Old Mr. Flood

by Joseph Mitchell

  MR. FLOOD SOLD HIS HOUSE-WRECKING BUSINESS, the H. G. Flood Demolition & Salvage Co., Inc., a prosperous enterprise, in 1930, when he was eighty. A year and a half later, Mrs. Flood, his second wife, died. Directly after the funeral he gave up his apartment in Chelsea, put his furniture in storage, and moved into the Hartford, a hotel he had known and admired for many years as a truly peaceful place. “I was sadly in need of peace and quiet when I moved into here,” he once said. “I had a saintly wife, God rest her. She was opposed to anything and everything in the line of fun. Use to, when I showed up with a load on, she’d persecute me. She never offered to hit me. She just stood in the door with her head throwed back and howled. She used both lungs and it didn’t seem possible for all that racket to come out of one human mouth. Some nights I was afraid my eardrums wouldn’t stand the strain. Once I said to her, ‘Mary, dear, I’m thankful to God you ain’t a drinking woman. If you can make that much noise cold sober, just think what you could do on a little gin.’”

  The Hartford stands on the southwest corner of the junction of Pearl Street, Ferry Street, and Peck Slip, down in the old city. The South Ferry branch of the Third Avenue elevated line goes past it, on Pearl Street. The fish market is a couple of blocks to the south of it, and The Swamp, the tannery district, is one block north. Rooms run from three-fifty to four-fifty a week. Mr. Flood took one of the four-fifty rooms, and he has been happy in it. “You take an old retired widower crock like me,” he says, “the perfect place for him is some back-alley hotel where he can be among his own kind, the rough element. I’ve got a married daughter by my first wife, and she begged me to go live with her. Praise the Lord I didn’t ! Like I said to her, ‘Louise, in a month you’d hate the sight of me, and vice versa. You couldn’t help it. That’s nature. You’d be wanting me to die and get out of the way, and I’d probably go ahead and die, just to be accommodating.’” Mr. Flood is well off and could undoubtedly afford the Waldorf-Astoria, but newness depresses him. Like most old people, he feels best when he is around things that have lasted a long time. The Hartford is the oldest hotel in continuous operation in the city, and it just suits him. It was opened in 1836 as the Eastern Pearl Street House; the name was changed in the late sixties, when steamboats from Hartford and other New England ports docked nearby in Peck Slip. It is a shoebox-shaped building of five stories, it is surrounded by factories and hide and spice warehouses, and at night the friendly light in its combined lobby, barroom, and dining room is the only light that can be seen for blocks around. A flower-basket design is cut in the thick glass of the front door, across from the bar is a row of rickety spindle-backs, the bill of fare is scribbled in chalk on a big slate on the dining-room wall, and at the foot of the stairs is an oak rack on which the tenants hook their keys when they come down in the morning. The keys are heavy and each is attached to a serrated brass fob nearly the size of a saucer. There is no elevator. On the back-bar shelf are several photographs of the hotel. One, taken in 1901, shows Buffalo Bill and some Indians in fringed buckskins eating lobsters at a family table in the dining room. Around the margin, in a crabbed hand, someone has written, “Col. Buffalo Bill and 1 doz. red Indians just off the Boston boat, stayed three days, big eaters, lobster every meal, up all night, took the place.”

  The Hartford has about forty-five tenants right now, most of them elderly mariners who have retired on savings or pensions. Some of them do not budge out of the place, even to take a turn around the block, for weeks on end. Six were merchant-ship officers, four were Hudson River bargemen, two worked on scallop dredges, one owned a pair of harbor tugs, one operated three rows of shad nets in the Hudson off Edgewater, New Jersey, one had a bait barge in Sheepshead Bay, and one was captain of a seiner in the old Long Island Sound gurry-fleet that caught moss-bunkers for fertilizer factories. A few are grim and withdrawn and still unused to idleness after years of it. These stay quietly in their rooms much of the time. About a dozen are beery and wildly imaginative mythomaniacs, and Mr. Flood is often in their company. These get up at dawn, bustle downstairs to the barroom, and start talking big during breakfast; at closing time, around midnight, they are still there and still talking big. Before the night bartender goes home, he usually has to help two or three up the stairs and put them to bed; he considers this one of his duties. Some are cranks, but the proprietor, Mrs. James Donald, does not mind that. She says she has noticed that day in and day out it is easier to do business with a cranky man than with one who has forever got a grin on his face. Mrs. Donald is a handsome, friendly woman of Huguenot and German ancestry. She inherited the Hartford from her first husband, Diedrich Bloete, who had owned it since 1901. A brother of hers, Gus Trein, is manager. Her present husband, a retired policeman, is head bartender.

  Mr. Flood’s room is on the top floor. Its furnishings remind him pleasantly of years gone by; there is a brass bed, a washstand with pitcher and bowl, a wicker rocking chair, and a marble-top table. “The furniture in here goes back about as far as I do,” he said one day. He has decorated one wall with a set of cardboard posters designed for display in retail fish stores, which he picked up in the office of the Fishery Council, the market’s chamber of commerce. Among them are the following:

  CRABS FROM THE BAY

  ARE A TREAT ANY DAY

  FRESH MACKEREL IS IN SEASON

  AT A COST WITHIN REASON.

  BE OF GOOD CHEER

  OYSTERS R HERE.

  On another wall, just above the head of the bed, Mr. Flood has tacked up a map of Staten Island. He was born there. Once I asked him a question about his youth. He frowned and said, “My boy, I like to talk, but I don’t much like to talk about my past. It’s a sure sign of second childhood.” On another occasion, however, he said, “I’m a third-generation Staten Islander. I’m from Pleasant Plains, a village on the south shore. My grandfather and my father before me were carpenters. I had an uncle in Brooklyn who was a general contractor—dwellings and small factories—and I went to work for him when I was a boy. Let me give you some advice: never work for your own flesh and blood. My uncle was a big-hearted man. Once I saw him chip in with a five-dollar bill to assist the family of a poor fellow who had been his bookkeeper for thirty-five years and died without funeral money. I worked for him I think it was sixteen years and then I got wise to myself and quit and became a house-wrecking contractor. I think I got into that line out of spite.”

  Mr. Flood’s room has one window, and from it, looking south, he can see the gilded bluefish on the weathervane atop the great gray shed of the Fulton Market Fishmongers Association, a sight of which he is fond. Mr. Flood is tidy about his person; he goes to the barber every day, he keeps his suits pressed, and his derby is seldom dusty. His room, however, is extraordinarily untidy. He rarely lets the maid clean it. Above the washstand hangs a water-splotched calendar for 1932 on which the month pad, even the leaf for January, is still intact. On the marble-top table are four grape baskets filled with sea shells and river shells. He is a shell collector. One of his most prized possessions is a group of fresh-water mussel shells. They were given to him by a dealer in live carp in Peck Slip who got them, on a buying trip, from some Tennessee River carp fishermen who dredge mussels for the pearl-button trade as a sideline. Mr. Flood has shells of nine species. Each has, in addition to its Latin name, a name that is used in the trade. “I’ve got a pig toe, a pistol grip, a heel splitter, a warty back, a maple leaf, a monkey face, a rose bud, a rabbit’s foot, and a butterfly,” he says with pride. “I had a washboard, a lady finger, and a mule ear, but I came home one night in poor order and I was reeling around and I couldn’t find the light cord and they were on the floor and I stepped on them.” The floor around Mr. Flood’s rocking chair is always cluttered. Scattered every which way about it the last time I visited him were a wooden shrimp scoop that he knocks his cigar ashes into, a kind of fish knife known as a ripper, a whiskbroom, a Bible, two volumes of Mark Twain (he owns a ten-volume, large-type set), a scrapbook filled with yellowing c
lippings of Heywood Broun’s column in the World-Telegram, a copy of the War Cry, the magazine that Salvation Army women hawk on street corners, and an old, beautifully written United States Bureau of Fisheries reference book, “Fishes of the Gulf of Maine,” which he ordered years ago from the Government Printing Office and which he reads over and over. He knows the habits and ranges of hundreds of fishes, mollusks, and crustaceans; he has even memorized the Latin names of many of them. Twain and Broun are Mr. Flood’s favorite writers. “If I get to heaven,” he once said, “the first Saturday night I’m up there, if it’s O.K. with the management, I’m going to get hold of a bottle of good whiskey and look up Mr. Twain and Mr. Broun. And if they’re not up there, I’ll ask to be sent down to the other place.” A moment later he added uneasily, “Of course, I don’t really mean that. I’m just talking to hear myself talk.”

  Mr. Flood visits the fish market every weekday morning. He rises at five, has a cup of black coffee in the Hartford dining room, lights a cigar, and begins a leisurely tour of the fish stalls, the oyster sheds, the flounder-filleting houses, the smoking lofts, and the piers. When he reaches Fulton Street, the pandemonium in the market invigorates him. He throws his shoulders back, sniffs the salty air, and rubs his palms together. To him, the reek of the fish houses is not unpleasant. “I’ll tell you a valuable secret,” he once said. “The Fulton Fish Market smell will cure a cold within twenty minutes. Nobody that works in the market ever has a cold. They don’t know what a cold is. The fishmongers are afraid the general public will find this out. It’s too crowded around here as it is, and if the public took to coming down here to cure their colds there wouldn’t be room enough to turn around in.” When making his tour, he dresses like a boss fishmonger, wearing a full-length white apron and knee-high rubber boots. The streets down there, as well as the floors of the stalls, are constantly being hosed down, and he believes in heeding the old market proverb, “Keep your feet dry and you’ll never die.” He goes first to the piers and looks on as the trawlers, draggers, and scallop dredges are unloaded. The fishermen treat him with respect and answer all his questions. They seem to think that he is an official of some kind. The call him Pop or Commissioner. One morning I was standing on the Fulton Street pier with Edmond Irwin, supervisor of the Fishery Council, when Mr. Flood came poking along. He looked down into an unloading trawler from New Bedford and yelled, “Hey, Captain, step over here!” The captain stopped what he was doing, obediently crossed his deck, and peered up at Mr. Flood, who asked, “What you got today, Captain?”

  “Nothing to speak of, sir,” the captain said. “Just a load of flounders—blackbacks and yellowtails.”

  “Fine, fine, Captain,” said Mr. Flood. “You got enough filly of sole in that load for five thousand dinners. Where’d you go this trip?”

  “We was up north of Brown’s Bank.”

  “Up in The Gully?”

  “That’s right. We was up in The Gully.”

  “Fine, fine, Captain!” said Mr. Flood, beaming and rubbing his hands. “That’s just fine!”

  Mr. Flood moved on down the pier. The captain stared after him for a moment, obviously puzzled, and then turned to Mr. Irwin and said, “Ed, who in hell is that man, anyway? Does he work for the government, or what?”

  “It’s hard to say,” Mr. Irwin said. “All I know he’s an old boy who’s trying to live to be a hundred and fifteen years old by eating fish.”

  “God bless us!” said the captain. “How far along is he?”

  “He’s way past ninety,” Mr. Irwin said.

  “I declare to Jesus!” the captain said. “Well, we live and learn. Maybe I ought to start eating fish.”

  After Mr. Flood has inspected the boats, he goes into the shed of the Fishmongers Association. He listens to the blasphemous haggling between the fishmongers and the buyers from the retail fish stores, asks scores of questions, peers into bins, hefts and admires a striped bass here and a red snapper there, and carries market gossip from one stall to the next. He has so much curiosity that a few of the fishmongers look the other way when they see him coming, but the others treat him considerately and sometimes introduce him to visitors as the Mayor of the Fish Market. Presently he leaves the shed and steps into one of the filleting houses on South Street and helps himself to a bucket of gurry, or fish scraps, with which to feed some one-legged gulls that he has adopted. The fish market supports a flock of several hundred gulls and there are always a few crippled ones among them. “This condition,” Mr. Flood says, “is due to the fact that sea gulls don’t understand traffic lights. There’s a stretch of South Street running through the market that’s paved with Belgian blocks. And every so often during the morning rush a fish or two and sometimes a whole slew of them drop off a truck and are ground up by the wheels and packed down tight into the cracks between the blocks. The gulls go wild when they see this. They wait until traffic gets halted by a red light, and then they drop out of the sky like bats out of hell and try to worry the fish from between the cracks with their beaks and claws. They’re stubborn birds. They get so interested they don’t notice when the light changes and all of a sudden, wham bang, the heavy truck traffic is right on top of them. Some get killed outright. Some get broken wings and flop off and hide somewhere and starve to death. Those that lose only one leg are able to keep going, but the other gulls peck them and claw them and treat them as outcasts and they have a hard, hard time.” The crippled gulls are extremely distrustful, but Mr. Flood has been able to make friends with a few of them. When he strides onto a pier toting a bucket of gurry they circle down and surround him. One or two will eat from his hands.

  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 the 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.