My Ears Are Bent (10 page)

“It’s wonderful.”

Divine has ordered the people who tenant his Ulster County property to give out no information to strangers. A reporter tried to find out how many angels lived in the Chapel Street establishment. A Negro got up from the front porch where he was painting the floor green and came to the yard. He was asked a few questions.

“I don’t bear witness,” he said, shaking green paint off the brush. “It’s wonderful.”

“Couldn’t you just tell me the number of people living here?” the reporter asked.

“All information of a spiritual or personal nature will have to come from our father, who art in heaven, and I think he’s in New York City right now,” said the painter. “Peace. It’s wonderful.”

She is known as “Miss Mazie” by the blighted men who exist in the walk-up hotels along the Bowery. Her real name is Mazie Gordon, and she is a blonde
with a heart of gold. Her clothing is flamboyant, and she uses cosmetics with abandon. Until midnight she sits in the cramped ticket booth of the Venice Theatre, which she owns, at 209 Park Row, with a Pomeranian dog named Fluffy in her lap.

She feeds the dog farina in hot milk, and talks to it with gruff baby talk. On cold nights she covers the dog in her lap with a blanket. She is a good business woman, and she owns the theater, a few tenements, and a few concessions at Coney Island. A chauffeur calls for her at midnight with a Stutz. She used to work in one of the burlesque houses of Hurtig & Seamon in Harlem, but she will not talk about it. She says, “I never let my right hand know what my left hand is doing.”

Mazie sits in the ticket booth with a green eye-shade pulled down low over her wise, pleasant eyes. The admission to her theater, an aged moving picture house, is one dime during the day, two dimes at night. Sometimes a bum goes in at 10 o’clock in the morning, and at midnight he is still there, sleeping in his seat, snoring as if he owned the joint. Mazie does not mind, but if one begins to yell derisively at the actors on the screen, giving them good advice, she goes in and pulls him out by the slack of his worn pants.

“What the hell!” she shouts, eyeing the bum. “Maybe them other guys in there want to sleep.”

Each morning Mazie gives away a double handful of currency to the inhabitants of the Bowery. A man comes up and stands before her, expectant. He is bleary-eyed. He takes off his hat and bows to Mazie.

“I thought I’d come to see you this morning,” he says. “Could you let me have a nickel, Mazie, please?”

“Why don’t you go die?” says Mazie, pushing two dimes through the slot in her ticket window.

“Thank you, Mazie,” says the drunken man, making a speech. “Got a heart of gold. Best friend I got. Thanks, Mazie. You my girl, Mazie. See you tomorrow.”

He moves off, heading for the nearest saloon.

“I got a good show on today,” says Mazie. “Don’t you want to see the show?”

“No, thanks,” says the bum, anxious for his morning alcohol. “I got to see a man about a job.”

“So long,” says Mazie, closing the slot in her window.

She rubs the ears of her dog. Perhaps she takes a piece of chamois cloth from her bag and polishes her diamond rings. Perhaps she lets the usher take the window while she goes back for a drink. Perhaps she takes down one of the lives of the saints from a shelf in her booth and reads it, making change and selling tickets automatically. Mazie is Jewish, but she wants to be a nun. She admires nuns. She knows scores of nuns and many Mother Superiors, and when “The
White Sister” was playing at her theater she telephoned them all and told them to come see it free.

“I would like to be a nun and live a life of sacrifice,” she says. “I am practically a nun now. The only difference between me and a nun is that I smoke, and drink a little booze, and talk rough. Except for things like that, I am a nun.”

The only thing the people of the Bowery know about Mazie is that she is very kind. At night they see her take her dog for a walk in Park Row. They remember when she used to go up to Perry’s drugstore in the Pulitzer Building (they are making a sporting goods store out of it now) for a cup of coffee, and they remember that she gave a nickel to every man that asked for it. Some of them know, perhaps, that she lives in Coney Island, has four sisters and four brothers. But no one knows about the days when she worked in the burlesque houses. Was she a singer? Was she a girl in the chorus? Mazie won’t tell you.

“None of your damned business!” she says.

Is she married?

“I never saw a man good enough to marry, and it’s none of your damned business,” says Mazie.

The shopkeepers in the neighborhood—the clerks in the flophouses, the dealers in second-hand clothes, the waiters in the joints that sell a whole
meal with French-fried potatoes for 15 cents—all tell stories about Mazie’s generosity.

They recite with pride the remark she made to the corpulent director of one of the Bowery missions, who objected to her language.

“What makes you so damned cut up about my cherce of words?” said Mazie. “How I talk is none of your pot-bellied business.”

And on the cold nights, the nights when the Bowery is the coldest street in the city, Mazie takes the bums into the Greek’s on Chatham Square and buys them stew and coffee, and sometimes Mazie sees a man with busted shoes, and she turns her ticket window over to an usher and goes with the man and sees that he is shod against the wet pavements, and there is many a day when Mazie finds she has given away her profits.

But Mazie says she worries a lot, and some nights she goes home to Coney Island and cannot sleep, and for peace she looks at her religious medals and dreams of becoming a nun and reads the not especially eventful lives of the saints.

“What worries you, Mazie?”

“What worries me is none of your damned business.”

One Sunday afternoon I went to see Mr. Jack Pfefer, an importer of freaks for the wrestling business. He sat with his feet on the desk in a red-walled office on the tenth floor of the Times Building and carefully combed his long black hair with a pocket comb. He has worn his hair long and flowing ever since he left Warsaw to take over the management of a company of itinerant Russian opera singers.

He wore a wilted white carnation in his lapel. Some of his obese, no-necked wrestlers call him “Carnation Jack,” but he does not approve of the nickname; he insists on being known as Mr. Jack Pfefer.

The red walls of his office were littered with framed photographs of wrestlers and opera singers. A sign was tacked above the rows of photographs on one wall. It read: “Dead wrestlers.” Among them were photographs of several living wrestlers. When a
wrestler wrongs Mr. Pfefer his photograph is immediately tacked up on the “dead wall.” It is a way Mr. Pfefer has of getting even.

While the little man combed his hair he whistled a tune from “Boris Godunov.” He impresses his wrestlers by whistling tunes from operas. When he finally got his hair arranged the way he wanted it, he tucked his comb into one of the pockets of his vest.

“I got to wear my hair long, like I was a poet,” he said, sighing. “I don’t want to be mistook for a wrestler. Some bum might come in here and mistook me for a wrestler.”

The door opened and in came a member of Mr. Pfefer’s herd, a mournful, furtive-mannered wrestler with a long beard who is billed only as “King Kong, the Abyssinian Gorilla Man.” Even Mr. Pfefer does not know his correct name. He is a Greek, but his greatest popularity coincided with the Ethiopian war and Mr. Pfefer changed his nationality to Abyssinian. He did not mind. King Kong always looks as if he is expecting someone to hit him over the head with a chair. He always looks as if he is ready to dodge. He is popular in New Jersey arenas because of the plaintive screech he lets out when some other wrestler begins to twist his feet. He shuffled into the room and looked through a pile of letters on the desk. Mr. Pfefer jumped to his feet.

“Take off your lousy hat, you bum,” he yelled.

King Kong, the “Gorilla Man” who weighs 202 pounds, obediently took off his hat.

“Go into the other room,” yelled Mr. Pfefer, who weighs 125 pounds on his best days. “There’s a couple more gorillas in the other room. Go inside, like I told you.”

“Yes, Mr. Pfefer,” said King Kong, shuffling out of the room.

“I got to handle these freaks like I was a father,” said the fearless Mr. Pfefer. “They are like my little children, the bums. One day I beat them up and yell their ears off, and next day I am with them gentle like a father.”

Mr. Pfefer sighed. He sighed so deeply that his wilted carnation opened up.

“This is a nervous-wrecking business,” he said. “With freaks, with politics from the Athletic Commission, with fights against me all the time by the wrestling trust. Them schemers! Them manipulators! Them bums! All the time they want to squeeze me out. I lost in three years $75,000 cash fighting with them schemers, which my books can prove. They should squeeze me out! Not when I got one breath in me they should squeeze me out.”

Mr. Pfefer used to be allied with the late Jack Curley, wrestling promoter and friend of the former
Prince of Wales. They fought all the time, however, and now Mr. Pfefer is alone. He calls himself a booking agent for wrestlers. Sometimes he promotes a match himself, but usually he only supplies wrestlers to matchmakers of the Garden, of Ridgewood Grove, of the Bronx Coliseum, and of the Mecca Arena, a new club which has opened up in an old theater on Fourteenth Street. Some of his boys can really wrestle, but he would not be angered if you told him that most of them could not wrestle their way out of a bathing suit, catch as catch can.

“I’m in the show business, like Ringling Brothers,” he says. “The show must go on. The main thing what the public wants is freaks, a good laugh.”

Mr. Pfefer claims credit for the boom in wrestling which has lasted for the last twelve years, more or less.

“On the level, on account of it’s a fact,” he said, “when I came on the scene the wrestling business was dead like a cemetery. Jack Curley’s office was a cemetery. With me it is an art to make things boom. I have to send right away pictures to the papers. I have to change right away the names of the wrestlers. Suppose I got a boy named Alexander Garkowienko, which I did have. All right, I name him Alexander the Great, the Russian Giant. I get from Europe freaks like nobody ever saw before. Phooey! So wrestling
booms. From my first match we take in from the box office a couple grand, maybe more. Before I come eight hundred dollars was wonderful like heaven. So the wrestling trust gets the credit and the glory. Do I care? The main thing what I want to make is money.”

He is proud of the freaks he has imported by the ton. Sometimes he will stare at a photograph of one of his bearded, corpulent pets and shout, giggling, “Boy, what a freak.” A wrestler has to be an exceedingly grotesque person to win Mr. Pfefer’s respect. The wrestling business may appear wretched to some, but he usually thinks it is wonderful. Sometimes even he has a fit of loathing. He knows, however, that there is a kind of mass sadism rampant in the country, and so long as citizens will pay to see wrestlers moan and grunt and burp and slap the mat in agony he is willing to take their dollar bills. It is not a pretty business, with its epidemics of trachoma (which is an occupational disease), and its phony champions, and its catfights among promoters, and its shabby theatricalisms. It is not like prizefighting, where the best man quite often wins. About it is the furtive air of the sideshow, the flea circus.

“Oh, hell,” Mr. Pfefer said, generalizing about his business, “it is like the circus with elephants that wear shoes and eat off plates. I am so sick of freaks sometimes
I have to go to the opera to quit my nerves from jumping. Right now my boys are clean-living American boys. Clean-cut. One hundred percent.”

A moment later, however, he was again enthusiastic about his freaks.

“I have a new monster,” he said, “a freak with class. His name is Martin Levy from Boston. He has trained three months, and we got him down to 625 pounds. That is the most meat which ever stepped into a ring. He is twenty-five years old. He could not wrestle a baby-carriage but what’s the difference?

“Suppose a wrestler makes a flying tackle against him, he is so big it’s the same thing like you would flying-tackle the wall. Can you throw the wall? Can you pin the wall to the mat? He is expensive to me. It costs me ten, twelve dollars by the day to feed him. He eats vegetables and eggs by the dozen. He pours olive oil into his soup. He has to travel around with a truck on account of no hotel bed would hold him. By train he can’t travel. It takes a half-hour to push him through the door, and suppose the train don’t stop in the station only a minute? He’s going to draw, you know, tremendous. If he don’t draw I’m going to took him and chalk him on the wall, the bum.”

For many years Mr. Pfefer had agents in Europe, men he met when he was touring with his Russian opera singers, and they would cable him whenever
they caught sight of a giant who might be persuaded to come to America and wrestle. He imported his first wrestler in 1922.

“I always love sport like I love music,” he said, “and I was very proud when my first giant arrived. He was Garkowienko, which I called Alexander the Great. I imported him from the Ukraine. He weighed 425 pounds when he came, but when I shipped him home he was down to 235, a ghost. Once to amuse me he took a big steel beam like they use to make skyscrapers, and he balanced it on his shoulders and sixty people stood on it, thirty on each side. He was always homesick.