Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  Johnny sighed and slopped some more gin into his glass. ‘Things have been getting worse and worse for gypsies ever since the automobile was put on the market,’ he said. ‘When I was a little knee-high boy the U.S. was gypsy heaven. Everybody was real ignorant and believed in fortune-telling. You could take their money so easy they just about gave it to you. And horses to trade. And every woman had some pots with holes in them, and if she couldn’t pay you to tinker, why, a dozen fresh eggs was just as good. And our wagons was red and yellow, and we had bells on the harness, and there wasn’t no motorcycle cops, and you could camp anywhere. Private property wasn’t even heard of. Nowadays, if gypsies was to make a camp out in the middle of some far desert a hundred and fifty miles from nowhere, about the time they got all settled down for the night a old farmer with a shotgun would come a-running and he’d say, “Private property. You get right off my private property or I’ll shoot you dead.” The entire country is overrun with private property. Some of them farmers, I’m surprised they let the airplanes fly over their goddam private property.

  ‘But when I was a little boy any place would do. The air would be clean, no stinking automobiles around, and we’d camp under some green shade trees near a stream of cooking water. And we’d put the horses on long halters and leave them feed theirselves. And we’d go fishing and fry the fish right off the hook. And firewood was free. And there was a violin in every family – at least a guitar – and you didn’t have to get drunk to feel like dancing. And the little kids would run around strip, stark naked. And the girls and womenfolks would go down the stream a piece and take a bath, and you would hear them through the trees a-giggling and a-hollering. And the yellow gypsy dogs that we don’t even have no more, they would lie down under the wagons and scratch their fleas. These gajo dogs you see in New York that the women practically nurse them, I despise those dogs. When they bark, yah-yah, they don’t even sound mad. They sound sick. A yellow gypsy dog, even a baby one, when he barked he sounded like a old bear. And the womenfolks would spread out and dukker at all the farms for miles around, and on the way back, after the sun went down, they would pick up a hen here and a cabbage there, and if they come across some clothes on a line, they would take the shirts and dresses. They never bothered the overalls. We didn’t have no use for overalls. When I think of the whole armfuls of roasting ear corn we used to steal, and the watermelons, and now and then a little grunty pig, why, it hurts my heart to think of it. When I was a little boy we almost always had enough to eat. You never saw no skinny gypsies.’

  Johnny was interrupted by one of his daughters-in-law, a tall, haughty gypsy girl who came striding into the room, her heels clicking and her head held high. She went over to Johnny’s trunk, threw the lid back, and took out a number of copies of ‘Old Gipsy Nan.’ Johnny keeps a supply on hand and sells them to the women in his families. ‘I took six,’ the girl said, slamming the lid shut. She offered Johnny a five-dollar bill, and he grunted angrily. ‘Don’t bother me,’ he said. ‘Go get that changed and bring me sixty cents.’ She strode out of the room and Johnny’s eyes followed her.

  ‘I don’t mean no disrespect,’ he said after the girl had gone, ‘but gypsy women have got it all over civilize women. They got such a springy walk on them. No corset, no girdle, no brassy, none of them gajo inventions to weight them down. When you look at a gypsy woman you not looking at a corset, you looking at a woman. Most gajo women, I bet they carry more harness than a dray horse.’

  Johnny kept working on the gin. Every few minutes he downed a drink and shuddered.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, ‘years back gypsies lived high. But along about the time I got grown up, whenever that was, the bottom fell out. Automobiles spread and spread. No more horses to trade. Then came aluminum and cheap kitchen pots. Aluminum was a severe blow to gypsies, but when they took to selling pots in the five-and-dime they should of held the gypsy funeral right then and there. Women got so they wouldn’t have nothing tinkered; a pot got a hole in it, what the hell, pitch it out the window and get a brand-new one from the five-and-dime. Also, with only horses to feed, you could travel cheap. But when we took to cars we had to have gas and tire money. So we looked for big jobs. For a while we did fine. People don’t generally know it, but gypsies handled some real big tinker jobs. Back in 1921, in one fall and winter, a crowd of gypsy coppersmiths I and six of my families was travelling with, old King Steve Kaslov’s crowd, we did sixteen thousand dollars’ worth of copper and tin work for the Arlington Mills at Lawrence, Massachusetts. Not long after we did ten thousand dollars’ worth for the Waltham Bleachery and Dye Works at Waltham, Massachusetts. Bunged-up dye vats and dry cans, that kind of stuff. And Paterson, New Jersey, them big dye works out there, we handled the biggest kind of tinker jobs. We’d take the job right out of the factory and truck it to our camp in the woods. We’d leave gold coins on deposit, so the factory would trust us to bring the job back. We worked together in the woods like bees, with the old gypsy coppersmith secret that was handed down from centuries ago. We can shape a pipe sleeve so accurate it fits like a grape hull on a grape, and just use our fingers to measure by. A gajo coppersmith with a shopful of machinery, he can’t do no better. Then came the depression, and the union fellers began to grab off all the copper work. In 1930 we handled a big job for a bleachery in Worcester, Massachusetts. After that the union fellers took everything. We was washed up.’

  Johnny rested his head in his hands and stared at the floor for a minute or two. ‘Well, we still had our gold,’ he said after a while. ‘It’s hard to make people believe it nowadays, but gypsy women used to be loaded down with gold. They was our banks. In 1933 I and Looba had six thousand bucks in gold coins and she carried the most of it around sewed up in her skirts. And, compared to some gypsies, we was poor. What happened? President Roosevelt. Except he made everybody turn in their gold, I wouldn’t say a word against him. Us gypsies, we had gold coins from damn near every country in the world. Some of it had been toted around for centuries. We used to change all our money into gold. And the cops came to our camps and made us take it to the banks and turn it in. Orders from Washington, D.C. And the banks gave us paper money in exchange. What the hell good is paper money? It went like wine at a wedding. We all bought new cars – who wants a Ford? Give us a Packard. Make it two, one for Ma, one for Pa, ride in style, honk, honk! And along about that time, I don’t know why, but the whole entire country turned against gypsies. Them motorcycle cops would chase us across one state line and then some more cops would chase us across another state line. Pretty soon we didn’t know where the hell we was at. Whole sections of the country had to be dodged or they’d put us on the chain gang, or try to. Even the carnivals turned against us. Use to, up to the depression, every spring the carnivals and little circuses would put ads in the Billboard magazine, rounding up the attractions. And all of them would advertise for a gypsy mitt joint, split half and half with the carnival. And the amusement parks and beaches all up and down the Atlantic Coast would advertise for gypsies. Nowadays, you look at the carnival ads in Billboard and it says, “No gypsies wanted.” Or it says, “American palmistry only.” Gajo women dukkering for carnivals. It’s sunk to that!

  ‘So we began heading for New York, Chicago, big cities where there’s slums to live in. And rent to pay. The fundamental thing a gypsy is opposed to is rent. Use to we was healthy. But now the babies get the rickets and the old folks get the itch. And colds, and t.b. And right after they’re weaned the babies start eating hot dogs. And the steam heat, it’s paralyzing us. It’s drying us up. It takes us all summer to get over the steam heat. It makes our hair fall out. It gives us the dropsy. You take a gypsy woman, out on the road she’d have a baby every year. Let her spend a solid winter in a steam-heat room, she quits having babies. And the relief people, always wanting to know where at was you born. Now, how would a gypsy know that? You’re born in a tent beside the road someplace and a week later you’re in another state and there ain’t nobody got ti
me to keep track of where at you was born. Who cares? And birth certificates! Why, we never heard of birth certificates until we hit the relief. I don’t have the slightest idea where I was born. All I know it was in the U.S. someplace. I’m alive, ain’t I? I must of been born.’

  Johnny had worked himself into a frenzy. He lurched to his feet, and started to say something more to me, and then stuttered and stopped, and I could see that the gin was beginning to take hold. At this moment the tall, haughty gypsy girl returned, bringing the money for the books she had taken. She stood at his elbow and tried to give him some coins, but he disregarded her.

  ‘And let me tell you something,’ he said finally, waving his hand at me with an oratorical gesture. ‘I just can’t wait for the blowup.’

  ‘The blowup of what?’ I asked.

  ‘The blowup of the whole entire world, that’s what,’ said Johnny. ‘It’s going to bust wide open any day now, ask any gypsy, and I don’t give a D-double-damn if it does.’

  ‘That’s no way to talk,’ I said.

  ‘And if it was left to me,’ continued Johnny, paying no attention to my remark, ‘I’d sure fix things up. The very first thing I’d do, I’d unlock the insane asylums all over the world and let them people out. I’d leave them run things. I’d hunt up the insanest feller of all and I’d say to him, “Sir, you got any notion how to run the world?” And he’d say to me, “Yes, indeed!” “O.K., pal,” I’d say to him, “take charge. You can’t possibly do no worse than them that’s been had charge.” And if the crazy fellers couldn’t somehow straighten things out, why, I’d call on the gypsies. I’d put everything in their hands.’

  The gypsy girl snickered and made what I thought was a sound observation. ‘Uh oh!’ she said.

  (1942)

  The Gypsy Women

  IN THE EARLY thirties, I covered Police Headquarters at night for a newspaper, and I often ate in a restaurant named the Grotta Azzurra, which is only a block over, at the southwest corner of Broome and Mulberry, and stays open until two. I still go down there every now and then. The Grotta Azzurra is a classical downtown New York South Italian restaurant: it is a family enterprise, it is in the basement of a tenement, it has marble steps, it displays in a row of bowls propped up on a table dry samples of all the kinds of pasta it serves, its kitchen is open to view through an arch, and it has scenes of the Bay of Naples painted on its walls. Among its specialties is striped bass cooked in clam broth with clams, mussels, shrimp, and squid, and it may be possible to find a better fish-and-shellfish dish in one of the great restaurants of the world, but I doubt it. I had a late dinner in the Grotta Azzurra one Sunday night recently, and then sat and talked for a while with two of the waiters at a table in back. We talked about the upheavals in the Police Department under Commissioner Adams; a good many police officials eat in the Grotta Azzurra, and the waiters take an interest in police affairs. I left around midnight and walked west on Broome, heading for the subway. At the northeast corner of Broome and Cleveland Place, just across Broome from Headquarters, there is an eight-story brick building that is called Police Headquarters Annex. It is a dingy old box of a building; it was originally a factory, a Loft candy factory. It houses the Narcotics Squad, the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad, the Missing Persons Bureau, the Bureau of Criminal Information, and a number of other specialized squads and bureaus. I was about halfway up the block when a middle-aged man carrying a briefcase came out of the Annex and started across the street, and as he passed under a street lamp I saw that he was a detective I used to know quite well named Daniel J. Campion. I was surprised that he should be coming out of the Annex at that hour, particularly on a Sunday night, for some months earlier I had heard in the Grotta Azzurra that he had retired from the Police Department on a pension of thirty-five hundred dollars a year and had gone to work for the Pinkertons, the big private-detective agency. He was an Acting Captain when he retired, and the commanding officer of the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad. He had been a member of this squad for over twenty-five years, and had long been considered the best authority in the United States on pickpockets, confidence-game operators, and swindlers. He was also the Department’s expert on gypsies. He had become curious about gypsies when he was a young patrolman on a beat and first arrested one, and had spent a great deal of time through the years seeking them out and talking with them, not only in New York City but in cities all over the country that he visited on police business. He sought them out on his own time as well as on Department time, and he always made notes on the information that he picked up from them. He made these notes on yellow legal scratch-paper, and kept them in some file folders, on the flaps of which he had pasted detailed labels, such as ‘Notes in re the gypsy confidence game known as doing, making, or pulling off a bajour (also pronounced bahjo, boojoo, and boorjo),’ ‘Notes in re individual techniques of Bronka, Saveta, Matrona, Lizaveta, Zorka, Looba, Kaisha, Linka, Dunya, and certain other bajour women in the gypsy bands that frequent New York City,’ and ‘Notes in re various different spellings of gypsy given names and family names as shown on the tombstones of gypsies in two cemeteries in New Jersey.’ I became acquainted with Captain Campion while I was covering Headquarters. Afterwards, during the late thirties and up through the middle forties, I used to drop into his office in the Annex whenever I was down around Headquarters and had time to spare. If he also had time to spare, he would send out for a carton of coffee and we would sit at his desk and talk, almost always about gypsies. If he was busy, he would let me take his gypsy file folders out to a table in an anteroom and go through them and read his latest notes. In recent years, I hadn’t seen much of him. I called out to Captain Campion and he stopped, and I hurried up the street to him.

  ‘I bet I know where you’ve been,’ he said as we shook hands. ‘Over in the Grotta Azzurra, eating striped bass.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and if it’s all right to ask, what in the world are you doing down here at this hour of the night, and a Sunday night at that? I heard you had left the Department and gone to the Pinkerton Agency.’

  ‘I was attending to some unfinished business,’ he said. ‘Six months or so before I retired, somebody over at Headquarters spoke to me about two young detectives out in precinct squads who sounded like they might be good material for Pickpocket and Confidence. I had thirty-three detectives in the squad at the time, seventeen men and sixteen women, but two of my best men were about to be transferred to Narcotics because of certain skills they had. So I looked up these two young detectives, and I was impressed by them, and I asked them would they like to work in Pickpocket and Confidence. At first, they weren’t so sure, but after I explained the nature of the squad to them in some detail they came to the conclusion they would. So I put in for their transfer. Well, these things take forever. Months went by. Then I got this offer to work in the private-detective field. I hadn’t intended to retire from the Department for years yet, but this offer appealed to me, and I decided to go ahead and retire. And the way things happen, the very morning of the day I was due to leave, notification came through that the transfer of these two young detectives had been approved. So I got in touch with them and told them the situation – I wouldn’t be able to break them in – but I told them I would call them as soon as I got settled in my new job and would meet them and sit down with them and tell them all I possibly could about pickpockets and confidence-game operators and swindlers, give them the benefit of my experience. I felt I had a moral obligation to do so. I called them the other day and asked if they still wanted me to talk to them, and they said they did, so we agreed to meet in the squad office on Sunday night – it would be quiet then and we’d have it pretty much to ourselves. And that’s what I’ve been doing. I talked about four hours tonight, talked and answered questions, and I hardly got started, so we decided to meet two or three more Sunday nights. And where I’m going now, I thought I’d drop in at Headquarters for a minute and say hello to the lieutenant on the main desk and find out what’s new s
ince I retired. Come on, walk me around to the back door.’

  We turned in to Centre Market Place, a narrow, ominous, brightly lit, block-long street that runs behind Police Headquarters.

  ‘What about the gypsies?’ I asked. ‘Do you still see any of them?’

  ‘I was waiting for you to ask me that,’ Captain Campion said. ‘Sure I do. Only the night before last I drove over to Brooklyn and had a talk with an old bajour queen from the West Coast named Paraskiva Miller. She’s a Machvanka – that is, a female member of the Machwaya tribe of Serbian gypsies – and she’s seventy-five. She calls herself Madame Miller. She’s been telling fortunes and pulling off bajours since 1898, 1899, or 1900, somewhere around there, mainly in California, and I’m pretty sure she’s one of the richest gypsies in the country. According to gypsy gossip, she believes that money will be worthless before long, something she saw in a dream, and she puts her money in diamonds and keeps them sewed up in her skirts and petticoats; one of these days some gypsy from another tribe is going to strip her down to her bones. I heard about her first in San Francisco in the summer of 1945. The New York Police Department and the police departments in several other cities around the country have an arrangement by which they lend detectives to each other on certain occasions, and I was loaned to San Francisco that summer. An international conference was going on out there, the one at which the United Nations was organized, and the city was crowded, and I was supposed to watch out for criminals from the East. When I had any time to myself, I looked up the local gypsies. Paraskiva and one of her daughters were running an ofisa in San Francisco then – a fortune-telling joint in a store – and I tried several times to see her, but her daughter always came out and said Madame Miller wasn’t in, which meant she was sitting behind the curtains and had peeped out at me and didn’t like my looks. I got word here recently that she had come East to visit one of her granddaughters, Sabinka Uwanawich, who runs an ofisa on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. I know Sabinka quite well; I’ve arrested her I think it’s five times. So I went out to her ofisa the other night. When I walked in, Sabinka began to scream insults at me, the usual gypsy-woman insults – I was a rat, I was a stinking rat, she’d like to pull my guts out through my ears, all that stuff – but she knew I had left the Police Department and was curious what I wanted, and when I told her I just wanted to ask her grandmother some questions about gypsies on the West Coast in the old days, she quieted down and took me in the back room. Paraskiva turned out to be one of those stout, dark, gold-toothed, big-eyed, Hindu-looking gypsies. She was the bouncy kind. I’ve seen her kind over and over among the Serbian gypsy women; they’re top-heavy – they’re nine-tenths bosom – but they hold themselves erect and they’re quick on their feet and they walk with a strut. As old and stout as she was, she had on high-heeled shoes and lipstick and rouge. She wasn’t well. She had a cough, a persistent cough, and she said she had had t.b. some years ago and was afraid it had come back on her, but she talked to me an hour or more, and I got some odds and ends of information out of her that I couldn’t have got anywhere else. She didn’t tell me a whole lot, but what she told me fitted in with what I already knew.’