Read Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) Online
Authors: Joseph Mitchell
In the new place, dressed like a drug clerk, Maxie is often called a sourpuss, but he laughed a lot in the old days. Nothing amused him so much as a customer with a hangover. ‘Did the Brooklyn boys get you?’ he would ask. He would sing, ‘Shut the door, they’re coming through the window. Shut the window, they’re coming through the door.’ The suffering customer would shudder and beseech him to stop, but Maxie would keep on singing. ‘My God,’ he would wind up, triumphantly, ‘they’re coming through the floor!’
Dick’s old place was isolated; at night the streets surrounding it were deserted. Consequently there was always the fear of a holdup. When Maxie had the late trick and things were dull, he would take the money out of the cash register, hide it under the bar in a trash bucket, stretch out on the bar, and go to sleep, using his rolled-up overcoat for a pillow. ‘Let the robbers come,’ he would say, yawning. If more customers arrived, they would have to put pieces of ice in his ears to arouse him.
You never hear any conversation worth listening to in Dick’s new place. In the old gin mill, when the customers got tired of whooping and sat down to talk to each other, they really had
something
to say. I remember a conversation I heard between two men in Dick’s.
‘So this friend of yours died, you mean?’
‘Sure, she was murdered.’
‘How do you know she was murdered?’
‘If you’re murdered, you die, don’t you, for God’s sake?’
For a moment the two men were quiet, thinking.
‘I’m preparing evidence,’ said the friend of the dead woman.
‘What you got to do with it?’
‘I’m afraid they might suspect me.’
‘Why should they suspect you?’
‘Well, I’m getting everything ready in case they do.’
Obeying the law spoiled Dick. Now he is just another gloomy small businessman, the same one day as the next. In the old days he was unpredictable. One night he would be as generous as a happy idiot, next night he would be stingy, setting up no drinks on the house at all.
Usually, when a customer came in, Dick would be expansive. He would call the customer by his first name and inquire about his health. However, if the customer got short of cash and began to put drinks on the tab, Dick would become distant in manner. His hearing would seem to fail. Soon he would begin using the customer’s last name and putting an emphatic ‘
Mister
’ in front of it. After a while the customer would be a total stranger to Dick. Then all Dick’s civility would vanish and he would call the customer ‘You bum’ or ‘You goat.’ If the customer got angry and said, ‘I’ll never come into this place again,’ Dick’s fat face would harden and he would lean forward and ask, ‘Will you put that in writing?’
One time Dick got drunk. Ordinarily he was able to withstand an enormous amount of liquor, but this time he got drunk. He had mixed up a big tub of May wine on a warm day and had sampled the brew as he mixed it. He developed fits of laughter, as though he were a schoolgirl with her first drink. The customers who came in looked funny to him. He pointed at them, slapped a thigh, and shook with laughter. Somebody suggested that he should buy drinks for everybody if he felt that good and he sobered up immediately. However, even on his stingy nights, Dick always
gave
a quarter to the grim Salvation Army women who came into the place, half-heartedly shaking tambourines. And I always liked the way he treated the scrubwomen from the skyscrapers in the financial district who would come in the place late at night for beer. Dick used to give them gin and say, ‘This is on the house. Drink hearty.’ He knew the old women really wanted gin but could not afford it.
You had to respect Dick, too, when you saw the way he behaved when one of his customers died. He would order a big, expensive wreath. Just before the funeral he and Maxie and the other bartenders would take off their aprons and shave themselves carefully at the sink in the kitchen. Then they would put on dark suits, and with solemn looks on their faces, they would get into Dick’s automobile and go to the funeral, leaving the gin mill in the hands of the cook. Sometimes, particularly on dull, rainy nights, Dick would close up early and take all the customers left in the place to a burlesque show or to a basement chow-mein restaurant in Chinatown. He would take along a couple of bottles of Scotch and pay all the bills.
In the old days Dick often took part in the incessant dice game. He was an intense gambler. ‘This ain’t ping-pong,’ he would yell when an unsteady player rolled the dice off the uneven bar. In the old gin mill they used to gamble for drinks and for money every night, but around Thanksgiving and Christmas they would have pig and turkey pools. For a quarter, a customer would get three throws of the dice. The dice would be thrown into a soup dish. After a certain number of games the customer with the highest score would get a live turkey or a suckling pig. One Christmas Dick kept the suckling pig in the window of the gin mill. The man who won the pig lifted it out of the window and named it Dick. He took off his necktie and tied it around the pig’s belly. Then he lost interest in the pig and it ran around the saloon for hours, squealing and sniffing at the customers’ shoes. Late that night the customer took the pig home with him in a taxicab. The customer lived in a hotel, and he put the pig in his bathroom. Next morning his wife found the pig and telephoned the A.S.P.C.A. to come and take it away.
The customers in the old place were always playing jokes on Dick. One night a man left the saloon, ostensibly to buy some aspirin. Instead, he went up the street to a telephone booth and called Dick, posing as a gangster. Warning Dick that he would have to pay for protection in the future, the customer said that two of the boys would be around to collect and for Dick to have fifty dollars in five-dollar bills ready to hand over. Otherwise it would be just too bad. Dick came out of the telephone booth with a frightened look on his face. After a while two strangers
did
happen to come in. They ordered beers. Trembling, Dick served them with the utmost courtesy. He had the money ready to hand over. When they finished their beers, the strangers went out, leaving two dimes on the bar. Dick sighed with relief. Presently one of the customers said, ‘Say, Dick, have you heard about the trick a lot of drunks have been playing on bartenders? They call them up and pose as gangsters. They tell them they have to pay protection or it’ll be just too bad.’
‘Is that right?’ said Dick, his face brightening.
‘Yes,’ said the customer. ‘It’s going on all over town. I’m surprised they haven’t tried it on you.’
‘I’m surprised, too,’ said Dick, laughing heartily.
His worried look vanished. He even bought a round of drinks.
‘Say, Dick,’ said the customer, after a while, ‘what would you do if some gangsters really tried to shake you down, God forbid?’
‘What would I do?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, hell,’ said Dick, ‘I just wouldn’t stand for it. I’d reach across the bar and grab them and crack their heads together. I’d jar their back teeth loose.’
(1939)
Houdini’s Picnic
CALYPSO SONGS COME
from Trinidad, a British West Indian island, six miles off the coast of Venezuela, which also provides the world with asphalt and Angostura Bitters. They are written and sung by a band of haughty, amoral, hard-drinking men who call themselves Calypsonians. The majority are Negroes. With guitars slung under their arms, they hang out in rumshops and Chinese cafés on Marine Square and Frederick Street in Port-of-Spain, the principal city of Trinidad, hunting for gossip around which they can construct a Calypso. Several brag truthfully that women fight to support them. Most of them are veterans of the island jails. To set themselves apart from lesser men, they do not use their legal names but live and sing under such adopted titles as the Growler, the Lord Executor, King Radio, Attila the Hun, the Lion, the Gorilla, the Caresser, the Senior Inventor, and Lord Ziegfeld. Some of their songs are based on sensational news stories – a bedroom murder, a switchblade fight between two prominent madams, the suicide of a concupiscent white Englishwoman. Other Calypso songs deal with abstract matters like love, honor, man’s fall, the wisdom of marrying a woman uglier than you, or the question of which has the most ache in it, a rum hangover or a gin hangover. Others are character studies; one of these is called ‘They Talk about Nora’s Badness.’ In it, Nora’s frailty is defined in a recurring line: ‘She go to the old dance hall and drink alcohol with Peter and Paul.’
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.