Max (10 page)

‘Max –'

He stood up now, staring around the room, where clusters of people were still engaged in heated discussion and where Mr Benton was hotly defending himself. Without a word to Sally, Max walked to the back of the room, where the two projectionists were rewinding the film. He stood watching them, and since he was one of the few males in the room, one of the projectionists said to him, ‘What the hell is this, some kind of temperance outfit?'

‘Teachers.'

‘Oh. Yeah, that figures.'

Max moved up to the projector. ‘Can I look at that?'

‘Be my guest.'

The other projectionist said to Max, ‘Come on, buster. We got to pack it up and get out of here.'

Sally stood to one side, watching Max as he circled the projector, for all the world like a predatory animal circling its prey. Suddenly he turned to the projectionists and demanded, ‘How does it work? What makes it work? How do you get that moving picture up there on the wall?'

‘Look, buster, it works. You pay your money and you take your choice. We're electricians. We ain't teachers.'

‘We got to pack up and get out of here,' the other one said.

Max reached into his pocket, came out with his money, and counted off five singles. ‘Five bucks,' he said angrily. ‘That ought to pay for ten minutes of your time. I'm not asking you to bust your asses. All I'm asking is to show me how that damn thing works.'

‘Take it easy, sonny.'

‘And don't call me sonny!'

The room was empty now except for Mr Benton, two young lady schoolteachers who were evidently standing firm with Mr Benton's interest in science, and Sally and Max and the projectionists. Benton and the two teachers moved over to join Sally and watch, and the other projectionist took the five dollars and said, ‘I didn't know we had any high rollers tonight. O.K., my boy, you paid your money and you get your wish. This here thing is called a moving picture projector, and it was put together by Mr Edison's company out in Jersey. Now you want five bucks' worth of how it works, just listen carefully. Inside here is a lens. It is what we call an objective lens. Now you look at these pictures on the celluloid and you'd think they was negatives – I mean if you know anything about photography. Not so. They are positives. Now take a gander at this wheel, and you can see how these sprockets fit into the holes in the celluloid. The wheel with the sprockets is driven by this crank. Now watch. I turn the crank, and this shutter flips back and forth. Without the shutter, you'd just get a blur, but the shutter separates each picture, gives it a separate identity, as we say, and allows it to impinge on the eye of the beholder. Now maybe you been in one of them honky-tonks where they have kinetoscopes with the fancy ladies taking off their clothes. Ever been there?'

Max nodded.

‘O.K. Now you can make a cheap kinetoscope, instead of the fancy one that Edison makes, by just taking a series of action pictures, putting them together with a little trigger that flips them over one at a time. You shine a light on it, and the picture seems to move. Well, this is not so different. When these pictures of the Fitzsimmons-Corbett fight were taken, they were taken with a new kind of camera. Instead of having a photosensitive plate or piece of film inside of it which is exposed when you click the shutter, this camera employs the same kind of device we got here on this projector, film wound around a reel. The shutter clicks at a set relationship to the passing film, and so you get a continuing series of pictures, and the faster the shutter clicks, the more pictures you get – of course, in relation to how fast the crank is turned.'

‘It ain't as easy as it sounds,' the other projectionist put in. ‘Say we want to run this projector for a whole hour. Well, no, that's too long. I guess the realistic time limit is about twenty minutes, and then it tends to heat up, because the whole problem of putting enough light inside the projector to project the picture clearly is very difficult to solve. It ain't that Mr Edison can't come up with a bright enough bulb. He can do that easy enough, but how do you vent the heat? This little fan here helps, but the projector still gets hot as hell.'

‘Not to mention,' the first one said, ‘that you got to keep turning this crank, and you got to turn it in synchronization with the guy who took the picture, and you just hope that he stuck to the rhythm given to him, except that it's impossible to get it perfect, and that's why the pictures are so jerky.' He pointed to the small holes that lined the film. ‘These give us trouble too, because we still don't have a way to punch them absolutely even, but we're working on that.' ‘You work for Mr Edison, then?' Max asked him.

‘That's right.'

‘Does he make the film?'

‘No, but he handles it. It's made to his specifications, but the film's no good without the camera. You got to have a special camera, and I guess there ain't but half a dozen anywhere. Well, how about it, sonny? You got five bucks' worth?'

‘Was it worth five dollars?' Sally asked him when they got outside.

‘You bet your life.'

‘But why? I do think it's extraordinary, but the sight of two men beating each other to death – I could live without that.'

‘No, that's nothing. I don't give a damn about the fight. It's the camera and the projector. Can't you see, it's the beginning of something that never existed before.'

‘It's just a trick, Max. We've always had the magic lantern. This is a magic lantern that moves, that's all.'

‘Yeah, that's all it is.'

‘Where are you?' she asked him as he turned east down the street. ‘You're going the wrong way.'

‘Oh?'

‘Max, what's come over you?'

‘I don't know –'

‘You got to be crazy,' Bert said to Max. ‘You got a brain in your head, you'll leave it alone.'

‘It's my sister.'

‘So it's your sister. So it's the queen of England. It's the nature of a broad to get knocked up. Where's it get you to beat him up?'

‘He learns. It's the only way.'

‘There are times,' Bert said, ‘when you show a nasty streak.'

‘That's the way I feel.'

‘You could make him marry her.'

‘I need that. I got her on my back, I don't need two of them. Anyway, she says she'd kill herself first.'

His name was Joe Greenthal. Max got his name out of her by the simple process of threatening to turn his back on her if she tried to protect the boy or cover up for him, and then he went down to the corner outside the candy store on Pike Street and he asked around for a boy called Joe Greenthal. Compassion was not something Max had a large store of, but he almost felt sorry for this kid called Joe Greenthal, who was pudgy and had a round face and soft brown cow-eyes, and he might have walked away from it had he not spelled out his position to Bert. In all truth, what he had spelled out was only what he could articulate: the complex of pride, of family honor, of his own male macho, of his feelings about the stupidity and witlessness of the rest of his family with only himself to put some stamp of worth and importance upon them – these things he could not put into words.

Nevertheless, they drove him to acts hardly basic to him. He had a deep inner disgust of violence that was almost genetic and certainly tribal and cultural, but he told the boy, Joe Greenthal, that he had to talk to him, alone, concerning Freida, walking him away from the candy store toward the river.

The boy was frightened. ‘Geez,' he whimpered, ‘I didn't know it was going to happen. I didn't mean anything bad. I like Freida.'

‘That's why you knocked her up? Because you like her?'

‘I didn't know it was going to happen, I swear I didn't.'

‘So what do you think? The stork does it, right? So I'm going to teach you different. I'm going to teach you there ain't no stork, just snotty little shits like you.' And with that, Max drove a fist into his belly. When the boy doubled over, Max brought up his knee and laid him flat on his back. He lay on the pavement, doubled up, whimpering with pain, and Max shouted at him, ‘Stay away from her, you little son of a bitch, or I'll come back and break both your arms.'

The next day Freida said to him, ‘You're a crazy lunatic. You knocked out two teeth from Joey. I hate you. I'll always hate you.'

‘So you hate me. He has to learn. He learns. You learn.'

But Max hated himself, which was also a new sensation. He kept thinking of the boy's soft cow-eyes. A few days later, placatingly, he said to Freida, ‘I didn't want to hurt him. I had to learn him.'

‘Oh, big shot!' Freida exclaimed. ‘You're so goddamned great. You think because you're keeping company with that fancy teacher, you're too good for all of us, but you can't even talk right. I had to learn him. You don't learn people, you teach them. You're so smart. Why don't you tell your teacher friend how you beat up a kid because he liked me?'

Max was impressed. He had never thought of Freida as someone with enough guts to talk back to him.

Freida's anger turned into self-pity, and she began to weep. ‘Oh, Max,' she wailed, ‘what will I do? What's going to happen to me? All I can think of is that I have to kill myself.'

‘Don't kill yourself,' Max said.

‘What do you mean, don't kill myself? What else?'

‘I'll take care of it.'

‘What do you mean, you'll take care of it? You think you can do anything, you think you can twist the whole world around your finger, you're so goddamn smart and sure of yourself!'

‘I said I'll take care of it.'

That night, sitting before his dressing room mirror, staring at his lean, hawklike face, Max felt a wave of disgust that included the rouge and cream he was smearing on his face, the ridiculous baggy checked pants he wore, the routine waiting for him and for Bert when the curtain rose, the whole way of a living that brought life and sustenance to the six members of his family. Sally, trying to smooth his rough edges, read poetry to him on occasion, hoping it might interest him. There was a long poem about an ‘ancient mariner' and a line that went: ‘Instead of a cross, an albatross about his neck was hung.' They were all of them his albatross.

‘Do you know what a ransom is?' he asked Bert, who was using a lipstick to double the size of his mouth.

‘Kidnap money, you mean?'

‘You got it. I need a million dollars' ransom.'

‘Who'd they kidnap – Vanderbilt?'

‘Me, and I'm sick of it. I'm sick of this shit. I'm sick of everyone's
peckle
on my back.'

‘What's a
peckle?
'

‘Yiddish for burden.'

‘Your sister really got to you, didn't she?'

‘Eh, she's nothing. Dumb, stupid kid. I found someone to take care of her, but it's got to cost me fifty bucks.'

‘How do you find someone like that?'

‘Suzie. You got to hand it to those floozies – when you're being squeezed, they come up with something. They always do. But fifty bucks down the drain, that hurts.'

‘Are you so broke?'

‘I'm not broke.'

‘Then what are you crying about money for? A lousy fifty bucks is not the end of the world. If you need money –'

‘Yeah, I need money, but not to square Freida. I can take care of that. It's peanuts. Right now, I need money like a kid needs his mother's milk, and I ain't got it. I got maybe two hundred bucks put away, and how the hell I managed to squirrel away two yards with six yelping, shrieking hungry mouths, I don't know. All right, I did it, and it wasn't enough anyway, so what the hell!'

‘Enough for what?'

Max turned to Bert, staring at him as if he was seeing him for the first time. ‘You're not even married. What do you do with your dough?'

‘I live it up.'

‘Ah, bullshit. You're no looser with a buck than I am. How much you got soaked away, Bert?'

‘Why?'

‘I got an idea. I been living with it for weeks, eating on it and letting it eat out my guts. It's an idea that maybe it works, we can end up millionaires.' He thrust a finger at Bert. ‘Throw in with me, huh? This lousy, stupid life is getting us nowhere. It stinks. It's degrading.'

‘What's degrading?'

‘This shit we go out there and do every night, shoving a broomstick up our pants to get a laugh, cheap
double-entendres
and dirty jokes, pratfalls – fuck the whole stupid routine! I need a thousand bucks. We'll forget we ever saw a music hall.'

‘Max, you need fifty bucks for your sister, you got it. But don't come to me with any get-rich-quick baloney. I'm a street kid, like you. You don't like what we do – shit, it's better than a goddamn sweatshop or being a stock clerk. So I'm happy.'

‘You're happy?'

‘You are damn right.'

‘So be happy,' Max said sourly. ‘But let me talk frankly, and just remember what I say. I say you got shit in your blood – friendly, because we're old buddies – but I still say you got shit in your blood. Now remember, you won't work with me in something like this, then you know what?'

‘What?' Bert asked amiably.

‘You'll be working for me.'

‘As long as the pay is good,' Bert said.

He had gone to Suzie, Suzie the floozie, as the kids called her. He had always gone to Suzie when he was troubled. At the age of fifteen, he had been introduced by Suzie into the world of sex. She loved Max – as much as she could love any man and perhaps because he was more a little boy than a man – and she told him, ‘You stay away from the whores or I'll break your neck, because if you get a dose, you are washed up and your whole life is washed up, because there ain't no cure, and anyone who says there's a cure is sweet-talking you. Every snatch in this town is dirty, and don't you ever think any different.' She provided a prophylactic and instructed him: ‘This is the only thing that'll keep you clean. Any other way, you got a dose, and then it's yours until they put you away in the booby hatch.'