“Whichever. I don’t get it.”
“In that case, Walter, here is what I suggest you might do. Go to Casey’s Tap Room, on Adler, and listen to an Etude by Chopin with your beer. Or sit down in Morry’s Bowling Emporium and take in those wild licks by a cat called Handel. Or if your taste…”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute.”
“You prefer Vivaldi?”
“Which?”
“Happy’s Icecream Parlor.”
“Turn off that damn radio!”
“That was Wagner’s Valkyrie. Moishe’s Delicatessen.”
He said something but I didn’t catch it all because of the speed of his delivery. When he was done he got up and started to pace.
“How’d all those crazy records get on those jukes?”
“It’s what Don and Jimmy brought over.”
“Don’t they look at the crap they pick up?”
“You know damn well they don’t. We get the jobber’s list unless we ask for specials.”
Lippit paced and mumbled.
“It’s every place like that?” he asked.
“Armenian folk music at the rec hall of Irish Patriots, Tosca at the Teens Tavern, which goes well with the malteds, and…”
“Never mind.”
He grabbed up the phone and called up the jobber but before he got really wild he banged down the receiver. It was cramping his style. He went down there in person and I was along. A fine performance, and he meant every word of it. And it worked. He got the jobber to pick up all the wrong records and it wouldn’t cost Lippit a cent.
This was done. This was fine.
But the next day it was still as far as it had gone. We now didn’t have a box with a full quota of records and most of them were without current hits.
I went down to the jobber.
The place was big and dark. It was in one end of a warehouse in a street full of truck terminals. The disc jobber, who supplied a territory including three towns, used space which was higher than wide, a long hall with racks which did not reach the ceiling, because the ceiling was two stories up. You can’t pile records very high. The weight adds up and the bottom ones break. The racks were all over the place, making long, criss-cross alleys. The office part was on the second floor of the attaching warehouse and I got up there by a metal staircase which wound up to the door which had been put through the wall.
This place was all utility, too. Just a big room with factory windows, the walls green-painted cinderblock, a girl typing, a man with a desk full of ledgers, a wall of files, a half-glass partition. Bascot, the jobber, had his desk at that end.
I walked in, and when the iron door clanked shut the girl looked up from her machine and stopped typing. She had the stoop, dry hair and glasses of the girl who would have her kind of job forever.
I knew her and she knew me, but she didn’t say hello. She tried to smile but she only nodded, and because her machine had made the only sound in the office it was now very quiet.
“Bascot in, girl Friday?”
“Mister Bascot?”
“Yes. Bascot. I don’t know about the Mister yet. I’ll first talk to him.”
Then I heard the little sound a door makes when you try not to make any sound at all, the door on the other side of the partition, and I went in unannounced. He knew I was there, anyway.
The door was just hissing shut on the pneumatic gadget and I walked past Bascot’s empty desk, empty chair, and out of his empty office.
He was just partway down the stairs. They led out to the street or you could take a door which went back to the storage space.
“Bascot,” I said. “I’m happy to find you in.”
I could just see the top of his head and that he was trying to get out to the street.
“Wait up. I’ll walk with you.”
He didn’t want that. He turned to the door which went to the warehouse and there he went through this little act of just having heard me. Puzzled stop, look around at the air, distracted recognition.
“Oh. St. Louis,” he said.
I caught up with him and tried to ease everything with a smile of gladness.
“I almost missed you.”
Maybe I should have first practiced the smile with a mirror, because by the looks of Bascot it had not come off. He seemed to think I was glad that I could now take a bite out of him.
“I’m in a hurry, St. Louis. How about tomorrow?”
Bascot, it was true, was always in a hurry. He had a big forehead with permanent wrinkles, worry wrinkles about having to hurry, and he had a nervous pout which he did with his mouth, very quickly and about every two minutes. It was meant to resettle his plate. And his clothes showed hurry. Tie half down, collar curled under, vest buttoned wrong. If there were such a thing as a set of two left-footed shoes, Bascot would wear them.
“Today,” I said. “Because I’m in a hurry.”
“All right Come in here.”
Nasty, too. He went into the warehouse but didn’t open the door enough for me to get through. I had to open it again myself and when I was through he was standing there by a rack.
In spite of the summer outside, the warehouse seemed chilly. That was because of the two-story ceiling. Or maybe it was Bascot’s manner.
“You been giving me a lot of trouble,” he said. “That whole outfit of yours.”
Clever too. He had taken the words right out of my mouth.
I let the door slam shut first, left a pause, then stepped closer. That’s theatrics. It works with the nervous kind, such as Bascot.
“You’re stalling Lippit,” I said. “Thirty per cent of your business, Bascot, is Lippit.”
And a hundred per cent of Lippit’s coin depended on Bascot, so I shouldn’t have opened this way, maybe.
“And a hundred per cent of…”
I shouldn’t have opened this way. I told Bascot to shut up and not start out with this desperate talk because what I had come over for was strictly business and not his and my friendship.
“I’m not trying to be personal,” he said. “I got nothing against you.”
The dislike stuck out of him like his big, bony nose.
“Why this crap?” I asked him. “Why this stall with the records and then nothing at all?”
He stepped back into an alley of racks and picked at one of the marker cards on a shelf.
“You don’t like the way I been giving service, St. Louis, then why in hell you been letting me service your outfit for all this time? And the first complaint you ever had, don’t come in here and act like a-act the way-” He gave up, all choked with nerves and bad temper.
I put one arm on a shelf, which looks casual. “Please, Bascot. I just got this one question.”
“What? What question?”
“But I first want to apologize. I’m sorry, Bascot, for the way I sounded.”
This embarrassed him and he frowned like a prune.
“Okay, Bascot? I’m sorry.”
“Okay, okay. Forget it.”
“And the question is, why the runaround?”
He blew his stack. He said he didn’t know about any runaround and hadn’t he paid for picking up all those wrong records and what in hell more did we want.
“Service, Bascot That’s all.”
“Service, service, service! You think all I got to do is supply your jukes?”
