My Ears Are Bent

by Joseph Mitchell

  Some of the beds in the ward had sideboards on them so the men would not fall to the floor. They have no control over themselves. Some are able to make reed baskets. They have a room at the end of the corridor in which they sit and make the baskets. Outside the leaves on the maples in the eighteen acres of hospital grounds were yellow and red, and on Kingsbridge Road kids were throwing a football about and yelling, and on the blue Hudson two young men were rowing a boat, and inside, huddled around the radiators, five middle-aged men whose nerves had been blasted out of coordination by screaming shells were struggling with reed baskets. It takes them hours to do the work a child can do in no time. It made one furious watching them struggle with the lengths of reed, trembling and fumbling.

  Walking along the corridor one could see the men in their beds, staring vacantly at the ceiling. Their cheeks were sunken and pale. One man screamed and his hands reached up wildly. One man was smiling, but his eyes were as startled as if he were watching a hand grenade with the pin out.

  “Hello, doctor,” he said, smiling.

  The doctor patted the trembling man on the shoulder.

  “You’re looking better today,” he said.

  6. PEASANT WOMAN IN RED HOOK

  One morning I had a good time in Red Hook, a rowdy waterfront neighborhood in Brooklyn. I went over to visit Mrs. Anna di Massa Agnese, a sturdy peasant woman from Ischia, Italy. Mrs. Agnese was eighty-one years old. She had arrived the day before on the Italian liner Rex. It was 10 o’clock when I reached the Italian-American grocery operated by her son, Salvatore Agnese, at 504 Court Street, but the old woman was still upstairs, sleeping happily in a big feather-bed. In a little while she came downstairs, rubbing her eyes. She had a wry taste in her mouth. She did not have a hangover. She said she had never had a hangover in all her eighty-one years. She went to the door of the store and spat into the street. This amused Salvatore. He sat down on a keg and laughed heartily. Then the old woman laughed.

  The night before approximately sixty of her happy relatives—sons, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and assorted in-laws—gathered in the back room of the grocery and celebrated her arrival in the United States with a big dinner. During the dinner the old woman drank a large amount of home-made wine. She said the wine she drank on her way over on the Rex was too good for her taste, and so was the food. She said her son’s wife, Mrs. Salvatore Agnese, was a good cook, and that the dinner—macaroni, spring chicken, rabbit, and pickled peppers—tasted better than anything she ate on the Rex.

  “Tasted like home,” she said, according to Salvatore, who translated every remark she made for my benefit.

  “Glad you liked it, Mamma,” said Mrs. Salvatore, who beamed as she rushed to get her mother-in-law a tumbler of wine.

  The old lady was extremely proud of her son’s grocery store. She has four sons in New York City, and they all run grocery stores. She wandered through Salvatore’s store, admiring the provolone cheeses hanging in the window, slapping them affectionately with her wrinkled, capable old hands. She took the cover off the crock of black, ripe olives, and fished out a handful, eating them with relish and throwing the pits on the floor.

  She was particularly pleased with the cases of spaghetti and macaroni, cases with glass fronts like sectional bookcases, cases stuffed full of many kinds of macaroni—shells, cow’s eyes, elbows, seeds, butterflies, and those twisted ones known as spiedini and little crested ones known as rooster’s combs (creste di gallo). She admired the cases.

  “She said everything is magnificent in my store,” said Salvatore, who filled his mother’s tumbler with wine every time she emptied it.

  “I’m glad she likes it. I’ve tried for years to get her to come visit us. I bet I wrote her five hundred letters begging her to come. She lives near Naples on a little plot of land, and she didn’t want to leave her chickens. She has ten chickens.”

  The old woman broke into the conversation and talked loudly for a few moments. She was in high spirits. One of her grandchildren ran out of the back room with a drumstick in her hand. The child gnawed at the drumstick. The old woman pulled the child to her and kissed both her greasy cheeks. The child smiled with pleasure and kept on gnawing at the drumstick, enjoying it. Then the old woman began talking again.

  “She says they paved the street outside her home, and now it’s not so dusty any more,” said Salvatore. “She says she can keep the place clean now without breaking her back. She wants to sweep out my grocery store, but I won’t let her. I’m not going to let her do a lick of work. I want her to enjoy herself. I want her to eat a lot and get fat, and I want her to spend the rest of her days over here with me and my brothers.”

  The old woman wore a long brown dress, a sort of Mother Hubbard, with buttons down the front of it, and she had a brown shawl or bandana wrapped around her hair. Her face was criss-crossed with wrinkles, but her old eyes were clear, and she held herself erect. She went to the door of the store and looked out at the Red Hook street. She was rather bewildered by what she saw, and she came back in. She was bewildered on the trip from the pier, her son said, but when she got inside the store she felt at home. The heady smell of cheeses and olive oil made her feel right at home.

  While Mrs. Agnese wandered around the store I sat on a counter and ate a piece of raw Italian ham Salvatore cut for me. When Mrs. Agnese saw me eating she came over, shook my arm, and said something or other violently. I did not know what in the hell she was talking about. Salvatore laughed.

  “She said you should have a glass of wine,” he said. “She said you should have some wine with the ham.”

  She poured me a glass of wine and smiled as I filled my big mouth with it.

  Then Salvatore sat down on his keg and figured out on the back of a paper bag exactly how many children and grandchildren his mother had. After a lot of scribbling with the stub of a pencil he gave me these vital statistics:—Five sons, four of whom are in New York City; two daughters; and approximately thirty grandchildren. Once Salvatore said she had forty-three grandchildren, and once the figure was thirty-eight, but he finally settled for thirty grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

  “And God knows how many cousins and things,” said Salvatore, wrinkling his forehead. “She’s been a widow thirty-five years. My father was a farmer. Look at her gold earrings. My father gave her those. I saw her fourteen years ago. I took my family back to Italy for her to see. She hasn’t changed much. You look about the same, Mamma.”

  He said her sons in New York City besides himself were Joseph, who has a grocery in Staten Island, and Gennaro and Anthony, who have groceries in Brooklyn. The old woman will visit all her sons, going from Salvatore’s house to Joseph’s house. While Salvatore talked she wandered through the store, weighing things on the scales, peering into bins, opening olive crocks and stirring the olives with a big wooden spoon. She appeared to be having a good time.

  7. I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT IT

  All but two of the electric lights in the Dome, at 430 Sixth Avenue, a Greenwich Village meeting place for poets, painters, New York University students and other sensitive persons, were switched off and for two hours Prince Childe de Rohan d’Harcourt, a native of Guthrie, Oklahoma, stood in the middle of the floor and talked about the “cosmic ego,” a force which he likened to the pituitary gland, the third eye and the submerged portion of an iceberg.

  The pallid Prince appeared to be in good spirits, although he said he had been pursued by shadows and by the Police Department ever since he was separated from Miss Louise Krist, his under-age sweetheart. After their separation Miss Krist was put under the care of a woman psychiatrist at the Florence Crittenton Home. The Prince wore a purple figured shirt, a multi-colored tie and a mole-gray suit. When the Prince entered the Dome the hatcheck girl said, “How’s it, Prince?” and he bowed and said, “Quite all right, my dear.”

  “There seems to be a concerted effort to cause me trouble,” said the poet, speakeasy decorator, ex-convict and spurious nobleman, sittin
g down at one of the tearoom’s tiny tables and sighing. He sighed several times. Then he plunged a cigarette into a long holder and bent over to receive the fire from a match struck for him by a giggling girl.

  “However,” he said, sighing again, “there are about 10,000 people in this city who have learned of me since I had this trouble. They are not friends and they are not acquaintances. In fact, I have coined a new word to define them. I call them ‘frantances.’ I think that’s a beautiful word. And, offhand, I would say 100 young women have come to express their sympathy.

  “Since I was freed in West Side Court of the charge of seduction I have written many poems to Miss Krist. The best is called ‘My Beautiful Bluebird.’ She has blue eyes, and she dresses in blue. I am in a most deplorable situation. Miss Krist is only eighteen, but she knows she loves me. I cannot understand why her parents oppose our marriage. Oh, tears! tears! Oh, pray, how many tears are there within the ocean? I think she will get out of that home next Thursday. Then we will be married.

  “Strangely a haunted singing seems to pervade the air. Tears, tears, oh, pray, how many——”

  A man bent over the Prince and asked if he was ready to begin his speech.

  “They are waiting anxiously,” said the man, looking around at the sixty persons in the tearoom. Most of them were playing checkers, or staring at each other. The man who interrupted the Prince’s discourse on tears said he was William H. Kinnaird, a former commander of the Hunts Point American Legion Post 58, and at present the Dome’s master of ceremonies. He also said he was a landscape painter.

  The Prince walked to the middle of the floor. He leaned on his gold-headed cane and began his speech.

  “I have found,” he said nasally, “the perfect original conception. Yes, in my philosophical contemplations extending over a period of twenty, or maybe twenty-five, years I have found an inner-hidden, occult thing. In most of us it is asleep. In some it has never dawned. In about once in a period of centuries it is actually wide awake, and it produces such an entity as Jesus Christ.

  “Now, I must resort to words within words. Suppose we are having a little talk with a beloved, a love situation, contemplating each other in a physical way. What we are actually doing is contemplating the cosmic ego of one another. It is something like the jewel in the middle of an idol’s head. You know, like the pituitary gland. It accomplishes marvelous things and no one——”

  “Oh, Prince,” yelled a girl in a red dress. “Should a woman tell?”

  “No one,” continued the Prince, disregarding the girl’s query, “knows its power. It is a hidden thing. Unfortunately, it comes only one time. It is love. Now, when sensitive people do not find love the bottom drops out. It is like a boomerang. It is a matter you cannot express in the poor words we have. In fact, I assure you I know absolutely nothing about it. Look at an iceberg in the ocean. They tell me that seven-tenths of an iceberg is submerged.”

  “Should a woman tell?” asked the girl in the red dress.

  The Prince continued. He spoke for a long time, explaining the cosmic urge from various angles. He said the cosmic urge could be looked at from any angle and it would remain the perfect, original conception. At the end of his address the master of ceremonies said the Prince would be glad to answer questions.

  “Should a woman tell?” yelled the inquisitive girl.

  The Prince did not look her way.

  “Which would you say is the better cosmic urge?” asked a bald-headed man. “The Bulgarian or the American?”

  “The cosmic urge is not confined to any one country,” said the Prince. “Its qualities are ineffable.”

  “Should a woman tell?” reiterated the girl in the red dress.

  8. HOT AFTERNOONS HAVE BEEN IN MANHATTAN

  Coney Island Boat Leaves in Fifteen Minutes

  It is a hot day. The citizens of the biggest city in the world suffer with the heat-jitters. In tenement windows tired wives rest their stout elbows on pillows and stare blankly at the raucous elevated trains. High-priced blossoms in the show-windows of Fifth Avenue florists are shriveled. Subway guards, sweating in their heavy blue coats, mutter surly curses and push people into the hot cars.

  It takes ten beers to quench one’s thirst. The damp, insistent heat has placed blue lines beneath the eyes of subway passengers. The flags on the skyscrapers are slack; there is no breeze.

  Drowsy citizens stand in wet garments beneath the most popular thermometer in town—the giant in front of the Pulitzer Building on Park Row—and watch, fascinated, while the mercury climbs inexorably into the nineties. The asphalt in the streets is so soft that heels leave their marks in it. When two people meet one is almost certain to inquire, inanely, “Is it hot enough for you?”

  Summer has the city in a stranglehold.

  And the B.M.T. trains are loaded with people going to Coney Island. Almost every traveler on the Sea Beach expresses totes a little bundle containing a bathing suit and a towel. There are mothers surrounded with expectant children, and each mother has enough food for the day in a package in her lap. Before the train roars into the last station brisk young women will be smearing sun-tan oil on their faces.

  And each hour one of the boats of the Rainbow Fleet leaves the big pier opposite the headquarters of the Harbor Police at the Battery.

  All day a man stands at the front gate of the pier. Listen to him. “Coney Island boat leaves in fifteen minutes,” he yells, holding his megaphone aloft. It is a good forty minutes before the boat will reach the Battery.

  “And he kept asking me to go out with him,” says a girl, laughing hysterically, “and I said, ‘Oh, I know all about you.’ And every time I picked up the telephone it was him again. And every time he said he loved me I said to him, ‘Oh, you nasty man.’ Honest, I thought I’d die.”

  Children whimper for ice cream and frozen custard, and their mothers slap their faces and say, “Get out of here. You can get ice cream on the boat.” Presently the boat comes into sight and sidles furtively up to the pier. The gates are pulled open, and the people rush frantically aboard. They fight each other for seats on the upper deck, in the sun. In a few moments the old boat is crowded. There is not one vacant seat. Almost immediately the boat leaves its pier and begins a cool voyage of one hour. As soon as the travelers are settled salesmen begin to yell.

  “Get your sun glasses,” shouts a bad-complexioned youth in a white coat. “Look at my sun glasses.”

  “Beer and soda.”

  “Four times the size of a regular bar. We’re selling them at 10 cents in order to advertise the new size. Get your chocolate bar.”

  There is a surprising number of old people on the boat. They got used to going to Coney Island when they were kids and never got over the habit. Old men in stiff straw hats sit on camp stools and read their newspapers. Stout blond women in floppy hats and black sun glasses play bridge as the boat moves through the littered water.

  When the boat is tied up to the Coney Island pier, which juts far out over the breakers, the passengers rush off as if it were on fire.

  Before them is one of the world’s most startling sights, a spectacle as calculated to make one breathless with amazement as Niagara Falls, or a forest fire at night, or the sea itself. There are over 1,000,000 hot, happy humans on the three miles of clay-colored strand. The sand is covered with wriggling flesh. The sand is carpeted with brown, red, pink and white flesh.

  Males with paunches as big as beer kegs are stretched out flat on their backs. They wriggle their toes. Enjoying the sun on their fat bodies, they grunt and yawn. Here are tall, lithe, tanned females more beautiful by far than the white, powdered girls in a night-club chorus, and here are females with figures like roll-top desks.

  All of a sudden you realize that most of these humans are talking. The sound is like the sound in a theater just before the curtain goes up. Shut your eyes and listen. It is almost overpowering.

  Watch a family group on the sand. They are settled around a newspaper on which
is piled a mound of sandwiches, and pickles, and boiled eggs, and bananas. Watch the mother spread mustard on the sandwiches and pass them out. Watch these people as, with admirable gusto, they eat. See how they scatter sandwich rinds and greasy papers and peelings all around them.

  This is the summer resort of those who have only a few nickels to spend for hot sun and sea water.

  If you knew Coney Island ten years ago it is doubtful if you will find anything new there now. The freak dives on the resort’s three main streets—the Boardwalk, the Bowery, and Surf Avenue—are timeless. The fat woman dies and a new one takes her place. Impregnable, the freak places withstand the half-hearted indignation of suckers and of the Chamber of Commerce.

  “My friends, do not show your ignorance,” proclaims the barker at the World Circus Sideshow on Surf Avenue. “If you read your daily newspapers you know that medical science stands baffled by the mystery of Serpentina, the girl without a backbone. Now, don’t walk away and show your ignorance. You came down here to have a good time. Am I right, or am I wrong? I must be right. Then, my friends, see Serpentina. Born without a spinal cord. How does she live?”

  Inside the crowd finds a magician, a fat woman, a tattooed man, a man with no arms. It costs extra to see Serpentina. The three members of the Sex Family sell the story of their addled lives in a plain envelope for a dime.

  Down Surf Avenue there is a girl barker. She shouts for the Wonderland Sideshow. Her name is Ray Burns. She is twenty-three. She has a baby, Esther-ann, eighteen months old, and her husband, Dave Burns, drives one of the Luna buses. Wearing rehearsal bloomers and a veil, she used to stand on the platform of the Oriental, the Island’s wildest girl show, and do a wriggle-dance. Now she is a remarkably efficient barker.

  “They wanted me to be in a burlesque show over in New York,” said Mrs. Burns, “but I’d rather be an opener down here. I feel that this job is a real opportunity.”