EPILOGUE

SADIE SHUMSKY ALMOST NEVER GOT MAIL. SHE occupied a tiny apartment in assisted living outside Newark, New Jersey, where she grew up. She used to hear from her kid brother Sol, who had left the East a long time ago to make it big in L.A. Then even he quit writing.

“Letter for you,” said the charge nurse one day. “Special delivery.”

“It must be money,” said Sadie, who had practically none.

She almost had a coronary when it actually was money—$175,000. Sol’s club in North Hollywood had been sold just before he died. The new owner had sent her, as sole surviving relative, a check for the business. Or rather his lawyers had. The new owner wished to remain anonymous.

Everyone gathered around and cheered. “What will you do with all that money?” they asked. Sadie almost said, “Move out of this dump.” But they were good to her here, and if you have to go, it’s better to go among friends.

The new owner kept the same staff on when he took over the dive in North Hollywood. He was the solitary type and rarely came in. The bartender and hostess, who amounted to the entire staff, called him “Boss,” never by his name, which was a little strange. But he preferred it that way.

You could only be guaranteed to catch the boss on Fridays, which was amateur night. He sat at the back of the room nursing a single Miller Lite all evening. As in the old days, the acts were mostly comics who could only get a gig where there was an open mike.

The audience booed half the acts off the stage before they could finish their set, but the boss always laughed, no matter how awful the gags were. He liked to encourage new talent, and from time to time he had been known to open his own wallet and slip a couple of hundreds to a starving comedian.

Then one night, out of the blue, when the first act was finished, the boss came up to the mike. He tapped it.

“One, two, three, testing.”

“What, you have an act?” somebody called out.

“I’m working on some material,” the boss said. He cleared his throat. It was a full house, and he had lowered the price of beer. Nobody was feeling any pain.

He picked up the mike and began in a halting voice. “One day a priest, a minister, and a rabbi were out golfing.”

The crowd wouldn’t let him get to the next line. They let out a collective groan, leading to some serious catcalls.

The boss persisted, leaning closer to the mike. “The rabbi says, ‘I bet you a hundred bucks I can make a hole in one.’” He couldn’t drown out the crowd, however, and nobody got the punch line once it came. Yet somehow the catcalls didn’t seem to faze him.

The boss stood his ground the whole time until he took a bow and stepped off the stage with a smile. It was uncanny to watch him, really. You would have thought, amid all the boos and heckling, that he was listening to someone, somewhere, who was laughing to beat the band.