I Can Get It for You Wholesale Read Online Free Page A

them immediately. You can tell a shipping clerk a mile away. Three days after pay day every one of them quits eating lunches and borrows carfare. But that doesn’t stop them from trying to dress like the Meadowbrook polo crowd. Every nickel they can beg or borrow is on their backs.
    The ones coming up the block toward me had one other distinguishing characteristic, besides the regulation shipping clerk’s uniform of suede shoes, peg-top pants in a loud check, and Tyrol hat. They walked slowly, as though they were ashamed of what they were doing.
    When they came near the Temple they stopped. One of them pointed to the oilcloth sign.
    “This must be it,” he said. “Look at the sign there.”
    I guess that sign wasn’t such a bad investment after all.
    “Yeah, I guess so,” another one said.
    Just a couple of bright boys.
    “Let’s go in.”
    They went inside and I breathed easier. I knew it would work. It had to. I had planned everything too carefully. At first I wanted to rent a hall up in the Bronx, because that’s where most of them live anyway. But then I figured I’d be losing out both ways. First of all, I’d be losing all those that lived in Brooklyn and down on the East Side or any other place but the Bronx. And then the next thing was that if I called the meeting in the Bronx, they’d have a chance to go home and eat first. Once they had a chance to eat and wash up and get comfortable, maybe they wouldn’t feel so hot about the idea of getting dressed and going to a meeting. But like this, by hiring a hall right here in Manhattan, not far from the garment district, those that wanted to come would have to stay downtown.
    And judging from the way they began to arrive now, it looked like there were plenty of those that wanted to come.
    Those circulars Tootsie had been distributing all over Seventh Avenue were honeys. I’d written them myself. Me and Lenin. Shipping clerks attention! Step-children of the garment industry! Come out and fight for your rights! Organize against your exploiters! No more seventy-hour weeks for fifteen dollars! Demand higher wages and fewer hours! And get it, too! Come to the mass meeting at Pythian Temple and learn how!
    And a lot more of the same. But that’s enough to give you the general idea. I could rattle it off for you by the hour, but how do I know you’ve got a strong stomach? My insides aren’t exactly what you’d call delicate, but two and a half minutes of that baloney is enough to make me puke.
    By now they were coming down the block in droves. I hadn’t realized myself that they might be as interested as all this. Maybe conditions were even worse for them than I’d thought? After all, I’d been away from the Avenue for nearly a year. Watching them pour into the Temple, I got a feeling of the power that was there, if they only knew how to use it. Well, here was one guy who knew what that power was, and who knew how to use it, too.
    My watch said twenty to nine. Time to start. As I looked up I saw Tootsie climbing the steps into the Temple with a dame on either side of him. I couldn’t see their faces, but I recognized the one on his right immediately. Or rather, I recognized her can. My bet was that there were only half a dozen like it in captivity. It was big enough to play a game of two-handed pinochle on. Once you see something with those dimensions, you don’t forget it. It began to look like this Tootsie wasn’t such a dope after all. Near the top of my list of things to do, I jotted down a note to look into the situation as soon as I had a little time.
    The crowd in the street had thinned out. I crossed the gutter and entered with the stragglers. The large auditorium was just off a small foyer. I went in and took a seat in the rear. It was the only place where you could get a seat. The rest of the room was jammed. At the front, on a small raised platform, sat Tootsie and the two dames, their heads bent together, reading something spread on the table