IXJESSE JAMES TALKS ON TIPPING
On receiving the city editor’s assignment to interview the shade of Jesse James on the tipping custom, I carefully removed my watch, purse and scarfpin and left them in my desk, for even my brief experience with dwellers in the astral region had taught me that they haven’t greatly changed their habits and modes of living since their departure from earthly scenes, and I couldn’t afford to run any risk. But I soon found that I needn’t have taken the precaution, for in almost his first words the famous bandit and all-round bad man showed me that he had thoroughly reformed.
“Want me to talk about tipping, eh?” he growled. “Well, I throw up my hands. I’m through with the bandit business. I’m a has-been, a second-rater, and I don’t mind admittin’ it. I suppose you know that we shades go back to earth now and then to see how things are comin’ along, take a hand in ’em, too, if we feel like it. Sometimes we play one-night stands for the mejums. Captain Kidd had ajob all last season at a kind of continuous performance seance in Boston. Took all sorts of parts, from Julius Cæsar to Andrew Jackson. One night he was materializin’ as John Bunyun, and he couldn’t find his chewin’ tobacco or something, and he kind o’ forgot himself and he used the particular brand of language that Bunyun didn’t and—well, that ended the Massachusetts engagement. We don’t all go in for performin’. Personally, I prefer just to go around the old places and mix in with the crowds and compare old times to these, but I’m not going back again for a while. My last trip was a little too much for me. I got a shock and I guess I need a good long rest.
“I’d heard considerable about this tipping business, pro and con, but I thought it just meant slippin’ the colored waiter a nickel if he happened to be extra spry and accommodatin’. That’s the way it used to be out in Missouri back in seventy-nine. But tipping today! Yours truly and his gang was called bandits, and train robbers, and highwaymen, and I don’t know what all, when we was carryin’ on our profitable little business of forty years ago, but we had nothing on the members of the Amalgamated Association of Tip Extractors of 1922. We were pikers, that’s all, plain, everyday pikers. We had no organization, no system, nonothing. It was just about the difference between running a peanut stand and a billion-dollar trust. I suppose if we were operatin’ today with our old gang we’d have a cash register and an addin’ machine and a private telephone exchange and a card index of past and prospective customers and a publicity department, to see that the papers got our names and pictures straight. But, shucks! Even then we couldn’t compete with the great national hold-up game that’s going on all the time. On that last trip down below I was never so discouraged and humiliated in my life. I sat in a hotel restaurant and watched a head waiter at work. From the professional standpoint it was beautiful. Nothing could have been more artistic. But it made me feel blue, made me realize how I had neglected my opportunities. There he stood, no mask on his face, no gun in his hand, dressed in a swallowtail and biled shirt, takin’ toll so fast he hadn’t time to count it. Everybody gave up, without a murmur. And the next day, too, he was there at the same old stand, as if there wasn’t any such thing as a sheriff within fifty miles. No look-out men on guard, no disguise, no frisking the victims for concealed weapons. The folks just handin’ out the coin as meek as lambs. It was a revelation to me. In the old days we never stayed two daysin the same place, nor two hours neither, believe me. But somebody said that head waiter had been on that same job for fifteen years. Fifteen years! I’d have owned the state of Missouri if they’d let me alone that long.
“It made me positively sick to see how the hold-up boys are getting away with it so easy these days, and a friend recommended an ocean trip. ‘Take a run over to Europe and back,’ he says. ‘You’ve never been to sea and it’ll do you good.’ The day I boarded the boat I asked a stranger who had the next cell to put me wise to this tipping business, because I wanted to do the right thing. ‘Five dollars to your stateroom steward,’ he said, ‘and five to the saloon steward.’ ‘I don’t drink any more,’ I said. ‘Saloon means dining room.’ ‘Oh, all right,’ I said. ‘And two-fifty to the deck steward and the same to the library steward. The smoke room steward will expect a couple of dollars and the boy who blacks your boots about one-fifty. Bath steward, two dollars. Card room steward, one dollar. And of course you’ll tip the barber and anyone else who does you a service.’
“Going into the washroom, the first sign I saw read: ‘Please tip the basin.’ And I walked right out and went to bed for two days. The waiter brought in all my meals—a dollar tip a meal. When I had recovered enough to sit ondeck in one of them overgrown Morris chairs, I couldn’t get that tipping idea out of my head. A friend introduced me to a fat fellow in uniform. I didn’t catch the name, but automatically handed him fifty cents and then learned that he was the captain. The day we arrived at Liverpool the passengers were all drawn up on deck and so were the pirates—excuse me, I mean the crew. Then came the ringing words of command: ‘Present alms!’ And we handed over all the coin we had left. I only wished Captain Kidd had been there. He’d have learned something new about his old game.
“I confess I had thought some of going back into the hold-up business, just to keep my hand in, but never again now. Too much competition, and I’m too old to learn new ways. Good-bye, young man, and if you want to say a good word for an old man who never did you any harm, put this in your article:
“‘Jesse James may have had his faults, but he was different from some of the folks who are now carrying on the business—he never robbed the same man twice.’”