Henry Roth - Mercy of a Rude Stream - The Complete Novels

“C’mon!” Izzy hurried past with an empty tray. “Don’t be scared. Hustle! Hustle! Git a col’ drink here!” He paused long enough to demonstrate, raising face and voice boldly at the crowd. “Ice-cold drink here! Hey, go ahead, there’s one!” he prompted Ira. “Git him before that muzzler on top comes down. Run up the steps.”

Ira hurried upward. “Wha’ flavor you want?” He could scarcely raise his voice above a peep.

“Got any ginger ale?”

“No. Root beer, orangeade, cream soda—”

“All right. Give us the cream.”

So he made his first sale, snapped off the bottle top, asked the fans to pass the bottle, which they did, and the quarter the other way, and the dime change in return — which awoke a surge of thirst in the immediate neighborhood of the transaction, so that he sold another three bottles then and there.

Encouraged, emboldened, as much by the sale as by the realization that he was universally ignored, he increased the volume of his cry — to which nobody paid any more attention than before — until once again, out of the illimitable haphazard of the crowd, “Hey, you got an orange?”

“Yes, sir, yes, sir.” He served up an orange drink.

Despite the increased volume of his appeal, other hustlers — Ira could see — had some kind of magic in their cry, a compelling urgency. Fans bought soda in rows he had just passed half a minute before. He was flaccid, he lacked something, goddamn it, what? There was Greeny (they said he was going to college), tall, spindly-lean, a dynamo, he never seemed to tire, to get discouraged, or slacken; he had sold four trays already, and Ira hadn’t quite got rid of two. Half the bottles in Ira’s first tray had become warm before game time, and he had gone back to the depot, got credit for them with metal checks of smaller denomination, and reloaded with a new and dewy supply — which increased his self-confidence to the point where he felt justified in bellowing his wares. Dispensing a lukewarm drink embarrassed him, intimidated him. A fan might call him to account. Other hustlers, like Izzy, brazened it out, didn’t give a damn. They got their dough and scrammed out of sight. He didn’t have the nerve, the barefaced, the public, dishonesty.

It was a question of nerve, Ira told himself, his failure of nerve, not his scrupulousness, not his honesty, that slowed him down. His scanty aggressiveness too, he had to admit, was a primary factor in his mediocrity as a hustler. He replenished his tray with cold, fresh bottles of soda, instead of driving doggedly on with tepid ones as the others did. He was a plain, mopey, good-natured slob. And he was indolent; he loitered. He climbed up to the top of the stands, where the near beer bar and hot dog counters were, looked down over the slope of tiers solid with fans, and beyond them to the infield, the outfield, the base lines, the greensward, and lingered, watched, listened, enjoyed, daydreamed. All the things he shouldn’t be doing.

But he couldn’t help it: all that restlessness and tumult: the way Frankie Frisch’s cap flipped off his head when he dove headlong into first base to beat out the throw from infield. The way the umpire called a strike, as if he intended to overawe everyone within hearing. The way a Texas Leaguer, so they called it, dropped right in the middle of everybody. No wonder your soda grew lukewarm. .

Ira scratched the back of his head meditatively. He had come to a divergence within himself, a kind of fork in the road of narrative. All he needed now to do to close off the account of his novitiate at the Polo Grounds was to state merely the predictable — and the actual.

When time came, almost at the end of the ball game — when not even the most determined soda hustler could hope for another sale — when time came for everyone to check in, to cast up accounts, Ira had sold thirty-six dollars’ worth of soda, which entitled him to three dollars and sixty cents, ten percent of proceeds. That was his take for the day. Izzy, on the other hand, had sold over fifty-five dollars’ worth, and Greeny almost seventy dollars’ worth, which indicated what persistence and resolve could accomplish, or the differential between a good hustler and a poor one (only a single soda hustler sold less than Ira, a kid who must have watched most of the ball game). But Ira was a neophyte, after all.

“You didn’t do too bad,” Izzy encouraged. “You didn’t know all the ropes. You didn’t know where all the places to fill up were. There’s places on the upper stands, too. Did you know that? You went up there, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. You could fall out of ’em, they’re so steep.”

“You sometimes can get a good break up there,” Izzy assured.

Ira had made three bucks and sixty cents for his first day’s work. But there was something else. His — and his fellow hustlers’—work still wasn’t done. Not till all the grandstands were cleared of soda pop bottles. After the game was over and the fans departed, by now in the late middling of afternoon, a pair of hustlers were assigned a block of seats, each hustler given a basket. And his chore? To collect all the bottles left under the seats. Only then was it permissible for him to leave the Polo Grounds — if he wanted to be rehired the next day.

It seemed to Ira that he had reached a fitting place to finish the section, a logical and satisfying place. Later, he could resume again his documenting of the tyro’s further experience and development as a hustler. That was one option; the other was Freudian. For Ira the choice was a simple one: the Freudian, his forte, in preference to the social.

VI

Ira stood on the runway behind the top tier of the grandstands, surveying the multifarious movement below, spying Izzy hustling way over at the left wing, Greeny charging up the stairs on thin, long legs, and that ugly, stunted, raw-nosed Jew, Moe, who was always given the sinecure job — ice cream or peanuts to hustle. He started to ask why. Why so many Jews in the place? Ira pondered. What kind of symbiosis existed between them and the Irishman, Harry M. Stevens, whose baronial reign held sway as franchised caterer at the ballpark, stadium, and racetrack? Clearly because Harry M. Stevens had long since learned none were so enterprising as Jews, none so immune to the temptation to slacken efforts in behalf of watching, of enjoying the game?

Business before pleasure, that was it. Gelt, gelt , money, that was it. The more commission they earned, the more Stevens grossed. Of minor importance to them who had just scored, who stole a base. And yet, though true in general, there was always the exception. There was Eppie, short for Epstein, as old as Ira’s grandfather, and still speaking with heavy, thick Yiddish drawl, a Litvak, Eppie, sauntering along with a half-basket of peanuts, taking it easy. He was a privileged character in the Stevens establishment; he came and went when he pleased, responsible to no one but to Harry M. Stevens himself. Rumor had it he had been with Stevens when the latter owned only a modest stand outside the Polo Grounds, in the way back when, long before the War, in the heyday of Christy Mathewson and Honus Wagner, when Walter Johnson could throw a fastball that crossed the plate no bigger than a pea, when ballplayers sneaked over the fence to get a beer.

Eppie was a Giant fan, a staunch, unswerving Giant fan. It was hard to believe: an old immigrant Jew, yet a Giant fan (especially after Ira had heard McGraw’s uncouth, insulting bawling at the hustlers that morning!). It was like Zaida being a Giant fan. Who could imagine it? Looking up from davening the Mishnah or minchah , or whatever the prayers were called, to ask the latest standings of the ball clubs. Ira expected that kind of enthusiasm in the younger generation of Jews, his generation. He took their partisanship for one or another of the baseball clubs for granted; he hardly thought about it. But with someone as old as Eppie, who was about Zaida’s age, it came as a kind of shock, the realization that the cleavage had begun long ago, the branching away from Orthodoxy. It made the cleavage dramatic to have someone Jewish as old as Eppie a baseball fan; it dramatized that there was a cleavage, and it had long been going on, not something hit-or-miss, as he felt about his own muzzy shrugging off of being Jewish. He had even thought he was one of the first ones — oh, no, it had been going on always.