dollar. This is a curiosity he shares with Hy Sky and Morty Ormont, and sometimes the three of them get together at the lunch counter and discuss, with happy chuckles, the outrageous swindles perpetrated by