moment we do not have any openings...” when she suddenly reached across the desk and felt of my arms. It was a muggy day and I only had on a thin sport shirt. Due to not eating regularly I was in fair shape. She said, “My God, real midget muscle man, aren't you? Stick around for a second.”
She called Barrett on the office phone. He came in and looked me over like he was a queer. Turning to Kimball he grunted, “He's the man.” Then he favored me with a grunt. “Thirty a week. Okay, son?”
“Yes, sir!” I said, my heart pounding. Thirty was low, even for a starter, but that didn't matter... I actually had a job as an artist!
“Miss Kimball will explain your duties,” Barrett said and left us.
Marion Kimball looked like she could be in her late twenties, middle thirties, or even older. She had a firm, hard figure, probably well girdled, and a shrewd and sophisticated face under a smart makeup job, and she was expensively and smartly dressed. A handsome woman, rather than pretty. She grinned and it was her teeth that told me she was older than she appeared. “Let me break this to you right, Jameson. I'll let you do some art work, whenever I can. But you're a rent collector.”
“A what?”
“My, my, aren't we shocked and angry.”
“Well damnit, I'm an artist and...”
“Get the wind back in your sails, Jameson. Take the job, artists are a nickel a dozen. Job is fairly easy. Barrett owns several houses, some of them tenements. He has a complex about being held up, and a mania about real estate agents screwing him. Also, he hasn't the time to look after the houses. You'll do that, and collect the rents. Be any trouble bonding you?”
“I don't think so.”
“Fine. The houses won't take up all your time, and I will try to give you some art work. Buying it?”
“Yeah,” I said, disappointed as the devil.
We shook hands. Kimball's hand hard and warm, almost intimate.
It wasn't a bad job. I had seven houses to “take care of.” Each day I'd leave my room at about ten, start making the rounds of the houses. There were two “good” houses on West 55th Street, former brownstones that had been converted into small, expensive apartments. There were large tenements on the lower West Side, where five rooms and hot water rented for $30, and one house in Harlem where five rooms without heat or hot water rented for $40.
At each house I'd chat with the janitor, pick up what rents he had, visit people who were behind and maybe send them to the relief office. I had the authority to okay small repairs, or even order a paint job. Around the first of the month I'd be busy, put in full days, but usually I was finished by one, would drop into the office and give Barrett a quick accounting— and the dough—then finish out the day behind my drawing board.
I soon wised up to some of the soft dough waiting to be picked up. It was real small time, but I could average an extra ten bucks a week. Barrett probably knew about these rackets, that's why he started me at thirty. For instance, I'd tell a janitor to buy a broom and pay him when he gave me the paid receipt from the hardware store... then I'd add a new pail or a couple of pounds, of soap powder on the receipt—pocket the buck or two.
As I said, it was petty scuffling.
When there was an apartment to be painted, I had a choice of several painters and by dropping a hint that I was interested in a Broadway show, I'd chisel a pair of orchestra seats now and then.
There were other angles that could be worked with the janitors. If a tenant moved in on the fifteenth of the month, I'd hold his rent till the first of the following month, tell Barrett he'd moved in as of the first. Then when he paid again on the fifteenth, I'd split this one “extra” rent with the janitor. As long as I remembered to make out the tenant's receipt dated the fifteenth, everything was okay. Sometimes, when I had a couple hundred bucks in rent money on me, I could even short-change Barrett out of a five spot.
If you think this was a petty hustle, remember the janitors had their own angles. But it wasn't hard work, my hours were my own, and I never got tough with anybody or looked for trouble.
Life moved smoothly. I moved to a room on East 37th Street, which wasn't much, but the address was “good.” I lived correctly, wore the correct brands of clothes and, by scrimping, I could even take a babe out to a correct bar now and then—vaguely mention I was “something in real estate,” or “something in advertising,” depending on what brand of bull I was dishing out. It was all a phony front, and I didn't like playing the four-flusher, but it was a way of life, and good for a few fast tumbles.
Of course, after a week or so I got hep to the office set-up. Kimball was the brains of the firm—she was everything. She could write copy, lay out ads, butter up accounts when necessary. She was extremely capable and efficient. She was never off guard or relaxed, was in there pitching all the time... yet there was a sort of sensuous warmth about her I could never figure out I could feel it in the way she'd glance at me now and then, like the promise of an expensive mistress. Like the glowing of a match before it bursts into flame. It was all in contrast to her cold, super-efficiency. I never kidded around or made a pass, but I often wondered what she'd do if I pinched her ass, fire me or pinch me back.
Kimball was always barking, full of razor-like sarcasm. Everyone was lashed by her biting voice, even Barrett... but I had the feeling he slept with her any time he wanted.
Barrett was easier to figure—he was all boss, knew only one way of doing things—to keep plugging. He dashed at each new account like a bulldog, bluntly hanging on till he either had the account or was completely knocked out. He worked hard, worried hard, had his ulcers and a soggy wife —whom I only saw once, and who probably only saw him once or twice a week, if that often.
Barrett would have gotten nowheres, except to a padded cell, without Kimball. She was behind him every step of the way, calmly soothing and smoothing things out with her charm and cleverness. Barrett had either married or inherited money. With his houses, the agency, his stocks, he never had any real financial worries, yet he kept plugging after the buck as though he was on the ragged rim of poverty. I didn't try to understand his frantic rushing, killing himself for more dough, treating his wife as though she were an old pet dog.
I did try to understand Kimball—that was something else.
She always handled me like a child, as if everything I did was some secret joke to her. The first week there, I came tear-assing into the office every day before lunch, anxious to get a layout assignment—only to hang around the rest of the day, doing nothing. When I did the same thing the following week, Kimball asked, “Jameson, don't you take your lunch hour?”
“Grab a bite while going to the houses, Miss Kimball.”
“Cut the beaver act. From now on take an hour for lunch—even if you eat on the job. And for Christsake, stop rushing around with that pathetic eager smile on your kisser. Quiet down.”
The two other artists, and a copywriter, had desks in one large workroom, which was headed by Kimball's glass- partitioned office, where she kept an eye on us.
The copywriter was a tweedy old man, a beaten hack writer who I heard had done a fair novel in his youth, and whose only ambition now was to sip beer and figure the races.
Neither of the two artists bothered much with me. One was a snobbish middle-aged nance who flew into a loud tantrum if anything on his drawing board was touched. The other was a sloppy young woman who wore wrinkled stockings and always looked like she needed a bath—although she didn't smell. She was one of these overserious types, who get into a blue mood when they're old enough to stop playing jacks—and never snap out of it. But she really had talent, a wonderful sense of colors.
Then there was a receptionist-typist, a flashy redhead, who seemed to spend all her time in figuring out new ways of making her small breasts look bigger. She frankly told me she “never went out with any guy making under fifty per.” She was said to be a friend of Barrett's wife, but I wouldn't have been surprised if Barrett got into her bloomers. In fact maybe he got into the nance. Barrett went after sex with the same boorish tact he went after business— smashing right through the center of the line.
In the beginning, I'd sit around all afternoon, waiting at my drawing board. No one said anything to me, minded my amusing myself with cartoons, or whatever came to mind. Now and then Kimball would realize I was alive and send me on some goddamn errand. I tried reading a book or the paper all afternoon, but she didn't seem to notice.
One day when I came breezing into the office at about two, she said, “Jameson, before you get settled for the day, go down to the drugstore and find out what those bastards did with the tongue sandwich I ordered a half hour ago. On whole wheat toast, no butter or anything. And a container of iced tea—no sugar.”
Kimball was always watching her figure. I was, too— whether I wanted to or not. At the drugstore I got a gooey ham salad sandwich and a big chocolate sundae swimming in whipped cream and nuts. When Kimball opened the bag, she called me in, asked, “What's the bright joke, shorty?”
“Couldn't remember what you asked for, Miss Kimball. I'm not used to running errands.”
“I see. You don't like my...?”
“Didn't say I didn't like it, merely that I'm not used to doing errands. Anyway, this is my treat. I'm loaded today.”
“Did that would-be copywriter, that pseudo- Hemingway, give you a horse?”
“No, Miss Kimball. No, I hocked my paints and brushes —never be missed around here.”
For a moment she stared at me with those steady, hard, clear eyes, then the expertly painted red lips broke into a smile and she giggled. “Cute, Jameson. Not overbright, but still kind of cute, brash kid stuff. Guess it won't kill me to eat this junk—send you out again and who
