You Know Them When They’re Hungry

Damon Runyon

Our Old Man knocked around for a matter of ten years or more with a fellow back in our old home town whose name we will record as Smith. They were considered pals. They were together four or five nights in every week. This Smith was a successful business man.

One day a chap named Brown asked Our Old Man what kind of a fellow Smith was. Our Old Man said he seemed to be a nice fellow. Brown said that struck him as rather an evasive answer. He said to Our Old Man, you know Smith quite well and appear to like him, but your recommendation is not enthusiastic. Our Old Man said yes, he liked Smith all right, but that he did not know him.

Brown said what do you mean you do not know him? You go to the ball games with him. You eat with him. How can you say you do not know him? Our Old Man said he could say it because it was the truth. He said he was acquainted with Smith the same way he was acquainted with scores of other men, that he was on friendly terms with Smith but that he still did not know him.

Brown said he wished Our Old Man would explain to him how he could make an almost daily companion of a fellow for years and then maintain that he did not know him and Our Old Man said well, in all the years he had been acquainted with him, Smith had been prosperous and untroubled. He said he had found Smith under those conditions affable and considerate and congenial.

But Our Old Man said you had to know a man when he was unsuccessful and struggling to say you knew him. He said you had to know a man when he was broke and down and out and friendless and ill and when he was poorly clad and miserable and then you had to know him when he was well dressed and had his health and a job and was going good generally before you could say you knew him.

Our Old Man said you had to know a man when he was unhappy and when his cup of joy was overflowing. He said you had to know him when he was drunk and when he was sober. He said you have to know him in darkness and in daylight, in love and out, single and married. He said knowing him thusly you might say you knew a man, but if you knew him in only one of the conditions described, you did not know him. Our Old Man said that personally he doubted if he had ever known any one man 100 per cent—and only one woman.

He said several times in his life he thought he did. He said he had had friends that he felt he knew backwards and forwards, in and out, up and down. Friends that he thought could not make a move or entertain an idea that he could not anticipate. Friends whose action in any given situation he could call without consulting them in advance. But Our Old Man said they had invariably fooled him, usually under some untoward circumstances in which he had never known them.

He said he did not blame them but blamed himself for thinking he knew them without having known them under those circumstances. He said you had to know a man in all weathers, hot and cold, before you could say you knew him. He said he had had a friend in his earlier years by the name of Gadgetty that he thought he knew to the last drop of blood because he had known him under conditions good and bad. He said he had once taken the witness stand and sworn that he knew Gadgetty better than anyone else in the world, but he forgot that he had never known him in cold weather.

Our Old Man said one winter night they were sleeping out in the open with one blanket between them and Gadgetty stole the whole cover for himself while Our Old Man was asleep. Our Old Man said he almost froze to death. He said he once had another friend named Pipestem that he thought he knew almost as well as he did Gadgetty, but that one time when they were soldiering in the tropics in dreadfully hot weather and had to sleep in a mosquito infested swamp, Pipestem copped all the mosquito netting and Our Old Man was severely stabbed by the pests. He said that was when he decided that you had to know a man in all weathers before you could say you knew him.

He said Smith was as companionable a chap as he had ever associated with but that he had often wondered what Smith would do if his business was going to pot. He said he loved Smith as a brother and that he hoped Smith reciprocated his feelings but that on the basis of knowing a comfortable Smith he could not conscientiously say that he knew him until he had known him with a single blanket for two and only mosquito netting for one.