Chasing the Blues

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Let me stop you just a moment before plunging into the depths of this little book.

I must burden you with a terrible confession.

This is not a work of art!

I admit that this truth prevails rather from circumstance than choice. I have long since realized that my artistic deficiencies remove me far from the sphere of Rembrandt and Michael Angelo.

My ever-present realization of the material virtues of kidney stew and gorgonzola cheese has permanently destroyed whatever of the ethereal that may have been born within me.

With this awful fact staring me in the face I have set for myself the not-unpleasant task of drowning my tears in a sea of foolishness.

If, as you glance through these pages, a smile flits across your face, a base-hit will be registered on my subconscious scoreboard of satisfaction.

A touch of art may nourish the soul, but a good laugh always aids the digestion.

Now that we are pretty well acquainted, I feel that it is fairly safe to allow you to brave the hazards within.

These are the secrets of life according to Joseph I. Robbing, the handsome financier, who precipitated the depositors of the Southern Bank of New York into the ocean of despair.

This morning I succeeded in getting the first interview Mr. Robbing has given out since he was last interviewed.

“I see you are here,” he said looking at me with his eyes as he ushered me into his handsomely furnished library.

I looked about me in delirious wonderment. As my gaze wandered toward the floor I discovered there a carpet. Yes, a real, regular, the-kind-you-tack-down carpet. The ceiling was tinted in a rich gold, here and there softened with touches of yellow, brown, pink, green, lavender, red, and blue. It was simple, but elegant.

Mr. Robbing asked me to sit down on a chair. This simple request unfolded to me the analytical, far-seeing, technical, poetic, heterogeneous nature of the man. He had asked me to sit on a chair!

I watched him critically as he inhaled the air which naturally filled the room. He was indeed an all-powerful captain of finance. He had two eyes, directly underneath the intersection of which was a nose—a regular nose. A short, stubby moustache—kind worn by Ossip the First, ruler of the Sausage-ites during the last half of the second century Anno Domini—reposed gracefully beneath the nasal appendage.

My close observation of human nature led me to believe that a mouth was hidden there in the complex underbrush. My premonition proved true later on when he spoke.

“Um,” I ventured to say by way of drawing him out into a subconscious interview.

He moved his foot which was covered with a shoe. “Yes,” he reiterated after a slight pause of three hours, “I believe that Jack Johnson could have defeated any of them in his best days.”

The oracle—the man who dug his hand into the ash-can and pulled up a million—had spoken. I heard him with my ears!

“Do you think it pays to peddle the bunk?” I timidly asked him as he carelessly tossed a hundred thousand dollars to the crowd of officers in the street below.

​“I think,” he answered, his frank eyes still remaining above his nose, “that Abe Attell is greater in many respects than Shakespeare. I have looked over every page of Shakespeare's record and have not discovered a single K. O.”

The reflection brought to my mind the beautiful lines from the great bard’s masterpiece,

I could not resist the temptation of asking Mr. Robbing the vital question “What do you think of our American women?”

He did not hesitate an instant. Naively placing one word after another, he said: “Zybszko, the Polish plasterer, is a fine example of what three square meals a day can do for a man. I am told he lives solely on carpet tacks and herring. His waist is a classic.”

Still noting that Mr. Robbing’s nose was situated between his eyes and his moustache, I went out into the night.

I was a better being for having talked with a great man.

His work was o’er, he grabbed his hat and blew into the street. He jumped upon a trolley car to rest his weary feet. He paid his fare and opened wide. the Daily Evening Rage, to feast his eyes on all the news upon the sporting page. He doted on athletics, and he went to every fight; he pondered over baseball dope from morning until night.

So he was very anxious just to cast his eagle eye upon the page that tells of every pugilistic guy. And, as we said before, my child, he opened wide the sheet to soothe his nerves with fighting news and have a baseball treat.

And this is what he gazed upon with sad and weary eye. He smote his chest and pulled his hair and heaved a heavy sigh.

A picture of a lemon pie adorned the sporting page. On either side appeared a bunch of boobs within a cage. The picture was supposed to be a thing to make you laugh and of the good old sporting page it occupied one half.

And in the southeast corner there appeared an ad which read, “We offer special prices to the dying and the dead. We’re selling coffins very cheap, so hurry up and die—our shrouds are very stylish and our prices are not high.”

And in the other corner of this page of sporting news appeared in flaming letters, “We can cure you of the blues! Take Doctor Dope’s advice, my friend, and buy his purple pills. They cure the grip and colic and a million other ills.”

Right next to this there was an ad for vests and coats and shirts. “For cheap and nobby things to wear go down to Philip Wurtz.” And underneath the reader saw a list of billiard joints where he could play for twenty cents a game of fifty points.

Our hero’s eyes grew dimmer still. He brushed away a tear, when in his search for sporting news he read, “Drink Rummy’s Beer!”

He read about bananas and he read about the croup; he read, “Go down to Coney if you wish to loop the loop.”

In vain he looked for just a word of real old baseball news; in vain he looked to see what pug would win his fight or lose. He couldn’t even find the date—alack and still alas! He went straight home, rushed to his room, and then turned on the gas!

Clarence Sylvester Napoleon Jones was handsome and clever and wise; at 8 he knew all of the planets and stars that are located up in the skies; at 10 he could tell you how long it would take to travel from Venus to Mars, and he wouldn’t allow his old father to drink or smoke cigarettes and cigars.

Knew It All
At 20 he got about forty degrees from the College of Kalamazoo; there was nothing in Latin or Swedish or Greek that this little lad never knew. He spent several years in figuring out just why alligators can’t sing, and he knew why a herring is deaf, dumb and blind—in fact, there wasn’t a thing that Clarence Sylvester Napoleon Jones didn’t know from beginning to end; he could tell you the size of a bumble-bee’s nose and why a dill pickle won’t bend.

The Other Fellow
Lancelot Smith was homely as sin, with a face that would scare away flies; his chin was a yard in front of his nose and his cars were too close to his eyes. He didn’t care whether the Fourth of July came seventeen times in a year, and he didn’t care whether Columbus came over on water or whiskey or beer. He didn’t know why voters go to the polls and he couldn’t add seven and five; he didn’t care when he was going away and he didn’t care when he’d arrive.

Gets Away with It
He hung a right hook on the school teacher’s nose, and he busted his grandfather’s slats; he cut up his father’s pajamas and shirts and he smashed every one of his hats. He soaked his old uncle a crack on the bean and he walloped the cook on the jaw; he busted an egg on the fat grocer’s neck and he chased him out of the store. The people all said he would sure land in jail, he was ignorant, wicked and rough; he’d go to his grave in a hurry ’cause he wasn’t made of the right kind of stuff.

Now Clarence Sylvester Napoleon Jones sells onions and garlic and hay; his pay is a dollar and ten cents a week and he works twenty hours a day.

The Finale
And Lancelot Smith makes a thousand a month, as a fighter he’s known far and near; he calls himself Tony, the Walloping Wop, and he has an aluminum ear.

And so, as we play the roulette wheel of life, we shouldn’t have any regrets, when one fellow loses, the other one wins—we cannot cash all of our bets.

We were just struggling around the office in the throes of a delirium of oblivion yesterday afternoon when in walks a bulky gentleman clad in a red sweater, a dinky cap and other articles of wearing apparel that bespeak high-class pugilism.

“Ah!” we thought, “here is a messenger from the gods. He will save our unsullied young reputation with a big news item.” We bade him enter, and he lurched right into the middle of his business without any preliminary stalling. Here is what he shot over:

“Get me, cull, get me. Don’t take me for a Joe Magee trying to horn in with the soft stuff. I took it on the Arthur Duffy from right field to slip you the jerry on a big number. I’m holding the cards, see! I’m no shilaber. Am I delivered? Don’t get huffy; don’t get huffy. I’ll bet the limit. Just keep your feet close to the pavement:

“I’m Tuesday to the pen junk. No, I haven’t been flirting with the bamboo. While I’m not wearing any wings on my benny, still I’m three sheets in the wind and rigged to travel to the last island in the ocean with any Philip who wants to lean against the leather.

“I just yegged a couple of coppers on the way up to limber up my lunch hooks.

“Say, Monk, pipe my alcove. Get hep, get hep! Don’t glim me for a Romco. Make my Webster! Take a Brodie and ease me a rumble. I’m the guy that put the alkali in the desert. Cheese! Cheese! Nix on the Eden Musee stuff. Give me a Dr. Cook and flash the type. I’m hunk on Johnson.

“Pipe while I Weston myself to the nearest duck soup cave. Bloughie!”

When we awoke our pugilistic friend had went.

Scene: Library of Soupladle’s apartment.
Soupladle is discovered lying on the floor reading the telephone directory.

Soupladle (to an empty chair): After all, there’s no companion like a good book. (Knock on door.) Come in. (Enter Cheesecloth, tailor)

Cheesecloth: I have come to collect $76.55 for the fancy vest I made you in the fall of 1892. (S. rings bell. Enter Tompkins.)

Soupladle: Tompkins, throw this gentleman down the dumb-waiter. (Exit Tompkins and Cheesecloth struggling.)

Soupladle (to wall paper): As I was saying, literature is to life what smothered onions are to a steak. (Knock on door.) Come in. (Enter Joel Rosewood, furniture dealer.)

Rosewood: Either pay me my $824.97 or give me back my dining-room set. (S. presses button. Enter Tompkins.)

Soupladle: Tompkins, push this gentleman into the clothes chute. (Exit Tompkins and Rosewood battling.)

Soupladle (to cuspidor): Shakespeare was the Wolgast of his day. (Violent noise outside. Door bursts open. Enter shoemaker, florist, piano tuner, gas man, butcher and twenty other tradesmen.)

Tradesmen (in chorus): We want our money! (S. presses button. Enter Tompkins.)

Soupladle: Tompkins, give these gentlemen the Degree of the Loose Plank. (Tompkins pulls lever on wall, floor opens and tradesmen disappear.)

Soupladle: Tompkins, bring me my hat, coat, gloves and cane. I will be late for my lecture on “The Uplift of the Working Classes” before the Society for the Emancipation of Labor.

Ammonia sat gazing out upon the moor. She did not hear the shrill cry of a lonely wolf. She was deaf.

In a two-dollar-a-week hall room of a cheap New York lodging house, on a cold hard bed far removed from the better things of life, lay a thin young man in the throes of a delirium. He had smoked a campaign cigar.

It was just twenty-seven days, six hours and forty-five seconds since gray-haired old Mrs. Brussells Sprouts, widow of Captain Sprouts, the gallant soldier who lost his life in the Battle of Finnan Haddie during the Civil War, sent her only son and sole support to the butcher’s for three yards of frankfurters. Her eyes were red and her cheeks were sunken from long hours of watching for her boy.

“He must have eaten the sausage and died,” she sobbed.

Ammonia was the sausage man’s daughter and she wondered why Eric did not come. Her woman’s intuition told her that he was in distress. She wished she could rush to his side.

But she knew not where to rush.

Suddenly a strong hand grabbed her by the ear. She felt herself being lifted by an unseen force into a quick-moving vehicle and whisked away to unknown regions.

When she awoke she was seated in front of a shabby piano, gazing at the title page of a piece of music which read, “Light of My Life, Come Home, Come Home, the Soup is Growing Cold.”

She turned and saw her lover.

“Eric!” she cried.

“Ammonia!” he exclaimed.

They fell into each other’s arms and then fell into a six-dollar ornament representing a dying gladiator.

Eric and Ammonia were radiant.

They walked sixty-five miles out into the wilderness to break the news to Eric’s mother. The old woman was still waiting at the window.

“Mother!” yelled Eric and as he dashed into the house and knocked over the hat-rack, “I have brought home my bride.”

But his mother sat cold and motionless. The young folks were stupefied with horror.

“Speak, mother, for God’s sake, speak!” cried the frantic son.

She replied, “Where is the sausage?”