Harpo Speaks! Read Online Free PDF Page A

squeaky voice, was not much of a talker. Not to be totally outdone by Chico, I took to imitating faces and aping the way people walked.
    The imitation that gave me the most trouble was Chico himself. He used to walk the streets at a steady trot, head and shoulders thrust ahead, unmistakably a young man who knew where he was going. I practiced walking like Chico for hours. But I never could master his look of total concentration. I just didn’t have it under the haircut.
    When I quit P.S. 86 I still saw very little of Chico. He never came home directly from school. If he did show up for dinner, he would vanish as soon as he’d eaten. He was conducting some very important research, to extend his knowledge of arithmetic in useful ways. He was learning how to bet on horse races and prize fights and how to play poker, pinochle and klabiash, by kibitzing the action in the back room of a cigar store on Lexington Avenue. He was learning the laws of probability by observing the neighborhood floating crap game as it camped and decamped from cellar to roof and roof to cellar, one roll of the dice ahead of the cops. And he was learning the laws of physics by noting the action and reaction of spherical solids in motion at the Excelsior East Side Billiard Parlor.
    When he turned twelve, Chico decided he knew all he had to know about these applied sciences, and he quit school too. He also quit doing research, kibitzing and observing, and got into the action. He has never been without a piece of some kind of action since then and never will for the rest of his days.
    Chico was a good teacher, and for him I was a willing student. In a short time he taught me how to handle a pool cue, how to play cards and how to bet on the dice. I memorized the odds against rolling a ten or four the hard way, against filling a flush in pinochle or a straight in poker. I learned basic principles, like “Never go against the odds, at any price,” and “Never shoot dice on a blanket.” I learned how to spot pool sharks and crooked dealers, and how to detect loaded dice.
    Unfortunately, we couldn’t raise any action at home. Frenchie was too busy during the day, and his nighttime pinochle game was not open to kids. Grandpa’s only game was Skat. We tried to convert Groucho to cards, but we couldn’t. Groucho was already turning into a bookworm at the age of eight, and he sniffed at games of chance as being naive and childish.
    There was no place to go but out for the right kind of action. The catch to this was that it took money to get into a game, and more money to stay in a game if your luck was temporarily running slow.
    To me there was only one solution. We had to find jobs and earn some money.
    Chico thought this was the nuttiest idea he’d ever heard. “You don’t earn mazuma,” he said. “You hustle it.”
    Our first joint promotion, to hustle some scratch for pool and craps, was the Great Cuckoo Clock Bonanza of 1902.
    All his life Chico has had an uncanny talent for turning up prospects. It was he who turned up the producer who first put us on Broadway, and made us nationally famous. It was Chico who later turned up the producer-Irving Thalberg-who put us into Grade-A movies. Anyway, the first prospect I can remember Chico turning up was a novelty shop on 86th Street that was having a sale on miniature cuckoo clocks.
    These cuckoo clocks had no working cuckoos (the birds were painted on) but they had the genuine Black Forest look, they kept time, and they were on sale for only twenty cents apiece. We had just enough money between us to go into business, since Uncle Al had been to visit the night before, and we still had our Uncle Al dimes.
    Chico bought a clock. We got fifty cents for it in a hockshop down at Third and 63rd. Thirty cents profit. We went back and bought two clocks, pawned them for four bits apiece. Chico said business was now too good for me to remain a silent partner. I should start hocking clocks too. So off I went, with my