Read Online Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) by Joseph Mitchell - Free Book Online
Authors: Joseph Mitchell
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regularly to about twenty-five of these men. Because of this, she is disliked by many of the hard-shell evangelists who hold hymn-singings in the gutters of the Bowery every evening. One of them, a grim, elderly woman, came to the cage not long ago and shook a finger at Mazie. ‘We sacrifice our nights to come down here and encourage these unfortunates to turn over a new leaf,’ she said. ‘Then you give them money and they begin using intoxicants all over again.’ When Mazie is faced with such a situation, she makes irrelevant or vulgar remarks until the complainant leaves. On this occasion she leaned forward and said, ‘Par’n me, Madam, but it sounds like your guts are growling. What you need is a beer.’
Few of the men to whom Mazie gives money for eye-openers are companionable. They take her dimes with quivering fingers, mutter a word of thanks, and hurry off. Two of them, however, invariably linger a while. They have become close friends of Mazie’s. One is a courtly old Irishman named Pop, and the other is an addled, sardonic little man who says he is a poet and whom Mazie calls Eddie Guest. She says she likes Pop because he is so cheerful and Eddie Guest because he is so sad. ‘I come from a devout family of teetotallers,’ Pop once said. ‘They was thirteen in the family, and they called me the weakling because I got drunk on Saturday nights. Well, they’re all under the sod. Woodrow Wilson was President when the last one died, and I’m still here drinking good liquor and winking at the pretty girls.’ ‘That’s right, Pop,’ Mazie said. Pop works bus stops. He approaches people waiting on corners for a bus and asks for a nickel with which to get uptown or downtown, as the case may be. When he gets a nickel, he touches his hat and hurries off to the next bus stop. At night he sings ballads in Irish gin mills on Third Avenue. Mazie thinks he has a beautiful baritone, and every morning, in return for her dime, he favors her with two or three ballads. Her favorites – she hums them – are ‘Whiskey, You’re the Divil,’ ‘The Garden Where the Praties Grow,’ ‘Tiddly-Aye-Aye for the One-Eyed Reilly,’ and ‘The Widow McGinnis’s Pig.’ Sometimes Pop dances a jig on the tiled floor of the lobby. ‘Pop’s a better show than I got inside,’ Mazie says on these occasions.
Eddie Guest is a gloomy, defeated, ex-Greenwich Village poet who has been around the Bowery off and on for eight or nine years. He mutters poetry to himself constantly and is taken to Bellevue for observation about once a year. He carries all his possessions in a greasy beach bag and sleeps in flophouses, never staying in one two nights in succession, because, he says, he doesn’t want his enemies to know where he is. During the day he wanders in and out of various downtown branches of the Public Library. At the Venice one night he saw ‘The River,’ the moving picture in which the names of the tributaries of the Mississippi were made into a poem. When he came out, he stopped at Mazie’s cage, spread his arms, and recited the names of many of the walk-up hotels on the Bowery. ‘The Alabama Hotel, the Comet, and the Uncle Sam House,’ he said, in a declamatory voice, ‘the Dandy, the Defender, the Niagara, the Owl, the Victoria House and the Grand Windsor Hotel, the Houston, the Mascot, the Palace, the Progress, the Palma House and the White House Hotel, the Newport, the Crystal, the Lion and the Marathon. All flophouses. All on the Bowery. Each and all my home, sweet home.’ For some reason, Mazie thought this was extraordinarily funny. Now, each morning, in order to get a dime, Eddie Guest is obliged to recite this chant for her. It always causes her to slap her right thigh, throw her head back, and guffaw. Both Eddie Guest and Mazie can be grimly and rather pointlessly amused by the signs over flophouse entrances and by the bills of fare lettered in white on the windows of pig-snout restaurants. When Mazie passes
Few of the men to whom Mazie gives money for eye-openers are companionable. They take her dimes with quivering fingers, mutter a word of thanks, and hurry off. Two of them, however, invariably linger a while. They have become close friends of Mazie’s. One is a courtly old Irishman named Pop, and the other is an addled, sardonic little man who says he is a poet and whom Mazie calls Eddie Guest. She says she likes Pop because he is so cheerful and Eddie Guest because he is so sad. ‘I come from a devout family of teetotallers,’ Pop once said. ‘They was thirteen in the family, and they called me the weakling because I got drunk on Saturday nights. Well, they’re all under the sod. Woodrow Wilson was President when the last one died, and I’m still here drinking good liquor and winking at the pretty girls.’ ‘That’s right, Pop,’ Mazie said. Pop works bus stops. He approaches people waiting on corners for a bus and asks for a nickel with which to get uptown or downtown, as the case may be. When he gets a nickel, he touches his hat and hurries off to the next bus stop. At night he sings ballads in Irish gin mills on Third Avenue. Mazie thinks he has a beautiful baritone, and every morning, in return for her dime, he favors her with two or three ballads. Her favorites – she hums them – are ‘Whiskey, You’re the Divil,’ ‘The Garden Where the Praties Grow,’ ‘Tiddly-Aye-Aye for the One-Eyed Reilly,’ and ‘The Widow McGinnis’s Pig.’ Sometimes Pop dances a jig on the tiled floor of the lobby. ‘Pop’s a better show than I got inside,’ Mazie says on these occasions.
Eddie Guest is a gloomy, defeated, ex-Greenwich Village poet who has been around the Bowery off and on for eight or nine years. He mutters poetry to himself constantly and is taken to Bellevue for observation about once a year. He carries all his possessions in a greasy beach bag and sleeps in flophouses, never staying in one two nights in succession, because, he says, he doesn’t want his enemies to know where he is. During the day he wanders in and out of various downtown branches of the Public Library. At the Venice one night he saw ‘The River,’ the moving picture in which the names of the tributaries of the Mississippi were made into a poem. When he came out, he stopped at Mazie’s cage, spread his arms, and recited the names of many of the walk-up hotels on the Bowery. ‘The Alabama Hotel, the Comet, and the Uncle Sam House,’ he said, in a declamatory voice, ‘the Dandy, the Defender, the Niagara, the Owl, the Victoria House and the Grand Windsor Hotel, the Houston, the Mascot, the Palace, the Progress, the Palma House and the White House Hotel, the Newport, the Crystal, the Lion and the Marathon. All flophouses. All on the Bowery. Each and all my home, sweet home.’ For some reason, Mazie thought this was extraordinarily funny. Now, each morning, in order to get a dime, Eddie Guest is obliged to recite this chant for her. It always causes her to slap her right thigh, throw her head back, and guffaw. Both Eddie Guest and Mazie can be grimly and rather pointlessly amused by the signs over flophouse entrances and by the bills of fare lettered in white on the windows of pig-snout restaurants. When Mazie passes
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