The first time I saw him he couldn’t have been much more than sixteen years old, a little ferret of a kid, sharp and quick. Sammy Glick. Used to run copy for me. Always ran. Always looked thirsty.
“Good morning, Mr. Manheim,” he said to me the first time we met, “I’m the new office boy, but I ain’t going to be an office boy long.”
“Don’t say ain’t,” I said, “or you’ll be an office boy forever.”
“Thanks, Mr. Manheim,” he said, “that’s why I took this job, so I can be around writers and learn all about grammar and how to act right.”
Nine out of ten times I wouldn’t have even looked up, but there was something about the kid’s voice that got me. It must have been charged with a couple of thousand volts.
“So you’re a pretty smart little feller,” I said.
“Oh, I keep my ears and eyes open,” he said.
“You don’t do a bad job with your mouth either,” I said.
“I wondered if newspapermen always wisecrack the way they do in the movies,” he said.
“Get the hell out of here,” I answered.
He raced out, too quickly, a little ferret. Smart kid, I thought. Smart little yid. He made me uneasy. That sharp, neat, eager little face. I watched the thin, wiry body dart around the corner in high gear. It made me uncomfortable. I guess I’ve always been afraid of people who can be agile without grace.
The boss told me Sammy was getting a three-week tryout. But Sammy did more running around that office in those three weeks than Paavo Nurmi did in his whole career. Every time I handed him a page of copy, he ran off with it as if his life depended on it. I can still see Sammy racing between the desks, his tie flying, wild-eyed, desperate.
After the second trip he would come back to me panting, like a frantic puppy retrieving a ball. I never saw a guy work so hard for twelve bucks a week in my life. You had to hand it to him. He might not have been the most lovable little child in the world, but you knew he must have something. I used to stop right in the middle of a sentence and watch him go.
“Hey, kid, take it easy.”
That was like cautioning Niagara to fall more slowly.
“You said rush, Mr. Manheim.”
“I didn’t ask you to drop dead on us.”
“I don’t drop dead very easy, Mr. Manheim.”
“Like your job, Sammy?”
“It’s a damn good job—this year.”
“What do you mean—this year?”
“If I still have it next year, it’ll stink.”
He looked so tense and serious I almost laughed in his face. I liked him. Maybe he was a little too fresh, but he was quite a boy.
“I’ll keep my ear to the ground for you, kid. Maybe in a couple of years I’ll have a chance to slip you in as a cub reporter.”
That was the first time he ever scared me. Here I was going out of my way to be nice to him and he answered me with a look that was almost contemptuous.
“Thanks, Mr. Manheim,” he said, “but don’t do me any favors. I know this newspaper racket. Couple of years at cub reporter? Twenty bucks. Then another stretch as district man. Thirty-five. And finally you’re a great big reporter and get forty-five for the rest of your life. No, thanks.”
I just stood there looking at him, staggered. Then …
“Hey, boy!” And he’s off again, breaking the indoor record for the hundred-yard dash.
Well, I guess he knew what he was doing. The world was a race to Sammy. He was running against time. Sometimes I used to sit at the bar at Bleeck’s, stare at the reflection in my highball glass and say, “Al, I don’t give a goddam if you never move your ass off this seat again. If you never write another line. I default. If it’s a race, you can scratch my name right now. Al Manheim does not choose to run.” And then it would start running through my head: What makes Sammy run? What makes Sammy run? I would take another drink, and ask one of the bartenders:
“Say, Henry, what makes Sammy run?”
“What the hell are you talking about, Al?”
“I’m talking about Sammy Glick, that’s who I’m talking about. What makes Sammy run?”
“You’re drunk, Al. Your teeth are swimming.”
“Goddam it, don’t try to get out of it! That’s an important question. Now, Henry, as man to man, What makes Sammy run?”
Henry wiped his sweaty forehead with his sleeve. “Jesus, Al, how the hell should I know?”
“But I’ve got to know. (I was yelling by this time.) Don’t you see, it’s the answer to everything.”
But Henry didn’t seem to see.
“Mr. Manheim, you’re nuts,” he said sympathetically.
“It’s driving me nuts,” I said. “I guess it’s something for Karl Marx or Einstein or a Big Brain; it’s too deep for me.”
“For Chri’sake, Al,” Henry pleaded, “you better have another drink.”
I guess I took Henry’s advice, because this time I got back to the office with an awful load on. I had to bat out my column on what seemed like six typewriters at the same time. And strangely enough that’s how I had my first run-in with Sammy Glick.
Next morning a tornado twisted through the office. It began in the office of O’Brien the managing editor and it headed straight for the desk of the drama editor, which was me.
“Why in hell don’t you look what you’re doing, Manheim?” O’Brien yelled.
The best I could do on the spur of the moment was:
“What’s eating you?”
“Nothing’s eating me,” he screamed. “But I know what’s eating you—maggots—in your brain. Maybe you didn’t read your column over before you filed it last night?”
As a matter of fact I hadn’t even been able to see my column. And at best I was always on the Milquetoast side. So I simply asked meekly, “Why, was something wrong with it?”
“Nothing much,” he sneered in that terrible voice managing editors always manage to cultivate. “Just one slight omission. You left all the verbs out of the last paragraph. If it hadn’t been for that kid Sammy Glick it would have run the way you wrote it.”
“What’s Sammy Glick got to do with it?” I demanded, getting sore.
“Everything,” said the managing editor. “He read it on his way down to the desk …”
“Glick read it?” I shouted.
“Shut up,” he said. “He read it on his way to the desk, and when he saw that last paragraph he sat right down and re-wrote it himself. And damn well, too.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “He’s a great kid. I’ll have to thank him.”
“I thanked him in the only language he understands,” the editor said, “with a pair for the Sharkey-Carnera scrap. And in your name.”
A few minutes later I came face to face with that good Samaritan Samuel Glick himself.
“Nice work, Sammy,” I said.
“Oh, that’s all right, old man,” he said.
It was the first time he had ever called me anything but Mr. Manheim.
“Listen, wise guy,” I said, “if you found something wrong with my stuff, why didn’t you come and tell me? You always know where I am.”
“Sure I did,” he said, “but I didn’t think we had time.”
“But you just had time to show it to the managing editor first,” I said. “Smart boy.”
“Gee, Mr. Manheim,” he said, “I’m sorry. I just wanted to help you.”
“You helped me,” I said. “The way Flit helps flies.”
Ever since Sammy started working four or five months back he had done a fairly conscientious job of sucking around me. He hardly ever let a day go by without telling me how much he liked my column, and of course I’d be flattered and give him pointers here and there on his grammar, or what to read, or sometimes I’d slip him a couple of tickets for a show and we’d talk it over and I’d find myself listening to him give out with Glick on the Theater. Anyway, he had played me for a good thing and always treated me with as much respect as a fresh kid like that could, but right here, as I watched that face, I actually felt I could see it change. The city editor hadn’t hung a medal on his chest but he had put a glint in Sammy’s eye. You could see he was so gaga about his success that he didn’t care how sore I was. That was the beginning.
“Don’t you think it’s dangerous to drop so many verbs?” he asked. “You might hit somebody down below.”
“Listen,” I said, “tell me one thing. How the hell can you read when you’re running so fast?”
“That’s how I learned to read,” he cracked, “while I was running so fast. Errands.”
It made me sore. He was probably right. Somebody called him and he spun around and started running. What makes Sammy run? I pondered, looking after him, what makes Sammy run?
For the next couple of months Sammy and I didn’t have much to do with each other. I thought maybe by being tough I could teach him a lesson. I’d just hand him copy without looking up, and I quit trying to develop his mind. But after a while that began to seem a little silly. After all, here I was a grown-up drama editor having a peeve on a poor kid who was just trying to get along. It wasn’t dignified. So next time he stopped by I suggested that we bury the hatchet.
“Two bits says I know where you’d like to bury it,” Sammy said—“in my head.”
I had to admit that was quite a temptation, but I managed to overcome it. I guess I’ve always been a gentle soul at heart. I’ve never been able to walk past a street fight between two little newsboys out to murder each other over a three-cent controversy without trying to stop it. On off moments when I wasn’t drunk or working hard I suppose you would have to call me an idealist. I’m not boasting about this. In this world which is run with all the rules and restrictions of a rough-and-ready free-for-all, it is always a little embarrassing to find yourself still believing in such outmoded principles as the golden rule and brotherly love.
So I began piously, “Now, Sammy, after all, I’m almost old enough to be your father …”
“Don’t give me that,” Sammy said. “My old man was twice as old as you when he kicked the bucket five years ago.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “I hope you won’t mind my bringing it up. But I’ll bet I know what he’d say if he saw you today. He’d say, ‘Sammy, in the long run you’ll get further by being nice to people because then when you need them, they’ll be nice to you.’ ”
You should have seen Sammy’s face laughing at me. “Mr. Manheim,” he said, “that spiel really rings the bell on my old man. That’s what he’d be telling me, all right. Because you want to know what my old man croaked from? Dumbness.”
“That’s a fine way to talk about your father,” I said.
“Can I help it if that’s what he died of?” Sammy asked. “He didn’t know enough to come in out of the rain and he died of a disease that seems to run in my family—dumbness.”
“That diagnosis doesn’t sound exactly scientific,” I said.
“To hell with science,” he said. “All I know is that my old man kicked off because his brains were muscle-bound, and my old lady and my half-brained brother suffer from the same thing.”
I could see that all this talk was definitely a blind alley. Most Jewish families are pretty strong on filial love, but Sammy wasn’t what you’d call a loving son. So I switched to my sociological approach.
“Sammy,” I began wisely, “society isn’t just a bunch of individuals living alongside of each other. As a member of society, man is interdependent. Not independent, Sammy, interdependent. Life is too complex for there to be any truth in the old slogan of every man for himself. We share the benefits of social institutions, like take hospitals, the cops and garbage collection. Why, the art of conversation itself is a social invention. We can’t live in this world like a lot of cannibals trying to swallow each other. Learn to give the other fellow a break and we’ll all live longer.”
I felt pretty pleased with myself after I said that because I was convinced that it was one of the most sensible things I had ever said. But I might as well have been talking to a stone wall. In fact that might have been better. At least it couldn’t talk back.
Sammy’s answer was, “If you want to save souls, try China.”
I suppose the reason Sammy was getting my goat was because he was the smartest and stupidest human being I had ever met. He had a quick intelligence, which he was able to use exclusively for the good-and-welfare of Sammy Glick. And that kind of intelligence implies stupidity, for where other people might have one blind spot, Sammy’s mind was a mass of blind spots, with only a single ray of light focused immediately ahead.
But fat with tolerance, like a Quaker, I decided to break Sammy down with kindness. I had two for Of Thee I Sing, so I gave them to him and told him to take his mother or his girl.
“Girl,” he sneered, “you don’t see me with any girl.”
“That’s a terrible loss to the opposite sex,” I said.
“What good would a girl do me?” he said. “All they do is take up time and dough, and then if they happen to get knocked up they go yelling for their mothers.”
“In other words,” I said, “you’re above sex?”
“Hell, no,” he said, “I’ve got a pal who gets me fixed up every Saturday night. Gratis.”
“Isn’t it romantic?” I sang the words of a current song. “Now that we’ve got that settled, do you still want the ducats? Take ’em home and surprise your mother.”
“My old lady at a musical show?” Sammy said. “The closest she ever got to a real show was hearing the cantor sing ‘Eli Eli.’ ”
“Then take her out and give her a treat,” I said. “About the most fun you can have in the world is showing people who aren’t used to it a good time.”
“Jesus, you’re a sentimental bastard,” Sammy said. “Most of the Hebes I know drive me nuts because they always go around trying to be so goddam kind. It ain’t natural.”
“Remember what I told you,” I said. “Don’t say ‘ain’t’ or you’ll be an office boy forever.”
“Fat chance,” Sammy said, and hurried off.
When I saw Sammy the next day he didn’t even mention the show, so I finally had to ask him.
“I didn’t expect you to thank me for those tickets,” I said, “but I thought you might tell me what you thought of it.”
“Good show,” he said.
“Good show,” I screamed. “One of the greatest American plays ever written and all you can say is, ‘good show!’ ”
“I wouldn’t mind having half of what Kaufman and Ryskind have,” he added.
That’s a little more like it, I thought. “I’d settle for half their talent myself,” I said.
“I don’t mean talent,” Sammy said. “I mean profit. That show must be cleaning up.”
“Go on, beat it,” I said. “Disappear.”
A little later I happened to meet one of the rewrite men, Osborne, at the water cooler. He was a sweet old gray-haired duck who was gradually working his way down from the hundred-a-week ace reporter he had been before the War.
“Hello, Osborne,” I said, “I thought you were going to drop around when you wanted a couple of tickets for some musical. The offer still goes.”
“Thanks, Al,” he said, “but I didn’t want to bother you, so me and the little woman just took one in ourselves. Last night as a matter of fact.”
“What did you do that for?” I said. “Two seats at the box office must have set you back plenty.”
“As a matter of fact,” Osborne said, “it isn’t as bad as it sounds. I happened to get a bargain on two seats right up in front. And since it happened to be our twenty-seventh anniversary, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to splurge.”
“Someone bootlegging in the lobby?” I said.
“No,” he said, “I bought them from one of the kids. Name’s Glick, I think. Sold me the two of ’em for four bucks.”
That made me burn. Four dollars was a lot of money to Osborne.
I didn’t wait to run into Sammy again. I sent for him as soon as I got back to my desk.
“So you thought the show last night was pretty good,” I began.
“I’ve seen worse,” Sammy said.
“I didn’t know you were such a tough critic, Mr. Glick,” I said. “You make George Jean Nathan sound like a blurb writer.”
“I just know what I like,” Sammy said.
“That’s quite a trick,” I said, “knowing what you like without even having to see it.”
“What do you mean haven’t seen?” Sammy said in a tone of injured belligerence.
“Wipe that indignation off your face, Sammy,” I said. “I mean I’ve been talking with Osborne.”
He took this without a sign of embarrassment. Ability to absorb insults and embarrassment like a sponge was turning out to be one of his greatest accomplishments.
“Oh,” he said, “I would have told you only I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”
“Don’t be so goddam thoughtful,” I said. “If you didn’t want to see the show, why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t find out until the last minute that I couldn’t go,” he explained. “So instead of wasting them I gave them to Osborne.”
“There was nothing wrong with that,” I said. “Except for one little detail. You didn’t give those tickets to Osborne. You soaked him four bucks for them.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Sammy said. “On the other hand you could say I saved him the three and a half more he’d’ve had to pay at the box office.”
“You could say it,” I said, “but you’re the only one who could say it. Why, there’s even a law against profiteering on complimentary tickets. You could go to jail for this.”
Sammy found this threat merely amusing. “All right, mister,” he said. “Don’t shoot. I’ll come quietly.”
“You’ve taken four bucks from Osborne just as sure as if you’ve picked his pocket,” I said sternly. “Why don’t you be a good kid and pay him back? He’s having his troubles, too.”
“Sure, I’d give him his lousy four bucks back,” Sammy said. “Only it’s too late now. I spent it.”
I didn’t notice him looking down at his shoes as he spoke, but I guess he must have because I found myself staring at them too. They were brand new the way only shoes can be new, stiff and shiny and still in the window. They were a highly polished yellow-brown leather that made up in gloss what it lacked in quality, small neat shoes that came to a point too stylishly narrow for everyday use.
“So those are the shoes I gave you,” I said.
“They were on sale down at Hearns,” he said, with no hint of apology. In fact, he seemed really proud of what he had done. He looked down at his shoes, reveling in their newness and added, “You know what, Mr. Manheim, these are the first brand-new shoes I ever had. It’s about time, too. I was fed up with wearing my brother’s hand-me-downs.”
“Sammy,” I said, “for Christ’s sake, if you needed shoes that bad you could have told me. I’m not exactly Rockefeller, but I’m always good for a little touch if it means going without shoes.”
“Thanks,” Sammy said, “but you never find me going in for favors. I found out long ago that was a sucker’s trick. It leaves you wide open. This way you’re sore for a while and I don’t owe you nothing.”
“Don’t owe me anything,” I said. “When are you going to learn two negatives cancel each other? If you don’t owe me nothing that means you do owe me something.”
“O.K.,” Sammy said agreeably, “so I don’t owe you anything.”
I gave up. It was like trying to convince Capone to exchange his machine guns for water pistols. I simply became resigned. It was just as if a wildcat were loose in the office and if I happened to see it crouching on the water cooler I would say to myself that new copyreader certainly looks queer. Only Sammy Glick was a much more predatory animal than any wildcat. For a long time I thought that the phenomenon of Sammy Glick was my own little secret, but after a while I began to find that the whole office was afraid of him. I know that sounds wacky. Hardened newspapermen being afraid of a snot-nosed little office boy? But that’s really what it added up to. Even Osborne, the Christ-like rewrite man who always had a good word for everybody, confided to me one day, “I don’t know what it is about that kid, he’s a hard worker and I think he’s good to his mother but he gives me the creeps.”
And the managing editor who carried on the tradition of hard-boiled journalistic bosses to the best of his loud-mouthed and soulless ability put it this way:
“I’d kick his little ass for him—if he’d only leave it in one place long enough.”
“If he gripes you that much why don’t you can him instead of wanting to hand him a raise?” I said heartlessly, though I knew my conscience wouldn’t keep me up nights because there must have been thousands of kids in the city waiting to step into his job and I had seen enough of Sammy not to have to worry about his ever starving to death.
But the managing editor just smiled and said, “No, I hate his guts just as much as you do, but I’m not running a popularity contest; I’m running a business office and Sammy’s strength as a copy boy is as the strength of ten.”
“You’ve got me wrong,” I said. “I don’t hate his guts. He’s just another worm you haven’t got the heart to step on. What the hell makes you think he’s big enough to make me waste my time and energy hating him?”
“If he matters that little, why in hell are you getting your bowels in an uproar?” he asked me, and I had to admit that the logic of that stopped me cold.
Since Sammy burst into the office over a year before, I had tried every method I could think of to overcome him. I had tried fatherly criticism. I had guided him with the impersonal and professional tolerance the master craftsman shows the apprentice. I had humored him. I had patronized him with sermons on the goodness of man. I had insulted him. I had given him the silent treatment. I had smothered him with kindness. I had used psychology and I had resorted to frenzied ridicule. Once I had even taken a poke at him. And after twelve months of Sammy Glick I was still behind the eight ball. I can’t exactly explain it, but every time I looked at him now I got a crazy helpless feeling, the way you feel in drunken dreams when the Phantom of the Opera is coming after you and the faster you try to get away from him the more you run toward him. I couldn’t understand it. In the first place I hadn’t even figured him out, and in the second place I couldn’t understand why I felt I had to figure out an inconspicuous little copy boy, and in the third place I couldn’t figure out why I gave a damn in the first two places. I know that sounds nuts now but that’s the condition I was in when Sammy was running my tail into the ground.
But the wear and tear of our relationship was entirely one-sided. Sammy seemed to be absolutely blooming. Without giving an inch in the personal tug of war he was waging with the world, he was coming into maturity. Only it wasn’t what is generally thought of as maturity. It was his own special brand, Sammyglick maturity. No mellowing, no deepening of understanding. Maturity to Sammy merely meant a quickening and a strengthening of the rhythm of behavior that was beginning to disconcert everybody who came in contact with it. Because he seemed to escape all of the doubts, the pimpled sensitivity, the introspection, the mental and physical growing pains of adolescence, he was able to throw off his youth and take on the armor of young manhood with the quick-changing ease of a chorus girl. His alert little ferret face began to take more definite form, the thin neat lips permanently set, the nose growing larger but still straight and sharp, giving the lie to the hook-nosed anti-Semitic cartoons, a nose that teamed up with the quick dark eyes and the tense, lined forehead to give an impression of arrogance and a fierce aggressiveness, which, when you included the determination of the pointed, forward-thrust chin, produced a face that reminded you of an army, full of force, strategy, single will and the kind of courage that boasts of never taking a backward step.
The first sure sign I had of Sammy’s growing up was when he came to me with the announcement that he now felt himself ready to conduct the paper’s radio column. Of course, the fact that the paper had never had a radio column didn’t seem to discourage him in the least.
“And just what makes you think you’re prepared to be an expert on matters Marconi?” I said.
“What made you think you were an expert on the theater?” he said.
“That’s got absolutely nothing to do with it,” I said. “I had plenty of reasons.”
“Name one,” said Sammy.
I don’t know why the hell I was letting a twelve-buck-a-week half-pint bulldoze me, but there I was. “Well, for one thing,” I said, “I always liked the theater. I’ve seen lots of plays.”
“Well, I’ve listened to the radio plenty too,” Sammy said.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “Everybody listens to the radio.”
“That’s why there oughta be a radio column,” Sammy said.
It struck me funny. Here was this office boy applying for the job of writing a radio column that didn’t exist, and he actually had me on the defensive.
“Listen,” I said, “do you realize you have one hell of a nerve interrupting me in the middle of my work to ask me a thing like that?”
“O.K.,” Sammy said, “go ahead and put your own selfish interest ahead of the paper’s good.”
It made just enough sense to exasperate me into going on. That was getting to be one of Sammy’s favorite tricks. He could go so far that your curiosity was pricked because you wouldn’t believe anybody could get that brazen.
So instead of simply giving him his walking papers the way I should have, I accepted the challenge. “What are you talking about, the good of the paper?” I said. “What’s the good of the paper got to do with it?”
“You know the paper needs a radio column,” Sammy said. “But you’re such a dog in the manger you’re afraid it might cut into your column and that’s why you’re against it.”
“What’s the good of fighting with me about a radio column?” I said. “Everybody knows the old man doesn’t want it because he says why should we plug a setup that’s cutting our advertising.”
“But millions of people are listening in all day long,” Sammy argued. “That’d mean new readers for the Record. And I’ll bet the column would land us plenty of radio ads. So if you’d put in a good word for me with the boss …”
“Listen, Sammy,” I said. “That is, if you ever do listen, which I doubt. In the first place, I don’t care about radio columns, and in the second place, there are half a dozen boys I could name in this office I’d give the job to before you, and in the third place, even if you were the radio master mind of the century I’d be damned if I’d help you get it, and in the fourth place—or have you had enough places?”
“I don’t know,” Sammy said. “I guess if you’ve heard one place you’ve heard them all.”
Three or four weeks later I was sitting around in Bleeck’s one night with the boys after turning in my column.
The telephone rang and Henry answered it and said it was for me. “It’s your pal, Sammy Glick,” Henry said.
“Good evening, young man,” I said, feeling mellow on four or five highballs.
“It’s a good evening for me all right,” Sammy said. “But I don’t know about you, Mr. Manheim.”
I didn’t like the tone of that “Mr. Manheim.”
“What’s up?” I said.
“Your dinner,” Sammy said, “when you hear what’s happened.”
For a moment or two it was touch and go as to whether or not I burst a blood vessel right there in front of all my friends.
“Come on, spill it, you punk,” I said. I was so sore I was talking like a gangster in the movies.
“The boss says your column is two sticks short,” Sammy said.
“For Chri’sake I haven’t even finished it,” I said. “I just came down to grab a couple of drinks before wrapping it up. Tell him he can stop worrying. I’ll be right up.”
“He’s not worried a bit,” Sammy said. “And you don’t have to either. Everything’s under control. I took care of it.”
“You?” I said. “You?” I repeated. “What do you mean you?” I said stupidly. I knew he had me. I could tell.
“Sure, Al,” he said, just as if he had always called me Al. “I dashed off a four-inch radio column to fill, and the boss liked it.”
“Oh, he’s seen it already!” I said. “Then why the hell did you bother to call me? Why the hell don’t you just take over my column? Why the hell …?”
“I just wanted to help you,” Sammy said simply.
“Sure,” I said, “Joe Altruist,” and I hung up.
That night I dreamt about Sammy Glick. I dreamt I was working in my office, minding my own business and peacefully writing my column, when all of a sudden I looked up and screamed. Everybody in the office looked like Sammy Glick. There must have been thirty or forty of them, and every time one of them passed me he’d say, “Hello, Al, I’m the new drama editor”; or “Hello, Al, I’m the new city editor”; or “Hello, Al, allow me to introduce myself, your new publisher, S. Glick,” and, finally, when I couldn’t stand it any more, I started to run, with all the Sammy Glicks behind me and I got into the elevator just in time and heaved a sigh of relief when, so help me God, who do I see driving the elevator but Sammy Glick, and when I finally get out onto the street, sure enough there’s nobody but Sammy Glick waiting for me, thousands of Sammy Glicks all running after me.
It was a relief to wake up, because I figured that nothing that ever happened between me and Sammy could top that one. From now on Sammy Glick was sure to be an anti-climax and I was saved. That just goes to show you how little I still knew about my friend Glick.
The pay-off began next morning when the managing editor hovered over my shoulder just after I had started my column.
“From now on write it thirty lines shorter all the time,” he said in the same tone of voice he’d ask for a stick of gum.
“What do you mean thirty lines shorter?” I said.
“I mean,” he explained, “that from now on it should be thirty lines not as long as you’ve been writing it.”
“This is a little sudden,” I said, “but it’s O.K. by me if you can give me one good reason why this amputation’s necessary.”
“Listen closely and hold on to your seat,” the city editor said. “From now on we’re using Sammy Glick’s radio column.”
“You mean Sammy Glick the copy boy?” I said.
“No, I mean Sammy Glick the radio columnist,” he said. “His stuff looked all right today.”
“I read it,” I said. “Maybe you’d like to know he copied that first paragraph from Somerset Maugham?”
“Maybe that’s where you need to go for your stuff,” he said.
So that’s how Sammy got his start. It was hard to believe, but you didn’t have to pinch yourself to know you weren’t dreaming. All you had to do was turn to the amusement page of the Record, and there we were, side by side, “Down Broadway” by Al Manheim and “Sammy Glick Broadcasting.” I always suspected that Sammy sold the editor that title so his name could be in fatter type than any by-line could possibly be. That may not be one of the things you or I would think of doing but it meant plenty to Sammy.
The funny part of it was the kid’s stuff wasn’t bad. He was just smart enough never to crib from the same writer twice. He was glib. When it came to wisecracks he rolled his own. I had gone through so many emotions with Sammy that I felt as if I had to have my emotional valves ground but now I was reaching the stage of loathing him so much I was beginning to admire him. Every other copy boy in the place was just a nice guy. At least if you bent over, they’d ask you to stand up and turn around before stabbing you. But Sammy Glick was teaching me something about the world. Of course, I hadn’t found out what made him run, and, lucky for him, I had no idea just where he was running. And if I had, I suppose I might have spent the rest of my life serving time for committing premeditated mayhem. And I suppose there’s no use kidding myself. Somehow Sammy would have capitalized on that as he did everything else. It looked as if Sammy Glick had the drop on this world.
As a columnist, Sammy had no scruples about printing what he overheard. He always managed to get on the inside with the key secretaries. He had a well-developed talent for squeezing news out of victims by pretending he already had it. He had no qualms about prominently featuring what he knew to be lies and then printing the truth a day or so later in an inconspicuous retraction at the bottom of the column.
He even found a way of turning those retractions into a good thing. For instance, if some big shot happened to demand a correction, Sammy would call him by some private nickname and say, “Sorry, Jock,” or “Pudge” or “Deac, thanks for the help.” He learned to play all but the most complex and suspicious minds like a harp. He pumped and he promised and he did small favors. He managed to get near the best of them and he picked up much of his hot news from the worst. He overcame the fact that he had absolutely no literary ability whatsoever by inventing a lingo which everyone mistook for a fresh and unique style when it was really plain unadulterated illiteracy. But all of these achievements were overshadowed by one stupendous talent; his ability to blow his own horn. He blew it so loud, so long, and so often, that nobody believed all that sound could possibly emanate from one person and so everyone really began to believe that Sammy Glick’s name was on everyone else’s lips.
There was the occasion of Sammy’s birthday party which was also (though I always suspected him of tying these together conveniently to make a better story) the anniversary of “Sammy Glick Broadcasting.”
I hadn’t been on exactly chummy terms with Sammy for quite a time now but one afternoon he came up to me at Bleeck’s and, without taking his ten-cent cigar out of his mouth (this was a new addition to the evolving personality of Sammy Glick), he said, “Hello, Al, can I buy you a drink?”
I didn’t like the idea of his buying me a drink, so I offered to play him the match game to see who got the check and I lost. There’s no use making myself out a hero about this. I was pretty generally considered the King of the Match Game down at Bleeck’s and I didn’t like the way Sammy was starting to beat me.
After I finished my drink I started to edge away, but Sammy was too quick for me.
“Say, Al,” he said, “next Monday is my birthday, and since you sorta gave me my start I thought maybe you’d like to have dinner with me and my girl, at the Algonquin.”
“Gave you your start!” I said. “I did everything I could to get you canned.”
“No kidding, Al,” he said, just letting that roll off him. “I know birthday parties are old-fashioned, but I want you with us at dinner Monday night.”
“Monday night?” I said. “Sorry, Sammy, I’m a working man; I’ve got a show Monday night.”
I couldn’t think of a show Monday night, but, by God, I was going to find one.
“Then how about Sunday?” Sammy said.
“Well, it’s more fun to have your party on your actual birthday,” I said, “so why don’t you just go ahead without me? I’ll—sort of be there in spirit,” I added, a little lamely.
But Sammy always was too practical to go in for anything as philosophical as that. “No,” he insisted, “I wouldn’t think of having my party without my old pal Al, so I’ll just change it to Sunday night.”
We met in the Algonquin lobby. Sammy was standing with a spindly-legged, too thin, sickly-pale, vague little girl. She could have looked like an angel, only her face was made up like a Fourteenth Street chorus girl, heavy red lipstick and eye shadow and too much powder and orange rouge. I wanted to take my handkerchief and wipe it all off. The poor little kid. The blue eyes and the frail body and the sad beauty were hers. They grew out of the shadow of the tenement right up through the crowded sidewalk.
“Miss Rosalie Goldbaum,” Sammy said, “meet Mr. Al Manheim, who has the column next to mine.”
“Oh, Mr. Manheim, Sammy has told me so much about you,” Miss Goldbaum said.
Sammy took Miss Goldbaum’s arm and mine and guided us through the lobby to the restaurant. He caught the headwaiter’s eye with an air of practiced authority. He smiled down his cigar. For the occasion he had bought himself a new pair of $7.50 black flanged shoes at the London Character Shop.
Dinner was what I would have called uneventful. Sammy was too busy looking around for celebrities to pay much attention to either of us. Miss Goldbaum was shy, strangely unsophisticated, full of self-conscious smiles and silence. Except when she talked about Sammy. And I encouraged her. For her heart was so full of Sammy that I began to wonder if I had overlooked one of his virtues. Perhaps this was another side; he was a kind and thoughtful lover and slowed down to a walk for Miss Goldbaum.
“You know, Mr. Manheim,” she said, “writing that column isn’t what Sammy really wants to do.”
“Of course not,” I said, “they forced it on him.”
“He just does that to make a living,” she said.
“It’s a damn shame,” I said, “this materialistic world crushing a beautiful soul like that.”
“It really is,” she said. “Because he writes me the loveliest things. I just know that some day he’s going to be a really great writer. Because he’s really a poet.”
“He’s a great man,” I said, expecting God to strike me dead any second. “You’re a lucky girl.”
“You’re telling me,” she said.
There was a lull. Sammy was staring across the room at George Opdyke, the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. I was about to say he was lost in thought, but Sammy was never really lost, and he never actually thought, for that implies deep reflection. He was figuring. Miss Goldbaum edged her undernourished white hand into his. Sammy played with it absent-mindedly, like a piece of silverware.
“Gee,” Miss Goldbaum burst out again, “honestly, sometimes when I look at Sammy I just can’t believe it, and him just a little kid right out of the East Side like me.”
“You’re a lucky …” I began and then I caught myself and ended feebly with, “Yeah—a diamond in the rough.”
She was becoming tiresome. Her tight little world was bursting with Sammy Glick. All her craving to live and her blood rushing to possess and to be maternal found expression in this one smart little guy. I wondered if she had known Sammy that time a year or so ago when he had proudly pronounced his independence of all women, except for what he could get gratis on Saturday nights.
I liked her and pitied her and didn’t want to hear her any more.
About that time Opdyke had finished his coffee and was passing our table and just at the moment that I was going to nod to him, for I knew him slightly, Sammy suddenly surprised me in a loud voice:
“Hey, Al, I thought you said you were going to introduce me to Opdyke.”
Of course that was the last thing I had intended to do but it was too late because Opdyke had already stopped the way anyone does when he hears his name. He paused a moment, just long enough for me to get the introduction out and Sammy had had his way again.
Miss Goldbaum looked at Opdyke with some reproach, as if to say, You can’t horn in on this, it’s our birthday party.
But you should have seen Sammy go to work. He offered Opdyke a cigar and said, “I sent you a column of mine a couple of months ago giving you a pretty good plug. I always wondered how you liked it.”
Opdyke looked at him questioningly. “I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you,” he said, “I get quite a few clippings in the mail.”
That would have been enough to discourage you and me, but all it did was give Sammy a better idea of how to proceed.
“You know, Mr. Opdyke,” he said, “I was always hoping I could meet you so I could tell you how much I liked The Eleventh Commandment.”
This time Opdyke came to life a little bit. “Really,” he said, “I thought everybody had forgotten that little one-acter. I wrote Eleventh Commandment when I was just getting started.”
“It’s just as good today as it was when you wrote it,” Sammy said. “I happened to read it just a couple of weeks ago. You’d be surprised how it stands up.”
“Is that a fact?” Opdyke said, rather pleased.
I could see what Sammy was doing and I had to hand it to him. If there’s anything every successful writer loves, it’s to hear praise for some obscure failure which he is still convinced is one of the best things he ever wrote. That was Opdyke’s Achilles’ heel, just the way it probably was Dreiser’s and Shaw’s and Sinclair Lewis’s, and Sammy had found it.
The next thing I knew Opdyke was actually sitting down with us. “This protégé of yours is a real student of the American theater, Al,” he said.
Protégé. I winced. And I didn’t have the heart to tell him what I was beginning to realize: that Sammy, knowing that Opdyke usually hangs out at the Algonquin, had probably been doing a little research on the playwright at the public library.
For the next fifteen minutes, Sammy was in his element, busy being sophisticated and artificially gay, trying his best to outwise-crack Opdyke.
After Opdyke left, with a hearty Glad-to-have-met-you for Sammy, Miss Goldbaum started to yawn and I mumbled something about having a lot of work to do before hitting the hay, and Sammy looked at Miss Goldbaum and said, “We both appreciate your celebrating this way with us.” She nodded happily. Yes, her Sammy said it exactly right, and the birthday party was over. The last I saw of them they were walking down the steps to the subway arm in arm and she was looking up at him. He was nineteen years old.
On the way home I stopped in “21” and had a drink by myself, somehow hoping to find the answer to Sammy Glick at the bottom of my glass. I didn’t want to hate Sammy too quickly because I wasn’t a hater by nature. I usually tried to find some reason for liking everybody. That had always been my favorite luxury in life, being able to like everybody. I suppose that could be traced back to my heritage, in a small New England town where life was always peaceful and friendly, and where my father, the town’s only rabbi, had led a life of community service and true Isaiah-like vision that had won him Middletown’s approval and genuine respect. When I enrolled at the good little Methodist college in our town, I still expected to follow my father’s footsteps and go on to rabbinical school, but four active and enthusiastic years in college dramatics changed my mind for me and that’s how I happened to wind up in front of the footlights instead of the altar. My father’s life message of tolerance was imbedded too deeply in the undersoil of my adolescence for any Broadway cynicism to wipe away entirely, and sometimes at the most ridiculous moments the words of my father would return to me, phrased in the dignified Biblical language that had become his everyday speech, though I believe the wording was his own: “Try to love all your fellow men as you do your own brother, for the Lord placed all men upon the earth that they might prosper together.”
So that’s what I sat there saying to myself that night as I downed my Scotch and tried my very best to love Sammy Glick along with all the rest of my fellow men. Under the potent influence of Scotch and my father I began to feel downright repentant. Almost maudlin, in fact. Here he was a young kid just trying to get a good job and now that he had got it and was beginning to grow up he’d have a chance to relax and become one of the boys. Manheim, get a grip on yourself, I cautioned myself unsteadily. Stop seeing dark clouds behind every silver lining. You’re going to love Sammy Glick, Manheim, I lectured, you’re going to remember what your dear dead father told you and love Sammy Glick even if it kills you. Why, Sammy’s hospitality tonight is a beautiful gesture. It’s the beginning of a golden friendship.
You will have to forgive me for that because I was a little drunk by that time, and then too when it came to a knowledge of Sammy Glick I was still in the first grade.
But I skipped a couple of grades after I saw Winchell’s column next evening. There it was, right at the top, the boldface print laughing up at me:
When rising columnist Sammy Glick celebrated his twenty-first birthday at the Algonquin last night, George Opdyke and colleague Al Manheim were on hand as principal cake eaters …
You didn’t have to be a mastermind to figure out how Walter got that item, or where those two extra years came from. So when Sammy blew into the office I gave him one of my searching looks.
“I see where George Opdyke got himself a plug in Winchell’s column this morning, Samuel,” I said.
“Yeah,” Sammy cracked, “you should have been there.”
“Listen,” I said, “you’ve got enough gall to be divided into nine parts.”
“Aw, don’t be sore, Al,” he said. “I can’t hide in this nest forever. I gotta spread my wings a little.”
“Then you must be a bat,” I said, “because that’s the only rat I know of with wings.”
“Why, Al,” Sammy said, “I’m surprised at you. I always thought you were my friend.”
He really meant it too. Trying to hurt his feelings was like trying to shoot an elephant with a BB gun. It simply tickled him.
“You’re physically incapable of having friends,” I said. “All you can ever have are enemies and stooges.”
That rolled off my tongue just like that, without thinking much about it, but I remember looking back on it in later life as one of my few profound observations.
“Sammy,” I continued, “try to learn before it’s too late. Don’t be cheap. Cheapness is the curse of our times. You’re beginning to spread cheapness around like bad toilet water. That item about George Opdyke’s celebrating your birthday was one of the cheapest things I ever saw.”
“Sure, it was cheap,” Sammy said. “After all, I got better publicity free than you could have bought for big dough. You can’t ask for anything cheaper than that. And what are you squawking about? It didn’t do you any harm either.”
“You don’t have to convince me,” I said. “I know you’re a philanthropist. But while you were about it why didn’t you mention Miss Goldbaum? She’s the only one who would have got any joy out of seeing her name linked with yours in print. Why didn’t you give her a break?”
“Wise up,” he cracked, “she gets her break three times a week.”
“You—stink,” I ended lamely, so sore I couldn’t even try to be clever.
“Okay, I stink,” he said, walking off, “but someday you’ll cut off an arm for one little whiff.”