A few minutes after six, Gregor said, “Oh, the hell with it, keed, let’s call it a day.” He folded up his tripod and put his camera in the case. We walked to 1104 Halstead Street, where Co-op Photography was located. Co-op Photography was a name to put on the door, actually. Inside the door there was a large room jammed with desks and three smaller rooms, two of them darkrooms and one of them a slapdash studio with lights and a couple of backdrops. For ten dollars a month Gregor got the use of a desk, two hours a day of darkroom time, and use of the studio by arrangement. There was also a switchboard and a girl who functioned as a sort of collective receptionist, but it cost an extra five dollars a month to receive calls there, and Gregor figured it wasn’t worth it. So we walked past the girl without asking if anyone had called, and Gregor put some things in the desk, and took some other things out of it, one of them being a bottle of peach-flavored brandy.
“Jesus sonofabitching Christ,” he said, reflectively. Gregor was a short dark mixture of various Balkan strains that didn’t go together all that well. His eyes were sunken and his cheeks hollow. He had the heaviest beard of anyone I ever met. When he swore I always had the feeling I was hearing wrong, because he never sounded mad or aggravated or anything. He would say various obscene things in the tone of voice you would use to say, “I’m going down to the store for a new tube of toothpaste” or “I wonder how the White Sox did today.” It took a whole lot of getting used to.
He uncapped the bottle and took a drink and asked me if I wanted one. I said it sounded like a good idea. He gave me the bottle and I took a drink. The first time he had done this I wanted to wipe the neck of the bottle or something, but then I decided that anybody who stood out in the middle of State Street all day the way I had done was already exposed to every germ known to modern man, and besides there was something vaguely insulting about insinuating that Gregor was diseased or something.
I don’t know what good peach-flavored brandy tastes like, or even if there is any such thing, for Pete’s sake. This was very cheap stuff. If you’ve never had it, you’ve got the right idea. I think you could duplicate the taste by mixing equal parts of the sweet syrup from canned peaches and Zippo lighter fluid, but if you mixed it that way it would probably cost you more than Gregor paid for it.
He took another drink himself and put the cap on the bottle and the bottle in the drawer. Another photographer, an old man who wore suspenders all the time, believe it or not, came over and asked how it had gone.
“How should it go?” Gregor demanded. “You take the pictures and you see what happens.” He pawed through a handful of letters on the desktop, held one of them to the light, and squinted suspiciously at it. “So either there’s a dollar in it or there isn’t,” he said thoughtfully. “And what difference does it make?”
You may have gathered that he didn’t have the greatest moneymaking operation in the world. Good gathering. Gregor, from what I had seen, was a pretty fair photographer, but one look around that office told you that pretty fair photographers were in less demand than, say, pretty fair aerospace engineers. (Whatever they are: I don’t understand the term, but the Tribune’s classified pages are filled with people who want to hire them.)
Gregor’s business was straightforward enough. He stood there on State Street, taking pictures of people walking by, and as they passed I gave them a numbered slip, and theoretically they sent in the slip with a dollar, and theoretically the number on the slip enabled Gregor to find the right negative and print it and send the print to the customer.
“I don’t always get the right picture to the right person,” he had confided once. “Especially before I started using a kid. I would do the shooting and the card passing all by myself, and I would get the numbers a little off synch, and then I’d get some jerk writing in from Denver to tell me that he got the wrong picture, and I should either send him the right one or send his dollar back. So how am I supposed to straighten it out? Some of the jerks write back three, four times for a lousy dollar. Think how many times I must make a mistake and they don’t write at all. Sometimes I wonder if anybody ever gets the right picture. But what do they want it for in the first place, huh, keed? Answer me that. I have this way of making a buck and I am damned if I can tell you why anybody at all ever sends for the Jesus sonofabitching Christ photographs.”
Tonight his mood was less reflective. He seemed annoyed at the volume of late mail, and he cursed pleasantly as he slit the flaps of the envelopes and shook out the dollar bills. There were a couple of checks, and one clown had sent a dollar in stamps, and another hadn’t enclosed any payment at all.
He put away the orders he would fill tomorrow and added the money to his wallet. “The one with the stamps,” he said, “should sit on a hot stove waiting for his picture to come, the son of a bitch. Let’s see, keed, eleven-thirty to five-thirty is six hours at a buck and a half is what? Nine bucks?”
“Eleven to six. Seven hours.”
“Ten bucks?”
“Ten-fifty.”
He counted out ten singles. He didn’t have any change, he said. I had change, I said. So he discovered two quarters in his pocket and gave them to me.
“You’re the only one making any money,” he told me. “Don’t spend it all on the same girl, huh?”
I laughed politely and counted the bills again, and counted the money in my wallet. “Hey, that’s great,” I said.
“You’re in Rockefeller’s class now?”
“Not quite, but at least I can pay my rent by the end of the week.”
“Whattaya been doing?”
“Paying a day at a time. It’s three-fifty a day, but the weekly rate is only twenty-one bucks, so I’ll be getting one day a week free.”
“Jesus. You’re paying twenty-one bucks a week for a place to sleep?”
“That’s right.”
“Keed, that’s wrong. Where you staying, the Ritz?”
“As a matter of fact it’s a real dump. But at the price—”
“You’re paying way too much, Chip.”
“It’s the cheapest hotel in Chicago. Or at least in the downtown area. I looked all over.”
“Hotels!” He waved a great sigh and shook his head. “Hotels are for a night, two nights, a weekend maybe. Hotels aren’t to live. Who the hell can afford it? Twenty-one bucks a week and you don’t even get any meals or anything, is that right? Son of a bitch, you know what I pay? Eighty-five a month, and that’s two rooms and a kitchen and a bathroom. You got a private bath in that hotel of yours?”
“No.”
“I pay the same as you for Aileen and myself, an apartment instead of a room. That’s what it costs you to live in that hotel of yours.” He scratched his head. “Tell you the truth, I don’t see how you can live. What did I pay you today, eleven dollars?”
“Ten and a half.”
“Whatever it was. So three and a half from that for the room leaves seven, and figure a buck and a half each for breakfast and lunch is three from seven leaves four, and a decent dinner if you eat it out has to cost you two and a half bucks at the bottom, leaves you what? A dollar and a half? You can just about go to the movies.” He shook his head again. “On top of which there’s no work when it rains and no work when I got a big darkroom schedule. I don’t know what I’ve paid you altogether over the past couple of weeks, but it can’t come to all that much.”
It didn’t. I had worked six days out of the past nine, and my total earnings were $57.75. But then my expenses weren’t as high as he had figured them. My breakfast was seventy cents and my dinner ranged from a dollar to a dollar eighty. My lunch was generally a candy bar, and I had found a place where they only charged a nickel for a nickel bar. And sometimes I had a cup of coffee next door to the hotel before I went to sleep.