Free Further Adventures by Jon Stephen Fink Page A

concerning whom or what matter?”
    I did not want to reveal too much too soon so I told her it was Green Ray business.
    “Oh. That hooey.”
    Nor I did not expect her to do a backflip when she heard those words but a dark surprise filled my stomach when she shrugged off our Show being hooey. “I’m Ray Green.”
    “Mr. Carruthers doesn’t like to get involved with the actors Mr. Green.” She offered me a frost smile. “Anyway”—the smile melted on her face—“he’s at lunch.” She stretched a canvas cover over her typewriter shutting up shop for Lunch Hour.
    “Nobody else calls The Green Ray hooey.”
    “That’s good,” she said. Miss Shapiro standing up was not much taller than Miss Shapiro sitting down & when she stood up next to me to switch off the office light I was looking down on a bald spot the size of a yarmulke.
    “Everybody else says The Green Ray is their inspiration to do good.”
    “The world should be so simple. At exactly the right place in the nick of time a man in a green cape shows up flashing a green light and before you can say mazel tov everybody bad is in jail everybody good is saved and the whole world gets fixed better than new,” complained Miss Shapiro. “What’s waiting for children when they grow up if they believe in hooey like that?”
    “Is that what you tell Mr. Carruthers?”
    “Are you kidding? As if he’d ask. He doesn’t care about anybody’s opinion. Not mine or Mr. Silverstein’s or”—she dropped her Voice & whispered—“P. K. Spiller’s either. He doesn’t get emotionally involved.”
    At the elevator I pushed the Down button very gentlemanly. “His shows don’t sound like that to me.”
    “You don’t know him from Adam that’s why. I know Mr. Carruthers 16 years.” She tugged my sleeve & said, “Confidentially he doesn’t vote. That’s how much he cares about what happens. Not even for president. Not even for F.D.R.”
    “He didn’t vote for Wendell Wilkie either.”
    Miss Shapiro stabbed the Down button a few more hurry-up stabs. “It’s not the New Deal or any deal. He just doesn’t care. He says we get the politicians we deserve. I say we must be doing something right to get Franklin D. Roosevelt and he’s a man I thought Mr. Carruthers would sympathize with.”
    “How’s that?”
    “Since they both overcame their handicaps. Instead of staying cripples they rose to the top of their profession.”
    Ding-a-ling. “Polio?”
    “F.D.R. had the polio and Mr. Carruthers lost his leg in the Great War.”
    “Him?” I sang out. “I saw him drinking water from the fountain!”
    “He also eats soup with a spoon.”
    Well I could not stand around counting my fingers & toes waiting so I ran down 13 floors and skidded across the lobby. Stan the Cigar Man watched me almost crash into his glass display case. “Did you see Lamont Carruthers go out?”
    “Who the hell’s Lamont Carruthers?” Stan wanted to know.
    “Tall geek,” I panted, “with one leg.”
    “Yeah yeah.” Stan scratched his beak & closed his peepers to picture him. “Panatelas.” His poached egg eyes popped open. “Carruthers huh? Remind him he owes me 35 cents from last week. Walked right past me a minute ago.”
    “Right.”
    “Remind him 35 cents is 35 cents. Y’know Ray?”
    I look back at what happened to me & where & when & so help me I can not tell you which was the right place at the right time & which was the wrong. I am guessing here but maybe the things that happen are just the things that have to happen when you look at your state of mind (mine = desperate) & body (mine = exhausted). I revolved out of the revolving door & caught sight of Lamont Carruthers heaving his Fuller Brush sample case into the back of a taxi and pulling the door shut behind him. I stood there helpless behind the exhaust pipe too late he drove off.
    Around the block I walked around the City with no expert guidance what else was I going to do? I did not feel the cold of the