Dex’s Midnight Roaming

A pepped-up Glenn Miller tune blared from a jukebox inside the U.S.O. dance hall as the cherry red Duesenberg pulled up to the curb out front. Having established that it was the 1940’s, Dex turned off the ignition and stepped out of the car. He tossed the keys to a nearby idler who happily agreed to keep an eye on the sleek auto, since it was nostalgia times and everyone was as trustworthy as mom’s apple pie or mock turtle soup.

Dex ambled along the busy sidewalk, twirling a quarter between his fingers. In those days, a quarter could get you a month’s rent in a swank apartment uptown. In fact, Dex lived at the Swank Apartments and was on his way uptown to pay his monthly rent when he was struck with a sudden urge to go stroll the avenue and leer at broads. He was hoping he would run into his pal Shakes, who was always up for a good leer and also happened to owe Dex fifty cents.

In those days, fifty cents could buy you a year’s supply of bologna, white bread and ham. Of course, no one had an icebox big enough to fit a year’s supply of bologna, white bread or ham in their walk-up apartments. Yet the big bologna and ham producers would only sell by the year-ful. Bread, you could buy by the loaf. But the bologna and ham guys had you by the balls. That’s where a fella like Dex came in.

Dex put expiring meat in the hands of people would could use it. He was the used pork middleman of choice for most of the upper east side, with a fleet of refrigerated trucks full of ripening meat at his beck and call twenty-two hours a day. That’s why he could afford to twirl a month’s rent between his fingers as he ogled hot cookies on the avenue. That’s also why his suits usually smelled of damp pork and freon.

Just as Dex was peeling his peepers off a particularly ripe tomato, he noticed none other than Shakes himself staggering along on the other side of the broad thoroughfare. Shakes looked like he’d been hitting the hooch pretty hard. He was bumping into people, dogs and trees with abandon. Dex dashed across the street, praying that Shakes was sober enough to pay him the fifty cents back but drunk enough to forget about it later. Dex called it the old Two Paydays scam. Sometimes he called it the Double Drunk Dunk. Usually he went with Two Paydays, though.

Before Dex could even reach him, Shakes went down on the pavement in a heap. Female onlookers gasped and held their gloved hands to their mouths in shock. Their beaus quickly wrapped their overcoats around the shaken ladies to shield them from the unpleasantness and ushered them quickly away. Dex deftly rifled Shakes’ pockets for coins and dug out a total of 62 cents.

Dex kicked Shakes a couple times in a vain attempt to wake him. Unable to do so, Dex shrugged and continued his ambling. Along with his ambling, he started doing some figuring. If he added the 62 cents to the quarter he already had, that gave him a grand total of 87 cents. In those days, 87 cents could buy you a diamond ring in the shape of a ham shank. So that’s just what Dex did.

He rushed to the nearest jeweler and bought the biggest, most ham-shaped diamond ring he could find. Dex named his new ring Hammy and wore it proudly to many a local radio broadcast of a big prizefight. Years later, he lost Hammy to none other than piano great Liberace in a fixed pinocle game. He can be seen wearing the ring throughout the 1955 film Sincerely Yours. Of course, by then Liberace had already recut Hammy to resemble Revolutionary War hero Marquis de Lafayette. Still called it Hammy, though.