My own story (1934)

MY OWN STORY aunts, but also Bonita and her young husband, who had had a run of hard luck. Thankfully I took a job at the old Atlantic Garden on the Bowery. Here I sang two songs nightly for ten dollars. On Sunday nights, I sang at Koster and Bial's on Twenty-Third Street, where I got fifteen dollars. Because it was cheaper, I boarded in Brooklyn. When my money gave out, I walked the entire distance there and back. Memories of those days are responsible for the dry grin I can't keep back nowadays when I hear some youngster complaining bitterly because he has to put up with a Lincoln instead of a Rolls or a Suiza. In the old days most of the theatrical agencies could be found in the neighborhood of Fourteenth Street. To-day, of course, they are on and off Times Square. I don't know what the modern ones are like, but I can tell you that those I haunted years ago were the dreariest spots imaginable. Usually you walked up two or three flights of musty stairs to a dim, airless anteroom, as changeless as time itself. The curls of dust in the corners, the hard shabby chairs against the dingy wall, the very faces of the occupants of the chairs made a sort of horrid, recurrent dream from which there was no waking. For days on end, week 77