My Ears Are Bent (4 page)

“I hope to God you don’t favor us with no hymns tonight,” The House says when he enters the place.

Jeeter is an expert at snapping a coin, hidden between his fingers, against a highball glass the moment it touches his lips, making a noise as if he had bit a piece out of the glass. Then he screams and spits out a mouthful of ice, which looks a great deal like glass when it is flying through the air. It frightens new customers.

“My God, man,” they say, “are you hurt?”

“I am bleeding to death,” Jeeter moans, clasping his hand to his mouth and simulating expressions of extreme pain.

There are quite a few women among the regular customers. About once a month a stout bookkeeper for a religious-goods house over on Barclay Street shows up. She used to be a singer in vaudeville. She is a matronly person, and she says she had rickets when she was a child and it left her with a nervous disorder. She has windshield scars running from ear to mouth on both sides of her face, but they do not make her self-conscious. She often points them out to people and says, “I am streamlined.” When she is full of beer, she climbs up on the bar and pretends she is sitting on a piano.

“I got ants in my pants,” she sings in her lovely soprano voice. “I got a turtle in my girdle.”

“I am being crucified,” The House screams, pushing her off the bar.

The only man who ever died in this ginmill was a Mr. Friedman. He was extraordinarily fat. He ran a newsstand on West Street and sold newspapers to the New Jersey ferryboat commuters. He was a hardworking man during prohibition, when beer cost a quarter a glass, but when repeal brought the price down to ten cents, he would quit selling papers in the
middle of the day and hurry off to Dick’s. The night he died was after the day Wiley Post and Will Rogers crashed in Alaska. Everybody who passed the stand bought a paper, and by 3 P.M. he figured he had enough money in his coin apron to finance a night of beer-drinking. Every time Mr. Friedman finished a glass of beer, he would grunt and say, “Well, they can’t take that away from me.” He often complained about the steaks in the place.

“This steak wasn’t hung long enough,” he would yell, stabbing the thick air with his fork. “I can’t eat this fresh meat. I ain’t no cannibal.”

In the summer he slept in City Hall Park. Walking across the park to the Third Avenue El, I have often seen him stretched out on a bench, snoring to the moon. The place was full the night he died. He fell off his stool at the bar and began to gasp. The House ran to the booth and called the police. An ambulance doctor examined him while he was stretched out on the tile floor.

“You can hardly call him a man,” said the young doctor. “He is just a living barrel of beer.”

Just before he died he looked up at the customers gathered around him with drinks in their hands and said, “I drank thirty-two beers tonight.” Those were his last words.

“I guess Mr. Friedman is a dead barrel of beer
now,” said The House as a committee of customers wrapped up the drunken newsdealer in two tablecloths and carried him out.

An old printer spends whole days and nights in the place, holding to the bar with one hand and making oratorical gestures with the other. He makes a speech which never ends, muttering to himself, and no one knows what he is talking about, except that he is denouncing something.

“What’s the matter with him?” new customers ask, staring.

“I never been able to figure out what he’s talking about,” The House answers. “Hey, Jimmy, tell the man what you’re talking about. My God, Jimmy, let us in on the secret.”

A cabdriver who was born in England hangs out in the place. His only name is Liverpool. He is probably the only cabdriver in the city doing a credit business. He even sells Irish Sweepstakes tickets on credit. When he is in the place, he makes it his business to answer the telephone. It is practically impossible to reach anybody in the place by telephone. Liverpool will answer a call and yell from the booth, “It’s for you, Mr. Kennedy. Are you here?” Mr. Kennedy will shake his head and say, “I ain’t here. You haven’t seen me since Labor Day.” Then you hear Liverpool saying, “No, Miss, he ain’t been in since Labor Day.”

When Liverpool comes into the place, he looks scornfully at the row of drinkers. He never drinks anything, and when he hauls a drunken customer home on credit he gives him a temperance lecture. Sometimes he has the fare screaming in horror.

“You are a fool to drink,” he will yell through the cab window while waiting for a light to change. “You should let it alone. What do you think your liver looks like now? In the morning you will have a bad headache. Now, take me. I don’t drink, and I feel fine, just fine. If I didn’t have to in the line of business, I would never put my foot in a barroom. My mamma didn’t raise no crazy children.”

Shaking for drinks by way of a game called Indian Dice is always going on in Dick’s. Sometimes as many as fifteen people are shaking in one game, and it costs the man who gets stuck a day’s wages to pay the round. The House always shakes. He is a wizard with a dicebox, and sometimes customers drink themselves blind trying to stick him. The game is played with five dice, and no set lasts longer than one night. The losers get mad and throw them into the spittoon just to hear The House scream.

“Listen to him yell,” they say. “He got those dice from the five-and-dime, but to hear him yell you would think they was made from precious ivory from the Sudan or someplace.”

The House does not have any trouble with policemen.
He knows them all. One rainy night a policeman came in and got drunk. Then he took out his revolver and began to have target practice, using the telephone booth for a target. The House sidled out of the place and telephoned the police station, and two other policemen came and took the marksman away. The House keeps a bottle under the bar for them and calls it “the cops’ bottle.” This bottle contains a blend of Scotch and rye, made up of drinks left unfinished by paying customers. One big cop always snorts when he has his drink and says, “This must be some of that new kind of whiskey which they distill from axle grease.”

There used to be a pin game in the place which paid off beginning at a score of 13,500, but one night the customer called Jeeter Lester got a screwdriver and fixed up some bolts on the machine. He fixed it so you got at least 30,000, even if you shot wild, and everybody who played it collected at least a quarter before The House found out why there were so many expert pin-game players among his customers and called the company to take the damned thing out of his place.

A lot of fights start in Dick’s Bar and Grill, but they do not end there. There is a vacant loft upstairs, and when customers begin taking pokes at one another, The House makes them go up there and fight it out. One of the bartenders will help them up the
stairs, and soon the sound of scuffling and swearing will reach the customers below. Once a man was knocked out on a Friday night, and his opponent came downstairs and continued his drinking. Sunday morning the bartender went upstairs for something and found the loser on the floor, still asleep. When he was aroused and told about the passage of time, he took it all right.

“I needed sleep anyway,” he said.

Saloonkeepers are extremely useful to reporters in New York City. The dreary business of locating people takes up most of a reporter’s time, and in many neighborhoods, especially in tenement neighborhoods, the saloonkeeper is apt to know the address or hangout of any citizen dopey enough or unlucky enough to be of interest to a great metropolitan newspaper. When a person suddenly gets into the news—a happy idiot who wins an Irish Sweepstakes prize, for instance, or a woman who murders her sweetheart because she loves him so—the reporter is frequently able to piece together an accurate picture of the person by talking with the saloonkeeper, the delicatessen proprietor, the undertaker (half the people in any poor neighborhood owe money to the undertaker), and the grocer. In any neighborhood
these gentlemen know all the gossip, and unlike the priest, who also knows all the gossip, they do not mind talking, giving you the worst they know. Of these, however, the saloonkeeper is usually the best informed.

The saloonkeeper is also useful because he can be interviewed about anything. This is an example: If a war breaks out anywhere in the world an idea for a local story always takes form in the frenzied brain of the feature editor, and the idea is always the same. If the war is between Italy and Ethiopia, for instance, the idea is, “How do the Italians in New York City feel about the war?” When a reporter is assigned to such a story he goes on a hurried tour of the ginmills in the nearest Italian neighborhood (Mulberry Street if he works for The World-Telegram and Harlem’s Little Italy if he works for The Herald Tribune) and in his story each saloonkeeper is identified as “a community leader.”

When I am assigned to interview an “authority” on anything I sometimes find it wise to head for the nearest saloon and interview the bartender. One bitter afternoon in December 1936, I was told to find “an authority on mass insanity” and ask him to review the insane happenings of 1936. The best authority on mass insanity I could think of was Gilligan F. Holton, an eccentric Negro saloonkeeper and gambler, who ran the Broken Leg and Busted Bar & Grill in a basement
on West 138th Street until the end of 1931 when the cops tore the door down and put him in jail for seven months because he could not keep order among the society matrons who frequented the establishment.

I located Mr. Holton in a bar and grill operated by one of his former bartenders, a corner bar and grill on Third Avenue. He said he was completing a dissertation in which he expected to prove that William Shakespeare was a Moor, a dissertation he began years ago while working as a servant for David Belasco, but that he was willing to knock off work for a few hours and give me a discourse on certain examples of mass insanity in 1936. Before he began the discourse he ordered a beer. The bartender pushed the glass across the bar. Mr. Holton picked it up and called for a soup spoon. Holding the spoon daintily, with his little finger outstretched, he scooped the foam off the top of the beer.

“I never could stand whipped cream,” he said. “It don’t agree with me.”

When he had removed the collar from his beer Mr. Holton drank it with one triumphant gulp. Then he looked scornfully at the bartender and said, “Put it on my tab, you bum.”

Then he sat down at a table.

“It sure was a nutty year,” he said, gazing into the distance like a seer. “More high-class nuts running
around than you would think the world would hold. There was times when I thought the whole damned population had gone off and ate themselves a bait of loco weed. Each time some new thing came up my wife, Mrs. Ida, would try it out on me. Like one night she woke me up and said, ‘Knock, knock.’ I knew she was trying to get me to say, ‘Who’s there?’ But I just said, ‘Shut up, Mrs. Ida.’ She kept on knock-knocking, and I picked up an automobile jack I keep handy beside the bed and hit her over the head with it.

“The next night she came in and began to wiggle her fingers and stick out her tongue. I said to her, ‘What’s the matter this time, Mrs. Ida?’ She said, ‘What’s this?’ She kept on wiggling her fingers and I just looked at her. Then she said, ‘Don’t you catch on? I am imitating a cash register.’ I picked up my automobile jack and let her have it right where it would do the most good. I am too old for that sort of by-play. I reached my majority years and years ago. I do not wear long pants just because they become me.”

Mr. Holton sighed and shook his head. He said things got so bad at home that he wrote Santa Claus and asked him to give Mrs. Ida “a new set of brains.” He said he believed the song “The Music Goes ’Round and ’Round” had an effect on his mind which would last for many years.

“There was a time when I thought the dogcatcher
would come for me at any moment,” he said. “I could just see myself up at the State asylum, the star freshman at the State asylum.”

He began to bang on the table and the bartender rushed forward with a beer and a soup spoon. However, Mr. Holton disregarded the beer. He jumped up and began to scamper about the tiled floor of the bar and grill.

“You push the middle valve down,” he yelled. “Boom, boom.”

He jumped up and down as he sang.

“The music goes ’round and ’round,” he yelled. “Boom, boom.”

He ran over to the bartender and said, “Hit me, William, hit me.”

The bartender hit him over the head with a chair. Then Mr. Holton smiled happily.

“I feel better now,” he said, sitting down and drinking his beer.

He said that during the forthcoming year he hoped to establish himself as a cult leader.

“Sort of on the order of Father Divine, but more refined,” he said. “Now, there’s a man who contributed a lot to 1936. I won’t say what he contributed, but he sure did contribute. My cult will be a thing of beauty. I’m going to get a lot of doll-babies gathered around me, the fattest bunch of women I can find. I like fat women. I’m going to teach them to yell,
‘Thank you, Father,’ every time I draw in my breath. On second thought I think I’ll teach them to say, ‘Thank you, Papa.’ That will improve on Father Divine.

“Also, I will make all the people in my cult talk in the unknown tongue. It is so cute. I would have joined up with Father Divine’s movement myself, except I found out that there is no beer in the icebox up in his Promised Land. Plenty of spare-ribs, but no beer.”

He said that 1936 was indeed a screwy year, but that 1931 beat all the years he ever saw.

“I was running my Broken Leg and Busted Bar & Grill full blast that year,” he said. “It was one of those ‘intimate’ places. The people would stand for anything that year. One night the place was crowded, and a man and his wife came in. He looked like a big spender. I decided to use him for a psychological test, a test to determine just how much a human being will stand for.