Joe stared. “Fired? I wasn’t fired. What gave you that idea? I quit.”
The man reached for a chair, took a pipe from his pocket, and sat down slowly. “Why did you quit?”
Joe tried to tell him. The story used up a great many words, and he felt that he was telling it badly.
“I might have made a good producer. Vic thought I would and Tony told Vic I was doing well. But if I became a producer I’d always be meeting the sordid side of show business. All I’d see would be men and women wearing an artificial front. They’d make me a big stop when I had a show coming up. They’d stay awake nights planning to catch my attention as Mander caught Tony’s. They’d audition and try to hide how much a part meant to them. I don’t mean there isn’t struggle and uncertainty in every other line, but—oh, show business is different. I’d know too much about small time. I’d see too much: little corners of shabbiness, things that were mean and grubby, fine people trying to hide worry and apprehension behind a front. You get so you hate a front. I’d know they were getting hard knocks to-day and would get the same hard knocks to-morrow. I’d know that probably only one in a thousand would ever make the big time, just as I couldn’t make it and for the same reason. They’re good, but not good enough. Good enough for small time, and sustaining shows that pay no salaries, but only good enough for that. It got under my skin and did something to me. I used to turn on a radio, and listen to a show, and think it was all glamorous; there’s very little glamour in show business when you get behind the scenes. You see too many of the wounds.”
Tom Carlin filled his pipe.
“And then, to-day, Pop Bartell. That finished me. Sooner or later I’d have been finished, anyway. Vic says I feel too much. Maybe he’s right. I’m not sorry I tried show business. If I hadn’t, I’d probably always feel I’d thrown away a chance to see my name up in lights.”
Smoke was a thick cloud around Tom Carlin’s head. “Joe, I apologize for what I said in the car. I didn’t understand.”
“Does what I told you make a difference?”
“All the difference in the world. Instead of being up in lights, your name will some day be on a store window.”
“You mean I’m going into the store—now?”