Just One Catch by Tracy Daugherty

at 60 Hudson Street. Joey assumed he’d be assigned to Brooklyn, but his optimal hours—after school and on Saturdays—best matched the schedules of on-the-go city businesses. He was told to requisition a uniform (brown leather puttees) from the supply office and prepare to learn his way around the West Side.
    After school each day, he’d catch a trolley to the train (this took a ten-cent bite out of his pay, and there’d be another ten coming home—until he learned to take the subway directly from school), ride to Union Square, and then walk to the Flatiron Building, where a central locker room offered space enough for forty or fifty messengers to change into their uniforms. In an office on Seventeenth Street, Teletype machines spit out half-inch paper strands dark with words (the comedies and tragedies of daily commerce, and of ordinary lives); the machine operators pasted these strips onto yellow forms, folded the forms into envelopes, and handed them to the waiting messengers to be delivered to nearby addresses. Businesses in the area included Ohrbach’s, Mays, and S. Klein’s. Joey amused himself by timing the traffic signals as he hopped from one office complex to another, adjusting his pace so he always caught the WALK command. He dreaded the day (it never came) when he’d have to hand someone a yellow envelope with two red stars stamped on it, meaning sad news.
    Many of the offices he saw were nondescript, temporary-looking. Lots of closed doors. What went on in these places? How did these outfits justify the amounts of money ( whatever amounts they were) spent on lighting, carpeting, rent? He was astounded to see trucks lurching into the city, apparently from all over the country, bringing vegetables and fruits, dumping them at various distribution points, from which they’d be disseminated to the kitchens of the rich and the poor, into the bodies of penthouse dwellers and cellar rats, and finally into sewers and trash mounds. He was appalled to hear the squealing of animals and to smell blood from within what looked to be warehouses near the Hudson. To quell his stomach at the end of a day, he’d bum a Spud or a Kool from one of his older coworkers. Once in a while, he’d saunter into a tavern and bluff his way to an ice-cold beer.
    One day, one of the older fellows, a full-timer, twenty-one or twenty-two, returned to the office from a delivery he’d made to an apartment up near Gramercy Park. He swore that a man had let him into the apartment, where a beautiful and provocatively dressed woman languished on a couch. The man offered to pay him to make love to the woman. The messenger’s coworkers scoffed at this tale—hesitantly. Certainly nothing like that had ever happened to Joey. Not even close. He wondered if this guy was making up stories to take his mind off rumors they all heard about something called the Selective Service Act, which, if passed by Congress, could mean military conscription for boys his age.
    Soon, Joey was transferred uptown to a Western Union office in the General Motors Building between West Fifty-seventh and West Fifty-eighth streets, near Columbus Circle. Now, the subway ride was a little longer after school, but the job was easier: This office served only those businesses inside the GM complex. It was staffed by a pretty young woman, a Miss McCormack, who mused freely about her man troubles. Joey’s fellow messenger here was a friendly twenty-one-year-old named Tom Fitzgerald, who fretted mightily about Selective Service and whiled away his time practicing penmanship.
    Joey’s favorite office in the complex belonged to the Manhattan Mutual Automobile Casualty Company. The receptionist, a “Miss Peck or Miss Beck,” he recalled, smiled at him broadly each time he popped in with a telegram for the company. She was “dark, buxom, married, mature.” Each afternoon, he looked forward to her warmth.
    In another