The Losing Role by Steve Anderson

felt
sorry for that dancer. No one can afford to live it up in a joint
like that. It’s too depressing.”
    “The owner’s from Cologne,” Max said, as if this was
an excuse.
    A bus was coming, turning into their street two
blocks down.
    “Sure, and don’t I know it? Guy doesn’t even know
you need a liquor license. Wanna stay open? Just wait till the
bulls come in for the take. Get me?”
    “Bulls?”
    “The coppers.”
    “Ah, as in ‘ Bullen .’” Max wagged a finger.
“How do you know all this?”
    She opened her purse and held it open for Max. “See
a check in there? I was in to pick up my first check. Supposed to
be their cigarette girl—ha! Now I got no check, and I need no check
like I need a hole in my head.” She shook her head. “What’s a gal
gonna do? Joint’s going under any day now. So I quit, see.”
    “And the pig let you? What a fool.”
    She tilted her head at him, and her curls bounced
and seemed to unravel down to her chin. “Ah, now ain’t that
sweet?”
    Did she mean it? Max hoped. Americans spoke with so
much sarcasm, so much irony. He shrugged, smiling. “ Ach ,
what can one say?”
    The bus coming was his, he saw.
    “Anyway, a gal’s gotta eat,” she added.
    The bus kept coming and passed Max by, so full that
men stood in the doorway. He waved his hat and cussed in German and
English. “Goddamnit all to heck! Heck, heck you!”
    Her head had pulled back. She chuckled. “Hey, you
got to relax.”
    “You’re right. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing to
miss my bus,” he said. He offered her a cigarette, one of his last
two. She took it and he lit it.
    “Name’s Lucy,” she said and walked off down the
street, rocking her hips.
    Max watched her. He could watch this a long time. He
would have given his last ten dollars to watch her cross the next
intersection.
    She stopped and turned to him. “That was my bus too.
You coming or not?”
     
    Lucy Cage was one of the few Americans who spoke to
Max while looking him straight in the eye. The others were always
moving too fast, looking for the next street corner, or thinking of
the next three things to say.
    For Lucy, Max tried harder. He avoided the dark
coffee houses full of his melancholy émigré friends. For lunch, he
gave the automats a go. He strolled into one on Eighth Avenue and
gazed at the bright chromium and Bakelite—a wall of clear plastic
doors. “How does it work?” he asked a passing attendant.
    “See the little doors? Reach in one, grab yourself a
sandwich, piece a pie, anything you want we got it.”
    “Pie?” For lunch—Max never understood it. There was
a time and place for treats.
    “Sure, an’ add a slice of cheese if you want. Any
door you like.”
    Max got a piece of blueberry pie. It put a bounce in
his step, but an hour and a half later he was hungry again and he
needed a nap. He complained to Lucy, but she only shrugged. “A
guy’s gotta adapt,” she said.
    Max kept trying. He changed his stage name to
Maximilian von Kaspar. He thought this would help. That’s what you
do in America, keep changing the game—one of the more successful
émigrés had told him this. It helped little. His agent could only
get him parts playing silly continentals in off-off Broadway
shows.
    “If I wanted that, I might have stayed home,” Max
complained.
    “But that’s what you are,” his agent shot back. “The
continental. Look at the name you gave yourself, for God’s sake. So
work with it. Work with me.”
    That agent lasted another month. The next one could
only get Max roles in B-Movies playing insipid Prussians wearing
monocles or crude Nazis with hate burning in their eyes. All they
saw was a Hun. A Heini. The worst part was, they required that Max
move to Hollywood—half a world away. Hollywood? One émigré called
it that “candy-coated hell.” Many Germans who tried it fled back to
Manhattan broken, hobbling, alcoholic. To them, and to Max, America
was New York City. The rest was just a