Touch and Go (12 page)

I wasn't despairing because there was still an open-territory feeling. The whole country was in a strange, unsettled state. Soon after, another job came along: Roosevelt had created the FERA, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. They hired me for a project that involved understanding the nature of unemployment at the time. In what industry was unemployment highest? Where? San Francisco, unemployed longshoremen; Pittsburgh, steelworkers; Akron, rubber workers. We had to find out who the unemployed were and why they lost their jobs.

Each city was assigned a table, and each table had a guy and five girls—the guy got more money, he was in charge. I was the guy in charge of Omaha. What's in Omaha? Stockyards. This was a good period for me: The job wasn't civil service, but it paid, I
didn't have to put up an attorney's shingle, and the girls were good company.

In 1935, a horse named Omaha was running in the Kentucky Derby. I'm saying to the girls, “Omaha! I'm going to bet a half a dollar on him.” Below the Wells-Grand was a cigar store that was run by a bookie. The girls had never placed a bet in their lives, but I got them excited about Omaha, so each one gave me a quarter. The Derby is Saturday afternoon, and I'm with my friend and we're going to see a movie. I figure we'll go to the movie and I'll place the bet—my half-a-dollar and the girls' money—later. We see
Bolero
, with George Raft and Carole Lombard, at the Castle Theater, right next to the Boston Store where my brother worked as a shoe dog on the fifth floor. We leave the movie, and go outside, and what is the headline? OMAHA WINS DERBY, PAYS 8 TO 1. Oh my God. I can imagine they'll be jumping up and down on Monday when I come in. I can't tell the girls I didn't place the bet. So it's $3.50 times five girls. I had to borrow about $18 to pay them because I had picked the winner. What happens Monday? The girls
are
jumping up and down, kissing me. They'd heard about it on the radio, and oh, were they happy. Just my luck: picking a winner who costs me twenty-eight bucks. And George Raft can't even act.

I'd have stuck out the Depression in Chicago, but for reasons of personal safety, I felt the need to decamp for other pastures. An event from my shady past had caught up with me.

College kids would often pick up an extra ten bucks or so working as poll watchers on Election Day. Moler's was a college barbershop where barbers trained and gave free or ten-cent haircuts—a favorite spot for the guys on skid row. The barbershop was closed that day so it could be a polling place, and many of the skid-rowers came in to vote, early and often, as the Chicago saying goes. A guy named Berghoff was my poll-watching partner. The city election officials would hire five guys: Three were judges and the other two were clerks. They'd get paid $7.50 a day. These were guys like some who stayed at the Wells-Grand Hotel—doddering old men, unsure
and frail. These old guys were simply officials of the city, whereas the precinct captains, the guys who arranged for them to serve, were Republicans and Democrats. The Democratic precinct captain's name was Gordon and the Republican's was Romano, which happened to be the name of a Chicago family involved in various quasi-legal activities.

My righteous colleague, Berghoff, sat at the table by the judges, scribbling notes. I sat in the barber chair and watched. When Berghoff wasn't writing, he was glaring at me because I wasn't taking any notes. Some guys came in to vote three, four times. Money changed hands outside the barbershop; bottles of muscatel in paper bags, too; precinct captains kindly accompanied certain voters right into the booth. This went on all day. At one point, Gordon stuck a five-dollar bill in my shirt pocket. “Buy yourself a hat.”

I said, “I don't wear hats,” and handed back the five-dollar bill. Anything wrong going on?

Sure enough, this particular precinct was investigated. There's a trial, and Berghoff and I are subpoenaed. Who's on trial? The trembling old guys, the judges and clerks. The prosecutor is a light-skinned black guy named Cashin; the judge is named Jarecki.

Berghoff, good-looking, a law student, one of these upstanding law-and-order guys, is the first to testify. “Do you recognize these five defendants?” The five guys stand up and they're called by name. I'm thinking they'll probably get six months in prison, probably die there. Of course, the names of the two precinct captains are never mentioned!

It's my turn. Now what do I do? I could be Berghoff and say exactly what happened. Instead I say, “I don't remember.”

Cashin says, “You don't remember? You just heard your colleague, Mr. Berghoff.”

“Yeah, well, I don't remember.” I don't think I knew I was going to lie until the moment I did.

I was like Huck Finn on the raft. When did Huck decide? Remember Jim, the runaway slave, and his companion, Huck, on the
raft. The slave chasers, the bounty hunters say, “Is that guy on the raft white or black?” And in that one moment: “He's
white
.” Oh my God. Well, here am I saying, “I don't remember.”

“You don't
remember
?” You see the guys, shaky, about to fall down. So very much like guys I know from the hotel. That's when I decided, and at that moment I committed something close to perjury. The old guys were let off because of the split testimony. The gumless one, the gimpy one, the old rummy, the shaky one—Civilization, Teddy Tils . . .

Berghoff looked at me and I looked at him, and we hated each other's guts. I obviously violated a law, yet why did I feel good? As Huck put it: “If I go to hell, I go to hell.”

Time passes and the court decides to call on the precinct captains, Gordon and Romano.

Prince Arthur Quinn was our precinct captain (later to become our state senator).
²⁰
Young Prince Arthur knew my brother Benny, because Benny used to play the horses and gamble at a joint called Johnson's, a big booking palace on Clark Street two blocks away from the hotel. Prince Arthur was known to stop in at Johnson's now and then.

One day he comes in and says, “Hey, Ben, you got a kid brother. You like your kid brother?”

“Oh, I love my kid brother.”

“Louis, is that his name?”

“Yeah.”

“You want him to live, don'tcha?”

“Yeah.”

“You know, he may get shot.”

Artie explained: “I just wanted you to know that your kid brother is going to be called up as a witness against Romano. The Romano your brother remembers weighed about two hundred
and sixty pounds. He's lost about a hundred pounds, he wears glasses, has a mustache. Your brother won't recognize him, he won't know who he is. But at the same time, I know his relatives, these wops, they're gonna knock him off if he fingers Romano. All Louis has to say is, ‘I don't know the guy.' ”

Benny says, “Oh, my brother, he'll play along.”

So Benny tells all this to me. I think, holy Christ, I can't get called in front of Jarecki again. I can't tell the judge I don't remember Gordon and Romano. What am I gonna do? Then I thought of New York. I was in good standing with the FERA guys who ran the project because I did a decent job. I told them my aunt was very ill in New York and asked if they had any openings there. They did. They said they'd see if they could work something out. It so happened they could.

I went to New York for about six months and worked on the same unemployment project. And I kept seeing plays. Saturday, you could always pick up a single ticket for a matinee. That season I saw
Winterset
, about the Sacco and Vanzetti case, with Burgess Meredith. And
Porgy and Bess
. I saw Nazimova as Mrs. Alving in
Ghosts
, and Ruth Gordon and Pauline Lord in
Ethan Frome
. I was hooked on theater.

While I'm in New York living with my grandmother, I get a wire. The examination I'd taken for the fingerprint job had led to a different offer: counting Baby Bonds for the treasury department. It was an addition to the bonus FDR gave shortly after he was elected. A couple of thousand of us who hadn't made fingerprint classifier were called to Washington. Roosevelt had finally come through for the veterans of World War I. Remember? In 1932, thousands of veterans and family members, suffering from the Depression, campaigned and demonstrated in Washington, demanding the cash payout Herbert Hoover had vetoed in that failed attempt. The great marine hero Smedley Butler spoke on behalf of the soldiers, but to no avail.

An aside: Butler was “a pint-sized Marine for all seasons,” in the
words of his colleague General Douglas MacArthur, who once described him for
Smithsonian
magazine. “He was small, round-shouldered. He weighed barely 140 pounds dripping wet, and even when he was dry his uniforms seemed to hang off him like an oversize bathing suit. Yet this unlikely model for a recruiting poster was one of the really great generals in American history.”

It was somewhat astonishing, a pivot punch from nowhere, to read how this hero described himself in
Common Sense
magazine, November, 1935:

When the World War I veterans refused to leave, Hoover ordered the police to remove them. The D.C. chief of police, Captain Pelham Glassford, refused to take part in assaulting the veterans, in effect saying: I will not tear-gas my buddies. So Hoover instead enlisted Douglas MacArthur, with George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower as aides, to smoke the veterans out with tear gas and scare them off with bayonets.

It was a disaster—people were injured, some died. But now Roosevelt is president and finally a bonus is passed. Then came a move by congress to give the veterans an extra bonus—that was called the Baby Bonus. Say a guy named Joe Miller in Provo, Utah,
is going to get an extra fifty bucks. I count out two $25 bonds. That's what we did all day. That's
all
we did all day. It drove me crazy.

I ended up sharing an apartment with a colleague, Monroe Campbell Jr., a very funny Southerner. He was gay, which I didn't realize until we started living together. He kept it quiet so he wouldn't get fired. Monroe found a nice Georgetown apartment up above a tearoom. Fifty bucks a month in Georgetown! Monroe liked to throw parties, and naturally, I was his co-host—mostly his friends, gay, wonderful people. All of Monroe's women friends looked like Dorothy Parker or Louise Brooks: bobbed helmet hair, only gray instead of black.

We used to go to the Deck, a gay bar with a nautical theme. The bouncers were women, very butch, some tough. But they all liked me. They knew I was hetero and the word they used for me was “jam.” It's not a term used today, but apparently back then it applied to someone they could trust—a straight guy, wholly innocent, not overly hip, but someone you could bank on. Monroe was the first gay person with whom I became good friends.

We had a number of homosexuals who lived at the hotel, but I did not know them. Unlike the happenings in the Book of Luke, there was always room at the inn. Even for gay people.
²¹
Even for couples without luggage.

I wasn't in Washington, D.C., for long, less than a year, but if it hadn't been for my friends and acting, I'd have lost my mind counting those endless Baby Bonds.

I had heard about the Washington Civic Theater Group and their plan to stage Sinclair Lewis's
It Can't Happen Here
, a play about fascism coming to America. Remember, there were several Ameri-can
fascist groups, among them the Silver Shirts. Gerald L.K. Smith, Brinkley, the monkey-gland quack, the founder of the America First Party, et al. I auditioned for the director, Day Tuttle, and won the role of a George Wallace–type figure named Shad LeDue. We performed at the Wardman Park Hotel Theatre, which seated four or five hundred people. I received a glowing write-up from a reviewer at the Washington
Star
.
²²

Shad LeDue is a handyman working for a man named Doremus Jessup, an old-world liberal editor of the paper. Jessup is basically a nice person, but he looks down on LeDue as crude, as a nothing. LeDue belongs to a group called the Corpos that take over the community, and he becomes a sort of gauleiter, a petty tyrant of the town, strutting around in a special Corpos uniform. What hit me most about playing LeDue was the question: Who are the guys who join these kinds of groups? Who are the guys who become like him? Who are the ones who fix the lock on the door, who put the bulb in?

You're the professor and the janitor hates your guts because he thinks you look down upon him or barely even recognize his presence. There are millions who, deep, deep down, feel disdained (which is exactly how the Reagan Democrats came into being). I remember years later C.P. Ellis telling me of how he became a Klansman and how the Klan used him, feeding on his feelings of being a nobody. Because if you're
nobody
, you can't endure it unless there's somebody below you.

I have never forgotten performing the role of Shad and the feeling I had standing on the stage in front of that large audience, the feeling of power in wearing that uniform. If ever there were a contemporary (2007) challenge to our sense of self, it is this one; especially, fundamentalism in either its spiritual or its secular form.