Max by Howard Fast Page B

finger at Bert. ‘Throw in with me, huh? This lousy, stupid life is getting us nowhere. It stinks. It’s degrading.’
    â€˜What’s degrading?’
    â€˜This shit we go out there and do every night, shoving a broomstick up our pants to get a laugh, cheap double-entendres and dirty jokes, pratfalls – fuck the whole stupid routine! I need a thousand bucks. We’ll forget we ever saw a music hall.’
    â€˜Max, you need fifty bucks for your sister, you got it. But don’t come to me with any get-rich-quick baloney. I’m a street kid, like you. You don’t like what we do – shit, it’s better than a goddamn sweatshop or being a stock clerk. So I’m happy.’
    â€˜You’re happy?’
    â€˜You are damn right.’
    â€˜So be happy,’ Max said sourly. ‘But let me talk frankly, and just remember what I say. I say you got shit in your blood – friendly, because we’re old buddies – but I still say you got shit in your blood. Now remember, you won’t work with me in something like this, then you know what?’
    â€˜What?’ Bert asked amiably.
    â€˜You’ll be working for me.’
    â€˜As long as the pay is good,’ Bert said.
    He had gone to Suzie, Suzie the floozie, as the kids called her. He had always gone to Suzie when he was troubled. At the age of fifteen, he had been introduced by Suzie into the world of sex. She loved Max – as much as she could love any man and perhaps because he was more a little boy than a man – and she told him, ‘You stay away from the whores or I’ll break your neck, because if you get a dose, you are washed up and your whole life is washed up, because there ain’t no cure, and anyone who says there’s a cure is sweet-talking you. Every snatch in this town is dirty, and don’t you ever think any different.’ She provided a prophylactic and instructed him: ‘This is the only thing that’ll keep you clean. Any other way, you got a dose, and then it’s yours until they put you away in the booby hatch.’
    â€˜But you’re clean, aren’t you?’ Max argued.
    â€˜Like shit I am. I could have been, but I’m no damn good and I pissed away my life. The Brinkerhoffs are just as good as the Kuhns and the Lehmans and the Strausses or any of the classy uptown Jews, and I could have been in silks and velvets all my life and eating in Delmonico’s and having a carriage ride me up and down Fifth Avenue, but I had to piss it all away and become a floozie, but I’m not going to dose a nice kid like you. I’ll just give you a little loving for your sake and because I like you.’
    She was telling the truth. Max had heard the story from other girls many times, that Suzie was the daughter of one of those half-mythical German Jews who had come to America two or three generations before the flood of Eastern European Jewish peasants, who had garnered wealth and influence, who ran great banking houses and industries and who lived in brownstone and granite mansions on Fifth Avenue and on Madison Avenue. What had happened to turn Suzie into a ghetto whore he didn’t know, nor did he ever have the courage to ask her; and now Max was no longer a kid of fifteen, and Suzie was a fat, aging whore in her mid-forties who clucked with sympathy.
    â€˜I should have broken her ass,’ Max said.
    â€˜Why, you stupid jerk?’ Suzie demanded, suddenly enraged. ‘Because you’re a man with a stinking little pecker that don’t know a damn thing except to fuck? Suppose you were a girl. Did you ever ask her how she felt, what she needed, what her life is in that hole on Henry Street?’ She shook her head helplessly. ‘Ah, what do you know! What do any of you know! I never met a man who was more than an oversized stiff putz attached to a whimpering, whining baby. All right, I’ll help you. I’ll tell Mrs Kaner that