Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) (18 page)

‘Have you seen them lately?’ he asked, irrelevantly. His voice was blurry.

‘Why, no,’ I said. ‘Aren’t they out there with you any longer?’

‘I certainly would like to see them,’ he answered. ‘To tell you the God’s truth, I was just thinking about them. I was sitting here by the fire having a few drinks and I was thinking how much I’d like to see them. I used to have a few drinks at night with old man Hollinan. He was good company, and so was the old lady. He was a funny old crock.’ He paused.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I have a little farm out here and he took care of it for me when I was in the city. He was the caretaker, sort of. They stayed until about the end of March, and then one day the old boy and his wife just wandered off and I never saw them again.’

‘I wonder why they left.’

‘I don’t know for sure,’ he said, ‘but you know what I think? I think living in that cave ruined them. It ruined them for living in a house. I think they left me because they just got tired of living in a house.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘merry Christmas.’

‘Same to you,’ he said, and hung up.

(1938)

King of the Gypsies

THERE ARE AT
least one dozen gypsy kings in the city. All are elderly, quarrelsome, and self-appointed. One of them, Johnny Nikanov, a Russian, sometimes called King Cockeye Johnny by the detectives of the Pickpocket Squad, is a friend of mine. I became acquainted with him in the fall of 1936. I was covering the Criminal Courts Building for a newspaper and spent a part of every working day in the back office of Samuel Rothberg’s bail-bond establishment, diagonally across Centre Street from the Courts, where lawyers, cops, probation clerks, and the loafers of the neighborhood assembled to play pinochle. Among Rothberg’s clients were practically all of the gypsy pickpockets, wallet-switch swindlers, and fortunetellers, and King Cockeye Johnny came in now and then to get a bail bond written for one of his subjects. After transacting his business, he would always swagger into the back office and take a hand in the game. When the pinochle players saw him coming they would pretend to be alarmed. They would slap their hands over the money on the table and shout warnings at each other, such as ‘Stick your dough in your shoes, boys! Here comes Cockeye Johnny!’ or ‘Make way for the king, the king of the pickpockets!’ Johnny was never offended by their remarks; it seemed to give him a great deal of satisfaction to be looked upon as a thief. Whenever the gypsy reputation for thievery came up in conversation, as it frequently did, he would expand. ‘To a gypsy feller,’ he said on several occasions, with pride in his voice, ‘there ain’t but two kinds of merchandise. Lost and unlost. Anything that ain’t nailed down is lost.’ He professed to believe, however, that gypsies are far more honorable than
gajos
, or non-gypsies. He leaned across the table toward Rothberg one afternoon and said, ‘Mr Rothberg, you never heard of a gypsy feller stealing an oil well, did you?’ ‘I can’t say I did,’ said Rothberg. ‘Well,’ said Johnny triumphantly, ‘I heard of an American feller that did. Some years back a crowd of
us
was coming up from Florida in a couple of Ford trucks. The womenfolks had been telling fortunes at county fairs and business had been real bad. We was awful broke. So every night we’d hit some city and siphon gas out of cars that was parked on back streets. We’d steal enough gas to run us through the next day. Nothing was safe from us. I remember draining the tank on a hearse. There was a full moon one night in Washington, D.C., and a cop caught me in the act and throwed me in jail. And I got to talking to the man in the next cell and he said to me, “There’s been a lot of excitement in town over the Teapot Dome.” And I asked him what in hell was that, and he told me it was a big oil well that was stole by one of the President’s right-hand men. I bet I laughed for ten minutes. You take a poor, starving gypsy feller, he’ll steal a tankful of gas – there’s no denying it. But you take a high-class American feller, he’ll steal a whole damned oil well.’

Johnny was by no means spick-and-span and was constantly scratching; this made those who sat near him at the table apprehensive. ‘Look here, Cockeye,’ a policeman said one afternoon, ‘you got the itch?’ ‘No, sir, not at present,’ said Johnny. ‘I haven’t had the itch in more than a month.’ He bummed cigarettes shamelessly, and his tongue was rarely still. Furthermore, he was the winner in almost every pinochle game he entered. However, despite all this, he was a popular figure in the back office, and he appeared to be rather proud of his popularity; at least, unlike Rothberg’s other gypsy clients, he did not obviously despise
gajos
. Once he invited a few of the Criminal Courts loafers, including myself, to his home on Sheriff Street for a
patchiv
, or gypsy spree. We ate a barbecued pig, drank a punch composed of red wine, seltzer, and sliced Elberta peaches, watched the women dance, and had an exceedingly pleasant time. Since then I have often visited Johnny. Whenever I am in the Sheriff Street neighborhood I call on him.

Johnny says that he has been a king of the gypsies off and on since he was a young man, but he has no idea how old he is. ‘Between forty-five and seventy-five, somewhere in there,’ he says with characteristic vagueness. ‘My hair’s been white for years and years, and I got seventeen grandchildren, and I bet I’m an old, old man.’ Johnny is short, potbellied, and jaunty. His face is round
and
swarthy and sprinkled with smallpox scars. He has high cheekbones and a flattened nose. Because of a cast in his left eye, there is always an alert, skeptical expression on his face; he looks as if he does not believe a word he hears. He wears a wide-brimmed black hat and carries a copper-headed cane. Whenever he has to attend a wedding or a funeral he puts on boots, riding breeches, and a scarlet silk pajama top which buttons high around the neck and resembles a Russian blouse, but otherwise he dresses like any other American. He never owns more than one suit at a time. His current one is beetle green. Most nights he sleeps in it. As a rule Johnny is unobtrusively drunk by noon. He is a gin-drinker. He says that he never drinks less than five quarts a week. He mixes gin with Pepsi-Cola, half and half, and calls the mixture old popskull. Johnny is a highly skilled coppersmith, but he brags that he hasn’t touched a tool since 1930. ‘I despise to work,’ he says. ‘It makes me bilious. If I had to take a steady job or be exterminated, I would beg to be exterminated.’

A gypsy gets to be a king by calling himself one. There is not a king in the city who has the respect of more than fifty families, but all the kings make big, conflicting boasts about the extent of their jurisdiction. Until King Steve Kaslov was sent to a federal penitentiary in the summer of 1942 for swearing to draft boards that certain of his unmarried youths were married, he was perhaps the most powerful. Steve, whose headquarters were on Attorney Street, always claimed to be the
o boro
, or supreme ruler, of all the Russian gypsies in the United States. Actually, he was the spokesman for approximately fifty families on the lower East Side. King Frankie Mitchell, of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who calls himself a Russian on some days and a Serbian on others, has been disputing Steve’s claim to supremacy for many years. ‘
I
am the head of all the Russians in the United States,’ Frankie says. ‘I am also the head of all the Serbians in the same territory.’ Frankie is the head of about twenty families. King Tene Bimbo, of Spanish Harlem, a Serbian who has a record of a hundred and fourteen arrests, is hated by his people; detectives say that except for members of his own family there is hardly a gypsy who will go near him. He maintains, however, that he is the
king
of all the Russian, Serbian, and Rumanian gypsies in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Johnny is similarly boastful. When he is full of old popskull and talking to a
gajo
, he claims that he is the head king of all the Russian, Serbian, Rumanian, Syrian, Turkish, Bulgarian, German, and English gypsies in the whole of North America. When he is cold sober, however, and in a truthful mood he says that he is the king of exactly thirty-eight families of Russian gypsies – about two hundred and thirty men, women, and children, to all of whom he is related by blood or marriage. He refers to them as ‘my crowd.’ Officials of the Police and Welfare departments concede that Johnny has these families under his thumb, but they annoy him now and then by suggesting that he call himself spokesman rather than king. ‘To the Department of Welfare, I may not be no king,’ he recently told one of these officials, ‘and to the King of England, I may not be no king, but to those poor, persecuted gypsies that I run myself knock-kneed looking after their personal welfare, I am king.’

Johnny does not know how many gypsies there are in the city, and neither does anyone else. Estimates range between seven and twelve thousand. Their forefathers came from every country in Europe, but the majority call themselves Russians, Serbians, or Rumanians. They are split into scores of vaguely hostile cliques, but they intermarry freely, speak practically the same dialect of Romany, the universal gypsy language, and are essentially alike. They are predominantly of the type that anthropologists call nomad gypsies; that is, unlike the Hungarian fiddler gypsies, for example, they never willingly become sedentary. They are contemptuous of the Hungarians, calling them house gypsies. In the past the nomads straggled from Maine to Mexico, spending only the winters in the city, but since the depression fewer and fewer have gone out on the road. Johnny has not been farther away than Atlantic City since 1934. At least two-thirds receive charity or relief of one sort or another. The gypsy kings are authorities on relief regulations; they know how to get their families on relief and keep them there. In the city, gypsies prefer to scatter out, but there are colonies of them on the lower East Side, on the Bowery, on the eastern fringe of Spanish Harlem, and on Varet Street in the Williamsburg
neighborhood
of Brooklyn. They rent the cheapest flats in the shabbiest tenements on the worst blocks. Three or four families often share one flat. They move on the spur of the moment; in the last two years one family has given seventeen addresses to the Department of Welfare. In the summer, like all slum people, they bring chairs to the sidewalks in front of their houses and sit in the sun. They nurse their babies in public. They have nothing at all to do with
gajo
neighbors. Even the kids are aloof; they play stick-and stoopball, but only with each other. The children are dirty, flea-ridden, intelligent, and beautiful; one rarely sees a homely gypsy child. They are not particularly healthy, but they have the splendid gutter hardihood of English sparrows. Practically all the adults are illiterate and only a few of the children have spent much time in public school. Johnny says he has never heard of a gypsy who went through high school. Both parents and children are opposed to education and they fight hysterically with truant officers. Not long ago one truant officer said that the very word ‘gypsy’ made him shudder. All are able to speak slum English as well as Romany. Among themselves they use Romany exclusively. Some of the older ones are multilingual. Johnny can carry on conversations, volubly, in Russian, Rumanian, Romany, and English. They believe in child marriage; most gypsy brides and grooms are in their early teens. Brides have a price. Johnny sold his daughter, Rosie, to a Chicago gypsy in 1934 for $875. Each person has two first names, a travelling or
gajo
name, and a home or gypsy name. Johnny’s home name is Lazillia. Wives use their husbands’ first names; Dovie, say, becomes Dovie Steve, Annie becomes Annie Mike.

The older men are able coppersmiths and horse-traders, but their skills are anachronous. Some occasionally make a little money repairing copper stockpots for restaurants and hotels. Almost all of the younger men are good automobile mechanics. They repair their own ramshackle automobiles with odds and ends picked up in junk yards, but they are too temperamental to hold down garage jobs. A few are itinerant saloon musicians; they go from joint to joint on the lower East Side, taking up a collection after entertaining for a half-hour or so. The men pick guitars and the women learn
to
sing popular songs they have heard on the radio. ‘Amapola’ is one of their favorites. The children, particularly the girls, are gifted beggars. Wearing the castoff clothes of their parents, grimy, and hungry-eyed, a pair of them will dart into a saloon, tap-dance and sing furiously for a few minutes, and then go from drunk to drunk with appealing looks and outstretched palms. When they get home, long after dark, their pockets are crammed with pretzels, potato chips, and small change.

The women are the real breadwinners. All of them are
dukkerers
, or fortune-tellers. They foretell the future by the interpretation of dreams and by the location of moles on the body, lines in the palm, and bumps on the head. This occupation is illegal in the city and they operate furtively. Each woman keeps on hand a stock of a paper-bound book called ‘Old Gipsy Nan’s Fortune Teller and Dream Book.’ They buy this in bulk from Wehman Brothers, a wholesaler of cheap dream, astrology, sex-education, and joke books, at 712 Broadway, and give one to each client. Then, in case they are arrested, they are able to swear to the magistrate that they did not take money for telling a fortune, that instead they merely sold a book and taught the buyer how to use it. Practically all the
dukkerers
are thieves of one sort or another, and they give the Pickpocket Squad a lot of trouble. One member of the squad, Detective John J. Sheehan, has worked exclusively on gypsy crime for the last nine years. He has learned some Romany and has developed an admiration for gypsies. They call him Mr Sheeny, and are quite frank with him. They invite him to weddings and he has often been asked to stand as godfather. He says that most victims of gypsy swindles are ignorant, worried, middle-aged women.

‘There are thousands upon thousands of old sisters in the city so thick that any gypsy woman can con them out of their lifetime savings without half trying,’ Detective Sheehan says. ‘Women that want to know if their husbands are cheating on them, women that think they’re about to die with some strange disease, superstitious old German chambermaids – the like of that. If I didn’t see it every day, I wouldn’t believe it.’ The detective says that a woman who acts and talks sensibly gets her fortune told when she visits
a
gypsy, and that’s the end of it. ‘But,’ he says, ‘when one of those thick babies comes along, the
dukkerer
gets down to work. Most of them use a swindle that’s old as the hills. We call it the gypsy-switch or the wallet-switch and they call it the
hokkano baro
, the big trick. First of all the gypsy convinces the victim there’s something wrong with her insides; usually they say it’s cancer. This may take several visits. Pretty soon the victim is so upset she’ll do just about anything; when gypsies set their minds to it, they can be more scary than the stuff you’ll see in the movies – Boris Karloff, the like of that. Then the gypsy says that money’s what’s wrong, that the money the victim has been saving for years is unclean, unholy, got the black mark on it. So the victim trots to the bank and withdraws her savings, every red cent, and gives it to the gypsy to be cleaned, or blessed. The gypsy rolls up the bills, sews them inside a little cloth bag, lights some dime-store candles, and blesses the bag with a lot of hocus-pocus. All the time the gypsy has another bag up her sleeve and this has a roll of blank paper in it. After a while she switches bags, and she sews the phony bag securely to the inside of the victim’s dress over her heart, and she tells her to wear it that way seven days before opening it. At night she’s supposed to put the dress with the bag on it under her pillow. That will make her well. And soon as the victim is out of sight the gypsy family packs up and moves. And a week later the victim runs howling to the police. When I arrest the gypsy, nine times out of ten the victim won’t go to court to testify. Too scared. Not long ago I had a woman who had been conned out of eighteen hundred bucks, the head of a big beauty parlor, and she wouldn’t go to court, not by any means. She kept saying, “The old gypsy lady will put a curse on me and I’ll die in my sleep.”’