Desperate for Companionship

Paul G. Cressy's sociological study of taxi dance halls in the 1920s

Chapters 41-44 from Asch’s The Road is markedly different from the optimism of the introduction. These chapters bring to mind the loneliness of being on the road, detailing a traveler’s desperate attempts at forging human connections to stave off the cold and dark of solitude. Some opportunistic businesspeople profit handsomely from this need for human connection, such as the owners of taxi dance halls, who assumed – correctly – that a lonely traveler will pay good money just to feel like he’s not alone for a little while.

Asch does exactly that, paying a dollar to a bored, “magnificent blonde girl” (247) at the bar, asking her to lay off the beers and the dancing and just “sit down and talk to me like a human being” (248).

The rest of the chapter continues as dismally as it began, taking the reader through the sadly orchestrated motions of feigned affection that the taxi dancer girls have to go through to make ends meet. “The blonde girl” – we learn later that her name is Cynthia – tells Asch of worse joints to work in, like one similar bar “on the Cook County line where you don’t even wear dresses. You’ve got to work in a brassiere and panties” (249). Women worked at places like these to support themselves and, often, their family – in Cynthia’s case, a “dope fiend” husband “in the bug house” that costs her “twenty bucks a week” for room and board (249).

The chapter ends with Cynthia and Asch joining another “couple” – Clio, who is another woman working at the taxi dance hall, and her “boy friend,” Arthur (250). After waiting for Cynthia to finish up with another client, the foursome go off to what seems to be Cynthia and/or Clio’s home, in an apparently earnest attempt to have a good time together (no money is exchanged). But the night is cut abruptly short when Cynthia’s taxi arrives to take her away, leaving Asch to ponder the events of the night, alone.