The Gate Crasher

Cornell Woolrich The Gate-Crasher

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.

It’s like taking candy from a baby. You see, at almost any of these big proms and coming-out parties they ask as many as a thousand people or more because they know that a great many won’t come and they want to be sure to have enough to go around. Naturally when a crowd that size gets together, they have no way of finding out who the invited guests are and who dropped in without invitations. Like myself, for instance. If you know how to behave, and don’t give yourself away, you are pretty safe once you get by the doorman and mingle with the crowd. And I am an expert at that, believe me. My roommate, Frankie Turner, and I used to sit in our dingy third-floor hall bedroom on Sunday afternoons scanning the papers for announcements of coming social functions, “hops” as we called them, and deciding which ones we would crash in the week ahead.

We went in for this indoor sport for all we were worth, because you certainly do meet some 14-carat girls at these affairs; the kind of girls you never would have a chance of meeting anywhere else. I often wonder what some of those girls would think if they could see Frankie and me in our hall bedroom with our shirt-sleeves rolled up and the coffee pot boiling on the gas plate and our handkerchiefs pasted flat on the mirror to dry after we’ve washed them under the cold-water faucet.

It seems like yesterday that Frankie came home early one evening and found me pressing the trousers of his tuxedo with a flat-iron I had borrowed from the lady in the room next to ours.

“Oh, you beat me to it,” was the first thing he said. “I was counting on wearing ’em myself tonight.”

We had only one suit of dress clothes between us, which happened to belong to him, and we used to take turns wearing it.

“We’ll toss for it tonight,” I declared, slipping my hand into my trouser pocket.

“Fair enough,” said he.

I threw a coin up into the air and caught it between my hands.

“Heads!” he cried.

I won. It was tails.

“I go,” I told him, “and you sit here and clip paper dolls.” And I licked my thumb and touched the bottom of the iron to see if it was still hot enough, the way the lady that owned it had shown me.

“What’s so special tonight?” my roommate asked curiously, making himself comfortable with a newspaper he had brought in with him.

“One of these big coming-out parties down at the Hotel Versailles,” I told him.

“What are you going to do, crash the gate? You better not try it,” he warned me, lighting a cigaret. “I know the Versailles — there isn’t a chance of your getting in down there.”

“It won’t be the first time I’ve gotten in without an invitation,” I said, putting on my collar.

“You know what’ll happen to you if you get caught, don’t you?” he said.

“I suppose so. I’ll get thrown out sooner or later, but I may as well crash while the crashing is good.”

“Well if you must, you must,” said Frankie.

And that was that.

When I was all through I looked at myself in the glass. The suit I had on may have been Frankie’s, but it certainly fit as though it had been made for me. The patent leather oxfords were his too, and they were half a size too small. But they looked good after I had rubbed a little bay rum on them. I gave the black satin tie a pat and tucked a white silk kerchief in around my collar.

“If I’m not back in half an hour,” I told Frankie facetiously, “that means I got in. And don’t wait up for me.”

I rode down in the subway and walked up to one of the side entrances of the Versailles, which was brightly lighted. A party of men and women in evening clothes had just gotten out of a limousine and, unnoticed, I followed them through a glass turnstile into the lobby, which was crowded with people.