The Telephone Booth Indian (11 page)

“By the time the Count came back from Florida,” Morty says, “Johnny Attorney was running a night club on Fiftysecond Street. The Count walks into Johnny's joint as if nothing had happened, and in fifteen minutes he cons Johnny into making him a banquet manager. He booked a couple of nice banquets
into there, but when Johnny would send the bill to the chairman of whatever club it was that held the banquet, the chairman would write back and say, 'I see no mention on your bill of the deposit I paid your Mr. Bimberg.' The Count had glommed the deposits. So after that he had to play the duck for Johnny for a couple of years. Whenever Johnny would get shoved in the can for assault or manslaughter, the Count would come back to town. That gave him quite a lot of time in town, at that.”

Morty and Hy agree that the Count had a rare gift of making women feel sorry for him because he looked so small and fragile. “He made many a beautiful head,” Morty concedes with envy. “If I had met a refined, educated girl like you when I was still young, my whole life would have been different,” the Count would tell a head who might be a minor burlesque stripper. He would invite her to his tiny office in the Jollity Building to plan her Hollywood career. This office, he would assure her, was just a hideout where he could get away from the crowds of people who besieged him for bookings at his regular place of business. The Count always made a point of stopping at the switchboard which then served the furnishedoffice tenants, collectively known to Morty Ormont as the heels. “Did that girl from the Paradise Restaurant call me this afternoon?” he would ask the operator. “You know, the one I got a job for last week? And by the way, if Monte Proser calls up in the next halfhour, tell him I'm out. I'm going to be busy.” The mainsprings of feminine character, the Count used to tell his friends, were avarice and mother love. He would make extravagant promises of contracts in shows or moving pictures which he would tell every girl he was on the point of closing for her. Then he would say sadly, “Your success is assured, but I will never be happy. I am a Broadway roue, and no decent girl would look at me.” “Oh, don't say that, Mr. Bimberg,” a girl might beg, remembering she had not yet
signed the contract. (The Count used to say, “You would be surprised how sorry a girl can feel for a man that is going to make a lot of money for her.”) “Oh yes, I cannot fool myself,” the Count would sob to the girl, and tears would flow from his large, protruding eyes as he grabbed for his protege's hand. If the girl put an arm around his narrow shoulders to steady him, he would work into a clinch. If she pulled away from the lead, the Count would sometimes fall to his knees and sniffle. “Why should I live another day?” he would wail. “Tomorrow your contract is coming through. If I lived through tonight, I could collect my tenpercent commission, which would amount to perhaps a couple of thousand bucks. Is that a reason to live?” Usually the girl would think it was a pretty good reason. The Count did not always succeed. “When a bosko wouldn't have nothing to do with him,” Hy Sky says, “Maxwell C. Bimberg became very emotional.” He once offered a female boxer forty dollars to let him hold her hand. The boxer declined, saying, “I would rather wake up in a hole with a snake than in a room with Count de Pennies.” The Count was very discouraged by her remark and hated to hear it quoted.

An enterprise which the Count's admirers remember with considerable pleasure was the Public Ballyhoo Corporation, Ltd. To launch this concern, the Count spent a couple of weeks promoting a bookmaker known as Boatrace Harry. The Count kept on telling Boatrace Harry about the great incomes that he said were earned by publicity men like Steve Hannagan, Benjamin Sonnenberg, and Richard Maney. Then he allowed Harry to invest a couple of thousand dollars in Public Ballyhoo, Ltd. He had letterheads printed saying that Public Ballyhoo, Ltd., would supply “anything from an actress to an alligator” for publicity stunts. The Count became so interested in his idea that he forgot to duck with Boatrace Harry's money. The manager of a theater
showing the first run of a picture called
Eskimo
asked the Count to secure a genuine Eskimo to pose on top of the marquee with a team of huskies. The Count made a good try. He found in the telephone directory some kind of society for the preservation of the American Indian and obtained from it the addresses of two alleged Eskimos. One turned out to be a Jewish tailor in Greenpoint; this was obviously a wrong listing. The other, who lived in Bay Ridge, was a real Eskimo who had a job in a foundry. He turned down the job, however, and begged the Count not to give his secret away, because his girl would make fun of him.

The Count had a number of other disappointments. He saw a classified advertisement inserted in a newspaper by a man who said he wanted to buy cockroaches in quantity. The Count knew where he could buy some large tropical roaches which had been a feature of a recently raided speakeasy called La Cucaracha, where the customers could race roaches along the bar, instead of rolling dice, to see who would pay for their drinks. In his enthusiasm, the Count bought five hundred
cucarachas
, at a nickel apiece, from the prohibition agents who had raided the place. The Count knew some newspaper reporters from the days when he had exploited murderesses and boxing girls, so he called several of them up and told them of the big deal he had on the fire. They thought it was funny, and the story was published in the early editions of a couple of afternoon papers. The advertiser, however, did not want racing cockroaches. He wanted to feed the roaches to tropical birds, and the Count's acquisitions could have eaten the birds. Ordinary household roaches, obtainable from small boys in tenement neighborhoods at low cost, were better for the aviarist's purpose. The Count was stuck with five hundred hungry bugs. He turned them loose on the third floor of the Jollity Building and left for Florida with what remained of Boatrace Harry's money. Barney attributes the unusual size of
the bugs in the Jollity Building today to the thoroughbred outcross.

Morty was naturally quite angry with the Count at first, but after a few weeks began to miss him. “You have to hand it to him. He had a good idea all the same,” Morty says now. “The story about the roaches was in all the papers, and with that kind of publicity he could have gone far. A week after he left, a guy called up and asked for Mr. Bimberg. I asked him what did he want, and he said he had read about Public Ballyhoo, Ltd., and he was in the market for some moths. So I told him, 'I haven't any moths, but if you'll come up here, I'll cut holes in your pants for nothing.' “

The Count de Pennies must have convinced himself that he was a publicity man. When he reappeared in the Jollity Building after he had lost Boatrace Harry's money at Tropical Park, he got a job with a new night club as press agent. The place had one of those stages which roll out from under the bandstand before the floor show starts. The Count decided he could get a story in the newspapers by sending for the police emergency squad on the pretext that one of the show girls had been caught under the sliding stage. The policemen arrived, axes in hand, and refused to be deterred by the Count's statement that there was no longer any need of them because he had personally rescued the girl. “You know very well that poor little girl is still under there!” the sergeant in charge roared reproachfully, and the coppers hilariously chopped the stage to bits. The Count lost his job.

What was perhaps the zenith of the Count's prosperity was reached during the brief life of the Lithaqua Mineral Water Company. Lithaqua was formed to exploit a spring on the land of a Lithuanian tobacco farmer in Connecticut. The water of the spring had a ghastly taste, and this induced the farmer to think it had therapeutic qualities. A druggist who was related to a murderess
the Count had formerly managed organized a company to market the water. He gave the Count ten per cent of the common stock to act as director of publicity. The Count “sent out the wire,” as fellows in the Jollity Building sometimes say when they mean that a promoter has had a third party act as gobetween, to Johnny Attorney and Boatrace Harry. “Why be thick all your life?” he had his intermediary ask Johnny. “The Count has something big this time. If you will call it square for the few hundred he owes you, he will sell you ten per cent of the mineralwater company for exactly one grand.” The Count had the same offer made to Boatrace Harry, and he sold his ten per cent of the stock to each of them for one thousand dollars. He sold his share in the enterprise to five other men, too, and was just beginning to think he had better go to Florida again when a chemist for a consumers' research group discovered that seepage from the vats of a nearby dye works accounted for the bilious flavor of the tobacco farmer's water. This got the Count out of a difficult situation. Even Johnny and Boatrace could understand that ten per cent of a worthless business was not worth quarreling about.

During this period of affluence, the Count lived in a hotel on West Fortyeighth Street. “There was even a private shower,” intimates recall solemnly when they evoke the glories of that era. The Count took to wearing cinnamoncolored suits with pointed lapels that flared from his waistline to an inch above his shoulders and trousers that began just below his breastbone. Every day he bet on every race at every track in the United States and Canada, and he invariably lost. Almost four weeks elapsed, Morty Ormont recalls with astonishment now, before the Count again had to borrow nickels to make telephone calls.

The Dixie Melody Tours followed several promotions of an increasingly prosaic nature. “The tours was too legitimate for his character,” Hy Sky says sadly. “There was nobody left for him to
promote, only the railroad. So he went ahead and promoted it. Maxwell C. Bimberg was too brilliant!” Morty Ormont is more realistic. “In every class of business there has got to be a champion,” he says. “The Count de Pennies was never no good to nobody, but he was the champion heel of the Jollity Building.”

n times like these, the lodginghouse conducted by Mrs. Rosa Braune on West Ninetysecond Street, near Central Park, is a peaceful and comforting place. It is almost entirely inhabited by prize fighters, who are the most tranquil of athletes. Unlike baseball players and jockeys, fighters seldom have noisy arguments. Not fighting is their avocation. Mrs. Braune's house gives a city dweller the same soothing sense of continuity that the round of seasons is said to impart to peasants. There are always new fighters coming up, old ones going down, and recurrent technical problems to discuss. I hadn't been to see Mrs. Braune and her lodgers since midsummer of 1939, and, as the world had gone through a lot in the interim, I visited the house a few days ago with certain misgivings. Happily, I found everything serenely unchanged.

Most of Mrs. Braune's lodgers are under the direction of Al Weill, a bulbous man who is the thriftiest and most industrious fight manager of the day. The two windows of his office—an indication that he is at least twice as opulent as any competitor— overlook the land of the Telephone Booth Indians, but he is too wise to stable his prize fighters in the vicinity. Fighters not in his charge occasionally stop at Mrs. Braune's house, but Mrs.
Braune doesn't encourage them. Prize fighters are drawn inevitably to parks, and the Central Park reservoir, around which they can take their morning runs, makes the neighborhood especially popular with them. Weill has a family and a home of his own on the upper West Side; his viceroy at Mrs. Braune's is Charles Goldman, a trainer and an old friend of mine. Goldman is a brisk little man with a flattened nose and a thickened right ear. These add authority to his comments on professional subjects. He used to be a smart bantamweight and never lets any of his pupils forget it. Charlie opened the door and greeted me as soon as I had rung Mrs. Braune's bell. This was not strange, because he lives in the front parlor of the oldfashioned brownstone house. His wide windows are a strategic point from which he can see any fighter who comes home late at night or tries to bring a girl in with him. From them he can also check on the boys as they leave for their morning runs in the park.

We shook hands, then Goldman yelled up the stairs for Mrs. Braune and took me into his room to wait for her. It is a big room, and there are three beds in it. A FrenchCanadian fighter named Dave, who is not under Weill's management but lives in the neighborhood, was sitting on one of them talking in French to a Weill featherweight named Spider. Goldman introduced me, and then Spider said, raptly, “Go on, Dave, talk more French.” “Spider don't understand him,” Goldman said seriously, “but he thinks it sounds pretty.” When Mrs. Braune came in a couple of minutes later, Dave stopped talking, because Mrs. Braune, a German Swiss, understands French and would not have liked what he was calling Spider. “It's better than double talk,” Dave said to me with a grin. The two boys went out, and as they were leaving, Goldman said, “Don't get into no crap games.” The house stands in a treeshaded block of almost identical brownstones, all with high stoops, and usually there is a crap game in progress
on at least one of them. Goldman disapproves of crap games because they take a fighter's mind off business. Whenever one of the boys is arrested and fined two dollars for shooting crap, Goldman gloats over his misfortune.