Max Read Free

the workers.
    Max, whose schooling was in the past, entered the business on a weekday. He moved into the bakery almost unnoticed, savoring the smells hungrily, watching the bakers mold the bagels in one swift yet intricate motion, dropping them then into the pots of boiling water, from whence they were fished out and thrust into the oven to be baked to a golden brown.
    Finally, someone noticed him and asked him what he wanted.
    â€˜One hundred bagels,’ Max said, flattening a dollar bill on the counter.
    â€˜Why ain’t you in school?’
    The whole world of adulthood was nosy, officious, and suspicious. Storekeepers were walking into the place and walking out with huge bags of bagels. No one questioned them. Their money was sufficient.
    â€˜School don’t open until nine o’clock.’
    At Stylish Shirtwaists, Inc., on East Broadway, it was the same thing. A fat janitor, sitting at the door of the old loft building, demanded to know why Max wasn’t in school.
    Unspoken, Max thought, Up yours, you old shithead. Aloud, he poured out the tale of his dead father and the many mouths to feed.
    â€˜Costs you twenty cents to go in there.’ The janitor was unaffected by sentiment and beyond compassion. He lived in a world of lies and liars, and Max would have been surprised if he had accepted the story as the truth.
    â€˜Ten cents,’ Max countered.
    They settled for fifteen cents after Max informed him that it could be a daily source of income. Upstairs, between the clattering rows of sewing machines, Max sold his bagels, still hot, charging two cents for each and making a hundred percent profit. When the floor boss would have thrown him out, the women at the machines took pity on him and defended his right to sell his merchandise. He elicited pity and sympathy. He could assume an air of wistfulness that made his face quite lovely; he was small and skinny. When he explained his case to the women workers, their hearts went out to him. In that one building, from Stylish Shirtwaists to Sylvan Frocks to Ben’s Blouses, he sold his hundred bagels, and with his capital increased almost fifty percent to three dollars, less the fifteen cents he had to pay the janitor, he went on to his beginning in show business.
    In those days, when a theatrical piece opened in New York City, they placed showcards in the windows of hundreds of retail stores. The showcards were usually eighteen by twenty-four inches, and they announced the name of the show and the lead players and included a puff about the contents. In return for the use of his window as a display place, the merchant was given two tickets to the performance. Most of the merchants on the Lower East Side were indifferent to the English-language plays, performed in another world that existed uptown, and as often as not they gave away the tickets or sold them for a few cents. Once, in a grocery store on an errand for his mother, Max saw a woman pay fifty cents for a pair of tickets that the storekeeper would just as soon have given away. But since the woman was a prostitute, the storekeeper exacted payment as a sop to his moral indignation. Max, who had never seen a theatrical performance and who had no desire to see one, could not understand what a woman in his neighborhood, where money was spent on food and clothes and not much else, was doing when she put out good money for theatre tickets. Reasoning simply and directly, he decided that whores were addicted to the theatre. While this was very poor deductive reasoning, it was a lucky guess, for among the hundreds of prostitutes who plied their trade on Allen Street and Orchard Street and Ludlow Street, the uptown theatre was very much in vogue. It was their lifeline to a little class, a veneer of culture and a glimpse of life outside the ghetto.
    Thus, balancing one need against another, Max made his approach directly and specifically. He went into Sal Marietta’s shoe repair place and said,