Chance Meetings Read online

He finally wrote a letter to Fremont Older, the publisher for William Randolph Hearst of the San Francisco Call. Old Fremont Older liked to take up causes and accuse the Judicial and Penological Systems of Corruption and Inhumanity, respectively. Rightfully. He ran front-page stories about how things could go for a hapless man in America—Jack Black, in this instance. He published some of Jack Black’s letters in full, and some of his photographs, early and late. And finally Fremont Older sprung Jack Black, with the understanding that, now that he was free, Jack Black would go to work among the poor. He would give talks on the theme that crime doesn’t pay.

  And of course Jack Black agreed to do that, although one can imagine that he would have preferred just to be free.

  But when a big newspaper publisher fights the world for you, and sets you free, you are ever after in bondage to him, and to his ideas about what you and your life mean.

  I’m glad I met Jack Black, because he was honest, both about himself, his time in penitentiaries, his benefactor, cops, courts, the law, and society.

  He said, “A small man becomes a robber more often than an average-sized man, because a small man doesn’t like being small,” which of course came as a surprise to me, since he himself was a small man, about the size of a boy of twelve, and he was speaking honestly, from personal experience.

  And he also said, “Oh, I was guilty, I did the robbing all right, but I was never a criminal. And if you want to know the truth, in all the pens I was sent to I saw only half a dozen criminals—the rest are only fools, exactly the same as people on the outside—exactly, only they weren’t on the outside, they were in.”

  This was interesting, because I had always felt that a man in jail is a man who is not really unlike anybody else. I felt that getting caught and going to jail was a technicality, something that could happen to anybody. All the same, once you have been caught, you are rendered out of the big game, and relegated to the little game. You are a criminal, if only technically.

  I was twenty-two when I met Jack Black, and at that time I was somehow able to believe that people in penitentiaries are not really O.K. They might seem to be, but in a showdown they would not be O.K.

  It never seemed to occur to me that that was true of people anywhere. It was Jack Black who brought this truth home to me.

  I now consider putting anybody at all in jail an indication that the culture involved is underdeveloped —savages don’t fool with jails. They may kill in war or anger, but they don’t rub a man’s soul out of him with long dead time away from the company of the rest of the sons of bitches of the world.

  I spent only from about half past eleven in the morning to half past three in the afternoon one day with Jack Black: I enjoyed a nice Rotarian Club lunch with him, after which he made his talk, which was really a very sad piece of accommodation to the stuffed shirts in the big dining room.

  He was a quiet, dignified little guy, with a soul all shattered. Even so, I was surprised less than a year later when I read in the Call that Jack Black had committed suicide by drowning himself in the San Francisco Bay.

  Chapter 31

  Papulius was the publisher of the Macaroni Review.

  His office was on the second floor of a rattletrap building on Howard Street, where the winos lived the philosophic life, and still do, between Fourth and Fifth Streets in San Francisco.

  Overlooking the street was one large room in which he had a desk with a telephone on it, a few copies of the Macaroni Review, and three wire baskets containing a great variety of pieces of paper, letters, pamphlets, clippings, and anything else that had come to him in the mail, or by handout.

  At the top of one basket, for instance, was a religious pamphlet entitled, “Do You Want to Live Forever?” (I gather that he was giving the question his best attention.)

  He was a slim keyed-up man with a strong Greek accent. (Many years later when I listened to Spyrous Skouras I immediately remembered Papulius. But then you might well ask, Who is Spyrous Skouras?)

  Papulius was about thirty-eight to my twenty-four in 1932. He had put a short ad in the classified section of the Examiner, which I examined every morning free of charge in the display frame at the Hearst Building, at Third and Market Streets.

  The ad said something along the lines of “Writer wanted. Papulius. 848 Howard.” This meant that he had got the ad into the paper at the lowest possible cost, but I couldn’t be bothered about a detail like that, the thing that got me was that straight-out statement about what he wanted. Writer.

  Well, that was me all right, and it didn’t matter that there was no word about wages. Were the wages to be by the hour, by the day, by the week, month, year, or perhaps by the piece? If the writer wrote an especially good piece, would this man, this publisher, Papulius, show his appreciation by paying a little something extra? And in those days a little something extra was highly cherished, for the reason that a little something without anything extra was just about the highest achievement any young man could make.

  “Papulius,” I thought, as I hurried at half past nine one morning in June to 848 Howard Street. “Where have I heard that name before? Isn’t it the name of one of the greatest and noblest Greek philosophers, and isn’t this man at 848 Howard Street a descendant of that great Greek?”

  Well, whoever he was I would soon know.

  When I climbed the stairs to the second floor I saw a door marked THE MACARONI REVIEW. I knocked softly, waited, and then tried the knob. It turned, so I went in.

  A very intense little woman with rather insane eyes, and taut muscles, glanced in my direction, while a man who wore a very seedy gray Vandyke beard, standing across a table from the woman, not in anything like a game of ping-pong or anything like that, but in some kind of activity involving open books and long lists, this seedy man not only turned and glanced in my direction but actually asked, “Papulius?”

  “Yes, the ad in the paper.”

  “Well,” the man said, “he’ll be in in about an hour, I suppose. Come back in an hour.”

  “Is the job open?”

  “Oh, yes, yes, yes,” the man said. “The job is open.”

  “The ad said writer wanted.”

  “Yes, yes, that’s right, talk to Mr. Papulius about it.”

  An hour later when I went back Papulius received me with enormous cordiality, and said I was just in time to go along with him on some calls. He drove to a spaghetti factory in the North Beach, and, talking quickly, extracted not one hundred dollars, not fifty dollars, not forty dollars but thirty dollars in cash money from a spaghetti manufacturer for a full-page ad in the next issue of the Macaroni Review.

  Papulius wanted me to learn to call on such people and to get them to advertise in the magazine, six copies of which he showed me in the car.

  The magazine consisted of about forty rather thick slick pages in which there were many full-page advertisements from spaghetti manufacturers.

  “There are eighty-four spaghetti and macaroni manufacturers in San Francisco alone,” Papulius said with a certain amount of astonishment and pleasure, “and they do not have any other magazine in which to brag, only the Macaroni Review. The minute I go to a new customer and open my magazine his eyes pop open, and of course you heard what I told him.”

  “Yes, you said you would write about his company.”

  “Exactly,” Papulius said. “And you’re the writer. On this piece of paper I jotted down his name, and a few facts. Give him a write-up, about a hundred words is enough. Just say he’s got a nice clean factory on Columbus Avenue, number 142, he’s been making macaroni at this location for eight years, and the family has been in the macaroni business eight generations, something like that.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, because he hadn’t yet come to the money part, the wages, and I figured if I sounded eager and sensible he would mention wages of a certain dignity, but he didn’t mention wages of any kind at all, so that I was ready to consider rather undignified wages, even.

  We went four blocks in
his old Overland to another prospect, and he made the same pitch, but this time the macaroni maker said, “I no need advertise, I got too much business already.”

  “Prestige! Prestige!” Papulius shouted, “That’s the reason we want to advertise.”

  But the macaroni maker waved his arms and said, “I no want what you say,” and walked away.

  Papulius said, “I did it wrong, it was my fault, learn from my mistakes, I should have mentioned his mother, remember that, with certain big men speak softly of their mothers and they begin to listen, that man didn’t listen.”

  After stopping at half a dozen more places, and after he had won two more advertisers, we went back to his office, and he quicky made a phone call.

  “Hello, is that you, dentist? I got some people coming from Sacramento for dinner, I want the teeth cleaned—right away. No time to lose. I be over in five minutes.”

  And he hung up.

  “Have you met Mr. and Mrs. Goostenhouse?” Papulius said, and I thought, “Not officially, and let’s just keep it that way, too.” But Papulius hollered out, “Come in here, you two.”

  After they arrived, almost running, he said, “I want you to meet my writer, this boy has got it. He’s going to do the writing and the hustling both. Tell Mr. and Mrs. Goostenhouse your name.”

  I said my name quickly, and the little tense husband and the little insane wife nodded, and Papulius shouted, “All right, back to your work.” And sure enough they went trotting back to their tiny space in the outer office.

  “What do they do?” I said.

  “They do something,” Papulius said. “I don’t know. I give them the space, free rent, they answer the door and the phone when I’m out. They fool around with dogs, I think. They look like dogs, too. All right, this office is also your office, this desk is also your desk, that typewriter over there, that’s also your typewriter, write something for the Review, I’ll read it tomorrow.”

  And he went out, to get his teeth cleaned for dinner.

  After he was gone Mr. Goostenhouse and his wife stayed away for about an hour, during which time I wrote what I thought was a literary essay about eating, about wheat, flour, water, salt, the discovery of new usages for flour, the meaning of Italy, and the marvel of macaroni—all in well under a thousand words.

  I was revising the essay when the husband and wife came into the office and picked up pieces of paper from the wire baskets, and then stopped to chat.

  They were breeders of dogs—but only of the very rarest of breeds, not popular dogs.

  They showed snapshots of three of these breeds and the dogs looked strangely not unlike the husband and wife.

  “May we read what you’ve written?” the man said, and standing together they read it.

  “You are a writer,” the man said. “But this isn’t what he wants.”

  The following day, after reading the piece, Papulius said, “This is great—we feature it. We go hustle now.”

  Three days later I stopped going up there, that’s all, because he didn’t pay wages, and I didn’t even want to try to earn a living from wheedling money for macaroni ads from sensible men who just couldn’t quite resist the fame of having a full-page ad in a fine magazine, and for only $22.50.

  Chapter 32

  Papulius wasn’t the only one of his kind. There were others like him, and the thing they shared was a confidence that at a time of national depression they could still beat the system, and make a go of something that didn’t really have a chance.

  They were loners of one kind or another, even when they were attached to a big outfit and had to do their work according to the rules of policy. Even when they received written instructions about how to perform their work, they chose to follow another course.

  Wolinsky at Postal Telegraph in Fresno, in 1922, was theoretically only a roving troubleshooter, working out of Denver and covering the whole Pacific Coast, with instructions coming daily by telegraph both from Denver and from New York.

  He was thirty-four to my fourteen, and we were almost the same height, about five feet seven or eight, although I was all muscle and bone, and he was all blubber and smiles.

  He liked nothing better than to work hard, and at the same time to hear a joke and to laugh, or to tell a joke and to hear somebody else laugh.

  He was the fastest telegrapher in the world, according to the other telegraphers of Fresno, and he had the amazing ability to send a very important telegram full of hard words and numbers by Morse code and at the same time to carry on a loud lively conversation.

  He had a kind of double-mind, and a double-concentration system.

  Even though he was an outsider, sent in to survey the overall situation in Fresno, and should on this account alone be resented, he was liked by everybody, from the manager, J. D. Tomlinson, to the newest messenger—myself.

  He worked as a telegrapher, sending or receiving, only when telegrams had piled up and he didn’t want the pride of the company to be belittled—the important thing was the speed with which telegrams were picked up by messengers, the speed with which they were dispatched by telegraphers, and then the speed with which they were delivered, from Fresno to New York, for instance, sometimes in a matter of under twenty minutes.

  In those days long distance phone calls were not common. They were far more expensive than sending a telegram, and sometimes the connections were very bad.

  Wolinsky’s real work was to study the region and to extract the truth about it, with emphasis on the amount of the real and potential telegraph business, who was presently getting most of it, and who was going to get a lot more of it, very suddenly.

  Well, in Fresno, the real telegraph business was related to the grape and raisin growing, packing, and shipping business, and Western Union was getting most of it.

  Whenever anybody sent a telegram by Postal Telegraph, at the very same rates, it was because he had found out that Postal Telegraph had absolutely nothing to do with the United States Post Office, that it was a private company, and that the only competetive, or extra, thing it had to offer was greater speed and accuracy than Western Union.

  And it was Wolinsky’s job to spread this information among the people who sent telegrams, and to train others to spread it.

  He taught me, for instance.

  “Always let somebody who sends a telegram know you will get it to its destination immediately—if not sooner.” After waiting for me to laugh, he would go on. “Tell them, and then tell them again, Postal is a telegraph company, it is not part of the Post Office. Our rates are exactly the same as the rates at Western Union, but our service is better—swifter and more accurate. And then, prove it.”

  Now and then there would be an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the superior ability of Postal Telegraph in competition with Western Union.

  D. H. Bagdasarian, for instance, sent two telegrams to the same person in Boston, one by Postal, the other by Western Union. The test was the idea of Wolinsky, who sat in Bagdasarian’s packinghouse office on Tulare Street at First Avenue. The messenger from Postal Telegraph arrived to pick up the telegram in eight minutes, the messenger from Western Union arrived in twelve. The reply arrived by Postal in forty-eight minutes, and by Western Union in just under two hours.

  “All right,” D. H. Bagdasarian said. “I go with you, Mr. Wolinsky.”

  What was Wolinsky’s first name? Whatever it was, he was the man who got fat, as I wrote in one of my stories long, long ago, after he died of it.

  Chapter 33

  When I first began to make the scene in Paris from the fifth-floor flat at 74 Rue Taitbout the year was 1960, and I was a mere fifty-two years of age. There was no reason for me not to take the five flights of stairs fairly quickly, and so I did, and it did me more good than harm, as far as I know.

  When I got up in the morning I went down for a copy of the Paris Herald, as it was called at that time, and a crusty loaf of Paris bread in one or another of its various sizes, the most popular of which was (
and is) the bagguette, as it is called. A larger, longer, and broader loaf goes under the name of Parisienne, and a smaller loaf is called ficelle.

  I’d pick up one or another of these crusty loaves, hot from the oven, one might say, generally the bagguette, and I would bound back up to the flat. The water in the kettle would soon be boiling, I’d make a pot of tea, and I would sit down at the card table, the very same red-top card table at which I am now seated, at this typewriter, and I would have tea and fresh bread and Greek cheese and black olives, and then I would clear away the eating stuff and go to work at writing.

  I always believe that whenever I am in Paris my first job is to write.

  It is not to get married. It is not to find a rich and attractive woman, a riot in bed, and marry her. It is not to fetch all manner of young girls and mature women to bed, although now and then I would invite somebody up, for its own sake, no strings attached, no questions asked, no demands made. I mention this because whenever anybody thinks of Paris, especially whenever Americans think of Paris, they think of the Folies Bergère and juicy Algerian ladies bumping bumps like no American ever learned how, and ooh la la, girls girls girls, as some of the songs of the turn of the century used to put it.

  Everybody thinks Paris is one big roaring lark, and it isn’t, no city is, that’s all part of the tourist racket.

  My job in Paris from the beginning has been to do my work, because when a man reaches fifty he knows he isn’t forty, and he certainly isn’t thirty, but he is still himself, and he still has his work, so is he going to do his work, or is he going to quit?

  Well, I didn’t give the matter any thought at all, certainly not of that kind, I simply wanted to work, and there was a good reason why. I needed the money.

  I had to have money, and I couldn’t get any by any other means. My work was writing, so after the sensible breakfast of tea and bread and cheese every morning I went straight to work, and after I had done what I considered a fair day’s work I took to the stairway again and went out to walk in the neighborhood.