Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  Like Old John and Old Bill and like his father-in-law and his wife, Harry Kirwan is strongly opposed to change, and since he took over he has made only one change and that was a fiscal one and long overdue. He gave raises to the old bartenders, Eddie Mullins and Joe Martoccio, and he gave a raise to Mike Boiko, the cook, who is an old Ukrainian, and he gave a raise to Tommy Kelly, who broke down and cried when Harry told him about it. Tommy Kelly is perhaps the most important member of the staff of McSorley’s, but his duties are so indefinite that the old men call him Kelly the Floorwalker. When business is brisk, he acts as the potboy – he carries mugs of ale from the bar to the tables, hooking his fingers through the handles of the mugs and carrying two in each hand. He is sometimes the fill-in bartender. He makes an occasional trip to the butcher or the grocery store for Mike. He answers the coin-box telephone. In the winter he keeps the fire going in the stove. When he shows up, around 8:30 A.M., he is just a sad-eyed little man with a hangover, but by noon lukewarm ale has given him a certain stateliness; by six he is in such a good humor that he stands near the door and shakes hands with incoming customers just as if he were the proprietor. Some strangers think he is the proprietor and speak to him as Mr McSorley. Kelly says that he had a long succession of odd jobs before he wound up in McSorley’s. ‘And when I say odd,’ he says, ‘I mean odd.’ Once, for a brief period, he took a job as night clerk and night watchman in a large funeral parlor in Brooklyn, quitting because a corpse spoke to him. ‘I sat up front in the office all night,’ he says, ‘and I used to keep a pocket-sized bottle of gin in my coat hanging up in the locker in the back room, and I would go back there every little while and take a sip – not a real swallow, just a sip, just enough to keep me going through the night – and to get back there I had to pass through the parlor, the room where the coffins and the corpses were kept, and on this particular night I had to go past an open coffin that had a corpse in it, a man all laid out and fixed up and ready for the funeral in the morning, and I must’ve already gone past him a half a dozen times, passing and repassing, and this time, as I was going past him, he spoke to me, and quite distinctly too. “Take off your hat,” he said, “and put out that cigar and pour out that gin and turn off that damn radio.”’

  To a devoted McSorley customer, most other New York City saloons are tense and disquieting. It is possible to relax in McSorley’s. For one thing, it is dark and gloomy, and repose comes easy in a gloomy place. Also, the barely audible heartbeatlike ticking of the old clocks is soothing. Also, there is a thick, musty smell that acts as a balm to jerky nerves; it is really a rich compound of the smells of pine sawdust, tap drippings, pipe tobacco, coal smoke, and onions. A Bellevue intern once remarked that for some mental states the smell in McSorley’s would be a lot more beneficial than psychoanalysis or sedative pills or prayer.

  At midday McSorley’s is crowded. The afternoon is quiet. At six it fills up with men who work in the neighborhood. Most nights there are a few curiosity-seekers in the place. If they behave themselves and don’t ask too many questions, they are tolerated. The majority of them have learned about the saloon through John Sloan’s paintings. Between 1912 and 1930, Sloan did five paintings, filled with detail, of the saloon – ‘McSorley’s Bar,’ which shows Bill presiding majestically over the tap and which hangs in the Detroit Institute of Arts; ‘McSorley’s Back Room,’ a painting of an old workingman sitting at the window at dusk with his hands in his lap, his pewter mug on the table; ‘McSorley’s at Home,’ which shows a group of argumentative old-timers around the stove; ‘McSorley’s Cats,’ in which Bill is preparing to feed his drove of cats; and ‘McSorley’s, Saturday Night,’ which was painted during prohibition and shows Bill passing out mugs to a crowd of rollicking customers. Every time one of these appears in an exhibition or in a newspaper or magazine, there is a rush of strangers to the saloon. ‘McSorley’s Bar’ was reproduced in Thomas Craven’s ‘A Treasury of Art Masterpieces,’ which came out in 1939, and it caused hundreds to go and look the place over. There is no doubt that McSorley’s has been painted more often than any other saloon in the country. Louis Bouché did a painting, ‘McSorley’s,’ which is owned by the University of Nebraska. A painting, ‘Morning in McSorley’s Bar,’ by a ship’s purser named Ben Rosen won first prize in an exhibition of art by merchant seamen in February, 1943. Reginald Marsh has done several sketches of it. In 1939 there was a retrospective exhibition of Sloan’s work in Wanamaker’s art department, and a number of McSorley patrons attended it in a body. One asked a clerk for the price of ‘McSorley’s Cats.’ ‘Three thousand dollars,’ he was told. He believed the clerk was kidding him and is still indignant. Kelly likes the Sloan paintings but prefers a golden, corpulent nude which Old John hung in the back room many years ago, right beside Peter Cooper’s portrait. To a stranger, attracted to the saloon by a Sloan painting, Kelly will say, ‘Hey, Mac, if you want to see some real art, go look at the naked lady in the back room.’ The nude is stretched out on a couch and is playing with a parrot; the painting is a copy, probably done by a Cooper Union student, of Gustave Courbet’s ‘La Femme au Perroquet.’ Kelly always translates this for strangers. ‘It’s French,’ he says learnedly. ‘It means “Duh Goil and duh Polly.”’

  McSorley’s bar is short, accommodating approximately ten elbows, and is shored up with iron pipes. It is to the right as you enter. To the left is a row of armchairs with their stiff backs against the wainscoting. The chairs are rickety; when a fat man is sitting in one, it squeaks like new shoes every time he takes a breath. The customers believe in sitting down; if there are vacant chairs, no one ever stands at the bar. Down the middle of the room is a row of battered tables. Their tops are always sticky with spilled ale. In the centre of the room stands the belly stove, which has an isinglass door and is exactly like the stoves in Elevated stations. All winter Kelly keeps it red hot. ‘Warmer you get, drunker you get,’ he says. Some customers prefer mulled ale. They keep their mugs on the hob until the ale gets as hot as coffee. A sluggish cat named Minnie sleeps in a scuttle beside the stove. The floor boards are warped, and here and there a hole has been patched with a flattened-out soup can. The back room looks out on a blind tenement court. In this room are three big, round dining-room tables. The kitchen is in one corner of the room; Mike keeps a folding boudoir screen around the gas range, and pots, pans, and paper bags of groceries are stored on the mantelpiece. While he peels potatoes, he sits with early customers at a table out front, holding a dishpan in his lap and talking as he peels. The fare in McSorley’s is plain, cheap and well cooked. Mike’s specialties are goulash, frankfurters, and sauerkraut, and hamburgers blanketed with fried onions. He scribbles his menu in chalk on a slate which hangs in the bar-room and consistently misspells four dishes out of five. There is no waiter. During the lunch hour, if Mike is too busy to wait on the customers, they grab plates and help themselves out of the pots on the range.

  The saloon opens at eight. Mike gives the floor a lick and a promise and throws on clean sawdust. He replenishes the free-lunch platters with cheese and onions and fills a bowl with cold, hardboiled eggs, five cents each. Kelly shows up. The ale truck makes its delivery. Then, in the middle of the morning, the old men begin shuffling in. Kelly calls them ‘the steadies.’ The majority are retired laborers and small businessmen. They prefer McSorley’s to their homes. A few live in the neighborhood, but many come from a distance. One, a retired operator of a chain of Bowery flophouses, comes in from Sheepshead Bay practically every day. On the day of his retirement, this man said, ‘If my savings hold out, I’ll never draw another sober breath.’ He says he drinks in order to forget the misery he saw in his flophouses; he undoubtedly saw a lot of it, because he often drinks twenty-five mugs a day, and McSorley’s ale is by no means weak. Kelly brings the old men their drinks. To save him a trip, they usually order two mugs at a time. Most of them are quiet and dignified; a few are eccentrics. Some years ago one had to leap out of the path of a speeding automobile on Third
Avenue; he is still furious. He mutters to himself constantly. Once, asked what he was muttering about, he said, ‘Going to buy a shotgun and stand on Third Avenue and shoot at automobiles.’ ‘Are you going to aim at the tires?’ he was asked. ‘Why, hell no!’ he said. ‘At the drivers. Figure I could kill four or five before they arrested me. Might kill more if I could reload fast enough.’

  Only a few of the old men have enough interest in the present to read newspapers. These patrons sit up front, to get the light that comes through the grimy street windows. When they grow tired of reading, they stare for hours into the street. There is always something worth looking at on Seventh Street. It is one of those East Side streets completely under the domination of kids. While playing stickball, they keep great packing-box fires going in the gutter; sometimes they roast mickies in the gutter fires. In McSorley’s the free-lunch platters are kept at the end of the bar nearer the street door, and several times every afternoon kids sidle in, snatch handfuls of cheese and slices of onion, and dash out, slamming the door. This never fails to amuse the old men.

  The stove overheats the place and some of the old men are able to sleep in their chairs for long periods. Occasionally one will snore, and Kelly will rouse him, saying, ‘You making enough racket to wake the dead.’ Once Kelly got interested in a sleeper and clocked him. Two hours and forty minutes after the man dozed off, Kelly became uneasy – ‘Maybe he died,’ he said – and shook him awake. ‘How long did I sleep?’ the man asked. ‘Since the parade,’ Kelly said. The man rubbed his eyes and asked, ‘Which parade?’ ‘The Paddy’s Day parade, two weeks ago,’ Kelly said scornfully. ‘Jeez!’ the man said. Then he yawned and went back to sleep. Kelly makes jokes about the constancy of the old men. ‘Hey, Eddie,’ he said one morning, ‘old man Ryan must be dead!’ ‘Why?’ Mullins asked. ‘Well,’ Kelly said, ‘he ain’t been in all week.’ In summer they sit in the back room, which is as cool as a cellar. In winter they grab the chairs nearest the stove and sit in them, as motionless as barnacles, until around six, when they yawn, stretch, and start for home, insulated with ale against the dreadful loneliness of the old. ‘God be wit’ yez,’ Kelly says as they go out the door.

  (1940)

  Mazie

  A BOSSY, YELLOW-HAIRED blonde named Mazie P. Gordon is a celebrity on the Bowery. In the nickel-a-drink saloons and in the all-night restaurants which specialize in pig snouts and cabbage at a dime a platter, she is known by her first name. She makes a round of these establishments practically every night, and drunken bums sometimes come up behind her, slap her on the back, and call her sweetheart. This never annoys her. She has a wry but genuine fondness for bums and is undoubtedly acquainted with more of them than any other person in the city. Each day she gives them between five and fifteen dollars in small change, which is a lot of money on the Bowery. ‘In my time I been as free with my dimes as old John D. himself,’ she says. Mazie has presided for twenty-one years over the ticket cage of the Venice Theatre, at 209 Park Row, a few doors west of Chatham Square, where the Bowery begins.

  The Venice is a small, seedy moving-picture theatre, which opens at 8 A.M. and closes at midnight. It is a dime house. For this sum a customer sees two features, a newsreel, a cartoon, a short, and a serial episode. The Venice is not a ‘scratch house.’ In fact, it is highly esteemed by its customers, because its seats get a scrubbing at least once a week. Mazie brags that it is as sanitary as the Paramount. ‘Nobody ever got loused up in the Venice,’ she says. On the Bowery, cheap movies rank just below cheap alcohol as an escape, and most bums are movie fans. In the clientele of the Venice they are numerous. The Venice is also frequented by people from the tenement neighborhoods in the vicinity of Chatham Square, such as Chinatown, the Little Italy on lower Mulberry Street, and the Spanish section on Cherry Street. Two-thirds of its customers are males. Children and most women sit in a reserved section under the eyes of a matron. Once, in an elegant mood, Mazie boasted that she never admits intoxicated persons. ‘When do you consider a person intoxicated?’ she was asked. Mazie snickered. ‘When he has to get down on all fours and crawl,’ she said. In any case, there are drunks in practically every Venice audience. When the liquor in them dies down they become fretful and mumble to themselves, and during romantic pictures they make loud, crazy, derogatory remarks to the actors on the screen, but by and large they are not as troublesome as a class of bums Mazie calls ‘the stiffs.’ These are the most listless of bums. They are blank-eyed and slow-moving, and they have no strong desire for anything but sleep. Some are able to doze while leaning against a wall, even in freezing weather. Many stiffs habitually go into the Venice early in the day and slumber in their seats until they are driven out at midnight. ‘Some days I don’t know which this is, a movie-pitcher theatre or a flophouse,’ Mazie once remarked. ‘Other day I told the manager pitchers with shooting in them are bad for business. They wake up the customers.’

  Most Bowery movie houses employ bouncers. At the Venice, Mazie is the bouncer. She tells intimates that she feels fighting is unladylike but that she considers it her duty to throw at least one customer out of the theatre every day. ‘If I didn’t put my foot down, the customers would take the place,’ she says. ‘I don’t get any fun out of fighting. I always lose my temper. When I start swinging, I taste blood, and I can’t stop. Sometimes I get beside myself. Also, a lot of the bums are so weak they don’t fight back, and that makes me feel like a heel.’ Mazie is small, but she is wiry and fearless, and she has a frightening voice. Her ticket cage is in the shadow of the tracks of the City Hall spur of the Third Avenue elevated line, and two decades of talking above the screeching of the trains have left her with a rasping bass, with which she can dominate men twice her size. Now and then, in the Venice, a stiff throws his head back and begins to snore so blatantly that he can be heard all over the place, especially during tense moments in the picture. When this happens, or when one of the drunks gets into a bellowing mood, the women and children in the reserved section stamp on the floor and chant, ‘Mazie! Mazie! We want Mazie!’ The instant this chant goes up, the matron hastens out to the lobby and raps on the side window of Mazie’s cage. Mazie locks the cash drawer, grabs a bludgeon she keeps around, made of a couple of copies of True Romances rolled up tightly and held together by rubber bands, and strides into the theatre. As she goes down the aisle, peering this way and that, women and children jump to their feet, point fingers in the direction of the offender, and cry, ‘There he is, Mazie! There he is!’ Mazie gives the man a resounding whack on the head with her bludgeon and keeps on whacking him until he seems willing to behave. Between blows, she threatens him with worse punishment. Her threats are fierce and not altogether coherent. ‘Outa here on a stretcher!’ she yells. ‘Knock your eyeballs out! Big baboon! Every tooth in your head! Bone in your body!’ The women and children enjoy this, particularly if Mazie gets the wrong man, as she sometimes does. In action, Mazie is an alarming sight. Her face becomes flushed, her hair flies every which way, and her slip begins to show. If a man defends himself or is otherwise contrary, she harries him out of his seat and drives him from the theatre. As he scampers up the aisle, with Mazie right behind him, whacking away, the women and children applaud.

  Mazie’s animosity toward a stiff or a drunk usually lasts until she has driven him out to the sidewalk. Then, almost invariably, she becomes contrite and apologetic. ‘Look, buddy, I’m sorry,’ she said one afternoon recently to a drunk she had chased out because he had been screaming ‘Sissy! Sissy!’ at George Raft during the showing of a prison picture called ‘Each Dawn I Die.’ ‘If you didn’t see the whole show,’ she continued, ‘you can go back in.’ ‘Hell, Mazie,’ said the drunk, ‘I seen it three times.’ ‘Here, then,’ she said, handing him a dime. ‘Go get yourself a drink.’ Although the drunk’s ears were still red from Mazie’s blows, he grinned. ‘You got a heart of gold, Mazie,’ he said. ‘You my sweetheart.’ ‘O.K., buddy,’ Mazie said, stepping back into the cage. ‘You quit acting like a go
d-damn jackass and I’ll be your sweetheart.’

  The Venice is a family enterprise. It is owned by Mazie and two sisters – Rosie, the widow of a horse-race gambler, and Jeanie, an acrobatic dancer. Mazie’s sisters let her run things to suit herself. She is profoundly uninterested in moving pictures and is seldom able to sit through one. ‘They make me sick,’ she says. Consequently, she employs a manager and leaves the selection and ordering of films entirely up to him. For a theatre of its class, the Venice is prosperous, and Mazie could afford to hire a ticket girl and take things easy, but she enjoys the job and will not relinquish it, as her sisters often urge her to do. From her cage she has a good view of Chatham Square, which is the favorite promenade of Bowery drunks and eccentrics. ‘The things I see, by God, you wouldn’t believe it,’ she says proudly. When she catches sight of a person she knows among the passers-by, she sticks her face up to the round hole in the front window of her cage and shouts a greeting. Sometimes she discusses exceedingly personal matters with people out on the sidewalk. ‘Hey there, Squatty,’ she yelled one afternoon to a dreamy-eyed little man, ‘I thought you was in Bellevue.’ ‘I was, Mazie,’ the man said. ‘They turned me loose yesterday.’ ‘Where’d they put you this time – the drunk ward or the nut ward?’ ‘I was in with the drunks this time.’ ‘How’d they treat you?’ ‘They didn’t do me no harm, I guess.’ ‘You get drunk last night, Squatty?’ ‘Sure did.’ ‘Guess you had to celebrate.’ ‘Sure did.’ ‘Well, take care yourself, Squatty.’ ‘Thanks, Mazie. You do the same.’