It was about quarter past three. So this Oscar Apollinaire was behind the book, and the book must be meant to promote a stag picture, just like they used lobby cards to advertise the next pictures they’d be playing in real theaters. But why the hell would he be trying to put the squeeze on RKO, and what was this movie? I decided I didn’t know enough yet even to ask the right questions, so I quit thinking about it. As we drove uptown, I realized how many cabs I’d taken since last night. Give me somebody else’s money to spend and I was Diamond Jim Brady. That’s when I noticed all the guys on the street who were out of work. I hadn’t seen them at night, but in the middle of the afternoon, they were hard to miss. Shuffling along the sidewalk or sitting on park benches staring at nothing or waiting in soup lines, there were a lot of them. Working nights, it was easy for me to forget what it was like for those guys. I was lucky. The speak wasn’t going to make me a millionaire, but I never missed a payroll.
