Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  Some Calypsonians sing in a patois which contains English, Spanish, French, and Hindu words and idioms, but the majority sing in English with a peculiarly distorted British accent; in their mouths ‘parrot’ becomes ‘pair-ott,’ ‘temperament’ becomes ‘tem-pair-a-mint,’ and ‘hat’ becomes ‘hot.’ They are fond of big words and their conversation is flamboyant. The Lion, for example, does not say ‘Hello’; he says, ‘I embrace the rotundity of conventionality and wish you good day.’ Many Calypso songs are considered obscene or subversive by the British colonial government; sometimes it bans a song and jails the singer. Just before the war, for what it said was a diplomatic reason, the government banned an arrogant Calypso called ‘Hitler Demands,’ in which the Growler sang, ‘Hitler, me lad, take things easily, otherwise we sure to run you out of Germany.’ By ‘we,’ the Growler meant the British Empire.

  The most prolific of the Calypsonians is a Negro who calls himself Wilmoth Houdini. A few years ago he left Trinidad and worked his way to New York as a greaser on a freighter. Occasionally he goes back for a long visit, making expenses by singing in Port-of-Spain movie theatres under the billing of ‘The Calypso King of New York,’ but most of the time he lives in a furnished room on West 114th Street, in lower Harlem, where there is a large settlement of immigrants from Trinidad. His passport name is Edgar Leon Sinclair; in Harlem he is called Mr Houdini. He took the name from a movie serial he saw in 1916 in which Houdini, the magician, was featured. He was the first Calypsonian to make recordings. He has turned out thousands of songs, and more than six hundred of them have been put on records. He is the author of many classics. They include ‘Old Man You Too Old, You Too Bold, in Fact You Too Cold,’ ‘I Like Bananas Because They Have No Bones,’ ‘Keep Your Money, Hot Daddy,’ and ‘Drunk and Disorderly.’ Houdini makes public appearances at ‘picnics’ held in Harlem halls by an organization of convivial, homesick West Indians called the Trinidad Carnival Committee. He is the moving spirit of the Committee; other members are the manager of a beauty parlor, an ex-alderman, and a dentist. In Harlem there are two good hot West Indian bands, the Caribbean Serenaders and the Krazy Kats, and musicians selected from these bands are hired to supply the music at picnics. The Committee sends out folders bearing this proclamation: ‘Let us Dine and Dance! People talk about Dance? Mister, look Dance! Madam, look Dance!’

  One night I went to one of the Committee’s picnics with Mr Ralph Perez, a Puerto Rican of Spanish descent who works in the export department of Decca Records, Inc. He has been in the record business nearly twenty years, building up catalogues of Latin-American, Mexican, and West Indian music for several companies. Decca sends him to Port-of-Spain once each year. He arrives just before the pre-Lenten carnival, when Calypsonians set up palm-thatched ‘tents’ in vacant lots and sing the pick of their newest songs. He rents a house, makes it soundproof, sobers up a few singers, and records a year’s supply of Calypso.

  The picnic Mr Perez took me to was held in a long, narrow hall on the third floor of a seedy building on Lenox Avenue, just below 116th Street. When we arrived, at ten o’clock, only about fifty people were there. ‘Picnics are apt to start late and wind up at the break of day,’ Mr Perez said. Against one wall there was a row of slat-backed chairs. A number of stout, middle-aged women were sitting on these chairs, smoking cigarettes and gossiping. A space had been roped off for the band. Beyond this space, in the far corner of the room, there was a short bar and five tables covered with white oilcloth. At these tables sat young Negro and Creole women in evening dresses, drinking. I saw one take a pint of whiskey out of her handbag. She poured some of the whiskey in a paper cup, drank it straight, and put the bottle back in her handbag. ‘They’re waiting for their menfolks to arrive,’ Mr Perez said. ‘The men in this neighborhood work late, most of them. The men you’ll see here tonight will be elevator operators, barbers, hotel workers, musicians, and a few professional people.’ We went over and stood at the bar, which was tended by a buxom, smiling woman. Mr Perez said she was Mrs Lynch, a Committee member and manager of Isabel’s Salon, a Harlem beauty parlor. Assisted by two solemn, pretty children, her daughters, Mrs Lynch was transferring bottles of beer and pop to a washtub which was half full of cracked ice. Back of the bar was a sign: ‘PATTIES AND PAYLOU SERVED FREE AT THE BAR AT INTERMISSION. DRINKS WILL BE SOLD AT MODERATE PRICES.’ Mr Perez said the favorite drink at a picnic is rye mixed with orange pop. ‘Most people bring their own whiskey,’ he said. When Mrs Lynch finished putting the bottles on ice, she said, ‘I told Houdini to run out and get the whiskey we going to sell here tonight, and he’s sure taking his time.’ Mrs Lynch had white strings hanging from the lobes of her ears, and I asked her what they signified. ‘Just dental floss,’ she said. ‘I had my ears pierced for earrings, and the doc told me to keep the pierces open with floss. It may look unusual, but it don’t hurt.’ I heard some noise on the stairs, and then the band arrived. It was made up of Gregory Felix and three members of his Krazy Kat band – a drummer, a violinist, and a piano-player. The piano-player was a girl named Wilhelmina Gale. ‘I’m the clarinet,’ said Mr Felix, ‘and Houdini’s going to play the shakers and the gin bottle. Consequently, we got a five-piece band.’ Miss Gale went to the upright piano and removed its front and top boards. Then, with no preliminaries at all, she and the others took their places and began playing a rumba. Almost immediately, as if by signal, people started coming up the stairs in droves. Soon there were more than two hundred Negroes in the little hall.

  After the band had knocked off a couple of rumbas, a lean, gloomy-eyed man came up the stairs. There was a yellow rose in the lapel of his camel’s-hair topcoat. Under one arm he had a bulky package, and under the other was a big roasting pan. The lid of the pan was tied on with a piece of heavy cord. ‘That’s Houdini,’ Mr Perez said. As Houdini walked jauntily past the band, he said, ‘I got whiskey and paylou, me lads.’ Mr Perez said that paylou is joints of fowl cooked with rice and onions. (In Charleston it is spelled ‘pilau.’) Houdini gave the pan of paylou to Mrs Lynch. Mr Perez introduced me to Houdini, and he said, ‘Please to make your acquaintance. Let’s have a drink.’ He tore open his package and placed five quarts of whiskey on the bar. Then he went away for a moment and returned with a jug of a heavy, milky liquid. ‘Home-brewed ginger beer,’ he said. ‘This the drink that dominates alcohol. Whiskey can go to your feet when you got ginger beer inside you, but it can’t go to your head because it’s dominated.’ He poured some ginger beer into a paper cup and laced it heavily with rye. He drank it in one gulp. Then he said, ‘Where me shakers?’ Mrs Lynch handed him a pair of maracas, which are gourds with shot inside. ‘First song’s going to be “Daddy, Turn on the Light,”’ he said. He went inside the band enclosure, stood up on a chair, and yelled, ‘Now then, me lads!’ The band livened up when he began shaking the maracas. Presently the hall was seething with Lindy-hop, Susy-Q, and shim-sham-shimmy dancers, and Houdini stuffed the maracas in the pockets of his jacket and picked up a megaphone. The dancers seemed to pay no attention as he sang, but the old women sitting stiffly on the slat-backs along the wall listened attentively with big smiles on their faces. The first verse was:

  Please turn on the light, Dad-dee.

  Why you like to bite?

  Honey, don’t squeeze me so tight.

  Act so you mean to kill me tonight.

  The song went on and on. It ended this way:

  This is what I want you to know.

  It is indeed inescapably so.

  Daddy, don’t treat me like that,

  You got to le’ me go, le’ me shake meself.

  By did de-dup, bick bick bickety buck,

  Le’ me shake meself!

  When the song was finished, Houdini jumped off the chair and hurried to the bar. ‘Where me ginger beer?’ he asked. Mrs Lynch handed him the jug and he mixed drinks for the band. Men and women were standing three deep at the bar. Mrs Lynch was kept busy measuring out rye at fifteen cents a jigger. Some held a bottle of
orange pop in one hand and a jigger of rye in the other, following a gulp of rye with a long swallow of pop. A laughing, half-drunk girl got up on one of the tables opposite the bar and commenced to tap-dance. The table tilted and she screamed and leaped to the floor, ripping her dress in the rear. An older woman, evidently her mother, rushed to the girl and examined her dress. ‘Why don’t you behave yourself, Miss Wriggle-Tail?’ she said. ‘Now you’ve ruined your dress.’ ‘Oh, I don’t care,’ the girl replied. ‘It was rump-sprung anyway.’ Houdini went behind the bar and got a spoon and a square green gin bottle. He showed the bottle to me. ‘I brought her from Trinidad,’ he said. ‘I beat out many a tune on her. I can make her palpitate. I call her Ol’ Square Face.’ The bottle was a third full of water. The band struck up another rumba – whatever it played sounded like a rumba – and Houdini returned to the enclosure and got up on his chair. He began a rhythmic, tantalizing beat on the bottle with the spoon. Soon he was making more noise than all the other musicians. After a while, abruptly, he began to sing:

  I look for miser-ee

  Wherever I meet Johnnie.

  People, people, be sorry to see

  The grave for Johnnie, the gallows for me.

  The old women along the wall began to smile again. ‘The name of this one is “Johnnie Take My Wife,”’ Mr Perez said.

  This Mr Johnnie must be ver-ee nice,

  For me wife called Johnnie in her sleep last night.

  But from today I intend to go

  On a hunt for Mr Johnnie, that gigolo.

  I went in the house to get me gun,

  Me wife seen me coming and she starts to run.

  But let me tell you where I lose me head:

  Mr Johnnie was hiding underneath the bed.

  Johnnie, you should never do a t’ing like that,

  To stab Papa Houdini in the back.

  The judge and jury going to see me face,

  For the thing going to end in a murder case.

  Houdini’s next number was also about unhappy love. It was excessively sentimental. At intervals he would quit singing and speak in an unknown tongue, ‘Bick bick bickety bong bong de dup.’ The chorus went, ‘But I’m sure you will pay for me love some good day, that is all what I have got to say.’ Only the old women along the wall listened to him. The men and women on the crowded dance floor minded their own business. Occasionally one of the expertly wanton dancers would shudder and let out a loud moan, and then all the others would laugh uproariously and scream, ‘Hold tight! Hold tight!’ or ‘Peace, sister!’ Mr Perez looked at the sweating dancers and said, ‘There’s a mixture of bloods in Trinidad. There’s French, Spanish, Carib, Negro, Hindu, and Chinese. You can see it reflected in the faces here. You can see Hindu in the face of that big rumba-dancer. There are thousands of Hindus in Trinidad. The girl with him is a Creole.’ I looked at the Creole. Her face was lovely. She reminded me of Dolores Del Rio. Presently Houdini got tired and stepped off the chair. Mr Perez asked him to sit with us and have a drink. He brought his jug of ginger beer to the table. I asked him how he became a Calypso singer, and he began to talk smoothly and rapidly, almost like a public speaker.

  ‘I was inspired in 1916,’ he said. ‘Before that, I was just nobody. In the year 1916 a band were organized in Port-of-Spain by a distinguished girl named Maggie Otis. She was Queen of the band. I was King. It was called the African Millionaires. It had twenty-four men and girls. The men wore striped green silk shirts, flannel pants, and white shoes, and each had strung to him a camera, a stuffed crocodile, or a pair of field glasses. That was to ape the rich tourists who come to Trinidad. The girls dressed in a manner likewise. At Mardi Gras, which falls on the two days before Lent, the big stores and companies in Port-of-Spain give prizes of rum and money to the Calypsonian who improvises the best song about their merchandise. In 1916, with the African Millionaires in back of me, I entered the advertising competitions and won seven in one day, singing extemporaneously against men like the Senior Inventor and the Lord Executor. I collected the big prize from the Angostura Bitters people and the big prize from the Royal Extra Stout brewery people, and all like that. In those competitions you have to improvise a song on the spur of the moment, and it has to be in perfect time with the band. You must be inspired to do so.

  ‘That night, in a tent, I had a war with some old Calypsonians. A tent is a bamboo shack with a palm roof. The Calypsonians sing in them during carnival and charge admission. A war is where three Calypsonians stand up on the platform in a tent and improvise in verse. One man begins in verse, telling about the ugly faces and impure morals of the other two. Then the next man picks up the song and proceeds with it. On and on it goes. If you falter when it comes your turn, you don’t dare call yourself a Calypsonian. Most war songs are made up of insults. You give out your insults, and then the next man insults you. The man who gives out the biggest insults is the winner. I was so insulting in my first war the other men congratulated me. Since then I maintain my prestige and integrity as Houdini the Calypsonian. I got a brain that ticks like a clock. I can sing at any moment on any matter. If you say to me, “Sing a song about that gentleman over there,” I swallow once and do so.’

  The lovely Creole came over to our table. She put a hand on Houdini’s head and said, ‘Quit beating your gums together, Papa Houdini, and help me out with a drink.’ Houdini laughed and said, ‘The greatest pleasure, Madam!’ He poured her a drink; she kissed him and walked away.

  ‘Excuse the interruption,’ said Houdini, following the girl with his eyes. ‘As I say, I am a true Calypsonian, the only one in this country. Of course, I have to go back to Trinidad to renew me inspiration. It is like a door that has been shut a long time. The hinge get rusty. But the minute the rust fall off the hinge, the door come back supple again. I have to go back to Trinidad to drop off the rust on me. I have to go back and eat some calaloo. That’s bluecrab soup. It’s Sunday soup. I have to go back and drink some gin juleps. That’s green–coconut water and gin. That builds up me vitamin and contributes to me inspiration. I tell you a most peculiar thing about me. I am born in Brooklyn. The year of 1902. Father was a steward, and the family were living in Brooklyn when I came. Of course, we return to Trinidad when I was two. I come from a wandering family.

  ‘Houdini, come here!’ Mrs Lynch shouted.

  ‘I be there in a minute,’ Houdini called. Then he took another drink and resumed the conversation. ‘I tell you,’ he said, ‘the thing I don’t comprehend is why some big night club doesn’t hire me to sing Calypso in it. It would be remarkable. It would be a rage. That will happen sooner or late. Whiskey don’t murder me, Madison Square Garden is where I wind up.

  ‘I am now in possession of a numerous amount of new compositions. They come to me at all hours, day and night. Last night I went to the Apollo Theatre and I ran home in the drizzling rain. So I decide to take a bath to keep off a cold. I was in the tub and a Calypso come to me. I beat on the side of the tub with me fingernails to get the tune. The name turned out to be “From the Day of Birth I Been Told I Got Rhythm in My Soul.” Me trunk is so full of compositions I got no room for me suits. Pretty soon I think I make some new records. I used to get paid fifty dollars per record for me and the musicians, and a royalty of a penny per record. The royalties running thin, and I think I make some new ones. I am favorably known for suggestive Calypso, but I am a true Catholic and I have made many shouting Calypsos of a religious nature. One is a carol. It starts off like this: “The Blessed Virgin had a baby boy. The baby came from the Kingdom and the name of the baby was Jesus.”’

  He was interrupted again.

  ‘You got to come help with the paylou!’ Mrs Lynch shouted. ‘It’s intermission!’

  ‘Everybody depend on me,’ Houdini said, getting up. ‘After a picnic I go to bed for a week.’

  He hurried to the bar and pulled the strands of cord off the roasting pan. He took off the lid and began dishing out the paylou, placing mounds of rice and joints of chicken
on paper plates. Mrs Lynch passed out the patties. They were small, herb-seasoned meat pies, wrapped in wax paper. Pretty soon Houdini sent a man to Mrs Lynch’s apartment for two more pans of paylou and patties. Each person who could show the stub of a fifty-cent admission ticket got a plate of paylou from Houdini and a patty from Mrs Lynch. ‘I made those patties,’ Houdini said. ‘They got my signature on them.’ The people ate standing up. Presently the floor around the bar was strewn with paper plates and forks and empty pint bottles. An aged woman sat on a chair in a corner, peacefully sleeping with her mouth open, in the midst of the hubbub. ‘She sure did a good job of passing out,’ Houdini said. ‘If she don’t wake up, she’s going to miss out on the paylou.’ He went over and shook her awake and placed a plate of paylou on her lap. She blinked blearily and said, ‘I thank you. Now fetch me a fork.’ Intermission was over at two-thirty. Then the band went back to work. At three o’clock, Mr Perez and I said goodbye to Mrs Lynch and Houdini. After I turned to go downstairs, I looked back and saw Houdini climb up on his chair. He began beating out a tune on Ol’ Square Face, the green gin bottle, and singing a Calypso called, Mr Perez said, ‘Tiger Tom Kill Tiger Cat, Damblay Santapie and Rat.’ I asked him what the title meant. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Something to do with a woman, I guess.’