Free Harpo Speaks! by Harpo Marx, Rowland Barber

afternoon he fought Jack Munroe, in San Francisco, I sat on the sidewalk with forty other kids in front of a saloon on 9oth Street and Third Avenue. There was a ticker in the saloon. The bartender announced the fight blow-by-blow as it came off the ticker, and some kindly patron was thoughtful enough to relay the vital news to the kids on the street outside.
    When Jeffries knocked out Munroe in the second round, a rousing cheer went up inside the saloon, and all forty of us kids jumped to our feet and started dancing on the sidewalk and swinging at each other with roundhouse knockout punches. I came home with a black eye. I couldn’t have been happier or prouder if I’d come home with the championship belt itself.
    Some of the talk about the Responsibilities of Manhood must have stuck with me after my bar mitzvah, because when I was thirteen I landed my first bona fide job, regular wages and hours and everything. And, indirectly, it had to do with show business. I became a bellhop at the Hotel Seville, down on East 28th Street. The Seville was then a high-class theatrical hotel.
    I worked alternating shifts of six and twelve hours, with twelve hours off between each shift. I was paid twelve dollars a month, plus two free meals during the twelve-hour shift, and I earned fifty cents a week on the side for walking Cissie Loftus’ dog. Cissie Loftus was a famous English music-hall and vaudeville star. Not only that, she was-I thought-almost as beautiful as my mother Minnie.
    I have no recollection of why I was fired by the Seville, but of course I was. My next employment was setting pins in the bowling alley at YMHA-Young Men’s Hebrew Association-on 92nd and Lex. My salary wasn’t half what I made hopping bells, but the hours were better, and I still made enough dough to carry out my present mission in life. My mission was making myself a Neighborhood Character.
    Since I had been pretty much a failure as student, fist-fighter, musician and gambler, I decided to follow up on my Gookie success and play it for laughs. I became, therefore, a Character.
    The costume I sported upon the streets of the East Side now consisted of pointed shoes, tight-bottomed long pants, red turtleneck sweater, derby hat, and a sty in my right eye. Other adolescents broke out all over with pimples and boils, but not me. I broke out all in one spot-on my lower right eyelid. I couldn’t hide it so I kept the sty as part of the act.
    In my new role, I began hanging around older-type fellows, men of seventeen and eighteen. Their talk was mostly about sex. Specifically, they talked about their weekly exploits, every Saturday, down at a place in Chinatown called the Friendly Inn. It was clear to me that I had to go down to the Friendly Inn and “do it.” Otherwise I would lose whatever standing I had in the sophisticated crowd I hung around with.
    Besides, there were certain masculine urges stirring within me that itched to be assuaged. Besides that, it only cost four bits.
    So down I went, one Saturday afternoon, all gotten up in pointed shoes, tight pants, turtle-neck sweater, derby and sty. I took the El train to Chatham Square and strutted over to the corner of Mott and Hester.
    The downstairs part of the Friendly Inn was an ordinary saloon. The girls worked upstairs. Business was booming this particular Saturday, and the line of upstairs customers ran all the way through the bar, out the swinging doors, and halfway up the block on Hester Street. I got on the end of the line. I was very conspicuouslv the smallest and youngest male animal anywhere in sight. In front of me stood a big Polish guy who looked seven feet tall and four feet across the shoulders. I sweated buckets trying to look taller. I sweated so much I had trouble keeping the half dollar from squirting out of my fist.
    The line moved with regularity, and not too slowly. Every step forward meant that somebody ahead of me had gotten his money’s worth upstairs and had left the Friendly