The Gate Crasher

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I make fifty a week in a bank, and that just about keeps me in socks and neckties, because by the time I buy three meals a day, send a little money home at the end of the week, chip in on the room rent and pay my share of the light, laundry and telephone bills, there isn’t a whole lot left over to cover the expense of going on parties. I mean real swell parties — the kind that have two orchestras going at the same time in the Crystal Room at one of the biggest hotels, and then serve breakfast after the party is over. I go to that kind of a party regularly and it doesn’t cost me a cent. I go without being invited, of course, but I go just the same.

Gate-crashing is what they call the sort of thing I do. Gate-crashing is my specialty. You see, although I room with another fellow on the third-floor front in a brown-stone house off Seventh Avenue and punch an adding machine in a bank, nobody knows the difference. I get away with it at these big parties because, after all, all that’s needed is a good personal appearance and smooth dancing to put one over on them. There are never enough men to go around anyway, so the girls never stop to ask you who you are as long as you have the regulation college hair-cut and can get them in a corner and do a few trick steps.

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