Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  ‘One night,’ she says, ‘a swell-looking dame came to my cage and said she often took walks on the Bowery and would like to meet me. She said her name was Fannie Hurst. “Pleased to meet you, Fannie,” I said. “My name is Mary Pickford.” It turned out she really was Fannie Hurst. At first I thought she was going to put me in a book, and I didn’t go for her. Since she promised not to write no books about me, we been pals.’ Miss Hurst visits Mazie frequently. Each time she comes, Mazie looks at her dress, fingers the material, asks how much it cost, tells her she got gypped, and advises her to try one of the shops on Division Street. Miss Hurst does not mind this. ‘I admire Mazie,’ she said. ‘She is the most compassionate person I’ve ever known. No matter how filthy or drunk or evil-smelling a bum may be, she treats him as an equal.’ Until recently, Miss Hurst occasionally took friends down to meet Mazie. ‘I’m afraid they looked on her as just another Bowery curiosity,’ she says. ‘So I don’t take people down any more. I used to invite Mazie to parties at my house. She always accepted but never came. I think she’s still a little suspicious of me, although I’ve never written a line about her and never intend to. I simply look upon her as a friend.’

  From callers like Fu Manchu and Bingo, Mazie hears considerable gossip about the sleazy underworld of Chinatown. She says she never repeats such gossip, not even to her sisters. Detectives know that she has many Chinese friends and sometimes stop at her cage and ask apparently innocent questions about them; she shrugs her shoulders and says, ‘No spik English.’ In general, however, she cooperates with the police. Drunken tourists often come down to Bowery joints to see life, and when she notices them stumbling around Chatham Square she telephones the Oak Street station. ‘Such dopes are always getting rolled by bums,’ she says. ‘I got no sympathy for out-of-towners, but bums are the clumsiest thieves in the world. They always get caught, and it’s best to get temptation out of their way.’ Although her language frequently shocks the Oak Street cops, they admire Mazie. Detective Kain, for instance, says that she has ‘the roughest tongue and the softest heart in the Third Precinct.’ ‘She knows this neighborhood like a farmer knows his farm,’ he says. ‘I believe she’s got the second sight. If anything out of the way is happening anywhere along the Bowery, she senses it.’

  Detective Kain has for some time been trying to solve a mystery in which Mazie is involved. Mazie has a telephone in her booth, of course, and in June, 1929, a man whose voice she did not recognize began calling her daily at 5 P. M., asking for a date or making cryptic remarks, such as ‘They got the road closed, Mazie. They won’t let nobody through.’ After three months he stopped calling. Then, around Christmas of the following year, he began again. He has been calling intermittently ever since. ‘I won’t hear from him for maybe six months,’ Mazie says. ‘Then, one day around five, the phone will ring and this voice will say, “All the clocks have stopped running” or “Mazie, they cut down the big oak tree” or some other dopey remark. He never says more than a few words, and when I say something he hangs right up. One afternoon he gave me the shakes. He called up and said, “Mazie, I got a nephew studying to be an undertaker and he needs somebody to practice on.” Then he hung up. A minute later he called again and said, “You’ll do! You’ll do!” Somehow, I get to feeling he’s across the street in a booth. The worst thing is I suspect every stranger that buys a ticket. I strike up conversations with strangers just to see if I can find one who talks like him. I think he’s trying to drive me crazy.’ Among her friends, Mazie refers to her caller as The Man. If she has visitors around five o’clock and the telephone rings, she says, ‘Pick up the receiver and see what The Man has to say this time.’ Fannie Hurst once listened. ‘It was macabre,’ she said. Detective Kain has listened often, has warned the man, and has tried vainly to trace the calls. Mazie’s number has been changed repeatedly, but that does no good.

  Mazie closes her cage shortly after 11 P.M., when the final show is under way, and goes to an all-night diner near Brooklyn Bridge, where she glances through the Daily News while having a couple of cups of coffee and a honey bun. The only things in the News that she regularly reads from beginning to end are the comics, the ‘Voice of the People,’ and ‘The Inquiring Fotographer.’ She says she doesn’t read political or war stories because she can’t understand them and because they make her blue. ‘The world is all bitched up,’ she once said. ‘Always was, always will be.’ ‘Do you really believe that?’ she was asked. ‘No,’ she said, after a moment of deliberation, ‘I guess I don’t.’ She spends half an hour in the diner. Then, practically every night, before going home to bed, she makes a Samaritan tour of the Bowery and its environs. She carries an umbrella and a large handbag, which contains a flashlight, a number of cakes of soap of the size found in hotel bathrooms, and a supply of nickels, dimes, and quarters.

  If it is a cold night, she goes first to an alley near the steps leading to the footwalk of Manhattan Bridge. Bums like to keep fires going in discarded oil drums in this alley. She distributes some change. Then she inspects Columbus Park, a block west of Chatham Square, where every winter a few bums pass out on benches and die of exposure. The police say Mazie has rescued scores of men in this park. Then, passing through Chinatown, she returns to the Bowery and heads uptown, pausing whenever she recognizes a bum and giving him enough money for a meal, a drink, or a flop. Frequently, in addition to small change, she gives a bum a cake of soap. ‘Please use it, buddy,’ she says pleadingly. Here and there she gets out her flashlight and peers into a doorway. She pays particular attention to the drunken or exhausted bums who sleep in doorways, on loading platforms, and on sidewalks. She always tries to arouse them and stake them to flops. In warm weather, if they don’t seem disposed to stir, she leaves them where they are. ‘A sidewalk is about as nice as a flophouse cot in the summertime,’ she says. ‘You may get up stiff, but you won’t get up crummy.’ In the winter, however, she badgers them until they awaken. She punches them in the ribs with her umbrella and, if necessary, gets down on her knees and slaps their faces. ‘When a bum is sleeping off his load, you could saw off his leg and he wouldn’t notice nothing,’ she says. Sometimes a bum who has been awakened by Mazie tries to take a poke at her. When this happens, she assumes a spraddle-legged stance, like a fencer, and jabs the air viciously with her umbrella. ‘Stand back,’ she cries, ‘or I’ll put your eyes out.’ If a man is too weak, sodden, or spiritless to get up, Mazie grabs his elbows and heaves him to his feet. Holding him erect, she guides him to the nearest flophouse and pulls and pushes him up the stairs to the lobby. She pays the clerk for the man’s lodging (thirty cents is the customary price) and insists on his having at least two blankets. Then, with the help of the clerk or the bouncer, she takes off the man’s shoes, unbuttons his collar, loosens his belt, and puts him to bed with his clothes on. This is usually a tumultuous process, and sometimes many of the lodgers are awakened. They stick their heads out of the doors of their cubicles. ‘It’s Mazie!’ they shout. ‘Hello, Mazie!’ Now and then an emotional bum will walk out in his underwear and insist on shaking Mazie’s hand. ‘God bless you, Mazie, old girl!’ he will cry. Mazie does not approve of such antics. ‘Go back to bed, you old goat,’ she says. If she is acquainted with the clerk and trusts him, she leaves some change with him and asks that it be given to the bum when he wakes up. Flophouses are for-men-only establishments, and Mazie is the only female who has ever crossed the threshold of many of them.

  At least a couple of times a week, Mazie finds injured men lying in the street. On these occasions she telephones Police Headquarters and asks for an ambulance from Gouverneur or Beekman Street, the hospitals which take care of most Bowery cases. She knows many of the drivers from these hospitals by name and orders them around. Police say she summons more ambulances than any other private citizen in town, and she is proud of this. ‘I don’t over-do it,’ she says. ‘Unless a man is all stove-up and bloody, I don’t put in a call, but if I had my way, the wagons would be rolling all ni
ght long. There’s hardly a bum on the Bowery who don’t belong in a hospital.’

  On her walk, Mazie usually tries to steer clear of other well-known nocturnal Bowery characters. Among these are the Widow Woman and the Crybaby. The Crybaby is an old mission bum who sits on the curb for hours with his feet in the gutter, sobbing brokenly. Once Mazie nudged him on the shoulder and asked, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ ‘I committed the unforgivable sin,’ he said. Mazie asked him what the sin consisted of, and he began a theological description of it which she didn’t understand and which she interrupted after a few minutes, remarking, ‘Hell, Crybaby, you didn’t commit no sin. You just prob’ly got the stomach ulsters.’ The Widow Woman is a bent, whining crone who wears a mourning veil, a Queen Mary hat, and a rusty black coat, and comes hobbling down the Bowery around midnight giving bums little slips of paper on which are scribbled such statements as ‘God is love’ and ‘The fires of Hell will burn forever.’ Mazie is afraid of her. ‘She walks like a woman and she dresses like a woman, but when she talks I get the feeling that she’s a man.’

  Most nights, before going home to bed, which is usually around two o’clock, Mazie makes brief stops in several saloons and all-night restaurants. She does not mind the reek of stale beer, greasy cabbage, and disinfectant in them. ‘After you been around the Bowery a few years, your nose gets all wore out,’ she says. She goes into these places not to eat or drink but to gossip with bartenders and countermen and to listen to the conversation of drunken bums. She has found that bums do not talk much about sex, sports, politics, or business, the normal saloon topics. She says most of them are far too undernourished to have any interest in sex. They talk, instead, about what big shots they were before they hit the Bowery. Although their stories fascinate her, Mazie is generally cynical. ‘To hear them tell it,’ she says, ‘all the bums on the Bowery were knocking off millions down in Wall Street when they were young, else they were senators, else they were the general manager of something real big, but, poor fellows, the most of them they wasn’t ever nothing but drunks.’

  (1940)

  Hit on the Head with a Cow

  WHEN I HAVE time to kill, I sometimes go to the basement of a brownstone tenement on Fifty-ninth Street, three-quarters of a block west of Columbus Circle, and sit on a rat-gnawed Egyptian mummy and cut up touches with Charles Eugene Cassell, an old Yankee for whose bitter and disorderly mind I have great respect. Mr Cassell has Negro, French, Portuguese, and English blood. He calls himself Captain Charley because he had charge of an ammunition barge for a brief period during the First World War and saw no reason why he shouldn’t have a title. About fifteen years ago, after he got too contrary to hold down a steady job, he took out some of his savings and opened a museum – Captain Charley’s Private Museum for Intelligent People – in a Harlem apartment house; some time later, after a series of robberies, he moved to the basement on Fifty-ninth Street. The Captain is a relentless and indiscriminate collector, and stored in his place are thousands of curious odds and ends he gathered during the fifty-five years he worked as a sailor or cook on navy and merchant ships, and during other years when he was a servant in clubs and hotels in Manhattan. The most valuable exhibit is a group of stuffed animals. They are moth-cut and mangy, but several times a year the Captain is able to rent them to moving picture theatres for lobby displays during the showing of jungle films. The Captain charges fifteen cents admission to his museum, but half the time he forgets to collect it. The majority of his visitors are passers-by attracted by big cardboard signs which he puts up at the head of the steps leading down to the basement – signs such as ‘IF YOU CONSIDER YOURSELF INTELLIGENT, STEP INSIDE,’ ‘CAPTAIN CHARLEY WILL SELL A FEW ODDS AND ENDS FROM TEN CENTS TO FIFTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS,’ and ‘IF YOU ARE SO DAMN SMART, WHY AIN’T YOU RICH?’ A few of the visitors are women hunting for bargains in antiques.

  I like to sit in the gloomy, moldy basement and listen to the Captain. After I have listened to him for fifteen minutes or so, I get to thinking about something that happened to me when I was ten years old. My father and a hired man named Alonzo were butchering a cow in the hall of the barn in back of our house in the small town in North Carolina that I come from, and I was helping. We were hoisting the cow up in the air with a block and tackle so we could skin her, and Alonzo and I had hold of the rope. We had the cow off the ground when something went wrong with the gear, and when I came to I was out in the barnyard running around in circles and screeching, and my head was bloody. When I was caught and subdued by Alonzo and stretched out on the green grass under a pecan tree, I looked up at my father and said, ‘What happened, Daddy?’ My father had a faraway look in his eyes and he said, ‘Son, you were hit on the head with a cow.’ For at least a week after I received the blow on the head everything people said to me seemed illogical or disconnected; every conversation I heard seemed to end unerringly and pleasantly in confusion. That is the way I feel after I have listened to Captain Charley for a little while. I feel as if I had been hit on the head with a cow.

  The last time I went to see him I took a notebook along, and while he rummaged through the museum – he was searching for a bone which he said he hacked off an Arab around 9 P.M. one full-moon night in 1907 after the Arab had been murdered for signing a treaty – I wrote down everything he said. He didn’t pay much attention to me while he talked; most of the time he was talking to himself. And while he rambled along he kept plucking objects out of the clutter on the floor of the basement. He said he wanted to find the Arab’s bone and send it to Police Commissioner Grover A. Whalen by parcel post. ‘I dreamt about old Grover last night, and I made up my mind to send him a present,’ he said. ‘In this dream old Grover was a engineer on a fast freight on the New York Central, and I was the fireman, and we was arguing over who had the right to blow the whistle. Toot! Toot! Old Grover won.’ (Captain Charley is a great admirer of Mr Whalen, and I once asked him why. Mr Whalen is noted for his sartorial daring, and it turned out that that is the reason. ‘I like the way old Grover dresses,’ Captain Charley said. ‘He dresses like he means it.’) Before long the Captain had piled up a dusty mound of objects which included a stuffed barn owl, an old gilt picture frame, a tin lunch bucket, a stack of theatre programs and restaurant menus of the 1890’s, a woman’s hat with a green ostrich feather on it, a dirty beaded bag, a bashed-in pith helmet, a cigar box full of seashells, political campaign buttons, and Chinese coins; a big roll of yellowed newspapers around which a necktie had been knotted, a cutlass, a parasol which he said was once the property of a famous New Orleans madam named Mrs Lilly-belle Sue-belle Russell, and the lengthy skin of a boa constrictor that killed a girl and a goat in South America at a moment when the girl was milking the goat.

  ‘Where were you born, Captain Charley?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m born in Boston,’ he said. ‘I’m born in the Hub. I’m a bluenosed Yankee, fed on codfish and cranberries. My type of people are all dead. They broke the mold. I consider myself different from other men, on a higher plane, always been a boss, never wore overalls. Take the biggest man in the country and no matter what big deeds he did, I did twice as much. I don’t smoke and I don’t hang out in none of them low-down Columbus Avenue saloons. I drink in high-class places. Nothing but champagne wine and brandy, that’s all I drink. High-class people invite me to their houses for dinner, just for the honor of it, send me home full of brandy. I’m very particular about my something to eat. When I got cash on hand I set a fine table, don’t eat nothing but lobsters and fresh peaches and T-bone steaks. There’s people that could live high on what I throw away. Use to take advantage of women, but somewhere along the line I lost my animal spirits. I can look a gangster in the eye and make him change his mind, but I can’t do a thing with a woman no more. At one time I had nine big switch-tail women on my personal payroll and they all stole from me, picked me clean. Buzzards! One of these days I’m going to pack my grip and go up to Boston and die. Won’t even bother to get me a cemetery lot; I
’ll just find me a convenient gutter and lie down in it and die. Sad, sad! Made up my mind to die in Boston because I was born there. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Older I get the more disgusted I get. I’m yet to find a honest man, a honest woman. I don’t even believe in good deeds; once I tried to help a man out of a well and I tumbled in and broke both legs. I believe in assassination, it makes elbow room. I believe in gassing off all the old people, except me. I’m too smart to gas. I’m a taxidermist. I can mount a mosquito. I can mount a strawberry. I can mount any old fish you ever see.’

  At this moment a cowbell hanging from the knob on the street door began to tinkle and a middle-aged woman came in. When her eyes got used to the gloom, she peered at us and said, ‘May I look at the antiques?’ The Captain said, ‘Help yourself, friend.’ He shambled over and collected fifteen cents admission, and then returned to his search for the Arab’s bone. The woman stood stock still for a few moments and stared at the Captain. He is small, grimy, and surly. His eyes are always bleary. He wears a white, waxed mustache. He had on his customary outfit – ragged duck pants, a turtleneck sweater, a pea jacket, a captain’s cap, and tennis sneakers painted with silver radiator paint. He was decorating some seashells one day with the silver paint and decided that it would look good on his sneakers.

  ‘Look at this lunch bucket,’ he said. ‘Use to belong to Al Smith when he was in Fulton Fish Market. Never used such a common thing myself. Always had money, never broke; had the chicken pox, had the sleeping sickness, had the dropsy, had the yellow johnnies, had the walking, talking pneumonia. Didn’t miss a thing in the medical line. My old man was a big man with shoulders like a mule, born on a farm in Nova Scotia, lived most of his life in Boston. He was born in a barn. When he went in a place he always left the door wide open. People would yell at him, “Shut the door! Were you born in a barn?” and he’d say, “That’s right. How’d you guess it?” He was biggity as sin. What you call a beachcomber. He did odd jobs on the fish docks, and he fed us on fish until the bones stuck out of our ears. Comb my hair in the morning, I’d comb out a handful of bones. It got so my stomach rose and fell with the tide. Fish, fish! I was almost grown before I found out people ate anything else. Use to take me with him to the saloons when I was just a little teeniney baby. He’d set me on the bar beside his glass of whiskey. When he wasn’t watching, I’d sneak me a drink of his whiskey, then I’d crawl down on the sawdust and pick a fight with the saloon cats. My old man would tuck me under his right arm like I was a bag of groceries and tote me home and throw me on the bed and I’d sleep it off. I’d grunt and snore like a full-grown man. People said I was the prettiest boy baby ever born in Boston. I was always smart. Worked all my life, never had time for baseball, never spun a top. First job I ever had, I guided a blindman beggar around the streets of Boston, a fellow named Blind Clancy, a gin drinker. I was seven years old, going on eight. He had a grip like steel. He’d hold on to my shoulder, and he had such a grip it made my shoulder ache. He was a smart blindman; he wouldn’t ever let me hold the cup. We’d stumble along and he’d sing out, “All good people please to drop a penny in the blindman’s cup.” I got sick and tired of hearing that, and one day I walked off and left him right in the middle of a parade on Tremont Street. I took to knocking around the docks. At sixteen I was an A.B. on the deep sea, drawing down a man’s pay. Take those old sea captains; why, I made monkeys out of them because I knew so much astronomy. Use to be an atheist, but I’m getting so old I’m afraid to be an atheist. Take hell and damnation. Didn’t use to believe in it, but now I just don’t know. It sounds so logical. I’m a Just in Case Christian. Ever so often I hunt me up a church and get right with the Holy Ghost, just in case. Still and all, I can’t endure preachers. Deep down in my heart, I don’t believe in pie in the sky; I believe in T-bone steak in the here and now. Look at this. Theodore Roosevelt’s pith helmet. I was working in a big club full of rich old men that sat around all day in thick leather chairs dozing and grunting and scratching theirselves. And one of these rich old men said to me, “See here, Charley, you want this helmet? It use to belong to President Roosevelt.” I sure was glad to get it. Old Theodore wore it when he was a rootin’ and a tootin’ around in them deep jungles. That’s what I’d like, big game hunting. Bang! Bang!’