Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) (8 page)

That is a fair example of the way the Captain answers a question. If you remember, all I asked him was ‘Where were you born, Captain Charley?’ After my last visit I checked up on several of the Captain’s remarks, not that it makes any difference to me if they are true or false. First I checked up on his boast that he drinks nothing but champagne wine and brandy. The bartender in a saloon on Columbus Avenue around the corner from the museum said, ‘Sometimes that old boy comes in here to make a phone call and I invite him to have a beer, and he sure don’t refuse.’ The bartender said he once visited the museum. ‘Jeez,’ he said, ‘what a place! If they really want to find Judge Crater, that’s the place to look.’ Later I telephoned Alfred E. Smith and asked him if he was aware that his old tin lunch bucket was in a museum. ‘It couldn’t be my lunch bucket,’ said Mr Smith, ‘because I never owned a lunch bucket. When I was working in the fish market I always went home to eat.’

The Captain becomes evasive and hostile when any one tries to pin him down. Once I asked him the name of the ship of which he was captain.

‘It was in 1917,’ he said. ‘War time.’

‘What was the name of the ship?’

‘Like I said, it was war time. They called it the World War; to me, it was just a fuss, a commotion.’

‘What was the name of the ship?’

‘Number Four.’

‘What kind of a ship was Number Four?’

‘God damn it, sir, don’t interrupt me. Haven’t you got any respect for old age?’

‘What kind of a ship was Number Four?’

‘It was a barge. It was a munitions barge. It was towed between Wilmington and the Navy Yard in Brooklyn, and I was captain. Everybody took orders from Captain Charley. Half of Brooklyn would of blowed up one night if I hadn’t cut the barge loose from the tug. The tide was throwing her around, and I took charge and cut her loose. If she’d a bumped into Brooklyn it would of been goodbye Brooklyn. Might of been a good thing. Thinned out some of them slums. I been mixed up in everything. I even been kidnapped. When my museum was situated up in Harlem a fellow and a girl I never seen before came and stood over my bed, and the fellow said, “Are you the man that took advantage of this here girl?” And I said, “I don’t know. I might be. I’m a mean old man.” And the girl said, “Let’s slit his throat for him.” Then they kidnapped me and took me to the bank and made me draw out my account, two hundred and some odd dollars. Said they’d slit my throat if I told. I found out who the fellow was; he was a brush-boy in a barber shop four or five blocks up the street from my museum. I seen him on the street a couple of times, but I was afraid to notify the Police Department. I never said a mumbling word. I didn’t care to risk it. I need my throat to swallow with. There’s something about a knife that makes me shrink right up. Like that old saying my mamma use to have, “When the big bulldog gets in trouble, puppy-dog britches fit him fine.”’

I was surprised to find out about the Captain’s streak of timidity. He is small and frail-looking, but he is bellicose. He likes to push his captain’s cap on the back of his head, put his fists up like a prizefighter, and give a frightful account of the way he maimed a disrespectful shipmate by throwing pepper in his eyes and striking him in the face with ‘the business end of a broken beer bottle.’ He is proud of his captain’s cap. He says, ‘This cap takes me anywhere, right past the ticket window.’ The Captain seeks to give visitors the impression that he once was a great lover; tacked up in the museum is the old saloon wall-motto which states, ‘The happiest moments of my life were spent in the arms of another man’s wife.’ This motto usually ends with a dash and ‘My mother,’ but the Captain chopped off the last two words.
He
becomes rather wistful when he tells about his conquests in Paris, among the Eskimos, and on various South Sea islands. He shakes his head, cackles, and says, ‘I still got the passion, but I ain’t got the power. My race is run.’ He tells visitors that he is ‘seventy-seven years old, more or less.’ ‘I’m not long for this world,’ he likes to say. ‘I give myself three more years they’ll have me in a box.’ However, there is still plenty of grit and gristle in him. The basement is so crowded he has to wrestle with exhibits to get from the museum proper back to the tiny room in which he sleeps and eats, and he shoves a massive, old-fashioned bureau or a heavy sea chest out of his way with ease a young pug might envy. He is conscious of his strength and is always threatening to let loose and knock somebody’s head off. Like the museum, the room in the rear is stuffed to the ceiling with junk. He has his meals sitting on the bed. The last time I visited him there was a platter on the bed bearing the head and bones of a fish off which his cat was feeding.

Captain Charley has a good reason for his robbery phobia because the museum is frequently entered by petty burglars, a state of things for which he himself is responsible; in talking to visitors he always attributes a fabulous value to even the most worthless trinket. Naturally, some of his visitors believe him when he boasts, holding up a valueless gimcrack, ‘This is worth fifteen hundred and seventy-five dollars.’ Occasionally a visitor comes back at night, when the Captain is away, and walks right into the museum and steals a few things. I am certain these thieves are furious after they try to pawn their loot. When the Captain goes away from the museum he usually leaves it unlocked and sticks up a sign just inside the door which warns,
‘BEWARE OF THE ALIVE SNAKES LOOSE IN HERE.’
In the daytime the sign is effective, but at night, of course, it does no good. Paradoxically the Captain is proud of the frequency with which he is robbed. He laughs his high, goatlike laugh and says, ‘
Everybody
robs Captain Charley!’

Captain Charley’s most remarkable possessions are two objects which look like ironing boards wrapped with strips of brown cloth. The museum is too crowded for chairs, and I sometimes use one of these objects for a seat.

‘You know what you sitting on?’ the Captain asked me one day.

‘No, sir,’ I said. ‘What?’

‘A Egyptian mummy.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Yes, God damn it, that’s right.’

‘Where did you get it?’

‘Got it in Egypt. My boat was tied up in Alexandria and I took a turn around Egypt. They was pulling old mummies out of the tombs by the thousands, so I took three. I took three of the middle-sized ones. I think they’re he-mummies. I don’t think they mummied no women. I was cook on this boat and I stood ’em up in the kitchen, in the galley. I had ’em stood up in corners. When the crew found out I had the galley full of Egyptian mummies, they became disagreeable to me. They was going to throw my mummies overboard, but that night I took and hid ’em in the lifeboats, under canvas. We was months and months getting back to the United States and it use to give me the snickers every time I thought about them three mummies hiding up in the lifeboats like stowaways. When I went to sneak my mummies ashore a queer thing happened. One of ’em was missing.’

‘What do you think happened to it?’

‘Oh, hell, I don’t know. Something real peculiar. When a man takes to meddling with Egyptian mummies fresh out of the tomb, damn near anything’s apt to happen.’

(1938)

Professor Sea Gull

JOE GOULD IS
a blithe and emaciated little man who has been a notable in the cafeterias, diners, barrooms, and dumps of Greenwich Village for a quarter of a century. He sometimes brags rather wryly that he is the last of the bohemians. ‘All the others fell by the wayside,’ he says. ‘Some are in the grave, some are in the loony bin, and some are in the advertising business.’ Gould’s life is by no means carefree; he is constantly tormented by what he calls ‘the three H’s’ – homelessness, hunger, and hangovers. He sleeps on benches in subway stations, on the floor in the studios of friends, and in quarter-a-night flophouses on the Bowery. Once in a while he trudges up to Harlem and goes to one of the establishments known as ‘Extension Heavens’ that are operated by followers of Father Divine, the Negro evangelist, and gets a night’s lodging for fifteen cents. He is five feet four and he hardly ever weighs more than a hundred pounds. Not long ago he told a friend that he hadn’t eaten a square meal since June, 1936, when he bummed up to Cambridge and attended a banquet during a reunion of the Harvard class of 1911, of which he is a member. ‘I’m the foremost authority in the United States,’ he says, ‘on the subject of doing without.’ He tells people that he lives on ‘air, self-esteem, cigarette butts, cowboy coffee, fried-egg sandwiches, and ketchup.’ Cowboy coffee, he says, is strong coffee drunk black without sugar. ‘I’ve long since lost my taste for good coffee,’ he says. ‘I much prefer the kind that sooner or later, if you keep on drinking it, your hands will begin to shake and the whites of your eyes will turn yellow.’ While having a sandwich, Gould customarily empties a bottle or two of ketchup on his plate and eats it with a spoon. The countermen in the Jefferson Diner, on Village Square, which is one of his hangouts, gather up the ketchup bottles and hide them the moment he puts his head in the door. ‘I don’t particularly like the confounded stuff,’ he
says
, ‘but I make it a practice to eat all I can get. It’s the only grub I know of that’s free of charge.’

Gould is a Yankee. His branch of the Goulds has been in New England since 1635, and he is related to many of the other early New England families, such as the Lawrences, the Clarkes, and the Storers. ‘There’s nothing accidental about me,’ he once said. ‘I’ll tell you what it took to make me what I am today. It took old Yankee blood, an overwhelming aversion to possessions, four years of Harvard, and twenty-five years of beating the living hell out of my insides with bad hooch and bad food.’ He says that he is out of joint with the rest of the human race because he doesn’t want to own anything. ‘If Mr Chrysler tried to make me a present of the Chrysler Building,’ he says, ‘I’d damn near break my neck fleeing from him. I wouldn’t own it; it’d own me. Back home in Massachusetts I’d be called an old Yankee crank. Here I’m called a bohemian. It’s six of one, half a dozen of the other.’ Gould has a twangy voice and a Harvard accent. Bartenders and countermen in the Village refer to him as the Professor, the Sea Gull, Professor Sea Gull, the Mongoose, Professor, Mongoose, or the Bellevue Boy. He dresses in the castoff clothes of his friends. His overcoat, suit, shirt, and even his shoes are all invariably a size or two too large, but he wears them with a kind of forlorn rakishness. ‘Just look at me,’ he says. ‘The only thing that fits is the necktie.’ On bitter winter days he puts a layer of newspapers between his shirt and undershirt. ‘I’m snobbish,’ he says. ‘I only use the
Times
.’ He is fond of unusual headgear – a toboggan, a beret, or a yachting cap. One summer evening he appeared at a party in a seersucker suit, a polo shirt, a scarlet cummerbund, sandals, and a yachting cap, all hand-me-downs. He uses a long black cigarette holder, and a good deal of the time he smokes butts picked up off the sidewalks.

Bohemianism has aged Gould considerably beyond his years. He has got in the habit lately of asking people he has just met to guess his age. Their guesses range between sixty-five and seventy-five; he is fifty-three. He is never hurt by this; he looks upon it as proof of his superiority. ‘I do more living in one year,’ he says, ‘than ordinary humans do in ten.’ Gould is toothless, and his lower jaw swivels from side to side when he talks. He is bald on top, but the
hair
at the back of his head is long and frizzly, and he has a bushy, cinnamon-colored beard. He wears a pair of spectacles that are loose and lopsided and that slip down to the end of his nose a moment after he puts them on. He doesn’t always wear them on the street and without them he has the wild, unfocussed stare of an old scholar who has strained his eyes on small print. Even in the Village many people turn and look at him. He is stooped and he moves rapidly, grumbling to himself, with his head thrust forward and held to one side. Under his left arm he usually carries a bulging, greasy, brown pasteboard portfolio, and he swings his right arm aggressively. As he hurries along, he seems to be warding off an imaginary enemy. Don Freeman, the artist, a friend of his, once made a sketch of him walking. Freeman called the sketch ‘Joe Gould versus the Elements.’ Gould is as restless and footloose as an alley cat, and he takes long hikes about the city, now and then disappearing from the Village for weeks at a time and mystifying his friends; they have never been able to figure out where he goes. When he returns, always looking pleased with himself, he makes a few cryptic remarks, giggles, and then shuts up. ‘I went on a bird walk along the waterfront with an old countess,’ he said after his most recent absence. ‘The countess and I spent three weeks studying sea gulls.’

Gould is almost never seen without his portfolio. He keeps it on his lap while he eats and in flophouses he sleeps with it under his head. It usually contains a mass of manuscripts and notes and letters and clippings and copies of obscure little magazines, a bottle of ink, a dictionary, a paper bag of cigarette butts, a paper bag of bread crumbs, and a paper bag of hard, round, dime-store candy of the type called sour balls. ‘I fight fatigue with sour balls,’ he says. The crumbs are for pigeons; like many other eccentrics, Gould is a pigeon feeder. He is devoted to a flock which makes its headquarters atop and around the statue of Garibaldi in Washington Square. These pigeons know him. When he comes up and takes a seat on the plinth of the statue, they flutter down and perch on his head and shoulders, waiting for him to bring out his bag of crumbs. He has given names to some of them. ‘Come here, Boss Tweed,’ he says. ‘A lady in Stewart’s Cafeteria didn’t finish her
whole-wheat
toast this morning and when she went out, bingo, I snatched it off her plate especially for you. Hello, Big Bosom. Hello, Popgut. Hello, Lady Astor. Hello, St John the Baptist. Hello, Polly Adler. Hello, Fiorello, you old goat, how’re you today?’

Although Gould strives to give the impression that he is a philosophical loafer, he has done an immense amount of work during his career as a bohemian. Every day, even when he has a bad hangover or even when he is weak and listless from hunger, he spends at least a couple of hours working on a formless, rather mysterious book that he calls ‘An Oral History of Our Time.’ He began this book twenty-six years ago, and it is nowhere near finished. His preoccupation with it seems to be principally responsible for the way he lives; a steady job of any kind, he says, would interfere with his thinking. Depending on the weather, he writes in parks, in doorways, in flophouse lobbies, in cafeterias, on benches on elevated-railroad platforms, in subway trains, and in public libraries. When he is in the proper mood, he writes until he is exhausted, and he gets into this mood at peculiar times. He says that one night he sat for six or seven hours in a booth in a Third Avenue bar and grill, listening to a beery old Hungarian woman, once a madam and once a dealer in narcotics and now a soup cook in a city hospital, tell the story of her life. Three days later, around four o’clock in the morning, on a cot in the Hotel Defender, at 300 Bowery, he was awakened by the foghorns of tugs on the East River and was unable to go back to sleep because he felt that he was in the exact mood to put the old soup cook’s biography in his history. He has an abnormal memory; if he is sufficiently impressed by a conversation, he can keep it in his head, even if it is lengthy and senseless, for many days, much of it word for word. He had a bad cold, but he got up, dressed under a red exit light, and, tiptoeing so as not to disturb the men sleeping on cots all around him, went downstairs to the lobby.

He wrote in the lobby from 4:15
A.M.
until noon. Then he left the Defender, drank some coffee in a Bowery diner, and walked up to the Public Library. He plugged away at a table in the genealogy room, which is one of his rainy-day hangouts and which he says he prefers to the main reading room because it is gloomier,
until
it closed at 6
P.M.
Then he moved into the main reading room and stayed there, seldom taking his eyes off his work, until the Library locked up for the night at 10
P.M.
He ate a couple of egg sandwiches and a quantity of ketchup in a Times Square cafeteria. Then, not having two bits for a flophouse and being too engrossed to go to the Village and seek shelter, he hurried into the West Side subway and rode the balance of the night, scribbling ceaselessly while the train he was aboard made three round trips between the New Lots Avenue station in Brooklyn and the Van Cortlandt Park station in the Bronx, which is one of the longest runs in the subway system. He kept his portfolio on his lap and used it as a desk. He has the endurance of the possessed. Whenever he got too sleepy to concentrate, he shook his head vigorously and then brought out his bag of sour balls and popped one in his mouth. People stared at him, and once he was interrupted by a drunk who asked him what in the name of God he was writing. Gould knows how to get rid of inquisitive drunks. He pointed at his left ear and said, ‘What? What’s that? Deaf as a post. Can’t hear a word.’ The drunk lost all interest in him. ‘Day was breaking when I left the subway,’ Gould says. ‘I was coughing and sneezing, my eyes were sore, my knees were shaky, I was as hungry as a bitch wolf, and I had exactly eight cents to my name. I didn’t care. My history was longer by eleven thousand brand-new words, and at that moment I bet there wasn’t a chairman of the board in all New York as happy as I.’

Gould is haunted by the fear that he will die before he has the first draft of the Oral History finished. It is already eleven times as long as the Bible. He estimates that the manuscript contains 9,000,000 words, all in longhand. It may well be the lengthiest unpublished work in existence. Gould does his writing in nickel composition books, the kind that children use in school, and the Oral History and the notes he has made for it fill two hundred and seventy of them, all of which are tattered and grimy and stained with coffee, grease, and beer. Using a fountain pen, he covers both sides of each page, leaving no margins anywhere, and his penmanship is poor; hundreds of thousands of words are legible only to
him
. He has never been able to interest a publisher in the Oral History. At one time or another he has lugged armfuls of it into fourteen publishing offices. ‘Half of them said it was obscene and outrageous and to get it out of there as quick as I could,’ he says, ‘and the others said they couldn’t read my handwriting.’ Experiences of this nature do not dismay Gould; he keeps telling himself that it is posterity he is writing for, anyway. In his breast pocket, sealed in a dingy envelope, he always carries a will bequeathing two-thirds of the manuscript to the Harvard Library and the other third to the Smithsonian Institution. ‘A couple of generations after I’m dead and gone,’ he likes to say, ‘the Ph.D.’s will start lousing through my work. Just imagine their surprise. ‘Why, I be damned,’ they’ll say, ‘this fellow was the most brilliant historian of the century.’ They’ll give me my due. I don’t claim that all of the Oral History is first class, but some of it will live as long as the English language.’ Gould used to keep his composition books scattered all over the Village, in the apartments and studios of friends. He kept them stuck away in closets and under beds and behind the books in bookcases. In the winter of 1942, after hearing that the Metropolitan Museum had moved its most precious paintings to a bombproof storage place somewhere out of town for the duration of the war, he became panicky. He went around and got all his books together and made them into a bale, he wrapped the bale in two layers of oilcloth, and then he entrusted it to a woman he knows who owns a duck-and-chicken farm near Huntington, Long Island. The farmhouse has a stone cellar.

Gould puts into the Oral History only things he has seen or heard. At least half of it is made up of conversations taken down verbatim or summarized; hence the title. ‘What people say is history,’ Gould says. ‘What we used to think was history – kings and queens, treaties, inventions, big battles, beheadings, Caesar, Napoleon, Pontius Pilate, Columbus, William Jennings Bryan – is only formal history and largely false. I’ll put down the informal history of the shirt-sleeved multitude – what they had to say about their jobs, love affairs, vittles, sprees, scrapes, and sorrows – or I’ll perish in the attempt.’ The Oral History is a great hodgepodge and kitchen midden of hearsay, a repository of jabber, an
omnium-gatherum
of bushwa, gab, palaver, hogwash, flapdoodle, and malarkey, the fruit, according to Gould’s estimate, of more than twenty thousand conversations. In it are the hopelessly incoherent biographies of hundreds of bums, accounts of the wanderings of seamen encountered in South Street barrooms, grisly descriptions of hospital and clinic experiences (‘Did you ever have a painful operation or disease?’ is one of the first questions that Gould, fountain pen and composition book in hand, asks a person he has just met), summaries of innumerable Union Square and Columbus Circle harangues, testimonies given by converts at Salvation Army street meetings, and the addled opinions of scores of park-bench oracles and gin-mill savants. For a time Gould haunted the all-night greasy spoons in the vicinity of Bellevue Hospital, eavesdropping on tired internes, nurses, orderlies, ambulance drivers, embalming-school students, and morgue workers, and faithfully recording their talk. He scurries up and down Fifth Avenue during parades, feverishly taking notes. Gould writes with great candor, and the percentage of obscenity in the Oral History is high. He has a chapter called ‘Examples of the So-called Dirty Story of Our Time,’ to which he makes almost daily additions. In another chapter are many rhymes and observations which he found scribbled on the walls of subway washrooms. He believes that these scribblings are as truly historical as the strategy of General Robert E. Lee. Hundreds of thousands of words are devoted to the drunken behavior and the sexual adventures of various professional Greenwich Villagers in the twenties. There are hundreds of reports of ginny Village parties, including gossip about the guests and faithful reports of their arguments on such subjects as reincarnation, birth control, free love, psychoanalysis, Christian Science, Swedenborgianism, vegetarianism, alcoholism, and different political and art isms. ‘I have fully covered what might be termed the intellectual underworld of my time,’ Gould says. There are detailed descriptions of night life in scores of Village drinking and eating places, some of which, such as the Little Quakeress, the Original Julius, the Troubadour Tavern, the Samovar, Hubert’s Cafeteria, Sam Swartz’s T.N.T., and Eli Greifer’s Last Outpost of Bohemia Tea Shoppe, do not exist any longer.