What Makes Sammy Run? (10 page)

There was a long silence while we made a gesture at dancing and then Sammy and Sally Ann started for the bedroom with their arms around each other. They could have slipped out with us only half-noticing them, but Sammy could no more do things by halves than J. P. Morgan could run for president on the Communist ticket.

“If anybody asks for me,” he cracked at the door, “tell them I’m tied up in a conference.”

Billie started to laugh, but it was just force of habit, and I didn’t crack a smile, so he must have thought he wasn’t being funny enough and tried again.

“Well, be good, Al,” he said, “and if you can’t be good, be careful, and if you can’t be careful, see that it gets a good agent.”

Then we were left alone and I suddenly felt very lousy. Maybe I’m a Puritan, but there has to be somewhere you draw the line and this was always it for me. I have always been one of those who held that whatever sex may have been to our primitive ancestors, it has become an experience for us that at least deserves the same
privacy we give to taking a bath. Sinking to the couch with Billie, I remembered a similar revulsion years ago when I walked into a college fraternity the morning after an all-night house party and found half a dozen drunken cards cheering and egging on a preoccupied couple on the living-room sofa.

“What are you thinking about, honey?” Billie stage-whispered, though she could never be the quiet, seductive type. She and this whole set-up were about as subtle as Wallace Beery’s acting.

I wasn’t exactly surprised to find that Sammy approached the most elemental emotion in life with all the sensitivity of a slaughterhouse worker slitting a steer’s throat, but somehow that last crack at the bedroom door had sliced too close to the bone, and it wasn’t very pretty. With one razor-edge phrase he had cut me down to his level, and it was going to take me some time to rise again.

But one thing you had to say for Billie, she was very kind in her way and always patient.

I felt as if I had just closed my eyes when a sense of motion in the room opened them again. Through sticky eyes with the eyeballs burning holes in the lids, my host slowly came into focus, dressed for the day and apparently on his way out. As I sat up and started to rub some of the sleep out of my eyes, I could see that Sammy was all washed and shaved and looking irritatingly fresh. My face felt like an old shoe that had been left out all night in the rain, shrunk and stiff in some parts, swollen and mushy in others. But Sammy’s face looked fresh from the laundry.

I looked around at the half-empty glasses, the cigarette butts and the other desolate remains, and asked, yawning, “What time is it?”

“Eight-thirty,” Sammy said.

“Eight-thirty?” My stomach went roller-coasting down. “What the hell you doing up at eight-thirty?”

“I have a date for breakfast,” Sammy said.

“Not …” I began.

“No,” Sammy said. “That was last night. This is business.”

Then I realized only Sammy and I were left.

“Where are the girls?” I said. “In the other …?”

“I got them out of here around five,” Sammy said. “While you were passed out. I don’t like to see them when I get up. They get in my hair.”

“But eight-thirty!” I mumbled. “What’s doing at the studio at eight-thirty?”

“I’m picking up a friend for breakfast before I check in,” Sammy said. “As a matter of fact you know him. Julie Blumberg.”

“Blumberg,” I muttered. “Oh—Julian …?”

“He’s been trying to write some originals,” Sammy said, “so I thought I ought to help the poor kid out and take a look at them.”

I was too groggy to see anything wrong with that picture so I just let it pass. Sammy advised me to call the studio and say I was sick and then climb into his bed for the rest of the day. He was being kind, but even in my condition I could sense the way he was gloating over his superior powers of recuperation. He made me think of some horrible grinning robot.

“You did all right for yourself,” he said. “I’ll buzz you next week and we’ll do a repeat.”

Then he looked at his watch, saw he was late, cursed his dawdling and was off on a run.

So there I was, spending the day, of all places, in Sammy Glick’s bed. When I woke again around four I had a bad taste in my mouth and a worse one in my mind and all I thought about was getting out of there as quickly as possible.

I went straight from Sammy’s to a Turkish bath, where I abandoned myself to steam and sweat and where I had nothing to do for hours but stare at the ceiling and dwell upon the discovery that Sammy Glick at work was hardly more terrifying than Sammy Glick at play.

CHAPTER 4       

I
suppose it’s too bad that people can’t be a little more consistent. But if they were, maybe they would stop being people. They might become characters in epic tragedies or Hollywood movies. Most of our characters on the screen are sandwich men for different moral attitudes. We will have the young man who stands for Honest Government and Public Service while his brother is a low-down Wallower in Wine, Women and Corruption. In the last reel the good brother has to be killed off so the bad brother can be regenerated. Regenerated. That is one of Hollywood’s favorite words. This may be heresy, but I have yet to meet anybody who ever got himself Regenerated. I don’t see any one-hundred-percent-pure heroes running around loose either. All
people seem to do is the best they can to get along and have a good time; and if that means keeping what they’ve got, they’re liable to become fascists; and if it means trying to get what they need and don’t have, there’s a good chance of their learning the
Internationale
.

If I were trying to tell this as a picture story instead of just putting it down the way it happened, my hate for Sammy Glick would have to be exalted into something noble and conclusive. I mean if he passed me on the street I would have to cross over to the other side and sooner or later we would come to grips, probably on the edge of a cliff. But that doesn’t seem to be the way we’re made. Most of us are ready to greet our worst enemies like long-lost brothers if we think they can show us a good time, if we think they can do us any good or if we even reach the conclusion that being polite will get us just as far and help us live longer.

I’m afraid all this is just an apology for admitting that the next time Sammy called me, a couple of weeks after that first soirée, I didn’t hang up on him. In fact, I didn’t even refuse his invitation. And without that slackening of moral fiber I would never have had an excuse for knowing him better. For there was no use kidding myself any longer. I wanted to know him. Not that I ever expected to solve the mystery of What Makes Sammy Run. But I had been much too involved with Sammy already ever to be able to forget him. Or even want to. He rankled. He was like a splinter festering under my skin. If I broke off now, I had the feeling his memory would go on torturing me. I had the crazy feeling that only by drilling into him, deeper and deeper, could I finally pass through him and beyond him and free my mind of him at last.

Or maybe all I am trying to say is that he was slowly driving me nuts.

“Hiya, sweetheart,” he said, “don’t you love me any more?”

“As much as ever,” I said.

“How’s tricks over at that sausage factory of yours?”

He always made you feel that any confession of failure was on a level with admitting that you had a yen for nothing but female
dogs and ten-year-old corpses. So all I gave him was a cagey “Okay, I guess.”

“You guess! Don’t talk like a schlemiel, you schlemiel. Sounds like you’re letting them push you around.”

“Being pushed around can be quite a luxury,” I said. “At Atlantic City you have to pay for it.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, “you’ll pay for it here too. Remind me to give you a couple of pointers on How to Win Friends and Influence Producers when I see you tonight.”

“Tonight I am going to get into bed and read,” I said.

“Listen, dope, there’s only two things bed is good for. And one of them isn’t reading.”

I told him to try me some other time as I was already half undressed. As a matter of fact I did have my tie and shoes off.

“If you’re half undressed that means you’re also half-dressed, right?” he said. “So get those gunboats out of dry dock and get the hell over here. We’re unpacking and deflowering a new crate of virgins that just came in. I told Billie we might look in on her later too.”

I felt the knot which held me to the bedpost slipping a little bit. I had come to admire Billie considerably.

“Not tonight, Sammy,” I said. “I’m right in the middle of a book.”

He had to know what book and I told him.
“Fontamara
. By Ignazio Silone.”

“Who the hell is Ignats Silone?” he said.

“For my dough one of the greatest writers in the world,” I said.

“No kidding!” He was interested. “Has he got a good story?”

“One of the greatest stories I ever read,” I said. “All about how a ragged little group of peasants rise against Mussolini.”

“Well, for Chri’sake, who do you think’s gonna make a picture about a lot of starving wops? In the first place, you’d lose your whole foreign market and …”

As soon as I could get a word in I told him I knew it didn’t have a chance for pictures.

“I don’t know why the hell I waste my time with a crazy bastard
like you,” he said. “You’re shell-shocked, you don’t add up. What good do you think it’s gonna do you to crap around with stuff like that?”

Very much on the defensive, I admitted that I liked to read.

“Sure,” Sammy said, “I never said I had anything against reading books …”

“The publishers will be relieved to know that,” I tried to insert, but Sammy was too quick for me and was already rounding the bend of his next sentence.

“But as long as you’re going in for it there’s plenty of good, dead authors that’ll hand you terrific picture plots on a silver platter. Why, I knew a guy who made a nice little pile out of one of De Maupassant’s stories just the other day. And all he had to do was switch the hooker from a French carriage to a Western stagecoach. If you were smart you’d try to hit on something like that and write yourself an original.”

I found myself thinking that wherever De Maupassant was I hoped he was unaware of what was going on. He had too little faith in mankind as it was.

“Hello, where the hell are you?” Sammy was saying. “Have you hung up?”

“No,” I said, “but only because I have no conscience.”

“That’s what you get for being a rabbi’s son,” he said, “a conscience. Going through life with a conscience is like driving your car with the brakes on.”

I’m not sure why I switched and said I’d come. It might have been the lousy day I had had at the studio. My producer had thrown out my first script and put another writer on with me. His name was George Pancake. I hate to sound obvious, but Pancake couldn’t have been over five foot five and looked as if he shaded two hundred pounds. He had the body of a wrestler and the face of a fag. The boys in the office across the hall told me Pancake was a credit hound, one of those writers who practically have convulsions over sole screen credits, so I knew I was in for trouble. The first thing Pancake said when we started talking it over was that he thought it would go faster if he did all the writing, as I
obviously hadn’t caught on to what producers want. Then he started dictating a new line as fast as he could talk and it suddenly hit me that he wasn’t just coming on the story at all. He must have been working on it for weeks without my knowing it. When that dawned I felt so low I knocked off early, went home and called a masseur. There is something about a massage that makes it a better gloom-chaser for me than getting plastered. But it didn’t quite sweat the mood out of me and just as I was about to climb into bed with my rebellious peasants and my blues I had a notion that a little of Billie and Sammy Glick might not be such a bad idea, if only to get my mind off my own
tsurus
.

I sat at Sammy’s little bar a few minutes, while he stood behind it making drinks and telling me what a riot his next picture was turning out to be. When the doorbell rang I started to answer it, but Sammy told me to sit still and let his Jap get it.