“How many bathrooms are there in this building?”—pencil poised over notebook, inquired the tall lady of the small, bright-eyed slum child.
“Bathroom? What’s witha the bathroom?” The slum child was genuinely puzzled.
“Oh yes, of course, ahh, toilets—how many toilets?” Just what value such knowledge would have was not clear to anyone, including the lady who asked.
“Toy-let?” The slum child mulls over this new word. “Toy-let? Oh! Yeah. You mean crap room. All of us has one.”
Still blushing, but delighted, too—this is the real stuff!—our female Henry Ward Beecher persisted: “Each family has its own toilet?”
The slum child was astonished. “Nah—what’s each fambly?—one crap room per each floor, whattaya think?”
Horrified: “You mean, each toilet must serve the residents of an entire floor!?”
“Look, lady”—the slum child was being extremely patient—“there’s only twenty-fi, thirty people on each floor, everybody craps on a average maybe once, twice a day. Takes you maybe ten, twelve minutes a time each crap, don’t it? Peein’s much faster—one, two minutes—plenty a time for everbody—whattaya have in mind, one crap room for each ’n every fambly in a house?” Laughs. “Hey, Florio, lady here thinks every poison in New York should have his very ownliest private crap room!”
The pushcart peddlers, the fat ladies leaning on second-floor pillows get into the hilarious act, whole-Italian-hearted laughter at the wonderful idea of a one person, one crap room. Amid this undignified cacophony, the fashionable ladies unfashionably retreat.
ONE FROGGY EVENING (1955): Construction worker as Michigan J. Frog emerges from cornerstone
Mike grew into his teens to become a plumber’s helper—installing basic pipes and conduits, reaming metallic intestines together to form the necessary iron alimentary canals to make livable the skeletal frames of newborn apartment buildings. An honorable but often dangerous trade, particularly so in the winter, when frozen winds and icy iron make the plumber’s slippery high-steel act dangerously precarious. Mike said the danger didn’t concern him but the cold did, which was brought into focus one fateful frosty January morning with the Arctic wind keening through the snowy girders when he opened the door to the wooden shack where his overalls were stored. They were, he said, frozen stiff, literally—frozen stiff in a sort of jumping, knee-bent position, just as he had removed them the preceding night.
“I immediately decided, then and there,” he later told me, “that whatever the future might hold for me, I would never again work at any job that required, as a condition of employment, that I wear frozen overalls.”
Without qualm, or a second thought, or worry about an uncertain future, he slid and skittered down fourteen flights and out onto Broadway. Letting pure chance lead his feet, he turned east on 40-somethingth Street, checking each window, ashcan, doorway for a key to his expectations, with no harbinger, no bluebird of gladness, to guide him. Then destiny planted a small sign in the window of a rather tallish, ramshackle, run-down building: “In-betweeners Wanted. Apply 18th Floor.”
“I didn’t know,” Mike told me, “an in-betweener from a go-between. Riding up in a rickety, wobbly elevator, I found the name Terrytoons on an eighteenth-floor glass door. Somehow I knew that I was home. I had always had the knack of making terrible drawings that seemed funny, and funny was precisely what the Terrytoons studio was looking for. At the ensuing interview with Paul Terry I suggested a slogan for his spastic elevator: GOOD TO THE LAST DROP.” This was all that fate needed. His fate and our good fortune were determined.
After a year or so at Terrytoons, and by devious routes (he could not drive a car), Mike emigrated to Warners in the late 1930s and eventually became my associate, my friend, my gag man, and writer extraordinary for most of the days of my life as a director.
The quirky brilliance of his ready wit was never neutral. He disdained facts as useless—only the odd, the unusual, the hilariously peculiar interested him.
All things, all people were, in Mike’s mind, related to each other in some undiscovered ways. The fun lay in the marriage of oddities: a French skunk in a perfume shop; a male rabbit singing Brünnhilde’s role against a mighty eighty-piece symphony orchestra; a singing frog driving a simple man into a diabolical frustration. With people his attitude and philosophy remained constant; their personalities most interested him when most skewed.
At the studio Mike struck up a friendly friendship with a girl named Henrietta Hultz. She interested him, I think, because she didn’t appear to be either a girl or a boy. She was thin as only bamboo is thin, and her hair hung in a gray mass, like secondhand noodles.
One day Mike and I were walking down the hall and came upon a wet, bedraggled gray mop splayed flat on the floor.
Mike struck his forehead. “My God, Henrietta’s fainted.”
However, the case of the extension cord brought me into absolute harmony with Mike. When creative ineptitude meets creative ineptitude, bonds far stronger than steel are formed.
Mike’s problem was to get an extension cord from outlet A over the door to position B. His early Elmo Lincoln circa frame house having few electrical outlets.
A twenty-five-foot extension cord was quickly purchased, along with a half pound of brads. It was the work of but an hour or two to run the wire up and over the doorway, secure this wire with brads every few inches or so—an effective if not artistic job accomplished.
But how to anchor the outlet to the wall? It did not occur to Mike, nor would it have occurred to me, to unscrew the plate as instructed and firmly anchor the plate to the wall with a single screw or nail.
Mike’s work was far more picturesque, and effective, too, in its poetic way. He simply pounded nails all the way around the plate and bent them over to hold the plate: the
