An’ Ah’ll have someone aftah you’s gone,
A street car or a sweetheart doan’ mattah to me,
There’ll be another one comin’ along!”
Six or seven years ago the people of the United States in their sovereign wisdom had passed a law forbidding the sale of alcoholic liquor for beverage purposes. But the advocates of law and order reserve to themselves the privilege of deciding which laws they will obey, and the prohibition act is not among them. All ruling class America celebrates its political victories by getting drunk. Bunny knew how it was, having got drunk himself four years ago when President Harding had been elected; he could smile appreciatively when the announcer of QXJ tripped over his syllables—“Thass not polite now, Polly, quit your shovin’ this micro-hiccrophone!”
The householder next door was a workingman, or clerk, or such humble being, denied the royal privilege of breaking the law at ten dollars a quart for gin and thirty for champagne. But he could sit here till after midnight, and turn from one studio to another, and enjoy a series of vicarious jags. “Radio VXZ, the main dining-room of the Admiralty Hotel.” A chanteuse from the Grand Guignol in Paris was singing a ballad, and you could hear the laughter of those who understood the obscenity, and those who pretended to understand it, and those who were too drunk to understand anything but how to laugh. Bunny was there in his mind, because it was in this dining-room that he had been drunk, and Dad had been drunk, and Vee Tracy and Annabelle Ames and Vernon Roscoe—and Harvey Manning sound asleep in his chair, and Tommy Paley trying to climb onto the table, and having to be kept from fighting the waiters. There were three hundred tables in that hall, all reserved a month in advance, and all with occupants in the same condition; the tables stacked with hip-pocket flasks and bottles, strewn with the ashes of cigarettes, the stains of spilled foods, flowers and confetti, and little rolls of tissue-paper tape thrown from one table to another, covering the room with a spider’s web of bright colors; toy balloons tossing here and there; music, a riot of singing and shouting, and men sprawling over half-naked women, old and young, flappers, and mothers and grandmothers of flappers.
There would be election returns read, more of those triumphant, glorious majorities for the strong silent statesman; and a magnate who knew that this victory meant several million dollars off his income taxes, or an oil concession in Mesopotamia or Venezuela won by American bribes and held by American battleships—such a man would let out a whoop, and get up in the middle of the floor and show how he used to dance the double shuffle when he was a farm-hand; and then he would fall into the lap of his mistress with a million dollars worth of diamonds on her naked flesh, and the singer from a famous haunt of the sexual perverts of Berlin would perform the latest jazz success, and the oil magnate and his mistress would warble the chorus:
What do I do?
I toodle-doodle-doo,
I toodle-doodle-doodle-doodle-doo!