My Ears Are Bent

by Joseph Mitchell

  2. THE PICKLE WORKS

  On one side of the stage at the Alvin Theatre two tall chorus girls in rehearsal bloomers were sitting on a bench eating three-decker sandwiches and gulping light brown coffee from a cardboard container. Both girls were drinking from the same quart container, and they smudged lipstick on the rim of it every time they took a swig. They were talking with their mouths full.

  An actor came in and stood beneath a sign which read: “Fire Laws Require No Smoking On Stage.” Standing there, the actor took out a paper book of matches and lit a cigarette. Actors were rehearsing in every corner of the stage. Some were singing and others were yelling lines at one another. Two tapdancers stood off to one side pitching nickels at a crack in the stage. The dancer whose nickel hit nearest the crack tapped his way forward and picked up his winnings.

  In the pit a piano player with a cigarette stuck in the corner of his sneering mouth and a felt hat on the back of his head was banging away. Ethel Merman stood in the middle of the stage in a big white fur coat. It was chilly on the stage. Once in a while a chorus girl would put her arms akimbo, lean forward and shiver. A rehearsal of “Red, Hot and Blue!” was in progress.

  The star of the show, Jimmy Durante, sat on a shaky chair tilted against the bare bricks in the back wall of the stage. He looked as if he were trying to get as far away from other humans as possible. His face was haggard. When he took his cigar out of his big, ragged mouth his hands shook.

  “I can’t drink,” he said, shivering. “Only my great sense of responsibility forced me to show up at the pickle works today. I can’t drink. It’s all right if I take a glass of vermoot, or some red wine. Yeh, that’s all right. But last night I’m feeling thirsty, so I go to this joint across the street and I say to the bartender, ‘Recommend me something.’ So he give me what he called an Alexander. I had about six of these here Alexanders, and I get dizzy. When I go home I hit the bed and it whirls around like an electric fan. I am seasick. I’m in an awful fix. I want to die.

  “First time that happened in weeks and weeks. I am going on the water wagon. I’m going to sit up there with the driver, and hold on tight. That is, except for some wine with meals. Red wine, what they used to call Guinea Red, only I never liked that terminology. The French they like red wine as much as the Italians.”

  A chorus girl walked by, a beautiful redhead with long white arms.

  “Don’t believe anything he tells you,” she said.

  Durante jumped up and gave the girl a resounding smack on what might be called the hips. She squealed with laughter.

  “You great big angel,” said Durante, forgetting his hangover.

  He got up and walked out to the orchestra, and sat down in one of the front seats, a $5.50 seat. He stuck his feet up on the seat in front. He appeared more cheerful. Two chorus girls sat in back. One was talking and the other was cracking her chewing gum.

  “So he said to me, ‘You’re just what the doctor ordered,’” said the chorus girl. “And I said, ‘Your doctor must be a dentist, you big bum, keep your hands off me.’ Can you imagine. I only met him half an hour and he’s trying to kiss me.”

  “Yeh,” said her colleague, “the big bum.”

  “I sure do like this life,” said Durante. “When I was a kid down on Catherine Street I used to have a job, delivering papers. I would grab this bundle of 500 papers, night editions, see? And I would get on the elevated and take them up to the four newsstands at Third and Fourteen Street. In those days a paper would only have twelve pages, and a kid could handle 500. Nowadays it would crush a kid if you tried to pile that many on him. It would pulverize him.

  “So I take them up there. Then I rush around to the dives in the neighborhood. I would peep under them swinging wicker doors they had on the saloons, and I would see the men dancing with these dames, and drinking, and the piano player knocking the hell out of the piano, and I would think to myself, I would think, ‘Geeze, if I could just get me a job in there it would be like in heaven.’ I still feel the same way. The stage may be the pickle works to some people, but it’s a big box of candy to me. Look at that blonde over there. Boy!”

  Sitting there in the dark theater, nursing his hangover, the big-nosed comedian began to talk about his childhood, the days when he used to run wild on Catherine Street, raising hell with the other kids, the days when he liked to go barefooted and they had to run him down and catch him every winter to put shoes on him, the days when he learned that if he stuck his nose in the air and talked and kept on talking he was bound to say something funny. That is still his technique. He learned it when he lived at 90 Catherine with his brothers—Michael, who became a photoengraver, and Albert, who became a cop, both dead now. His father, robust old Bartholomeo Durante, now eighty-seven, who ran a barber shop at 87 Catherine, used to think he was nuts when he came in, talking incoherently about some experience he had in the street.

  “We kids used to have a good time,” he said. “They tore down where my home was and where my pop had his shop. They tore it down to put up this high-class tenement house, this Knickerbocker Village. Most of the old-timers moved out long ago. I take a walk down there sometimes at night by myself to see the mob, what’s left of it. Like I drop in to see Eddie De Rosa. He runs a drugstore at 94 Catherine.

  “Geeze, used to when some kid would pop me in the nose or maybe I got a nail in my foot I would rush up to Eddie’s, and he would stick some iodine and court plaster on it. I go down to see Eddie, and we talk about the old days, when the East Side amounted to something.

  “I went to P.S. No. 1. I quit about the sixth or seventh grade. When I was younger I would tell people I went to high school, but what’s the use of bluffing? People know I’m not an educated man.”

  The comedian forgot all about his hangover. He said he likes to go into a pizzeria for a pizza, or rubber-pie, the big cheese and tomato pies you see in the windows of Italian restaurants. Or a dish of spaghetti with three big dippers of meat sauce. He is about as unaffected as a subway guard, and when he gets to talking about groceries nothing stops him. He will drop into a coffeepot with a copy of Variety sticking out of his coat pocket and climb up on a stool. Ten minutes later he will be telling the counterman how to run the joint.

  The comedian snapped his fingers.

  “Say,” he said, “you should see my pop eat. He’s an old man, eighty-seven. Now he lives over on Palmetto Street in Brooklyn, with my sister, Mrs. Lillian Romano, but he was with me two years in Hollywood. What a lot of laughs I get out of him!

  “He loves his wine. On the way out we was eating in the diner of the train and I took this waiter aside and told him to give Pop a bottle of wine, but to take it away when he had one glass. So he does. But when he picks it up my pop made a grab for it. He jerked it out of this waiter’s hand. Boy, did he grab. I nearly died laughing. This Negro waiter said, ‘Mr. Jimmy said to give you some water.’ Pop exploded. He said, ‘Water you wash your face. Wine you wash your stomach.’ Boy, did he let out a yell when he saw that wine disappearing! ‘Where you go with the wine?’ he yelled at this waiter.

  “My pop’s a barber, see? They brought him over here from Salerno, Italy, to help put up the Third Avenue El. He was just a common laborer, but he had too much sense. He saved his money and opened a barber shop. Well, he retired years and years ago, but he still carries his tools around with him, his clippers and his straight razor. He’s got a mania about haircutting.

  “When people come to my house he goes up and grabs at their hair and tells them they need a haircut. If they don’t resist he makes them sit down right there, and he gives them a haircut. He won’t take money. One day I had him on a movie set with me, and he sees Johnny Weissmuller with his long, flowing hair. Pop almost had a fit. He walks up to Johnny and says, ‘What’s a matter with you? Why don’t you have your hair cut? Sit down and I cut it.’ I had to grab him. Every morning he goes up to the priest’s house in Ridgewood where he lives and shaves the priest. He won’t take a dime. Just
a way of amusing himself.”

  The comedian stood up and lit a cigar. It was raining outside. He walked to the stage door. A group of chorus girls were huddled there, waiting for the rain to slack up, so they could dash across the street to the drugstore for coffee. They had polo coats over their rehearsal clothes. Two of them were singing a song from the show.

  “Look at them angels,” said Durante, smacking his hands together. “Can you blame me for loving the pickle works? Why, it’s a privilege to work here. I should be paying the boss for the privilege of working here. Geeze.”

  3. TOWN ANARCHIST DELIGHTS IN BEING

  THOUGHT A VILLAIN

  On one of the final nights of the city’s last political campaign Max Steuer made an interminable, bitter speech over WOR in which he shouted; “Why, I’ll show you the kind of man La Guardia is. He associates with criminals. He associates with this man, Carlo Tresca.”

  When they heard these remarks many solid citizens, puzzled over which lever to pull, felt better about Fiorello La Guardia. They considered Mr. Steuer’s statement a recommendation of the Fusionist.

  This man, Carlo Tresca, is the town anarchist. He has lived as an exile in the United States—mostly in New York—since 1904 and is one of the city’s veteran practicing political refugees. Exiled long before Mussolini came into power, he became, after 1922, a leader of the thousands of Italians exiled to the United States by the fascist dictatorship. For twelve years, a period in which strife over the Mussolini program split the Italians in this country into factions and precipitated murders and bombings and civil wars in a hundred Little Italys, Tresca has carried on a persistent campaign against the man he sometimes calls “Little Benito.”

  A gracious Italian, distinguished in appearance, he wears a black hat and is heavily bearded. He sometimes takes six hours for dinner and would rather be considered a villain than a hero. For many years the police believed—perhaps correctly—that he was one of the country’s most dangerous men and that he frequently tossed bombs. But he is a sly anarchist.

  After the bomb explosion in Wall Street in 1920, for example, his photograph was published with the caption “Police Want This Man.” Members of the Bomb Squad finally located him in the People’s House at 7 East Fifteenth Street, sitting in an office, sleepily reading a book on political economy. They discovered a package in his pocket. They unwrapped it and found three cheese sandwiches.

  “They are nice boys,” he says, referring to the Bomb Squad. “Since then, whenever there is a bomb, they come to see me. They ask me what I know, but I never know anything. So we have wine.”

  Now his life is comparatively placid. Years have passed since Tresca, the perennial dynamiting suspect, the antifascist, the militant editor, the I.W.W. agitator, the companion in labor struggles of sharp-tongued Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and of fat Emma Goldman, was suspected of an earth-rocking crime. Plagued by nostalgia, he sits at a restaurant table, smokes his pipe, drinks dark red wine, and recalls the headlines of other years: “Tresca Confirms Bomb Plot Aimed at Rockefeller,” and “Waterbury Cops Bar Tresca Again: Arrest Companion,” and “Haywood, Tresca, Miss Flynn and Two More Indicted.”

  He speaks often of the jails and festivals of other years. There was the Red Revel of the Anarchists in 1915. It was held in the Harlem Casino, and Emma Goldman appeared as a nun. The revel began with a waltz called “The Anarchists’ Slide,” which consisted of two long dips, a short slide, and what Ben Reitman, Miss Goldman’s manager, styled “the eternal swing.”

  “Ain’t it a grand sight?” Reitman is supposed to have yelled when Miss Goldman tried vainly to essay the two dips and the slide. “Let ’er rip, Emma.”

  “I had a good time that night,” said Tresca, who always was the idol of the lady anarchists.

  And there was the time a policeman tore off Tresca’s vest during a confused riot at Sixth Avenue and Forty-first Street and disclosed a romance. The vest, torn in three places, was taken to a police station. In one of the pockets the ruthless cops found a small, worn volume, “Love Sonnets” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. A line in one poem—“And tell thy soul their roots are left in mine”—was underscored and beneath it was scribbled, “I love you, Carlo. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, December 12, 1912.” Miss Flynn, known as “The Joan of Arc of the I.W.W.,” and leader of many strikes in New Jersey silk mills, was a married woman. Tresca also was married. For a time newspapers referred to them as “the trade-union lovers.”

  With sardonic amusement Tresca recalls another headline: “Tresca Penniless, He tells Creditors.” One year ago his newspaper, Il Martello (The Hammer), in which Mussolini was soundly whacked each week, went bankrupt. Tresca’s tendency to recall other days is no sign that he is slowing up. He returned that week from a trip through Italian communities in New England with Athos Terzani, the antifascist who is accused of having murdered another antifascist during a meeting in Queens of Art J. Smith’s Khaki Shirts of America, a fascist organization. In December he will start publishing Il Martello again.

  Tresca has three lairs. He may be found in the office, on the top floor of a loft building at 52 West Fifteenth Street, of La Stampa Libera, the nation’s leading antifascist newspaper, for which he occasionally writes an essay. (This is the newspaper whose name Steuer scornfully mispronounced in his radio speech. It supported La Guardia.)

  You go up to the office in a slow, grimy elevator. Most of the editors and reporters were exiled by Mussolini. They are suspicious of visitors. At noon the editors spread cheese and wine on their tables. And Tresca, if present, makes a few scurrilous remarks about Mussolini.

  Tresca also puts in a daily appearance at the Manhattan office of the Industrial Workers of the World, on the third floor of 94 Fifth Avenue, one of those buildings inhabited by commercial artists, sign painters, and radical organizations. On the floor above is the office of his dormant newspaper. There is a row of benches in a hall outside the office, and scores of antifascist exiles use the room as a headquarters. Tresca listens to their tribulations, gives them good advice.

  “Sure,” said Tresca, “I tell you all about the exiles from Italy. After the Fascisti took power in 1922 around 20,000 left the country, a big crowd every month, and come to the United States. For years they come. They had political beliefs very unpopular, or were Masons, or did not like any more how things looked. So they leave. The most famous, the wealthy, go to Paris or Switzerland. Great mass come here.

  “Most famous to come here is Professor Gaetano Salvemini, historian and once a member of Chamber of Deputies—like a congressman here. On his way here Salvemini stops in London. There they send word his property is confiscated. He laughs. ‘How funny!’ he said. ‘It is a compliment. All the property I have are few dry books and some sticks of furniture.’ He is a respected history professor now at Yale. If he touches his foot on Italian dirt he get thirty years in jail, but maybe Mussolini would reduce the term to twenty-five. Who knows?

  “Also famous was Vincenzo Vacirca. He was a deputy also. Also had his little home confiscated. Was a famous editor here one time and at present is olive oil salesman in Brooklyn. Another was Virgilia D’Andrea, most outstanding in Italian labor movement and a fine poet. She was beaten up, insulted, and her home destroyed. Only salvation was exile. Here she died a month ago.

  “There were many more very famous. They are taken care of, you see, somehow, but what of the masses, the laborers and those kind of people? Not so good. Terrible. In this city there are at least 15,000 militant antifascist. All hate Mussolini very much. Positively, I know at least 3,000 are here in clandestine. They are living day by day in fear, exiles all. They change their homes two, three times a month. You see, those who live in clandestine are aliens. If they get deported, it means death in Italy. So they live in horrible fear. A racket goes on, based on fear. The fascists hunt the exiles out.

  “A fascist finds an alien. All right. One night a man knocks on the door. He comes in and says, ‘I am from Department of Justice. We have
to deport you now.’ Then he says $200 will straighten this little matter out. It is a shakedown—see? I stopped that racket three times, but up it springs again. For a time everything is quiet, and then one of my boys comes in, says they are shaking down again in the Bronx, on Staten Island, every place where Italian exiles live. It is hard for those in clandestine to get jobs. They live bad. They are unknown soldiers of antifascism.

  “In Italy a man may have to go into exile if he says, ‘No prosperity here. Hard times all the time.’ That is called a crime against the honesty and soundness of Italian finance. Once Mussolini announce he gives amnesty to all exiles. A friend of mine, Anthony Vellucci, decides to go home. We try to talk him out, but it is no good. He believes Mussolini to tell the truth. He goes. When he gets home they arrest him and say, ‘You must spend five years in prison on the island. Then everything is all right.’ Nice business. Five years on that malaria island and Heaven is next stop.”

  Tresca delights in telling of an encounter with Mussolini in 1904.

  “In Italy,” he said, “I worked with socialist labor union of railroad workers. Also was editor of Il Germa [The Seed]. It is very powerful paper. Suddenly I am arrested for something I write, given sentence of eighteen months in jail or ten years in exile. So I take the exile. On my way here I stop in Basel, Switzerland. There is another exile living there. His name is Benito Mussolini. He is very weak-tempered and vain, a man who would push himself forward so people applaud. I argued all night with him. He says he is a very radical man, an extreme socialist. Next day he says goodbye to me at the station and he says, ‘Tresca, you are not radical enough.’