The big night was winning that amateur thing. And having the man sign us up to compete against the winners of the other amateur things. And when little Phil turned up with his sarcasm, and telling us we didn’t know a damn thing yet, and he could help us, gee, how we jumped at it!
He made us work, all right, and he’s a nice guy, and he means well, and how could he possibly know that he was teaching us all the wrong things?
That guy from New York, he fixed us good, him and his fancy friends. They caught the show, a whole tableful of them, and when he sent the note back for us to join their party, just the two of us, not Phil, Phil read the note and his eyes went real wide open and he said, “Jimmy Angus! Say, I heard of him. Mixed up in musicals in New York. A big shot. Look, gals, be on your best behavior. This could be a break.”
So we went to the table and there’s that trick we used since we were kids, of Mary Anne starting sentences and me finishing them without a break. Funny now to think of her as Mary Anne instead of Niki.
Well, it seemed to go over pretty good, and we worked in some of the gags that we learned from Phil, and they all laughed like crazy, and maybe we should have known because there was a funny little edge in all the laughing. They weren’t really with us.
Jimmy Angus was a big skinny guy, sort of old, and the girl with the boy’s haircut was his wife and she used to be an actress, and then there was a fat agent from Hollywood, and the redhead, and some young guy with an old bag of a wife, and some spare people.
It’s hard to figure out now whether it was a mistake to go to the hotel suite with them all or not. Maybe we’d have been better off to go ahead being dumb. It certainly was one hell of a big layout there in the Del Prado. Biggest hotel suite I ever saw. With a bartender from the hotel all set up in a little alcove, and more people coming in, and we finally got the drift that they were all down there figuring out some kind of angle on doing a Mexican movie. It was pretty hard to follow a lot of the conversation. We stuck close together, as usual.
We thought we were sort of like friends, and for a while there it was kind of exciting, because they certainly all acted famous, even though we hadn’t heard of any of them.
Phil had told us to be on our best behavior, so we did a lot of drink-nursing. I didn’t get the drift at all when Jimmy Angus started arranging a table, but then when he came out with an armload of hats and dumped them on the table, it began to worry me.
He banged on a glass, like at a banquet for the speaker, and he said, “And now for your pleasure, Angus and Company present the show-stopper from the Club de Medianoche—Riki and Niki and their very obvious talents. Let’s go, gals.” He trotted over to one of those little pianos and began the theme we use for the act, “Lovely to Look At.”
We looked at each other, and we always seem to think alike and get the same reaction to things, and I knew we’d both fallen flat down with a big thud. We’d thought we were guests, and now we were supposed to strip for this crazy drunk crowd. It was tough enough to do it in a club, but in a club it was sort of impersonal; we weren’t going to undress in anybody’s living room, that was for sure.
“No.” I said. “No, please.”
The fat agent came over and gave us a sort of greasy smile and he handed us a fifty-dollar bill each and said, “For that, ladies, I think you can go on with the act, without making that little concession to censorship like you do at the club.”
By the time I’d figured out what he was saying to us, that he expected us to go through with it completely starko, he’d eased back away from us, and there we were with our bare faces hanging out and the fifties in our hand, and everybody looking, and that Jimmy Angus, grinning over his shoulder at us from the piano bench, still doing our theme. We said no again and they kept applauding and stamping their feet and some jerk was yelling, “Take it off! Take it off!”
And we tried to head toward the door, and some guy came trotting over, a little bitty guy, and he said in a big loud voice that stopped the music, “These little girls are shy, folks.” Little girls! He came up to my chin.
He went on and said, “What they need is a little rehearsal. Louie, I’ll reimburse you for the hundred bucks, and these little lovelies and I, why, we will retire to a private chamber and get in some practice.”
Another guy elbowed in and said, “And by God, for another hundred they’ll practice with me, too.” All the women yelped like they were shocked or something. The little guy was wiry, and he tried to steer us down toward a sort of hallway.
Mary Anne and I have always worked pretty well together on wise guys. It’s something we worked out as far back as eighth grade. She spun him and I hit him, and while he was still spinning she hit him as he came around, and she was crying, and it knocked out a funny little bridge and he fell down and Mary Anne kicked him in the chest. We were both crying then, and it stopped all the noise so you couldn’t hear a thing except the little bitty guy saying bad words and crawling toward that little bridge.
We got out the door and Jimmy Angus caught us at the elevator. He had a different look on his face. He said, “I want to talk to you girls.”
“And you can go to hell,” Mary Anne said, with sobs in her voice like broken springs in a bed.
“I want to tell you something for your own good.”
I told him I wouldn’t go back in there with those crumbs for a thousand bucks. He told us we didn’t have to, and he was very persuasive and he got us down the hall somehow and into a small bedroom. We sat side by side on the bed. He leaned on the bureau with his arms crossed and a cigarette bobbing in the corner of his mouth as he talked. He said, “I’m not going to apologize for what I did. I was misled. Where do you girls come from?”
We didn’t want to talk, but he got it out of us, a little bit at a time, until we were interrupting each other to tell him the whole thing. He kept nodding.
Neither of us will ever forget what came next. He took a long time butting his cigarette. He was frowning. “So O.K. So you’re a couple of good-looking girls from Ohio. Young and healthy and good. I could kid you along. But I owe you something for what happened in there. That Decker. He’s taken a couple of nice kids and turned them into a fair imitation of brass blondes. He’s taught you to talk and walk and act like a pair of high-priced whores. He’s turned you into a pair of burlesque types. A lot of fine comics have come up from burlesque. They came up because they had sense enough to change their styles and grow. Decker will never be anything but one of the less clever baggy-pants boys. I imagine you girls want to stay in show business. I say, get out. Your voices are true, but too small. Neither of you has the instinctive grace of born dancers. Your only stock in trade is a pair of beautiful bodies and a blue routine. You’ve had your kicks playing joints with Decker. Go home and get married and have beautiful babies. Now don’t interrupt. You can go on with Decker, and I’ll tell you exactly what will happen. You’ll play joints until your voices sound like whisky tenors. You’ll go on and on until you start to sag, and by then Decker will be through, and all you’ll have left is heartbreak. And don’t be too rough and too indignant when people figure you’re both pushovers. Decker has taught you to look like a pair of pushovers. We got you up here for laughs. So we didn’t get any laughs, and maybe you made us feel a little ashamed.”
He took out a card and scribbled on it and tossed it into Mary Anne’s lap. “If you’re too stubborn to take good advice, the least you can do is ditch that crumby little comic. Go to the address on that card. He’s a friend of mine. He’ll place you somewhere in New York after he cures you both of the phony tricks Decker’s taught you. Maybe some big club where all you have to do is wear fancy costumes and walk around for the baldies to lick their chops at.”
On the way back in the cab we told each other that Jimmy Angus didn’t know sugar from Shinola. We were whistling as we walked past our personal cemetery. Angus had shown us the cemetery. With one stone saying Niki and one saying Riki.
Phil was waiting up, all excited about what had happened. We told him that Jimmy Angus had told us to give him a ring in New York. You’d think somebody had just told Phil he’d won a raffle.
The next day we tried to talk Phil into taking the strip out of the routine. It was as easy as taking away his left arm.
What Angus had said worked on us. We talked it over. Niki put it in words finally. She said, “Face it, Buster. Angus gave it to us straight. He opened the window and some fresh air blew in. But can you tell Phil? Can you?”
We knew how much he was counting on us. And we knew the dream. It would have killed the little guy. He was thinking that now he could get into the big time before it was too late for him. We heard the lines with new ears, and watched each other with new eyes, and we began to feel cheap and ashamed and tricked. The life went out of the act, and the applause lost its edge, but Phil didn’t seem to notice. And the same way we’ve always done everything together, we seemed to find out at the same time that a wee dollop can make the world right rosy and make you forget that a big suite full of smart show people thought you were a flooze pair because that’s what you had been taught to act like.
Riki lit another cigarette. The decision had been made. They had decided to ride along with Phil Decker because they knew they couldn’t hurt him that badly. And, she thought, it would have been O.K. if they’d been able to keep moving. You keep moving and you can stop thinking. But get a big fat delay like here at the ferry and you start turning it over and over in your mind again. The card Angus had written on was carefully tucked away. Ugly little man with sparrow legs in those absurd red shorts. Ugly little man with his tired jokes and his big dream. What would happen to him? But, on the other hand, who were they to toss themselves away for the sake of his impossible dream? She took a hard drag on the cigarette. Get to New York and then make the break? No, if any break was going to be made, it ought to be here and now, here in the protecting darkness of the night.
Niki appeared out of the darkness and leaned against the side of the car. Her voice was dull. “Sitting this one out, baby?”
“Sitting and thinking.”
“Keep it up. You might have beginner’s luck.”
“That’s Phil’s line.”
“They’re all Phil’s lines, baby.”
“Mary Anne, I…”
“I know, Ruthie. I’ve been thrashing around the same way. There’s a long life ahead. Sure, he’s a sweetie.”
“Can we do it?”
“It’s dark now. That seems to help a little. Think how blissfully happy we’d be, baby, if we’d never met one James Angus. Right now, it all seems kind of nightmarey. Right now I can’t believe I’ve bared my fair white body for the public. Can you imagine what Granny would say?”
“Be a busy woodshed.”
“And food standing up.”
“I’m laughing and I feel like crying.”
“You know, he’s uneasy. He’s sensed something wrong. He’s a little worried.”
“How about a jolt? Will that help?”
“Let’s not. It may make us so sentimental, we’ll drop the whole thing.”
“How are we going to say it?”
“Open up the subject and let the words come.”
Instinctively they reached for each other’s hands, held tight.
“Agreed?” Riki asked softly.
“O.K. We do it. Sit tight. He’ll be hunting us soon.”
Niki joined her sister in the back seat of the car. They sat together and there was no need for any more words. In ten minutes Phil Decker came wandering up the road.
“Hey, there you are!” he said, peering into the car. “I think I got a skit figured. We put Niki in a tight skirt leaning on a prop lamppost, see, smoking and swinging a red pocketbook and looking at her watch and stamping her foot to show she’s waiting for some guy who’s late. I walk by her and turn about and give her the old double take, and then come back casual-like, see. Then—”
“We want to talk to you, Phil,” Riki said in a low voice.
“Eh? Don’t you want to hear the skit? It’s tricky. See, Niki is waiting for a streetcar, but we get the yuk out of it being a streetcar named desire, and the little guy, that’s me, gets it wrong and thinks that she…”
“We want to say something to you, Phil,” Niki interrupted. “So why don’t you get in the front seat and turn around and listen?”
“Something wrong? Hell, don’t worry about the ferry. We’ll get across sometime tonight.” He got in the car, turned to face them.
“It’s more than that, Phil,” Riki said. “Honestly, we’re terribly grateful for everything you’ve done for us.”
“But,” said Niki, “we want to split.”
The silence was heavy. Phil slowly took out a cigarette, lighted it. He let the flame burn for a few seconds before he snapped the lighter shut on it.
“You maybe think that’s simple or something?” he said in a harsh voice. “You maybe think you snap your fingers and we’re all done? I knew something’s been eating on you two. I’ve had my hunches. Well, let me tell you something. Without old Phil keeping you in shape, you two will be finished in a month.”
“We’ll take that chance,” Riki said, glad that he had taken that attitude.
“You might, and then again you might not,” Phil said coldly.
“How do you mean that?”
“It’s pretty tough to fool old Phil. I caught that Angus angle. He figures he can use you. Use you is right. He won’t do you any good. You can bet on that. Hell, I could see it all shaping up.”
“We’ve talked it over, Phil,” Riki said. “And we want to break it up.”
“There’s a hell of a distance between wanting to and doing it. Don’t forget that. I got your names on a little piece of paper. Maybe it don’t seem like much to you, that little piece of paper, but let me tell you it’s protection. There’s no way you can sneak out of it, believe me.”
“We talked that over a couple of weeks ago, Phil. We got to appear with you, O.K. But Lincoln stopped slavery. We’ll stand there, and you can make all the jokes you want, and it still goes as a fifty-fifty split.”
“I’ll wait you out, then. We won’t work at all.”