Free The Telephone Booth Indian by Abbott Joseph Liebling Page B

That night Everett Winterbottom's Rhumba Raiders ride again. The only worry in the world the Raiders have, at least for the moment, is that they will have to finish their engagement before a union delegate discovers them and takes away their cards. Each man is going to receive three dollars a night, which is seven dollars below union scale.

II—From Hunger

    It is likely that when the six story Jollity Building, so called, is pulled down, it will be replaced by a oneor twostory taxpayer, because buildings along Broadway now derive their chief incomes from the stores at street level, and taxpayers, which earn just as much from their stores, are cheaper to operate. When the Jollity Building comes down, the small theatrical agents, the sleazy costumers, the band leaders in worn camel'shair overcoats, the aged professors of acrobatic dancing, and all the petty promoters who hang, as the phrase goes, in the Jollity Building's upper floors will spill out into the street and join the musicians who are waiting for jobs and the pitchmen who sell selfthreading needles along the curb.
    Meanwhile, day after day, smalltime performers ride the elevatorsand wander through the grimy halls of the Jollity Building looking for work. Jack McGuire, who in the evening is a bouncer in Jollity Danceland, on the second floor, thoroughly understands the discouraged performers. “They're just like mice,” he says, “they been pushed around so much.” Jack is a heavyweight prize fighter who recently retired for the fortyeighth time in the last five years. He still looks impressively healthy, since few of his fights have lasted more than one round. “It was the greatest twominute battle you ever seen,” he said a while ago, describing his latest comeback, against a local boy in Plainfield, New Jersey. “For the first thirty seconds I was ahead on points.” Jack's face is of a warm, soft pink induced by the prolonged application of hot towels in the Jollity Building barbershop, which is just off the lobby. Sprawled in the sixth barber chair from the door, he sleeps off hangovers. His shoulders, naturally wide, are accentuated by the padding Broadway clothiers lavish on their customers. Among the puttycolored, sharpnosed little men and the thinlegged women in the elevators, he looks like an animal of a different breed. His small eyes follow the performers constantly. During the day, Jack is a runner for a great number of agents. He learns from them where there are openings for various types of talent—ballroomdancing teams, Irish tenors, singing hostesses, and so on—and then steers performers to the agents handling the jobs. He has strolled about the Jollity Building so long that he knows hundreds of them by sight. “Suchandsuch an agent is looking for a ballroom team,” he will tell a husbandandwife pair he knows. “A week in a Chink joint in Yonkers.” He gives them one of the agent's cards, on which he writes “Jack.” If the team gets the week, at forty dollars, it must pay a commission of four dollars to the agent, and another of two dollars to Jack. The second commission is entirely extralegal, since Jack is not a licensed agent, but Jackoften steers performers to a job they wouldn't have had otherwise, so they don't kick. Agents are glad to have Jack work with them, because buyers of talent want instantaneous service and few acts can be reached by telephone during the day. Sometimes, when an act is held over for a second week and fails to pay the agent his additional commission, Jack is engaged to put the muscle on the unethical performer. When Jack encounters him, usually in Charlie's Bar & Grill or at the I. & Y. cigar store, which are both near the Jollity Building, he says, “Say, I hear your agent is looking for you.” The hint is enough ordinarily. When it is not, Jack uses the muscle.
    The proprietor of Jollity Danceland is the most solvent tenant in the building and he pays by far the largest rent. The dance hall has an