Free The Telephone Booth Indian by Abbott Joseph Liebling

that there was not a steady living in it. “But you would be surprised,” Morty says now, “how near it came to paying our overhead.” The volume of mail made it look bona fide. They built up a prosperous semiwholesale liquor business, specializing in furnishing whisky to firms in the Garment Center, which used it for presents to outoftown buyers. “The idea on that stuff was that it should be as reasonable as possible without killing anybody,” Morty says. “It was a good, legitimate dollar.” The depression in the garment industry ruined the Music Writers Mutual Publishing Company's business even before repeal and left Morty broke.
    The Jollity Building belongs to the estate of an old New York family, and in the twenties the trustees had installed as manager one of the least promising members of the family, a middleaged, alcoholic Harvard man whom they wanted to keep out of harm's way. Morty had been such a good tenant and seemed so knowing a fellow that the Harvard man offered him a job at twentyfive dollars a week as his assistant. When the manager ran off with eleven thousand dollars in rents and a head he had met in the lobby, Morty took over his job. He has held it ever since. The trustees feel, as one of them has expressed it, that “Mr. Ormont understands the milieu.” He now gets fifty dollars a week and two per cent of the total rents, which adds about two thousand a year to his income.
    The nostalgia Morty often feels for the opportunities of prohibitiondays is shared by the senior tenant in the building, the proprietor of the Quick Art Theatrical Sign Painting Company, on the sixth floor. The sign painter, a Mr. Hy Sky—a name made up of the first syllable of his first name, Hyman, and the last syllable of a surname which no one can remember—is a bulky, redfaced man who has rented space in the Jollity Building for twentyfive years. With his brother, a lean, sardonic man known as Si Sky, he paints signs and lobby displays for burlesque and movie houses and does odd jobs of lettering for people in all sorts of trades. He is an extremely fast letterer and he handles a large volume of steady business, but it lacks the exhilaration of prohibition years. Then he was sometimes put to work at two o'clock in the morning redecorating a clip joint, so that it could not be identified by a man who had just been robbed of a bank roll and might return with cops the next day. “Was that fun!” Hy howls reminiscently. “And always cash in advance! If the joint had green walls, we would make them pink. We would move the bar opposite to where it was, and if there was booths in the place, we would paint them a different color and change them around. Then the next day, when the cops came in with the sap, they would say, 'Is this the place? Try to remember the side of the door the bar was on as you come in.' The sap would hesitate, and the cops would say, 'I guess he can't identify the premises,' and they would shove him along. It was a nice, comfortable dollar for me.”
    Hy has a clinical appreciation of meretricious types which he tries unsuccessfully to arouse in Morty. Sometimes, when Hy has a particularly preposterous liar in his place, he will telephone the renting agent's office and shout, “Morty, pop up and see the character I got here! He is the most phoniest character I seen in several years.” The person referred to seldom resents such a description. People in the Jollity Building neighborhood like to bethought of as characters. “He is a real character,” they say, with respect, of any fascinatingly repulsive acquaintance. Most promoters are characters. Hy Sky attributes the stability of his own business to the fact that he is willing to “earn a hard dollar.” “The trouble with the characters,” he says, “is they are always looking for a soft dollar. The result is they knock theirselves out trying too hard to have it easy. So what do they get after all? Only the missmeal cramps.”