Everybody Knows Joe
Everybody Knows Joe
JOB HAD QUITE A DAY for himself Thursday, and as usual I had to tag along. If I had a right arm to give, I’d give it for a day off now and then. Like on Thursday. On Thursday he really outdid himself.
He woke up in the hotel room and had a shower. He wasnt going to shave until I told him be looked like a bum. So he shaved and then he stood for a whole minute admiring his beauty in the mirror, forgetting whose idea it was in the first place.
So down to the coffee shop for breakfast A hard-working man needs a good breakfast So getting ready for a backbreak-ing day of copying references at the library, he had tomato juice, two fried eggs, three sausages, a sugared doughnut, and coffee—with cream and sugar.
He couldn’t work that off his pot in a week of ditch-digging under a July sun, but a hard-working man needs a good breakfast. I was too disgusted to argue with him. He’s hopeless when he smells that short-order smell of smoking grease, frying bacon and coffee.
He wanted to take a taxi to the library—eight blocks!
“Walk, you jerk!” I told him. He started to mumble about
pulling down six hundred bucks for this week’s work and then he must have thought I was going to mention the high-calory breakfast. To him that’s hitting below the belt. He thinks he’s an unfortunate man with an affliction—about twenty pounds of it. He walked and arrived at the library glowing with virtue.
Making out his slip at the newspaper room he blandly put down next to firm—The Griffin Press, Inc.—when he knew as well as I did that he was a free lance and hadn’t even got a definite assignment from Griffin.
There’s a line on the slip where you put down reason for consulting files (please be specific). It’s a shame to cramp Joe’s style to just one line after you pitch him an essay-type question like that. He squeezed in, Preparation of article on year in biochemistry for Griffin Pr. Encyc. 1952 Yrbk., and handed it with a flourish to the librarian.
The librarian, a nice old man, was polite to him, which is usually a mistake with Joe. After he finished telling the librarian how his microfilm files ought to be organized and how they ought to switch from microfilm to microcard and how in spite of everything the New York Public Library wasn’t such a bad place to research, he got down to work.
He’s pretty harmless when he’s working—it’s one of the things that keeps me from cutting his throat. With a noon break for apple pie and coffee he transcribed about a hundred entries onto his cards, mopping up the year in biochemistry nicely. He swaggered down the library steps, feeling like Herman Melville after finishing Moby Dick.
“Don’t be so smug,” I told him. “You still have to write the piece. And they still have to buy it”
“A detail,” he said grandly. “Just journalism. I can do it with my eyes shut.”
Just journalism. Somehow his three months of running copy for the A.P. before the war has made him an Ed Leahy.
“When are you going to do it with your eyes . . . ?” I began but it wasn’t any use. He began telling me about how Gautama Buddha didn’t break with the world until he was 29 and Mohammed didn’t announce that he was a prophet until he was 30, so why couldn’t he one of these days suddenly bust loose with a new revelation or something and set the world on its ear? What it boiled down to was he didn’t think he’d write the article tonight
He postponed bis break with the world long enough to have
a ham and cheese on rye and more coffee at an automat and then phoned Maggie. She was available as usual. She said as usual, “Well then, why don’t you just drop by and we’ll spend a quiet evening with some records?”
As usual he thought that would be fine since he was so beat after a hard day. As usual I told him, “You’re a louse, Joe. You know all she wants is a husband and you know it isn’t going to be you, so why don’t you let go of the girl so she can find somebody who means business?”