Max Read Online Free PDF Page A

and they really move. So when we get some of those machines in here, I’ll blow you to another show.’
    â€˜Sure,’ Max said. ‘Sure, why not?’

[ T W O ]

    Â 
    In 1897, on a fine afternoon in March, Max and Suzie Brinkerhoff were having dinner together in the Empire Dairy Restaurant on Second Avenue. Although they served an excellent table d’hôte dinner for thirty cents, economy was not what drew Max there. It was the potato soup. As he explained to Suzie, ‘I am not a gourmet, believe me – hey, I pronounced that right, didn’t I?’
    â€˜You got me. What does it mean?’
    â€˜Having class when it comes to food. I mean, my mother is a lousy cook, the world’s worst, so I developed a taste for good food. Does that make sense?’
    â€˜I suppose so.’
    â€˜And the potato soup here – Well, I don’t know, maybe if you set it up at Delmonico’s they’d hold their noses, but by my judgment, it’s the tops, absolutely the tops.’
    Suzie shook her head and smiled affectionately. ‘You’re a funny kid, Maxie. Sometimes you make me feel that you got a lot of class, not just about food but about other things, too. Three or four of the girls, we was talking about it, and they all agreed that if you’d get a place, we’d all rather work for you than for anybody else. It wouldn’t have to be any kind of great, fancy place, just a place –’
    Max shook his head. ‘No, forget it.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜Because I’m not a pimp. I hate pimps. I never knew a pimp. I didn’t want to kick his face in.’
    â€˜That’s only because pimps are rotten people.’
    â€˜So? And you want me to be a pimp?’
    â€˜You’re different.’
    â€˜No, no, not in a hundred years, Suzie. Forget it.’ He rose, took out his wallet, and dropped a dollar on the table. He enjoyed that; he liked being a large tipper. Waiters remembered him, and he liked that, too. They scrambled to serve him when he came in.
    â€˜Where you rushing to?’ Suzie asked him. ‘I thought we had a date.’
    â€˜We got a date, but it’s showtime. You want I should pass you in? You sit through the show, and then afterward, me and you and Bert, we’ll go out for coffee and cake.’
    â€˜I seen the show, and your friend Bert I can live without.’
    â€˜We got a new routine for tonight, two new jokes.’
    â€˜You know, Maxie, you set up with me and two or three of the girls, you can make yourself maybe three, four hundred a week. That ain’t hay. That is big, big money.’
    â€˜I told you no!’
    â€˜O.K., O.K., don’t get sore. Thanks for the dinner.’ She turned on her heel and started away.
    â€˜Hey, where are you going?’
    â€˜I’m a working girl, Maxie. I don’t improve my income sitting in that flea-bitten Bijou and watching you tell dumb jokes.’
    The Bijou, which was located on West Broadway between Prince Street and Spring Street, was a music hall, which meant that it was the workingman’s theatre and that it catered more to the English-speaking population than to the immigrants. It had been built in 1823, and its footlights had once been candlelights. Now they were gaslights. The style and manner of the Bijou’s entertainment – and, incidentally, the entertainment of most of the other music halls in New York City – had been lifted originally from the British music halls and then adapted to fit the local taste. The evening of entertainment consisted of a mixture of what would someday be called vaudeville and what would be known as burlesque, except that the acts were never overtly lewd or obscene. The meat and potatoes of music hall comedy was a kind of vulgar double-entendre , which the less prurient-minded could pretend not to understand, and the songs were mostly ballads, some brought over from London and reworked, since