Tours of the Black Clock

36

I’M WORKING AT THE stand three days, never leaving but sleeping behind the counter, before Jerry comes back. He couldn’t be more amazed to find me and the money still there. “How’s the wife,” I say, and he answers she’s doing better but he’s going to have to stay with her awhile. “So you want this job for a time?” he asks and I say all right. I have the job a couple of weeks and I don’t mind it. Mostly I read the magazines.

One of the customers who rolls by in his Packard every day is John “Doggie” Hanks, who runs a big part of uptown Manhattan all the way to Harlem. He was a gangster up until a year ago when Prohibition ended and gangsters were either legalized out of business or frozen into legitimacy. Hanks is legitimate now more or less, or at least as legitimate as he can stand to be. He wears a nice suit and sits in the back seat of the car while someone else drives. In his early forties he has curly blond hair and a face shaved as smooth as a swimmer’s legs except for the pockmarks around his temples. His driver has hair that stands up like a brush and a nose that points like a compass, except his brain tilts in the south direction as far as I can tell. “What happened to Jerry?” Hanks asks the first day, and I tell him his wife’s sick. He gives me some money for her. “I hear Jerry didn’t get it,” he says, “and I’ll come looking for you. You don’t look so difficult to locate either.” I give the money to Jerry the next time he comes by. As with a lot of people, Jerry’s feelings about someone like Doggie Hanks tend to be a bit confused. He’s too awestruck and terrified to be purely grateful. “You tell Mr. Hanks,” he instructs me very carefully, “that I say thank you very, very much. You got that?”

“Sure,” I answer.

“Thank you very, very—”

“All right, all right.” It’s disgusting. Hanks comes by later that day. “Jerry says to tell you ‘Thank you very, very much.’”

“OK,” he says, taking his paper through the car window.

“You got the correct tone of that?” I ask. “‘Very, very much.’ Solicitous as hell.”

“‘Solicitous’?” Hanks looks at his driver. “Billy, the kid says ‘solicitous.’”

“Yes sir, Mr. Hanks,” says the driver with the beak.

“What do you think of it,” says Hanks.

“It’s somethin’ all right,” Billy says tersely.

Hanks laughs. He points at Billy and says to me, “Billy says it’s somethin’. He’s got a way with words just like you.” He stops laughing after a bit. “How old are you?”

“Twenty,” I say.

“Ha ha,” says Hanks. He says to Billy, “He’s got a way with numbers too, huh? Eighteen maybe.” He waves, still laughing, and they drive off. Every day after that, when he comes to get his paper in the backseat of his car, he says to me, “So how about a ten dollar word today,” and I give him one off the top of my head. This goes on for a week and a half. Sometimes he’ll say, “How old are we today?” and I get a little tired of it. “Today I’m fucking retirement age, Mr. Hanks,” I say, “today I’m moving to Florida to live with the grandkids.” Hanks loves it. “Hear that, Billy?” he laughs, and Billy says, “Punk’s got a mouth if you ask me, Mr. Hanks.” Hanks just laughs more. “Billy’s not too happy with you,” he explains, “I’d never let him smartass me like that.” Finally one day Hanks makes his offer. It’s the middle of the afternoon and he’s just bought some cigars. “I have a club on the upper west side,” he tells me. He gives me a card that reads Top Dog, and there’s an address. “I can use a doorman who’s big as a damn wall and smarter than he looks. You come tonight around seven if you want it. Needless to say, you’re twenty-one if you take it. It’s a step up from peddling cigars, huh?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, just gives me a small salute as though to say it’s understood I’ll be there, and I have half a mind not to show up because of it. But that’s silly. I pick a guy out from among the drifters hanging around the corner like I was doing not too long ago and give him my job; today I’m retirement age, like I said. I roll up an issue of the pulp I’m reading called Savage Nights and stuff it in my coat pocket.