| Share page | Visit Us On FB |
|
|
|||
|
224 |
THE BITTERS WITH THE SWEET |
||
|
|
|||
|
decided to form a monopoly and put my money behind a lot of my type bands with the main office located in Los Angeles, I needed a confidential partner to handle the New York end. This guy said he could type and do accounting, so I gave him a break and took him into the firm as a partner, keeping all the property in my name.
I assured him 1 didn't want to make him an office boy, but the son-of-a-gun was jealous of me. He didn't want to handle the music counter and told me I was high-hat because I kept my door closed. I had to have it quiet for my arranging and composing. I guess he hated me because he was such a poor excuse for talent, himself—if you told him to rhyme "ham," he would say "Ponefaartrain."
Many evenings I used to drive him home to Brooklyn in my Lincoln and often he would ask me to wait for him on a certain comer where he would meet and talk with a light-complected old man. Quite often he would have me wait so long that I would grow very impatient. Once I heard this old man tell my West Indian partner that such-and-such a woman was no good. ''Listen," the old guy said, "That woman ain't paid me what she owe me. If it hadn't been for me, she wouldn't have had a quarter. Now she has a fleet of trucks, and is doing business with the subway company. All right, you wait. In a month she won't have anything."
Sometime later on, the West Indian remarked to me that this woman had lost everything she had. He told me the old man had a book like an encyclopedia, full of charms that never fail. If the police caught him with that book, right in the jail he would go. That put me to thinking and wondering if my partner had put anything on me through this old man.
Well, I found out that this West Indian not only couldn't do accounting, he could hardly count on his fingers, much less type. Then I discovered that he was stealing my music and selling it to a big, high-powered firm and I knew I would have to kick him out. "What's the idea of taking my music out of here and giving it to these other companies?" I asked him. |
|||
|
|
|||