I believe I phoned ten people altogether in the space of about twelve or fifteen minutes. I even lost the little tact I had had left and rang one or two who knew me so little I had to explain to them just who I was before I sprang the question. So you can see what chance I had. When there was just one nickel left, I gave it up as a bad job, left the booth, and bought a phosphate at the soda fountain. My throat was dry from talking so much.
The phosphate brought the jag on again a little. I went out and started to walk west without exactly knowing where I was going. I crossed Park, and then Madison and Fifth, just missing being run over by a Town Nash on the last thoroughfare. After which the jag left me for good, and I just felt drawn around the eyes. But the incident gave me an idea, which I pondered for fully half a block before finally rejecting it. It was to get myself hit by some timid, affluent old gentleman’s car and settle for a hundred on the spot instead of bringing suit later. The main difficulty was: not to get hit by some one who, after I was all knocked in a heap and no good for the rest of the evening, might prove to be anything but timid or affluent and say, “Go ahead, sue me!” And not to be damaged too badly to be able to get right back to Bernice with the booty. And not to be arrested as a would-be suicide. Outside of which the project was a perfectly good one. So I gave it up.
I turned south on Sixth Avenue and stared up at a passing elevated train for inspiration, but all it gave was a shower of sparks and someone’s saliva.
I went to Connie’s on Sixth Avenue. After he had let me in, Connie went back behind the bar and said, “Hello, Wade. What can I do for you?” So I looked at the ceiling, I looked at the floor, I looked at the wall in back of me, and I looked at the wall in back of Connie. I spoke, and when I spoke, I put it in the worst possible way, like you always do when you want a thing badly. I said, “I didn’t came in here to buy anything. I’m a punk, Connie. I want to borrow a hundred dollars.” Connie smiled and said, “You’re no punk, ’cause you’re not going to get it.” So I smiled back and said, “I’m no punk; you are,” and I went out again on Sixth Avenue.
It had started to rain while I was in there, and the shimmer of the lights looked like yellow torches blazing up out of the wet pavement. But that didn’t mean a thing to me; if it had been raining dimes and nickels that would have been a whole lot better. I turned my collar up and shoved my hands into my pockets and thought. I thought of some one I knew: Rapper, the stage manager of the show that had been running the past few months at the Cort. That was near there, too.
Before I was through thinking about him, I was there. My feet must have done it by themselves. I guess they loved Bernice too. I asked for him at the stage door, and the doorkeeper told me I had just missed him, he’d gone home only a minute ago. I thought of chasing after him, but the doorkeeper told me he’d broken his heart and taken a taxi because it was a wet night. Then I asked him where Rapper lived, but he said they weren’t allowed to tell things like that. So I said, “What’s he afraid of, the Board of Health?” and went out on the sidewalk again.
While I was standing there, the last stragglers of the company came out and went home. A girl by herself, still fixing her garter as she came out of the doorway, and then two girls and a natty fellow who looked as though he’d had his clothes poured over him hot and then allowed to harden.
I thought he was going to get into the taxi with them at first, but after he already had one foot on the running board, he glanced around and seemed to change his mind. He shut the door and they drove off, and he remained standing where he was and staring idly down the street. Then all at once, without even turning to look at me, he said, “Did you want to see Rapper?”
“Why?” I answered hostilely.
“I work with him,” he said, “maybe I could do something for you.”
“You nor nobody else,” I told him, “unless you have a hundred bucks you can fork over for the time being.”
He looked up at the sky, which was dry now and full of little silvery clouds, and said: “The gin at the drugstore goes right to one’s head.”
“I’ll be seeing you,” I remarked coldly.
So he said, “It may be the effect of the full moon, but you appeal to me to the extent of five dollars. Come along with me and get it.”
I felt like saying, “Go on away from me,” and help him do so with the end of my foot, and then I thought, “Somebody else has the hundred for her in his pocket right now; oh, don’t waste time!” So I took him by the lapel, which seemed to please him, and I said, “Let’s go, will you! I don’t want a drink, and I don’t want any incense burning in Woolworth Buddhas — I only want to go.”
We went in a taxi, and every minute my heart said sixty prayers. “Keep her there for me until I get back. I don’t know Who or What — but Somebody, Something, keep her there for me until I get back!” We went up a flight of steps, and every step my heart ticked off a prayer.
When he had lit the lights and locked the door, I hit him in the face. He went back into an easy chair that happened to be behind him, and stayed there, with his legs almost at right angles and two ribbons of blood, one from each nostril, dripping down his chin. I went all over the place, and then I came back to where he was. He’d gotten over his dizziness, and he drew his legs in to get up and said, “I’m going to get a policeman.”
“Try it,” I advised him, “and you’ll be telling your story at the stage door of hell.”
I went all over the place a second time. I was nervous, and the second time was as much of a waste of time as the first. By the time I got back, he had managed to get out of the chair and was fumbling at the door, trying to get it open without attracting my attention. I said, “Get away from there! I don’t want to hit you any more; you’re all squashy as it is.” He dodged aside and quavered, “I didn’t do anything to you.”
“Where is it?” I said. He asked me what I meant, and when I told him, got kind of wise and answered, “In the National City Bank on Seventy-Second Street, and the doors don’t open till nine on Monday.”
“You better pray you got some stuck around here some place,” I told him, “ ’cause if you won’t tell me where, I’ll hit you, and if you tell me the wrong place to look, I’ll hit you, and if you tell me there isn’t any, I’ll hit you anyway just for luck.” He went a little whiter (or whatever color comes after white, ’cause he was white already) and faltered, “I don’t know how much you want.”
“All,” I said.
He struggled with himself, and I drew my elbow back, and he said, “I have a little in the bathroom, in the crevice behind the tissue paper.”
I went right in there, and instead of using his head and getting out the front door while he had the chance, he came right at my heels, whining, “I was saving it for the rent. The show closes Saturday. What am I gonna do?” I was too busy to answer him at the moment. In the little built-in niche, between two tiles, where the putty or whatever it is they use had fallen out, there was a wad of fives and tens. While I was counting them over, he suddenly and belatedly made up his mind to quit the scene and get help. I got him by the shoulder with one hand just in time, and said, “You wait’ll I’m out of here before you do your act, get me?” But the interruption had made me lose count and I had to start over again at the beginning. It came to one hundred and fifteen altogether. I was going to leave the last three fives with him, but I reasoned that to get back to the party as quickly as possible I’d have to take a taxi, so I shoved the whole amount in my pocket. He gave a little moan of futile protest and lifted the handkerchief he’d been stopping his nose with to the side of his head. At the same time I caught sight of a lot of sooty water lying in the tub with bits of pink and white underwear floating around in it, and toyed momentarily with the notion of giving him a push into it. But there was no reason to do so, so instead I buttoned my coat, went through the large room, got the door open, and took a quick run down the steps, ending in a vault over the last five or six. He called down after me, “You dirty crook, you’ll get yours for this someday!” and then quickly slammed the door of his apartment shut, as though expecting me to turn around and come running back at him. He could have called me much worse than that, for all I’d have cared; he’d just been a means to an end, and I didn’t have any more time for him by now. And anyway you look at it, the epithet certainly fitted me. Dirty or otherwise, I had become a crook now for her sake. And did I regret it? I was the happiest crook that ever ran away from the scene of the burglary as I came out into the open and threw my arm at a taxi. Of course, it had some one in it, and the driver snubbed me majestically. I got a free one a moment later, and rearing down the street on what felt to be no more than two wheels, took a look back through the rear pane; there was no one in sight, no sign of commotion, not a whistle had sounded. It was almost no fun.