Max Read Online Free PDF

there was no international copyright protection at that time. The Bijou had five hundred and forty seats, and it played two shows every evening, double matinees on Monday and Wednesday, and two matinees and three evening shows on Saturday. For the comedy routine which he did with his partner, Bert Bellamy, Max and Bert were paid forty-four dollars a week, twenty-two dollars each. It was good pay. There were music halls that paid a lot less for their acts.
    Max had met Bert Bellamy at Rowdy Smith’s penny arcade four years before. Bellamy was fifteen at the time, a year older than Max, tall, freckled, with a small snub nose and gray eyes. He worked at the arcade evenings between eight and ten, which were the heaviest hours of business, and he had been taken on by Smith after worsening arthritis had diminished the amount of hours Mrs Smith could put in. Bellamy was given an apron with huge pockets filled with pennies, and each night he wandered through the place making change and looking for cheaters.
    He and Max became friends. Indeed, he was the only friend Max made in all the years of his clawing his way out of childhood into the beginning of maturity. Max was fascinated with Bert Bellamy. He came from a background as poor as Max’s; as with Max, childhood with its supposed carefree joys had slipped by him unnoticed, and like Max he was a survivor who survived through his wits and street-wise cunning. But unlike Max or any other kid within Max’s limited world, Bert Bellamy was a white Protestant American – Presbyterian – and the product of over ten generations of American-born white Protestants. Every other kid Max had ever known or fought with was either Jewish or Catholic and always the child of an immigrant. Bellamy was something else and from elsewhere, another place, planet, and culture – or so Max saw him and understood him. Actually, Bert Bellamy was the son of an alcoholic father and a mother he could not remember. The mother had disappeared when Bellamy was two years old. The father, a carpenter, drank himself to death when Bellamy was sixteen, after which Bert gave up the basement residence that could hardly be called an apartment and spent his nights in a tiny storeroom behind the penny arcade.
    But because he had been on his own, more or less, ever since he could remember, the death of his father made little difference. He and Max had a great deal in common: they were both products of the streets; they were both tough and tough-minded, survivors, and cunning in the paths and ways of survival; and they both had the gift of mimicry. They were both skinny, wiry, long-limbed, and they were well coordinated. They could pick up any dance step in minutes. When Max was sixteen, Bert talked him into working out an act and began to drag him around to the music halls. They never paid to go in. They would tell the stage door keeper that they had a date with the manager to show him a gig, and even when they were thrown out, they usually had enough time in the wings to watch the acts. They got their first tryout after practicing for almost a year, and by now they were reasonably successful as a song, dance, and joke team.
    Bert was made up and waiting for him when Max came in this evening, and petulant over the fact that it was only eight minutes to curtain.
    â€˜Take it easy,’ Max said soothingly. ‘I took Suzie out to dinner.’
    â€˜You still hanging around with that big floozie? Come on, come on, change.’ Bert was already dressed in the oversized checked trousers, the loose celluloid collar, pink waistcoat, and black tailcoat that made up his costume. Max climbed into green pants and purple jacket.
    â€˜She’s my friend.’
    â€˜Do you get it from her? What do you get, Max? I offer you some of the nicest ass in little old New York, and you turn your nose up at it.’
    â€˜I don’t sleep with her, and what you consider nice ass, I