The Telephone Booth Indian (32 page)
Read The Telephone Booth Indian Online
Authors: Abbott Joseph Liebling
Tags: #History, #True Crime, #General, #Literary Collections, #Essays, #Business & Economics, #Swindlers and swindling, #20th century, #Entrepreneurship, #Businesspeople, #New York, #New York (State)
The Gorilla Man then sneakily got behind the Nordic and began to strangle him. The referee made him release his unfair hold. The Blacksmith coughed desperately to indicate the degree of strangulation. The Gorilla Man grabbed him from behind again. It seemed unlikely that he understood the referee's English. He was an untrammeled savage. “Stop it!” my friend the waiter shrieked. “For God's sake, stop it!” The German did not seem to know what to do. Suddenly my friend had an idea. “Pull his whiskers!” he shouted. The German Blacksmith appeared to hear. He reached behind him and pulled at the Gorilla Man's long black beard. The Gorilla Man let out a wild scream and released his hold. He jumped up and down in the center of the ring clutching his whiskers. Then, with another shout, he leaped at the Blacksmith again and got another strangle hold. But now the fans had the answer. “Pull his whiskers!” they shouted joyfully. The Blacksmith pulled; the Gorilla danced and then took another hold. “Pull his whiskers!” came the chorus. The sequence was repeated four more times. At length the Blacksmith butted the Gorilla Man in the stomach. The latter fell down, still holding his whiskers, and the Blacksmith pinned his GraecoAbyssinian
shoulders to the mat. On the way to the nearest exit I caught up to my friend the waiter and greeted him. He looked at me a trifle sheepishly and said, “How did you like the show? I never take it serious.” Mr. Pfefer, at my other elbow, said, “We did only about six hundred dollars, the bums.”
A. J. Liebling
joined the staff of the
New Yorker
in 1935 and stayed there until his death in 1963. His many books included
The Earl of Louisiana, Back Where I Come From, Between Meals
, and
The Sweet Science
, which was recently voted the finest sports book of all time.
Luc Sante
is a renowned writer and critic and author of the classic book on the raffish, violent, and criminal side of New York,
Low Life.
He also wrote the introduction for Anchor Books's reissue of the David Maurer classic,
The Big Con.
An authority on the history of photography, Sante is now a professor at Bard College.
The Broadway Library of LarcenyThe Library of Larceny is a collection of books about—and sometimes by—people who exploit public confidence for their own personal monetary gain. Some of them are thieves pure and simple. Some are getalong types who just happen to be standing nearby with pockets flapping when spoils are divided. And some are con artists—with equal stress on the second word of that formula—men and women who do not steal, exactly, and certainly never employ violence or strongarm tactics, but who extract sums by means of a sort of psychic jujitsu from pigeons who are often all too willing to be plucked. These books fall into the truecrime genre, but that genre (once dominated by pipesmoking sleuths) has lately been given over almost entirely to depressing psychopathology and gore for gore's sake. The Library of Larceny proposes instead to restore property crime to its full, glorious stature. It is, after all, a portion of the inheritance of this Land of Opportunity.
The books in the series highlight their subjects' ingenuity, delight in the aesthetics of their profession, their artisanal pride in a neatly turned score, and, not incidentally, their pleasure in language. For whatever reasons, swindling seems to awaken in its perpetrators a gift for vigorous, highly colored language, with accompanying deadpan humor. The metaphors so often come from the natural world—a victim is a “doe” or an “apple”; he or she is “lopeared”; a dollar bill is a “fish” or a “bumblebee”—that it is as if we were listening to lions and tigers discussing their jobs. Add to all this an inside view of a world of poolrooms and racetracks and bars and brothels, the raffish world of professional leisure. The books will span the past century, stretching from the time after the West had been won—and the wildlife that had evolved along the way sought new outlets for its talents—right up to the present era of corporate malfeasance, by way of the hectic, wisedup city life of the Cocktail Age. The books, many of them long out of print, will appeal to a wide range of readers, young and old: hipsters, pirates, roues, scalawags, poets, armchair psychologists, advertising strategists, cultural theorists, promoters, touts, sibyls, and bon vivants everywhere.
Luc Sante
Series Editor
THE TELEPHONE BOOTH INDIAN. Copyright © 1942 by A. J. Liebling, renewed 1969 by Jean Stafford Liebling. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, contact: Broadway Books, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
HC108.7.L54 2004
eISBN: 978-0-307-48066-8
v3.0