I Can Get It for You Wholesale by Jerome Weidman

Author:Jerome Weidman [Weidman, Jerome]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-1075-6
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-02-19T21:45:00+00:00

20

THE BUILDING HAD TWO entrances. One on Thirty-Eighth Street and one on Broadway. I walked in through the Broadway entrance, slowly, then out the Thirty-Eighth Street side. I did it a few times, maybe five or six. Each time I got the same brisk, excited feeling that the place was full of people moving, working, coining money. I was glad now I’d had the fight with Ast. Even though it had meant taking a chance on his getting sore and walking out while I still needed him, I was glad I’d insisted on this building over the one he had wanted. The hell with what he wanted. The sooner he learned who was boss, the better. I was in the right place.

I walked through the lobby once more, the last time, but this time I didn’t go out the Thirty-Eighth Street entrance. I went into an elevator.

“Twenty-nine,” I said, and the young guy with the tiny nose and the marcelled hair punched the button. I wondered how long it would take him and the rest of the operators before they would remember my floor. What the hell, I wasn’t a shipping clerk in the building any more; I was a tenant.

As we stopped at the various floors, I noticed that the doors that faced the elevator had the names of the firms that occupied those floors painted on them. Before I stepped out of the car onto the twenty-ninth floor, I noticed that our name had not yet been painted on the door facing the elevator. I made a mental note to remind the super about that.

It was a lucky thing I made a mental note of it. Otherwise I would have forgotten it. Because the second I stepped into our showroom I saw the carpet.

There were a lot of things and people in that showroom. First of all, it was still full of ladders and pails of paint and brushes. Then some of the wrapping paper and excelsior and rope from the furniture was still lying around. And the pictures on the walls were new. They must have arrived since I had left in the morning. And there were three or four workmen moving around, too. But that didn’t matter. I noticed the carpet right away. It didn’t fit in with the way I had that showroom laid out in my mind. And after the fight I’d had with Ast over the money I was laying out on furnishings, I felt I’d earned the right to have everything just so. That was why, as soon as I walked in, I could see something was cockeyed. The carpet was supposed to be purple. But the stuff they had standing up in big rolls was the funniest looking purple I ever saw. It was red.

None of it was down yet. The workmen were just unrolling some of it and getting their tools ready.

“Hey, beyzon!” I called sharply from the doorway.

They looked up from their bent-down position.

“Whatsa matter?”

I came a little further into the room and they stood up straight.

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