Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  ‘In Pickpocket and Confidence,’ Captain Campion began, peering at us over his spectacles, ‘you run into two breeds of gypsies, the nomad coppersmith gypsies and the Boyasch. The nomads are by far the most numerous. They’re the ones we’re mainly concerned with, and I’ll describe them in detail, but first I want to say a few words about the Boyasch and get them out of the way. The Boyasch are what you might call Serbo-Rumanian gypsies. Serbia was the last country they lived in before they came here, and back before that they lived for many generations in Rumania. Among themselves, they usually speak Rumanian or Hrvatski, which is the Serbo-Croatian language. They claim they can’t speak a word of gypsy, and I guess it is dying out among them, but I’ve heard some of the old ones speaking it a mile a minute. They’re small and dark and strange, and if you saw some on the street you’d notice them but it probably wouldn’t occur to you they were gypsies. They’re cleaner and neater than the nomads, and their women don’t dress gypsy style any more, although a few of the real old ones still wear gold-coin necklaces. At the same time, they’re tougher-looking. I guess hard is more the word. They look hard. It’s something in their eyes. They have curious cold, hard eyes, and they watch you every second, and they rarely ever smile. They look like they’ve thought a lot about the way life is, they and their forefathers before them, and they don’t see anything funny in it. That’s how they look to me, but I remember hearing one of the women detectives in the squad describing them, and the way she described them, she said they look like they carry knives. I don’t know what Boyasch means. The nomads say it’s just an old gypsy word meaning gold-washer, but I’ve never been able to get a satisfactory explanation out of them what a gold-washer is. The nomads and the Boyasch don’t get along. The nomad women call the Boyasch women the dirty, sneaking Boyaschutza, and make contemptuous remarks about them, such as they say they’ll tell fortunes for a quarter and do both palms, and the Boyaschutza call the nomad women rag-heads. In the East, the Boyasch hang out in New York City and vicinity and Philadelphia and vicinity. In the Middle West, Chicago is their headquarters. They don’t travel anywhere near as much as the nomads; they sometimes stay put for years. The ones here mostly live in tenements in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, out in Brooklyn. The nomads spy on them, and a nomad informer told me recently that there are eighteen families in Brooklyn at present, and two or three in Queens and two in Harlem and six or seven more in Newark and Paterson. The principal Boyasch family names are Ivanovich, Lazarovich, Lucas, Magill, Mitchell, Morgan, Mort, Peterson, Petrovich, Stanley, and Stevens. These are typical American gypsy family names; there are nomad families with the same names.

  ‘The Boyasch men work. Some are automobile mechanics, and some work in factories that make tents and awnings and hammocks; they used to travel with circuses and carnivals and take care of the tents. The men don’t give us much trouble, it’s the women. When they’re young, the Boyaschutza stay home and keep house like ordinary women, but as they grow older the gypsy in them seems to grow stronger and stronger, and when they reach middle age some of them become fortune-tellers and swindlers. They don’t run fortune-telling joints. Instead of sitting and waiting for victims, they go out and hunt for them. They usually work in pairs. They lug around shopping bags containing a stock of dead and dried-up specimens of a peculiar kind of plant called the resurrection plant, and they go from house to house in working-class, home-owning neighborhoods out in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, and over in Jersey, and up in the Bronx and Westchester, and ring doorbells and try to sell these plants to housewives. “If your husband doesn’t show as much interest in you as he used to,” they tell the housewives, “buy one of these plants and sit it in a saucer of water and put it under your bed, if you and your husband sleep in the same bed, and if you don’t, put it under his bed, and leave it there, and you’ll soon notice a change for the better.” They’re terrifying fast-talkers, and after they get inside a house and demonstrate how to sit the plant in water, they offer to tell the woman’s fortune. Usually, that’s as far as they go, but now and then they hit a woman who responds to their superstitious talk and who they can feel in their bones has some money hid away in the house, and they go to work on her and swindle her. They use a swindle called the bajour, the same as the nomad women. I’ll explain this swindle, or confidence game, in a few minutes. The resurrection plant is just a means of getting the door open, and they’ve been using it for this purpose in and around the city for twenty years, to my knowledge. They know what they’re doing – when they hold one up in front of a woman, no matter how bright she is, or suspicious, she usually takes a good look at it and starts asking questions. A couple of months before I left the Department, we apprehended a pair of Boyaschutza who were wanted for a bajour, and they had a hundred and sixty resurrection plants in their possession. After the case was disposed of, I took some of the plants home, and I brought one along tonight for you to see. If you stay in the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad, it won’t be the last one you’ll see.’

  Captain Campion reached into his briefcase and brought out a paper bag. He held the bag over the desk and shook it, and out dropped a dead plant whose stems and leaves were tightly curled into a dusty, mossy, lopsided ball. In size and shape, it roughly resembled a woman’s clenched hand. From it hung a tuft of hairy roots.

  ‘It’s a weed that grows down in the lower parts of Texas, and over in Mexico,’ Captain Campion said. ‘It’s also called Mary’s hand, Our Lady’s rose, and bird’s-nest moss, and it belongs to the genus Selaginella. The reason I know, some years ago I took one out to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and had it identified. According to the nomads, the Boyasch learned about the resurrection plant back in the days they used to travel with circuses and they have some connection down in Texas that keeps them supplied. In dry weather, the resurrection plant tightens up into a ball the same as you see here. If it gets damp, if some dew falls on it, or a little sprinkle of rain, it opens up. Even if it’s dead, it opens up. This one here is as dead as a brickbat, but if you sit it in a saucer of water the roots will absorb the water and the stems will turn from gray to green and slowly uncurl and expand and stiffen up and straighten out.’

  ‘Why don’t we try it?’ asked Detective Kane. There was a glass ashtray on the desk and he picked it up. ‘I could take this out to the water cooler and run some water in it.’

  ‘I’d rather you’d wait until I get through talking,’ Captain Campion said. ‘Please don’t interrupt me now.’

  He opened the bulkiest of his file folders. ‘So much for the Boyasch,’ he said. ‘Now we come to another breed of cat.’ He took off his spectacles and lit a cigarette and leaned back in the swivel chair. ‘When people talk about gypsies,’ he said, ‘it’s usually the nomad coppersmith gypsies they’re talking about. The great majority of the gypsies that frequent New York City are nomads. In fact, the great majority of the gypsies in Canada, the United States, Mexico, and South America are nomads. There doesn’t seem to be any way to find out when they first started coming to the United States – according to immigration statistics and census reports, there’s no such thing as gypsies – but from what I’ve been able to piece together, I’m pretty sure the biggest migrations took place in the late seventies, the eighties, and the nineties. They came from many parts of Europe, but mostly from Russia and Serbia and the countries surrounding Serbia, and it didn’t take them long to get acquainted with the country. Some bands roamed the North, some roamed the South, some roamed the Middle West, a few roamed the West, and some roamed up and down and across and all over. In the early days, in the South and Middle West, the principal occupation of the men was horse trading and horse doctoring, and coppersmith work and tinkering came second. Then the horse business gradually died out, and tinkering came first. It was about the same out West. In the North, in most of the bands, coppersmith work and tinkering always came first. And in all the bands, wherever they roamed, the women told fortunes and swindled and stole. Just about anythi
ng they saw lying around loose, if it could be eaten or worn or sold or swapped or pawned or played with, and if nobody was watching it, and if they could lift it and carry it, they’d steal it. Why I say played with, an old gypsy once told me his favorite plaything when he was a little boy was a doctor’s stethoscope his mother had stolen. And while I’m on the subject, you’ll never understand gypsies until you understand how they feel about stealing. It’s simple: they believe they’re born with the right to steal, and the reason they give, they tell the blasphemous story there was a gypsy in the crowd that followed Jesus up the hill, and on the way this gypsy did his best to steal four nails that the Roman soldiers had brought with them to nail Jesus to the Cross – two for His hands, one for His feet, and one that was extra long for His head or His heart, whichever they decided to drive it through – but the gypsy succeeded in stealing only one, and it was the one that was extra long, and when the soldiers got ready to use it and couldn’t find it they suspected the gypsy and beat him bloody trying to make him tell where he had put it, but he wouldn’t, and while Jesus was dying He spoke to the gypsy from the Cross and said that from then on gypsies had the right to wander the earth and steal.’

  ‘Do they really believe that?’ asked Detective Kane.

  ‘They believe it as much as they believe anything,’ Captain Campion said, ‘and they bring their children up to believe it. They like to tell it; you can’t stop them; they seem to feel they’re slapping you in the face with it. I must’ve heard it fifty times. Now, as I said, coppersmith work and tinkering always came first in most of the bands that roamed the North, and some of these bands became quite prosperous. They followed fairly regular routes through Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. They’d stay a day or two in some places and a week or two in others. The men would repair and re-tin copper utensils and fixtures, mainly for hotels, restaurants, hospitals, bakeries, canneries, laundries, and cloth-dyeing factories, and the women would circulate around and tell fortunes and keep their eyes open. The men picked up jobs that ordinary American metalworkers wouldn’t touch – a dye vat with so many holes eaten in it should’ve been junked, a broken piece of equipment in a contagious-disease hospital, an old restaurant soup kettle so caked with grease they’d have to burn the grease off it with a blowtorch before they could mend it, jobs like that. Then the depression struck, and in a little while there weren’t any jobs that American metalworkers wouldn’t touch. Instead of which, no matter what the job was, they’d fight and scratch each other to get it, let alone leave it to the gypsies. By the end of 1932, in most localities, the money gypsies were able to make from tinkering wasn’t enough to pay for their gasoline, and they began to leave the roads and hole up in tenements in big cities. This demoralized the men, but it didn’t the women. One thing you want to keep in mind about gypsies: it would take ten of the men to make one of the women. The women talked to other women in the tenements about relief, which was just getting going then. After they learned some of the ins and outs of the relief regulations, they took off their good clothes and put on rags, and they hid their gold-coin necklaces, and they told the men to sell the automobiles or stop parking them in the neighborhood, where a relief investigator might see them and notice the licenses on them from other states and put two and two together who they belonged to. Then they went into the relief offices with their children following along behind and broke down and cried and said they were starving to death, and if that didn’t impress the relief officials to the proper extent they screeched and screamed and fell on the floor and fainted and used foul and abusive language and swept papers off desks and stood in doors and wouldn’t let people pass and brought everything in general to a standstill. They pretty soon got their families on relief. And after they had that attended to, they began to go shares with each other and rent stores and open fortune-telling joints – what the old ones call ofisas and the young ones call locations – and right from the start, even with the overhead, most of them made far more than they ever had out on the road. Any period where people are uneasy is good for fortune-tellers. The depression was good for them, and then came the war and things got even better, and then came the A-bomb and the H-bomb and the possibility the whole world may be blown out like a light any moment now, either that or you’ll die of cancer from smoking cigarettes, and things got even better still, the best yet. Nowadays, in most gypsy families, I think I can safely say the women bring in ninety per cent of the money. A few of the young men in the bands around here work as parkers in parking lots – they’re crazy about automobiles and they’re unusually skillful drivers. And a few have become fender-bangers – they canvass garages and get jobs now and then at cut rates hammering dents out of automobile bodies. And a few of the older men, once in a while the spirit moves them, or some dim memory the way things used to be, and they go out with their hammers and tongs and files and soldering irons and try to pick up jobs mending pots and pans for restaurants. But the majority of the men, young and old, they don’t do anything. If it’s unusually nice and sunny, they may go up to the automobile showrooms around Columbus Circle and spend the whole day lifting hoods and kicking tires and comparing prices, but they just sit around home most of the time and stare at each other and drink tea and spit on the floor and grumble. The main thing they grumble about is the women. They look down on the women, and they beat and bang them around. Of course, some of the women know how to return the compliment. A gypsy woman, the situation she’s in, she’s in between her husband and the police. If she becomes too cautious and lets chances go by, her husband beats her, and if she takes chances and gets arrested, then he really beats her. And as far as gratitude, if she pulls off a bajour running into the thousands, the way her husband feels about it, it’s only what she should do, the same as she should wash the dishes, but if he brings in a few dollars, that’s a different matter; that shows brains. I heard a gypsy talking one day whose wife promises women who come into her ofisa it’ll cost them only fifty cents to have their fortunes told and she’s so slick they hardly ever get out without paying her anywhere from a couple of dollars to fifteen or twenty, and she’s made several big bajours; she’s made at least one ten-thousand-dollar bajour. This gypsy was drunk, and he was bragging, but he wasn’t by any means bragging about his wife, he was bragging about himself. ‘When it comes to stealing,’ he said, ‘I believe in letting the women do it, but if I happen to feel like it, I can go into any grocery store in the United States and stand around and get in the way and ask the price of this and the price of that, and before you know it four or five cans of sardines will jump into my pockets.’

  ‘The fundamental thing that identifies the nomad gypsies is the way the women dress. They wear head scarves, and loose, low-cut blouses, and long, full, flashy skirts. That’s their basic outfit, and if one of them took it in her head to dress some other way, she’d soon regret it. The other women would call her a kurwa, a whore, and spit at her; I’ve known it to happen. That is, of course, unless she was doing it temporarily to evade the police or confuse a victim. They buy the brightest pieces of cloth they can find for their head scarves; these scarves are what the Boyaschutza are referring to when they call the nomad women rag-heads. They take a lot of pride in their skirts. They make them themselves, and they sometimes use very expensive material, and they wear old ones underneath new ones for petticoats. When they’re dressed up, nine out of ten wear Spanish shawls, or that’s what they were called when I was young and they were quite the style – the kind with big red roses all over them, red or yellow, and a row of tassels on each end. There must be a factory somewhere that turns them out especially for gypsies. They generally wear cheap fur coats. They seldom wear stockings. They wear the highest-heeled shoes they can find, and I’ve seen them many a time knocking around the streets in broad daylight in old scuffed-up gold or silver evening slippers. When it comes to jewelry, jewelry is their be-all and end-all, the breath of life, and I’ve seen everything
on them from dime-store junk to a stolen diamond lavaliere worth fifteen thousand dollars, but what they like best is gypsy jewelry – gold coins rigged to gold chains and worn as necklaces and bracelets and earrings. When I first started working on gypsies, the women wore quite a few foreign coins, some old, some new, and I’d see certain coins over and over, such as an Austrian four-ducat with Emperor Franz Josef’s head on it that many of them used for earrings – it’s a big coin but unusually thin and light. However, what I mostly saw were United States gold coins. For necklaces, they used eagles and double eagles – that is, ten- and twenty-dollar gold pieces. For bracelets and earrings, they used quarter eagles and half eagles – that is, two-fifty and five-dollar gold pieces. Then, in 1933, the government ordered everybody to exchange their domestic gold money for silver or paper, and what I think happened, I think the gypsies found some way to swap the bulk of their United States gold coins for Mexican gold coins, because ever since then that’s mainly what I’ve seen the women wearing. They wear them and they hoard them. It isn’t a bit unusual for women detectives or police matrons searching gypsy women to find dozens of Mexican gold coins sewed up in tucks running around the insides of their skirts. Every gypsy woman in the country, if she’s got anything at all, she’s got a few, and if she’s a smart old woman who’s made some big bajours in her time, she’s liable to have a trunkful. There’s no law against owning them, and the gold in them is purer even than the gold in United States gold coins, and you can pawn them anywhere or take them to a money dealer and get a good price. They come in several denominations, and the most popular among the gypsies is the fifty pesos. It’s thick and heavy – it’s worth sixty dollars in New York City at present – and it’s just right for necklaces. I looked in on a gypsy wedding in a hall on the lower East Side one night last summer – Beethoven Hall, on East Fifth Street – and I observed a woman who was wearing three necklaces of fifty-pesos coins. She had nineteen on the top necklace, and twenty-one on the middle one, and twenty-three on the bottom one, and they overlapped on her bosom. She was a big, stout woman and she had some wine in her and it was hot in the hall and she was breathing heavily, and every time her bosom rose and fell the gold coins shifted their positions and glinted and gleamed.’