Free Max by Howard Fast

three-card-monte operators and the peanut vendors. It was all wonderful and exciting and alive, and to Sally, who had been reading Émile Zola, it appeared to be very much the streets of Paris tansplanted to the New World. And there she was, walking into a music hall with one of the performers, with Max’s strong hand around her arm.
    Bert was already in his cop costume and making up his face when Max entered the dressing room and said to him. ‘What the fuck are you up to?’
    â€˜I think I’m coloring my puss. What do you think?’
    â€˜The cop suit.’
    â€˜We’re doing the tramp and cop. There’s a character outside from the Alderman Circuit. If he likes our act, he can give us twelve weeks outside this shithole, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago – Kansas City. You know what we get for three nights in Kansas City? Three hundred dollars for the act. Guttman says fine, we can take the twelve weeks if this guy from Alderman likes us and come back here to work when it’s over. Maybe we don’t come back here. Guttman figures it gives the Bijou class to have an act in Chicago or somewhere, but who knows? Maybe we move up to Madison Square.’
    â€˜Oh, Jesus!’
    â€˜What’s eating you?’ Bert demanded. ‘It’s a good routine. You know that.’
    â€˜I got Sally out in the audience.’
    â€˜Sally?’
    â€˜You know. The teacher.’
    â€˜So what? Educate her.’
    â€˜She’s not a tramp. She’s a lady.’
    â€˜I don’t believe you. I just don’t. Man, you are deluded.’
    â€˜We can do something else.’
    â€˜No! Now look, Maxie, this is our break. Don’t piss all over it. Guttman told this guy from the Alderman Circuit that we’re going to do our three cop and tramp routines. He knows what they’re about, and he’s waiting.’
    â€˜Oh, shit, shit, shit,’ Max moaned.
    The man next to Sally Levine kept glancing at her. She decided to ignore him. His knee then moved slowly, almost imperceptibly, toward her until it touched the crêpe de Chine. She jerked her own knees away, grateful that the aisle was on her left. Her whole body tightened as she watched the trained dogs perform, and when the curtain finally went up on Bellamy and Britsky, she had passed out of her receptive mood and was staring critically and tight-lipped at the stage.
    The backdrop was a scene in a park, old and faded with cracks in the paint and some stitched repair work. In front of the back-drop, a park bench, and on the bench a tramp and a blowzy middle-aged woman. They were seated about a foot apart, and between them, on the bench, the woman’s handbag reposed. Sally was hard put at first to recognise Max as the tramp. He had put on a bulbous, clownish red nose, and his face was shadowed with a week’s growth of whiskers. He wore baggy patched pants and an ancient patched jacket, and after the curtain rose, the two of them, the tramp and the woman, sat motionless and silent. This in itself brought a nervous response from the audience, a ripple of applause.
    Then the woman picked up her bag, opened it, and near-sightedly peered into it. Then she screamed – a succession of howling, hair-raising screams. The tramp did nothing – no response, no motion. For reasons Sally did not comprehend, the audience burst into laughter, laughter which increased as a policeman came on-stage. So this was Bert Bellamy, about whom she had heard so much! He carried an overlarge nightstick, which he pointed at the blowzy woman, telling her, ‘All right, lady, you can stop screaming now.’
    She stopped screaming and pointed wordlessly at the nightstick.
    â€˜It’s me nightstick,’ Bert said. ‘Have ye never seen a nightstick before?’
    â€˜Not that large.’
    â€˜You’re damn right.’ He spoke in a heavy Irish brogue, and by now the audience was convulsed with laughter.