‘Fill her up?’ he asked.
‘Fill her up,’ said Mike.
A man came in with a Daily News. He stood at the bar and looked through a comic strip in the back of the paper. He did not order, but the bartender automatically placed a bottle of rye, a whiskey glass, and a glass of water on the bar in front of him. When he finished the comic strip, the man laughed.
‘Hey, Tommy,’ he called to the bartender, ‘don’t miss Moon Mullins. Kayo certainly pulled a fast one on Lord Plushbottom.’
Mike smiled. On his way home he would pick up the News and see what had happened to Lord Plushbottom. He would get a News and a Mirror and read himself to sleep. His glass was empty again.
‘I tell you,’ he said to the bartender, ‘let’s have a rye this time. Beer chaser.’
‘O.K.,’ said the bartender. ‘Rye and a small beer.’
He placed the bottle of rye in front of Mike.
‘It looks the same,’ said Mike, filling his glass.
(1939)
The Kind Old Blonde
I WAS IN Shine’s, an Irish restaurant near the Pennsylvania Station, eating bluefish. A man and a woman came in and took the table opposite mine. While they were getting settled at the table, the man told the waiter they had just come in from the Belmont track. The waiter seemed pleased to see them. The man was bald and red-faced and substantial. He looked like a contractor, or maybe he had something to do with the horses. The woman was a big, sound, well-dressed blonde. She might have been the co-leader of a Tammany club, or an old vaudeville actress who had saved her money or perhaps married well. The waiter passed out menus and the man began to study his at once, but the woman ordered an Old-Fashioned before she opened hers. The man kept running a finger under his stiff blue collar and twisting his head from side to side. When the waiter placed the cocktail in front of the woman, the man looked at it sullenly.
‘That’s the only way I know to get ten cents for a little piece of orange peel,’ he said, staring at the cocktail. ‘Same amount of whiskey you get in a quarter drink. They stick in a strip of orange peel and charge you thirty-fi’ cents.’
‘I like it,’ said the blonde.
‘Rather take mine straight,’ he said.
She was considering clams and planked shad. He said he thought he would have some spaghetti. He spoke without enthusiasm.
‘I’m going to have another cocktail before I order,’ she said.
‘Go right ahead,’ said the man.
The way he said it made her look up from her menu. She closed it and looked at him.
‘You not drinking, Jim?’
‘No.’
‘That why you been so gloomy all day?’
‘I guess so. I’m sorry.’
‘Is there something wrong, Jim?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t had a drink for three days. I went up to see my doctor, Doctor Phillips. I got orders to lay off the stuff. He told me I been digging my grave with cigars and booze. I been worried. It worried me.’
The waiter came and the woman told him she wanted another cocktail and a dozen clams. She reached in her handbag and took out her cigarettes. The man held a match for her. She took a deep breath; then she let the smoke out through her nostrils.
‘Had a friend used to like spaghetti,’ said the blonde, settling her fat elbows on the tablecloth. ‘I bet he weighed three hundred pounds. Big as a horse. He was a handicapper. Used to kill a quart a day, and in the summer he’d take ten, fifteen beers at one sitting.’
The man grunted.
‘He was an Eyetalian fellow, name of Al,’ said the blonde, ‘but he never drank wine. One fall he got shooting pains. Doctor told him he better lay off the booze. He wasn’t no good after that; had to quit operating. He was up to my place for dinner one night and I told him, “Al,” I said, “your system’s like a machine. It’s got to have erl to operate. You taking the erl away and it’s killing you.” I was right. Year and a half later I was to his funeral. Been here now if he’d a gone ahead and drank with some moderation. In my humble opinion he was murdered by the doctor.’
‘I guess it was a shock to his heart,’ said the man.
‘What I told him,’ said the blonde. ‘I said to him, “Al, it’s a strain on your heart. Your heart can’t stand it.”’
‘How old a man was he?’
‘He was fifty-some-odd, Jim. He was about your age, Jim. He thought he’d live to be ninety if he gave up the booze. He said all the men in his family lived to hit ninety. Poor old Al. In a year and a half he was dead and gone. Died broke. Left hardly enough to take care of the funeral.’
They were silent for a little while, and then the man sat up in his chair.
‘Well, it just goes to show,’ he said.
The waiter brought the woman’s second cocktail and the plate of clams. She looked at them critically.
‘If you don’t mind,’ she said to the waiter, ‘these clams are mighty small. I’d like to have the cherrystones. If you don’t mind.’
The waiter picked up the plate of littlenecks.
‘Jim, please,’ she said to the man. ‘If I was you, I’d have a drink.’
When the waiter was about six steps from the kitchen the man called him back.
‘I want a drink of rye,’ he said. ‘Let me have a drink of rye.’
‘You want soda or ginger ale?’
‘Rye and plain water,’ said the man.
When the waiter brought the cherrystones, the blonde looked at them and said, ‘Now, that’s more like it.’ She picked up the little fork and went to work on the clams. The man poured the rye into the plain water and stirred it. Drinking it, he took his time.
‘Tell you what,’ he said to the blonde, ‘I think I’ll change my mind. Think I’ll have some shad roe and bacon. Before you know it the season for shad roe will be over and gone.’
She had a cherrystone halfway to her mouth.
‘Personally, Jim, I always liked the shad better than the roe,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘You feel better now, don’t you, darling?’
(1938)
I Couldn’t Dope It Out
THERE IS AN eating place on River Street in Hoboken, across from the piers and a couple of blocks from the Lackawanna ferry shed, called the My Blue Heaven Italian Restaurant. One summer I came back from Copenhagen on a Hog Island freighter and the food was bad, and when the freighter finally docked in Hoboken the first place to eat that I saw was the My Blue Heaven, and I went directly to it with my suitcase in my hand. I sat down and the waiter handed me a menu, but before I started looking at it he said that the combination that day was risotto and calamari and that he recommended it. ‘It’s rice,’ he said, ‘and squid.’ At that time I had never eaten risotto, let alone calamari, but I ordered the combination, impulsively, and I found it to be extraordinarily appetizing. Since then I have gone back to the My Blue Heaven really quite often, considering that I live in Greenwich Village and have to cross the river on the ferry to get to it, which, of course, is part of the fun. I have got to know the people who run the place and some of the regular customers. (I have never asked about the name, and I guess it is because I sense that there is something sentimental or even cute about it, and I have such a good opinion of the place and the people who run it that I would just as soon not know.)
One Sunday not long ago I woke up in the middle of the morning. It was a beautiful day and I decided to take a ferry over to Hoboken and have lunch in the My Blue Heaven.
When I arrived at the place around noon, Paulie, the bartender, was sleepily polishing glasses. A grouchy dock superintendent named Chris, who hangs out there, was sitting at a front table drinking Dutch beer and reading a Newark Sunday paper. Udo, the cook, and a waiter named Vinnie were at a table in the rear, opposite the door to the kitchen. Udo was drinking coffee and Vinnie was feeding free-lunch liverwurst to the kitchen cat. I sat down with Chris. While I had lunch, he scornfully read aloud a story in the Newark paper speculating on a fight between
Joe Louis and ‘Two Ton’ Tony Galento, the fat, eccentric New Jersey heavyweight. Paulie stopped polishing glasses and came over to our table and we got into a discussion about Galento.
While we were talking, a man and a woman came in. I would say they were in their late forties. She was small and red-haired and quite good-looking in a scrawny, slapdash way. I remember that she had on a green dress that was very becoming. The man was heavyset and his face was double-chinned and gloomy. The main thing I remember about him is that he was wearing a blue serge suit that seemed to be too tight, as if he had been putting on weight. In the front of the My Blue Heaven are two small tables pushed close together so the sun coming in through the window will strike them. Chris, Paulie, and I were sitting at one of them. The newcomers sat down right across from us at the other sunny table.
Vinnie came out of the kitchen, bringing them menus and glasses of water. Without looking at the menu or at Vinnie, the man ordered a hot roast-beef sandwich. He had a Herald Tribune and he slipped out the news and sports and tossed the other sections on a stand back of his chair, on which stacks of napkins are kept. He didn’t pay any attention to the woman, but let her order for herself. She studied the menu quite a while before she made up her mind.
‘Charlie,’ she said when the waiter had gone, ‘I want to see the magazine section, please.’
He was reading the sports. He didn’t look up when she spoke, but motioned with his head in the direction of the napkin stand behind him. She stared at him, waiting to see if he would get the paper for her. Then she stood up, walked around to the stand, and got it herself. At our table we resumed the discussion about Galento.
‘Galento won’t take things serious,’ Paulie said. ‘He thinks it’s funny to train on beer and hot dogs. If he’d quit boozing around and really train, he could take Joe Louis.’
‘Nuts!’ said Chris. ‘It would be like dropping a safe on his head. It would be murder.’
There were two big photographs of Louis and Galento in the Newark paper. Chris had the page spread out on the table. Paulie bent over and studied the photograph of Galento.
‘He looks like a tough man to shave,’ he said.
‘He just looks tough,’ said Chris. ‘There wouldn’t be any sense to a fight like that. It would be first-degree murder. Tony couldn’t take Joe if Joe was tied up hands and feet and Tony was fighting with a baseball bat.’
The man with the woman stopped reading. He turned around in his chair and looked at Chris. He appeared to be annoyed.
‘What makes you so sure about everything?’ he asked Chris.
‘Beg your pardon?’ said Chris, surprised.
‘What makes you so sure it would be murder?’ he asked. ‘Are you a big fight expert or something?’
The woman grabbed him by the wrist.
‘Charlie,’ she said. ‘Please, for my sake.’
‘Shut up, stupid,’ he said.
He pulled his hand away and turned again to Chris. ‘You think you’re an expert?’ he asked.
‘My friend,’ said Chris, ‘I think Galento is a bum. If it’s anything to you.’
‘An expert,’ said the man.
‘My friend,’ said Chris, ‘do you happen to know what Tommy Loughran said to the referee? What he said when Sharkey got through with him that time?’
‘What?’
‘He said, “Could I please sit down some place?”’
‘So what?’
‘So I’m just making a prediction.’
At that moment Vinnie came up, bringing the woman some tomato juice. The man turned around in his chair. ‘Another one of those Jersey experts,’ he said, returning to his sports section. Chris shrugged his shoulders. He told Paulie he wanted a beer and Paulie hurried off to draw it. There was no more conversation at our table. I drank my coffee and Chris turned back to his paper and his beer. Presently the man at the other table stopped reading, stretched his arms, and yawned.
‘I’m tired,’ he said to the woman.
‘Tired?’ said the woman. Her face was strained.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Tired. Ever hear of it?’
Vinnie brought their orders. The woman had an omelet and Udo had fixed the man a big roast-beef sandwich. When they finished eating, the woman said, ‘How was the sandwich, Charlie?’
‘Worst roast-beef sandwich I ever had,’ he said. ‘I think it’ll stunt me for life.’
‘My omelet was very good,’ she said.
‘What about a drink?’ the man said. ‘Maybe it would improve your disposition.’
‘My disposition!’ she said, opening her eyes in amazement. ‘What’s the matter with my disposition?’
‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘except you haven’t cracked a smile since Christ left Cleveland.’
The woman laughed nervously.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t care for a drink.’
The tables were so close together Chris and I could hear everything they said, and it made us ill at ease. I tried to reopen the prizefighting discussion, but Chris had become sullen. He wouldn’t answer me.
‘It’s a lovely day, isn’t it, Charlie?’ the woman said.
He didn’t answer her. A moment later he said, ‘Didn’t I tell you you should go see the dentist?’ The woman nodded.
‘I know, Charlie,’ she said hastily. ‘I know.’
‘I never saw such crooked teeth,’ he said. ‘You got to have some work done on your teeth. You look like you been in a wreck. Didn’t you promise me a dozen times you’d go see the dentist?’
Her lips trembled. Vinnie came up to clear the dishes away, and while he was at the table she was smiling. It was a strained, painful smile. When Vinnie left, she got a handkerchief out of her purse, not looking down at the purse in her lap but searching in it blindly. Her eyes were full of tears. Chris and I stared out of the window.
We could hear the man angrily rattling his paper. Then he got up and went to the washroom. A minute later the woman walked over to the slot-machine phonograph at the end of the bar. She selected a record and slipped a nickel in the slot. It was ‘Night and Day,’ a Frances Langford record. The music sounded a little hysterical. While she stood there, bent over the titles in the glass front of the phonograph, he came out of the washroom and sat down. She did not return to the table until the record was finished.
‘What did you put that on for?’ he asked when she sat down.
‘I don’t know,’ she said nervously. ‘I just did.’
‘“In the silence of my lonely room,”’ he sang, nasally mocking the song, ‘“I think of you.”’
‘Let’s go, Charlie,’ she said.
‘It was your idea,’ he said scornfully, ‘a ferryboat ride.’
‘I thought it would be fun, like a fool,’ she said. ‘Let’s go, Charlie.’
Vinnie put a check on their table. The man paid Paulie and they walked out.
‘Gee,’ said Paulie, as soon as they reached the street, ‘what a nasty guy!’
‘I shoulda bopped him one,’ said Chris. ‘He wasn’t even drunk.’
‘The way he treated that woman!’ said Paulie indignantly. ‘Gee, that’s no way to treat a woman.’
I stayed in the My Blue Heaven until about two. Then I walked up River Street. At the head of the street I went down the hill and walked out on the Gdynia American pier. I killed most of the afternoon on the pier, sitting on a stringpiece in the sun and watching the traffic out in the river. Late in the afternoon I climbed the hill, turned back into River Street, and headed for the Lackawanna ferry shed. On the cement plaza in front of the shed a crowd was watching a man feed the flock of pigeons that haunts the Hoboken piers. It was the man I had seen in the My Blue Heaven, the nasty guy. He was tossing peanuts to the pigeons. The woman was standing beside him, holding a bag of peanuts. They were having a good time. The man was kneeling. He would reach up and get some peanuts out of the bag, shell them, and fling them out. The arrogant pigeons would hurry across the cement, shouldering each ot
her out of the way and walking across the shoes of the onlookers, and the woman would laugh. When she laughed she was very attractive. I remember I thought, ‘I bet he’s poisoning the pigeons.’
I went into the ferry shed and got a cup of coffee at the lunch stand. After a while the gates to the ferry slid back and I went aboard. I walked to the front of the ferry and stood at the rail. While the ferry was moving out of the slip the man and woman walked out on the deck, arm in arm. They walked up and put their elbows on the rail. The woman stood right beside me. They were talking. He said something to the woman that I didn’t hear, and she laughed and said, ‘You wouldn’t kid me, would you?’ I didn’t hear his answer. Then the woman, laughing happily, said, ‘I bet you tell that to all the girls.’ They were talking that way, laughing and talking, all the way across the river. I couldn’t dope it out.
(1938)
III
The Downfall of Fascism in Black Ankle County
EVERY TIME I see Mussolini shooting off his mouth in a newsreel or Göring goose-stepping in a rotogravure, I am reminded of Mr Catfish Giddy and my first encounter with Fascism. In 1923, when I was in the ninth grade in Stonewall, North Carolina, Mr Giddy and Mr Spuddy Ransom organized a branch of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, or the Invisible Empire, which spread terror through Black Ankle County for several months. All the kids in town had seen ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ and they were fascinated by the white robes and hoods worn by the local Klansmen, and by the fiery crosses they burned at midnight on Saturdays in the vacant lot beside the Charleston, Pee Dee, and Northern depot. On Tuesday and Friday, the Klan’s meeting nights, the kids would hide in the patch of Jerusalem-oak weeds in the rear of the Planters Bank & Trust Company and watch the Klansmen go up the back stairs to their meeting hall above the bank. Sometimes they reappeared in a few minutes, dressed in flowing white robes, and drove off mysteriously. I spent so many nights hiding in the weed patch that I failed my final examinations in algebra, the history of North Carolina, English composition, and French, and was not promoted, which I did not mind, as I had already spent two years in the ninth grade and felt at home there.