Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  Mr Flood finishes feeding his gulls around nine o’clock. Then he is ready for his first drink of the day. He is opposed to drinking alone – he says it leads to the mumbles – so he proceeds along South Street, hunting for company. He often goes to the freshwater branch of the market, in Peck Slip, and invites Mrs Birdy Treppel, a veteran fishwife, to step into a bar and grill near her stand and have one. ‘I do need a little something,’ she usually says, ‘to thaw me out.’ Mr Flood and Mrs Treppel are old friends. She fascinates him because she is always cold. Mrs Treppel handles a variety of fresh-water fish, including carp, whitefish, pike, buffaloes, and red horses, and her stand, a three-bin affair partly on the sidewalk under a tarpaulin shelter and partly in the gutter, is in Peck Slip, just below Water Street, right in the path of the wind from the harbor. ‘I am beautifully situated,’ she says, ‘on the corner of Influenza Street and Pneumonia Slip.’ In the wintertime, Mrs Treppel lets an assistant handle the bulk of her trade, while she keeps a fire jumping in an old oil drum beside her stand, feeding it with barrel staves and discarded fish boxes. She says that it doesn’t do much good. She hovers near the fire, shivering, with her arms in her apron, which she rolls up and uses as a muff. She has a nervous habit of hopping up and down and stamping her feet. She does this in the heat of summer as well as in the winter; she can’t seem to stop. She appears to be unusually corpulent, but she says that this is misleading. ‘I’m really a thin little thing, nothing but skin and bones,’ she says, ‘but I got on twelve layers of clothes – thirteen, counting my shimmy. If you was to see me undressed, you wouldn’t know me.’ One morning I was going through the market with Mr Flood. We paused beside Mrs Treppel’s fire and he said, ‘Birdy, tell the man how cold it gets in Peck Slip.’ ‘Well, son, I tell you,’ she said, hopping up and down as she talked, ‘if you went up to the North Pole in the dead of December and stripped to the drawers and picked out the biggest iceberg up there and dug a hole right down to the heart of it and crawled in that hole and put a handful of snow under each arm and sat on a block of ice and et a dish of ice cream, why, you wouldn’t be nowhere near as cold as you’d be in Peck Slip in a sheepskin coat with a box fire in the gutter.’

  Another fish-market notable with whom Mr Flood occasionally takes a first-today drink is Mr Ah Got Um, a high-spirited Savannah Negro who operates a retail fish store on Lenox Avenue in Harlem and who attends the market two mornings a week to do his buying. If he feels good, he chants as he walks through the stalls:

  Ah got pompanos!

  Ah got buffaloes!

  Ah got these!

  Ah got those!

  Ah got um!

  Ah got um!

  Ah’m the ah-got-um man!

  Around eleven o’clock, Mr Flood shows up for lunch at Sloppy Louie’s. The last time I visited him, we had lunch together. He had decided on a blue-black sea bass that day, and while the chef was broiling it we sat at a table up front, talking. A young fishmonger in an Army uniform, on furlough and looking up his colleagues in the market, came in. Mr Flood hadn’t seen him in a year or so. ‘Why, hello, Pop,’ the soldier said. ‘Are you still alive?’ Mr Flood’s face fell. ‘Look here, son,’ he said. ‘That’s a rather personal question.’ He became gloomy and didn’t say anything for a while. When the chef brought his fish in, however, he started talking again. ‘You’re damned right I’m still alive,’ he said, opening his fish and deftly removing its spine and fin bones. ‘Fact of the matter is, I feel the best I’ve felt in years. I et four dozen oysters last night and I felt so good I almost had an oyster fit.’ He stared at me for a moment. ‘Did you ever see anybody have an oyster fit?’ he asked.

  ‘No, sir,’ I said.

  ‘My boy,’ Mr Flood said, ‘people who are unaccustomed to oysters sometimes behave real queer after putting away a few dozen. I’ve witnessed many seizures of this nature. I’ll tell you about one. My daughter Louise lives up in South Norwalk, Connecticut, and I visit her once a year, the first week in September, when the oysters come back in season. I’ve got a good friend in South Norwalk, Mr Drew Radel, president of the Andrew Radel Oyster Company. Drew owns twenty-two thousand acres of oyster beds in the Sound and he produces the biggest oyster in the United States, the Robbins Island. Some get as big as omelettes. His main dock is located on the Norwalk River, and when I’m visiting my daughter I walk down there every day and Drew and I sit around and talk and eat oysters.

  ‘Well, back in September, 1934, during the depression, Drew and I were on the dock, talking, and up walked three fellows said they were from Brooklyn. They took off their hats and asked for deckhand jobs on one of Drew’s dredge boats. They were weevily fellows, pale, stoop-shouldered, and clerky-looking, three runts, no life in them at all. I don’t believe a one of them had cracked a smile in months. Drew took pity on them and hired them. And before they went out to bring in a load of oysters, he took the captain aside and told him to let those Brooklyn boys eat all the oysters they could hold as soon as the dredge got out on the beds. ‘Let them stuff themselves,’ Drew said. ‘It might possibly put some life into them.’

  ‘Well, when the dredge came back the first time, I noticed that those Brooklyn boys were whistling. When it came back the second time, I noticed that they were singing. Late in the afternoon, Drew and I were sitting in his office on the dock when the dredge came back the third time. Shortly after it tied up, I heard a hullabaloo on the dock and I went to the window. Those Brooklyn boys were laughing and shouting and wrestling and throwing each other’s hats in the water. They were flinging themselves head over heels. The air was full of Brooklyn boys. One picked up a tin bucket and began to bang on it with a stick – a-rumpatiddy-rumpatiddy-rump-a-tump. He marched up the dock, drumming on the bucket and yodelling, stepping high, a regular one-man band. Another one turned a double somerset and stood on his head right on the edge of the dock. He got up, shook himself, and began to sing a song called “Tiptoe Through the Tulips with Me.” “Uh-oh!” I said to Drew. “The oysters have caught up with them.”

  ‘In a little while they came trooping into Drew’s office, whistling. Drew was dictating an important letter and he frowned at them. “Boys,” he said, “what in the hell do you want in here?” One of them, the littlest, snickered and said, “We want to throw you off the dock.” “At the present moment,” Drew said, “I’m far too busy. You’ll have to excuse me.” “Well, then,” this fellow said, “we’ll box you.” Drew told them he didn’t have time right then to do any boxing, and this fellow said, “In that case, we’ll go up the street and find somebody else to box. Will that be all right?” “Why, yes indeed,” Drew said, “that’ll be all right.” In about half an hour the phone rang and I answered it. It was the sergeant at the police station in South Norwalk, and he said he’d just locked up two men who claimed they worked for the Radel Company. “That’s funny,” I said. “There should be three of them.” “Hold the phone a minute,” the sergeant said. “There’s a dreadful racket out in the street.” I held the phone and presently the sergeant came back. “Everything’s O.K.,” he said. “They’re bringing the third man in now, and it’s taking four patrolmen, three detectives, and a couple of civilians to do it.”’

  Mr Flood cackled. ‘Drew and I were so proud of those Brooklyn boys,’ he said, ‘we went right over and bailed them out.’

  (1944)

  The Black Clams

  ONE NOVEMBER MORNING I got a letter from Mr Flood, inviting me to come down to the Hartford House and help him eat a bushel of black clams. ‘Hope this finds you well and enjoying life to the full,’ he wrote. ‘I am well, can’t complain. On Friday the next I’ll have something down here I want to show you, something highly unusual in the eating line, a bushel of black clams, the mysterious Arctica islandica. It’s also known as the ocean, or deep-sea, quahog. I doubt you ever even heard of the beast. Until here lately only a few people in the world had seen one, let alone eaten one. Now and then a fisherman would find a nest of empty black clam shells in th
e belly of a cod or a haddock (these fishes root them off the bottom of the ocean and swallow them whole and naturally the shells don’t digest), and every year or so along certain stretches of the New England coast a hurricane or a freaky storm with an onshore wind would tear a small quantity off the bottom somewhere and wash them ashore. A few would be undamaged, and people who picked these up and ate them always spoke highly of their flavor, better than bay quahogs, or steamers, or skimmers, or razor-shells, better than cockles, or winkles, or scallops, or whelks, better than mussels, better than most oysters you get nowadays. All up and down the coast from Boston to Sheepshead Bay the oystermen and clammers tried their best for generations to find out where the black clams come from. They dredged here and they dredged there, but they couldn’t locate a bed anywhere at all. It was one of the secrets of the old briny. Now at last they have succeeded. In fact, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have just discovered thirteen beds out in the open ocean off Point Judith, Rhode Island. As far as the financial end is concerned, it is like they brought in an oil well. The beds are whoppers. One bed is about as big as R.I. itself, tons of clams, mountains of clams, millions upon millions, untold boatloads, a bellyful of clams for EVERYBODY, glory be to God. One of the fishmongers down here got hold of some last week and we ate them on the half shell. No fault to find. A friend of mine in Warren, R.I., is going to get me a bushel of them on Thursday the next and put them on The Round-Up, the fish train that the N.Y., New Haven & H. runs down five nights a week from Boston. I will pick them up in the market Friday A.M. Come down around noon and meet me in the lobby of the H. H. and we will eat some clams and drink some whiskey and tell some lies and sing the One-eyed Riley. I remain, yrs. very truly, H. G. Flood.’

  I wrote Mr Flood that I would meet him at noon on Friday. I showed up in the combined lobby, barroom, and dining room of the Hartford exactly at noon on that day, but he wasn’t around. Three of the old men who live in the hotel were sitting on stools at one end of the bar. They had a map spread out and they were hunched over it, each with pencil, probably dividing up Europe to suit themselves. I knew one of them, to speak to, Mr P. J. Mooney, who used to be part owner of a pair of big harbor tugs, the Nora T. and the Linda Lane. He is a raucous old man with mournful eyes and a paunch so enormous that he says it embarrasses him. (Mr Flood once told me that Mr Mooney, who is a wrestling fan, has a recurring nightmare in which he becomes separated from his paunch, which assumes the shape of a headless wrestler and advances on him. They square off and then they lunge at each other and wrestle for what seems like hours to Mr Mooney. ‘Some nights the paunch throws P. J.,’ Mr Flood said, ‘and some nights P. J. throws the paunch. I told P. J. he had a gold mine there. “Put that match on in Madison Square Garden,” I said to him, “and you’ll go down in history, the both of you. Anyway,” I said, “you shouldn’t fret so much about that paunch. In days to come, when you’re too old and feeble to get about at all, it’ll keep you company.”’) Gus Trein, the manager of the Hartford, was behind the bar, spelling the regular bartender, and he beckoned for me to come over. He seemed worried.

  ‘Mr Flood telephoned just now,’ Mr Trein said, ‘and asked me to tell you to step over to Tom Maggiani’s, the ship chandler on Dover Street. He’s waiting for you over there. What in the world is he up to now?’

  ‘All I know,’ I said, ‘he invited me to come down and eat some black clams.’

  Mr Trein looked at me suspiciously. ‘Some what did you say?’ he asked.

  ‘Some black clams,’ I said. ‘They discovered some black clams up in Rhode Island, and Mr Flood ordered a bushel.’

  Mr Trein glanced knowingly at Mr Mooney and said, ‘Did you hear that, P. J.?’ Mr Mooney nodded, and then he tapped his forehead with his index finger and described a circle in the air. I became uneasy. ‘How is Mr Flood?’ I asked.

  Mr Trein frowned. ‘To tell you the God’s green truth,’ he said, ‘I’m worried about him. He acted real peculiar this morning, didn’t he, P. J.?’

  ‘He did,’ said Mr Mooney. ‘He did, indeed. Black clams, be Jesus! That’s another delusion. The old boy’s out of his head, no doubt about it. When he came downstairs this morning, I was sitting over there reading the paper and I said to him, “Good morning, Old Man Flood. How you feeling? You look a bit pale.” And he stood and stared at me like he didn’t recognize me, like he was deathly afraid of me, and he shouted out, “Shut up, Old Scratch!” Then he commenced to stomp around the lobby and shake his fist and carry on. “You got to put a stop to it!” he yelled. “Coffins! Undertakers! Hearses! Funeral parlors! Cemeteries! Woodlawn! Cypress Hills! Fresh Pond Crematory! Calvary! Green-Wood! It starts the day off wrong! It’s more than a man can stand!” That’s what he yelled, word for word. Then he got ahold of himself and his mind quit wandering and he looked me straight in the eye and cursed me for a damned old pot-gutted fool. “I’d be much obliged if you’d keep your trap shut when I come down in the morning, P. J.,” he said to me, “you damned old pot-gutted fool.” Then he walked about eight or nine feet out of his way and deliberately kicked a chair. I started to inquire what in hell was the matter, but he stomped right past me and went out the side door, mumbling to himself.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Mr Trein, ‘he just probably got up on the wrong side. Either that or a hangover.’

  Mr Mooney snorted. ‘No, no, no, Gus,’ he said. ‘I hate to say this, but Old Man Flood’s not long for this world. It’s his time to go. I’ve had my eye on him lately. He’s failing, the poor man. He’s failing fast. He’ll drop off any day now.’

  I was taken aback by this conversation. I decided that Mr Flood’s gnawing fear of the hereafter had got the best of him and I made up my mind, with misgivings, that I would try to persuade him to go with me and have a talk with a doctor I know at Beekman Hospital, which is at Beekman and Water, on the rim of the fish-market district. I said goodbye to Mr Trein and Mr Mooney and started over to Maggiani’s. I was quite depressed.

  Maggiani’s is a fishing-boat chandlery. There are sixteen boats – ground-fish draggers and trawlers and sea-scallop dredges – that regularly make ten-day voyages from the Fulton Market piers to the banks in the Gulf of Maine, and Maggiani’s ‘grubs’ seven of them; that is, it equips them with meat, groceries, and galley gear. The fishermen, most of whom are Scandinavians or Newfoundlanders, are clannish; they don’t mix much with the fishmongers and Maggiani’s is their favorite hangout in the market. It is also one of Mr Flood’s favorite hangouts. He sometimes behaves as if Maggiani had him on the payroll; he frequently answers the telephone and on busy days he pitches in and helps make up orders. It is hidden away in the rear half of the ground floor of a converted Revolutionary-period dwelling on Dover Street, a crooked alley that runs beneath the Brooklyn Bridge from Franklin Square to the river. This building is of a type that old-time Manhattan real-estate men call a humpback; it is box-square and three stories high, its tar-papered roof is as steep as an inverted V, it is made of salmon-colored bricks, and it looks proud and noble, ten times nobler than the Chrysler Building. There are several fine humpbacks in the market, a district that contains the oldest and the most patched-up commercial buildings in the city. Maggiani’s is poorly illuminated, it is as cool as a cellar in summer and as warm as a kitchen in winter, it smells garlicky, and it is a pleasant place in which to sit and doze. Up front, surrounded by a collection of slat-back chairs and up-ended boxes, is an oblong coal stove with a cooking hob on it. Nearby is a deal table on which are some packs of cards, an accumulation of back numbers of the Fishing Gazette, and a greasy World Almanac, edition of 1936. There is a big brass spittoon. There is a cat hole in the door, and there are usually two or three burly fish-house cats roving about. Hanging on the walls are a lithograph of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a rusty swordfish harpoon, a photograph of the officers of the Fisherman’s Union of the Atlantic, a finger-smudged Coast and Geodetic chart of the Nantucket Shoals, an oar with a mermaid crudely carved on the blade,
and a sign which says, ‘LAUGH AND THE WORLD LAUGHS WITH YOU, WEEP AND YOU WEEP ALONE.’ In the middle of the tile floor, resting on its side and dominating the room, is a hogshead of molasses with ‘EXTRA FANCY BARBADOS’ stencilled on the spigot end; fishing-boat cooks take along several gallons of high-grade molasses every voyage for flapjacks and for beans and brown bread. On the days the boats are in, Maggiani’s is packed. On such days, Tommaso Maggiani, the proprietor, a Palermitano, puts complimentary platters of cheese, sliced onions, and salami under fly screens on the counter, and he keeps a pot of coffee on the hob, and the loafing fishermen get up from their seats around the stove, yawn, and fix themselves snacks – what they call ‘mug-ups’ – whenever the spirit moves them.

  Mr Flood was in Maggiani’s, standing with his back to the stove. He and Mr Maggiani, who was snoring in a swivel chair with his heels on his roll-top desk, were the only people in the place. As soon as I got a good look at Mr Flood, I felt relieved. His eyes were alert, his face was ruddy, his shoulders were erect, he was smoking a big cigar, and he shook hands vigorously. As usual, like a boss fishmonger, he had on rubber boots and a stiff straw hat with holes cut in it, and over his blue serge suit he wore a full-length white apron. He had two loaves of Italian bread, wrapped in a piece of newspaper, under his left arm. I asked him how he felt.