Read Online Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) by Joseph Mitchell - Free Book Online Page A

the Victoria House and sees its sign, ‘ROOMS WITH ELECTRIC LIGHTS, 30 C,’ or when she looks at the window of the Greek’s on Chatham Square, ‘SNOUTS WITH FRENCH FRY POTS & COFFEE, T, OR BUTTERMILK, 10 C,’ she always snickers. Mazie has considerable respect for Eddie Guest but thinks he is kidding when he calls himself a poet. Once he read to her part of a completely unintelligible poem about civilization in the United States, on which he says he has been working for twenty years and which he calls ‘No Rags, No Bones, No Bottles Today.’ ‘If that’s a poem,’ Mazie said when he had finished, ‘I’m the Queen of Sweden.’
    Mazie’s afternoon visitors are far more respectable than the morning ones. The people who stopped by to talk with her between noon and 6 P.M. one Saturday included Monsignor Cashin, Fannie Hurst, two detectives from the Oak Street station, a flashily dressed young Chinese gambler whom Mazie calls Fu Manchu and who is a power in Tze Far, the Chinatown version of the numbers lottery; two nuns from Madonna House, who wanted to thank her for buying a phonograph for the girls’ club at their settlement; a talkative girl from Atlanta, Georgia, called Bingo, once a hostess in a Broadway taxi-dance hall and now the common-law wife of the chef of a chop-suey restaurant on Mott Street; the bartender of a Chatham Square saloon, who asked her to interpret a dream for him; and the clerk of a flophouse, who came to tell her that a bum named Tex had hanged himself in the washroom the night before. When she was told about Tex, Mazie nodded sagely and said, as she always does when she hears about the death of someone she has known, ‘Well, we all got to go sooner or later. You can’t live forever. When your number’s up, rich or poor, you got to go.’ Most of the visitors on that afternoon happened to be old friends of Mazie’s. Miss Hurst, for example, she has known for eleven years. She calls her Fannie and likes to tell about their first meeting.
    ‘One night,’ she says, ‘a swell-looking dame came to my cage and said she often took walks on the Bowery and would like to meet me. She said her name was Fannie Hurst. “Pleased to meet you, Fannie,” I said. “My name is Mary Pickford.” It turned out she really was Fannie Hurst. At first I thought she was going to put me in a book, and I didn’t go for her. Since she promised not to write no books about me, we been pals.’ Miss Hurst visits Mazie frequently. Each time she comes, Mazie looks at her dress, fingers the material, asks how much it cost, tells her she got gypped, and advises her to try one of the shops on Division Street. Miss Hurst does not mind this. ‘I admire Mazie,’ she said. ‘She is the most compassionate person I’ve ever known. No matter how filthy or drunk or evil-smelling a bum may be, she treats him as an equal.’ Until recently, Miss Hurst occasionally took friends down to meet Mazie. ‘I’m afraid they looked on her as just another Bowery curiosity,’ she says. ‘So I don’t take people down any more. I used to invite Mazie to parties at my house. She always accepted but never came. I think she’s still a little suspicious of me, although I’ve never written a line about her and never intend to. I simply look upon her as a friend.’
    From callers like Fu Manchu and Bingo, Mazie hears considerable gossip about the sleazy underworld of Chinatown. She says she never repeats such gossip, not even to her sisters. Detectives know that she has many Chinese friends and sometimes stop at her cage and ask apparently innocent questions about them; she shrugs her shoulders and says, ‘No spik English.’ In general, however, she cooperates with the police. Drunken tourists often come down to Bowery joints to see life, and when she notices them stumbling around Chatham Square she telephones the Oak Street station. ‘Such dopes are always getting rolled by bums,’ she says. ‘I got no sympathy for