When he is asked why he moved, Dick grunts and mutters, ‘It was time to change the sheets,’ but I have learned that he opened the new place only because he wanted a bigger kitchen. Soon after he made up his mind to move, however, a salesman for a bar-fixtures concern got hold of him and sold him a bill of goods. I believe that bar-equipment salesmen have done more to destroy the independence and individuality of New York gin mills and their customers than prohibition or repeal; there is nothing that will make a gin mill look so cheap and spurious as a modernistic bar and a lot of chairs made of chromium tubing. Dick’s old place was dirty and it smelled like the zoo, but it was genuine; his new place is as shiny and undistinguished as a two-dollar alarm clock. The bar-equipment salesman was so relentless that Dick, who merely wanted a bigger kitchen, ended up by keeping nothing from the old place but the big, greasy, iron safe and a framed and fly-specked photograph of Gallant Fox. He even threw away all the photographs of Lupe Velez, his favourite movie actress. He used to have about a dozen pictures of Miss Velez tacked up on the wall, and sometimes he would gaze at one of them, shake his head, and say, ‘I would crawl a mile over broken beer bottles just to get one look at her in the flesh.’
Dick is proud of his new kitchen. Food always interested him more than alcohol. He used to say, ‘I keep an A-1 kitchen.’ Once I saw him stand at the bar and eat an eight-pound turkey the chef had cooked for the luncheon trade. Dick had intended to eat only a drumstick, but after he had satisfied himself there was nothing left but a plateful of bones. Maxie, the tub-bellied head bartender, watched admiringly as Dick dismantled the turkey. ‘The boss sure does have a passion for groceries,’ he said. Even in the old days Dick often put strange dishes on his mimeographed menu. He had a friend who worked in a soup cannery up the street and one day the friend gave him a bucket of turtle livers. Dick put them on the menu. A customer said, ‘Well, that’s something I never et.’ He ordered them, and while he ate, Dick watched intently. When the man put down his fork Dick went over to his table.
‘How were them turtle livers?’ he asked.
The customer deliberated for a moment.
‘Fact of the matter is,’ he said, ‘they were kind of unusual.’
‘Well,’ said Dick proudly, ‘I want you to know that you’re the first man in New York to eat turtle livers, so far as I know.’
The customer shuddered.
A few nights ago I saw turtle livers on the menu in the new place. They were listed as ‘Pâté de Foie de Tortue Verte.’ Until I saw those pretenious words I never fully realized how dead and gone were the days when Dick was the plain-spoken proprietor of a dirty, lawless, back-street gin mill. I am aware that it is childish, but sometimes, leaning against the spick-and-span new bar, I am overcome by nostalgia for the gutter; I long for a ‘cabaret night’ in Dick’s old place. Friday was pay day in many of the offices and factories in the neighborhood and Friday night was ‘cabaret night’ in Dick’s. A beery old saloon musician would show up with an accordion and a mob of maudlin rummies would surround him to sing hymns and Irish songs. The place would be full of hard-drinking, pretty stenographers from the financial district, and they would be dragged off the bar stools to dance on the tiled floor. The dancers would grind peanut hulls under their shoes, making a strange, scratchy noise.
Some of the drunks would try to push the bar over, putting their shoulders to it and heaving-to as they hummed the ‘Volga Boatmen.’ Dick often threatened to use a seltzer siphon on their heads. ‘I’ll knock some sense in your heads someday, you goats!’ he would yell at his straining customers. He once classified the nuts in his place as the barwalkers, the firebugs, the weepers, and the Carusos. The barwalker was a type of drunk who was not happy unless he was up on the sagging bar, arms akimbo, dancing a Cossack dance and kicking over glasses of beer. The most unusual barwalker was the ordinarily dignified city editor of an afternoon newspaper. He would crawl up and down the bar, making a peculiar, dreadful screech. Dick was always fascinated by him. One night he stared at him and said, ‘What in the hell is that noise you’re making?’ The city editor stopped screeching for a moment. ‘I’m a tree frog,’ he said, happily. The firebugs were those who found it impossible to spill whiskey on the bar without setting it afire. The bartenders would come running and slap out the fitful blue flames with bar towels. One drunk used to pour whole glasses of brandy on the bar and ignite it just to hear Dick yell. Once Dick hit this firebug over the head with a seltzer siphon. The blow would have fractured the firebug’s skull if he hadn’t been wearing a derby.
On those lovely, irretrievable nights a kind of mass hysteria would sweep through the establishment. The customers would tire of singing and dancing and shaking dice. There would be a lull. Then, all of a sudden, they would start bellowing and throwing their drinks on the floor. Arguments would commence. Someone would shout, ‘Take off your glasses!’ One night an ambulance from Broad Street Hospital had to come and get two men who had differed over which had the more nourishment in it: buttermilk or beer. As in a comic strip, the air on these occasions would be full of missiles. Once a customer who had been standing moodily at the bar for hours suddenly let go with a little, heavy-bottomed whiskey glass and knocked a big, jagged hole in the mirror behind the bar. Maxie, the bartender, dodged out of the way. Then he remembered that the mirror cost fifty-five dollars. ‘Dick’s going to dock me a week’s pay because I ducked,’ said Maxie, groaning.
On cabaret nights one customer, an oyster shucker from Washington Market, would go off in a corner by himself, smiling happily, and lead an invisible jazz band, using a swizzle stick for a baton and sometimes yelling at an invisible trombone player, ‘Get hot, you bum!’ Another customer, a tall, emaciated accountant, would hold up whatever object he got his hands on first and shout, ‘How much am I offered? Going, going, gone! Sold to that big dope over there with a cigar in his mouth.’ The accountant’s name was Peterson, but Dick always called him Mr St Peter because he was so thin and old. Mr St Peter lived in a furnished room and spent whole days and nights in Dick’s. Dick used to say that he had a bar-rail foot, that his right foot had become twisted by resting on the rail so much. Dick would point at him proudly and say, ‘Look at old Mr St Peter. When he goes home he walks on one heel.’ Mr St Peter’s principal failing was an inability to make up his mind. For years he complained about the rolls in Dick’s, wanting the poppy-seed variety. Dick finally ordered some and at lunch Mr St Peter said, ‘These sure are fine rolls.’ A moment later he added, ‘And then again, they ain’t.’
When he got tired of imitating an auctioneer, Mr St Peter would sidle over to the coat rack and slip such objects as beer pads and salt shakers into people’s overcoat pockets. In Dick’s, the customers wandered in and out of the kitchen at will, and once Mr St Peter got a mackerel out of the icebox and slipped it into someone’s pocket. One cabaret night Dick got suspicious of Mr St Peter and found that the thin, undernourished rummy had slipped enough food into his own pockets to last him several days. In the old man’s ragged overcoat Dick found eight cans of sardines and a big hunk of Swiss cheese. Dick was not angry. He was amused. ‘Mr St Peter reminds me,’ he said, ‘of a squirrel storing away nuts for a rainy day.’ In one stage of drunkenness Mr St Peter would spray people with a Flit gun; once he took the fire extinguisher off the kitchen wall and came out with it going full blast. Mr St Peter showed up for the grand opening night in Dick’s new place, but I never saw him there again.
It was dangerous to pass out in Dick’s old gin mill on a cabaret night. His customers thought there was nothing quite so funny as an unconscious man. They would strip him of his clothes and outfit him in a waiter’s uniform or whatever garments, including raincoats, they could find in the lockers in the kitchen. Then they would stuff his pockets full of cryptic notes and drag him up the block, depositing him in a doorway and forgetting all about him. When the man woke up he would begin to scream and would never be the same again. I kept some of the slips one victim found
in his pockets. They include the following: ‘The Shadow called. Said for you to call back.’ ‘Well, old boy, I guess your number is up this time.’ ‘Thursday afternoon at three. Make haste. The F.B.I. knows all about it.’ One man woke up with a rope around his neck.
There are never any good fist fights among the dried-up, mannerly men and women who hang out in Dick’s new place. In the old saloon people were always slugging away at each other. The only rule of behavior Dick ever tried to enforce was ‘No fights outside on the street. It don’t look nice. I don’t want my store to get a bad name.’ (Like many old-fashioned saloonkeepers, Dick always referred to his place as ‘the store.’) When a particularly violent cabaret-night seizure struck the gin mill, Dick usually locked the doors, knowing from experience that each newcomer would be infected with the hysteria and join right in. Dick would yell, ‘Lock the doors! We’re having a nervous breakdown in here! Lock the doors!’ Maxie was never unnerved. He would sometimes grin at the antics of a customer, shake his head, and say, ‘This place is a regular Bellevue Island.’ Once, in the middle of a furious Thanksgiving Eve, I saw him hunched over the bar reading a sports section and peacefully singing a song he learned in public school: ‘Glow, little glowworm, glisten, glisten.’
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.’