Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) (31 page)

‘The Paris was the number-one thing in my life until on or about the middle of October, 1901, when I heard a sermon concerning the profanity evil that shook me up to such an extent I determined to go out in the highways and byways and do something about it. And I did, let me tell you! At first I would just step up to profane persons and reason with them, telling them that swearing was vile and vicious, out of place, uncalled for, and a snare and a delusion, signifying nothing. I would say,
“Your
dear old mother never taught you to talk like that. Think it over!” Or I’d say, “If you haven’t got self-respect, please have some respect for the general public. Think it over!” Or I’d say, “Now, aren’t you ashamed of yourself, a grown man a-carrying on like that? Think it over!” But in those days I was a little bashful about talking to strangers, and one day the idea came to me: Why not let the printed word do the job? So I had a few thousand cards printed up requesting people to control their tongues. To make it look official, I had the printer put Anti-Profanity League down at the bottom.

‘Then, when I had any spare time, I’d stuff my pockets full of cards and go out in search of profanity conditions. Like I would attend meetings in the union halls of the teamsters. They used to be bad for swearing, but not as bad as the truck-drivers of today. A teamster would just swear at his poor old nag, but a truck-driver will swear at anything, man or beast, quick or dead, going or coming. And when I saw a building in construction, I’d drop around at noon and ask the foreman for permission to address the bricklayers and hod-carriers. They would be squatting around eating their dinner out of buckets and I would give them a little oration. Some would laugh, but some would take heed. My, the fun we had! And I’d go to baseball parks and pass cards out right and left. Baseball is an incubator of profanity. And I’d go to prisons, to the Navy Yard district, to pool parlors, to saloons where longshoremen and the rowdy element hung out. Everywhere I went, subway, elevated, or streetcar, I passed out cards. Nobody rebuked me. In fact, in forty years of cleaning up profanity nobody has ever got their back up with me. Instead, they apologize. That’s how I enrolled my first members. A man would say, “You’re dead right, Mister. What a fool a man is to swear!” Then I’d catch him up. I’d look him right in the eye and say, “If you feel that way, my boy, take a few hundred cards and pass them out yourself.” Presently I had around three hundred and fifty card-passing members in the city. For some reason the city membership stays around that figure. Old ones drop out, new ones come in. Internationally, I just don’t know how many members we have. It must run into thousands. I don’t burden myself down with a lot of records.’

I lit a cigarette, and Mr Colborne sniffed the smoke wistfully.

‘Used to be a great cigar-smoker, but the doctors made me cut it out,’ he said. ‘Nothing like a good cigar! Well, as I told you, my store in Brooklyn did a big business, but in 1905, after I had operated it for fifteen years, I lost interest. It was taking up too much of my time. I had saved up some money and I had no dependents. All my family is dead. Far’s I know, I’m the last of the Colbornes. So I closed the store and retired from business. Friends tried to stop me, but I told them I didn’t want to do anything but fight profanity. I became a world traveller. In fact, between 1905 and 1936, I crossed the ocean twenty-five times. Went to all the important cities of Europe, passing out exterminators and talking. On shipboard you can really talk to people. They can’t get away. I had exterminators printed up in French, Italian, Spanish, and Hebrew. Here and there I’d meet a go-getter, and I’d prevail on him to establish a branch of the League in his home country. At present there’s branches in Italy, Cuba, Australia, and Kingston, Jamaica. I always had great success in Rome. Pope Pius X and Pope Pius XI both wrote me letters, blessing my work. I wouldn’t take a mint of money for those letters. I bought me an iron safe in a second-hand store just to keep them locked up in. In Rome, in 1926, I sent a note to King Victor Emmanuel on a League letterhead. I told him I represented a multitude of right-thinking Americans, and we had a chat that lasted all morning. I got him so stirred up he talked the matter over with old Mussolini, and next year the two of them passed drastic laws against profanity. They posted warnings everywhere, even in streetcars, and arrested hundreds. I figure I’m personally responsible for ridding Italy of the profanity evil.’

‘Did the money you saved between 1890 and 1905 keep you going all these years?’ I asked.

‘Oh, that money ran out a generation ago,’ Mr Colborne said. ‘I live very economic, and I return to my trade when I run low. I restore paintings in big churches, including St Patrick’s Cathedral. Off and on, I do special frame-making and gilding jobs. Sometimes I’ll keep a job for years. Between 1918 and 1926, I worked for the Hippodrome Theatre, repairing everything that got out of
whack
. Profanity conditions among those show people were past belief when I went to work for the Hippodrome, but I cleaned things up, let me tell you. When I was travelling all over the world, it didn’t cost me much. I used to make most of my expenses guiding Americans. I know the big cities of Europe as well as I know this basement. I’ve guided many a party to the miraculous grotto in Lourdes, to Rome, and to the Holy Land. Anyhow, it doesn’t take much to keep the League going. I can get a hundred thousand exterminators printed for fifty dollars. It’s the postage that amounts up. The mail I get! It’s a sight. I have to do a lot of pecking on my typewriter to answer all my mail.’

Mr Colborne suddenly chuckled and slapped his knee.

‘I sure got upset here the other day,’ he said. ‘I had written a whole lot of letters and I went out to mail them. On the way I stopped at a grocery for a box of eggs, and I got to talking to the clerk about profanity. After a while I left the grocery, and I was crossing the street when I heard a cabdriver a-cussing at a truck-driver. I got out an exterminator and started over to the cabdriver, and just then the lights changed and he drove off, still a-cussing. He drove right past me and splashed some muddy water on my britches. It was very provoking! And when I got back to my door I found I had forgotten to mail my letters, and when I looked in my pocket for my keys I remembered I had left them on my desk. Well, I got so vexed I stomped my foot on the floor and the eggs fell down and broke all to pieces, and then I came right out and said it!’

Mr Colborne slapped his knee again.

‘What did you say?’ I asked.

‘I said, “The dickens!”’

We both laughed. While we were laughing, the alarm clock on the desk began to ring.

‘That’s to remind me to turn on the radio,’ Mr Colborne said. ‘There’s a program due I don’t want to miss. Hillbilly singing. Very wholesome.’

I got up to go. Mr Colborne counted out twenty-five exterminators and insisted that I take them and pass them out.

‘I’m afraid that’s too many,’ I said.

‘Oh, you’ll use them up in no time,’ he said.

At the door I asked him if he believed that there is less profanity now than in 1901, when he began his work.

‘Oh, my goodness, yes!’ he said. ‘Sooner or later we’ll have it all eradicated. There was a story in the
Holy Name Journal
that has some bearing on your question. It seems that two big turtles and one little turtle went into a saloon and ordered beers. It began to rain and one big turtle said to the other big turtle, “We should’ve brought our umbrellas. How about asking the little turtle to run home and get our umbrellas?” But the little turtle was listening and he said, “I’ll not go get your umbrellas, because when I’m gone you’ll drink my beer.” The big turtles promised they wouldn’t, so the little turtle started out. Two months later one of the big turtles said to the other, “If that little turtle doesn’t come back soon, I’m going to drink his beer.” And just then, at the end of the bar, a tiny voice said, “If you do, I won’t go get your umbrellas.”’

I laughed, but there must have been a puzzled expression on my face, because Mr Colborne said, ‘You don’t get the connection between those turtles and the total eradication of cussing, do you?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ I said.

‘Slow but sure!’ Mr Colborne said, laughing heartily and giving me a poke in the ribs with an index finger. ‘Slow but sure!’

(1941)

Obituary of a Gin Mill

IT MAKES ME
lonesome to walk past the old yellow-brick building, just south of Washington Market, once occupied by Dick’s Bar and Grill. The windows are so dusty and rain-streaked and plastered with ‘For Rent’ stickers that you can’t see inside, and there is a padlock growing rusty on the door. Dick’s prospered as a speakeasy throughout prohibition; after repeal, as a licensed establishment, it was just about as lawless as ever. A year or so ago, however, when Dick moved up the street, things changed. In his new place he commenced obeying the New York State Liquor Authority’s regulations: he refused to let his customers shake Indian dice on the bar for rounds of drinks; he refused to put drinks on the tab; he refused to sell liquor by the bottle late at night after the liquor stores had closed. In the old days Dick was an independent man. He was delighted when he got an opportunity to tell a customer to go to hell. He and his bartenders, in fact, usually acted as if they loathed their customers and the customers liked this because it made them feel at home; most of them were men who were made ill at ease by solicitude or service. When Dick started abiding by the liquor laws, however, a hunted look appeared on his fat, sad-eyed, Neapolitan face. He began to cringe and bow and shake hands with the customers, and he would even help them on with their coats. When they finished eating, he would go over, smile with effort, and ask, ‘Was the pot roast O.K.?’ In the old days he never acted that way. If someone complained about a gristly steak or a baked potato raw in the middle, he would grunt and say, ‘If you don’t like my grub, you don’t have to eat in here. I’d just as soon I never saw you again.’

The change in Dick reflects the innovations in his new saloon, which is six blocks away from the old one – a big, classy place with a chromium and glass-brick front, a neon sign in four colors, a mahogany bar, a row of chromium bar stools with red-leather
seats
like those in the uptown cocktail lounges, a kitchen full of gleaming copper pots, a moody chef who once worked in Moneta’s, a printed menu with French all over it, and seven new brands of Scotch. He told the bartenders they would have to shave every morning and made them put on starched white coats. For several days thereafter they looked clean and aloof, like people when they first get out of the hospital. The place was so stylish that Dick did not, for good luck, frame the first dollar bill passed across the bar; he framed the first five-dollar bill.

Dick’s regular customers had always been clannish – hanging together two and three deep at the end of the bar near the greasy swinging door to the kitchen – and some of them began to congregate at the fancy bar in Dick’s new place. Here they resented everything. They snickered at the French on the menu, they sneered at the bartenders in their starched white coats. One of them waved a menu in Dick’s face. ‘What the hell does this mean,’ he demanded, ‘this here “Country Sausage Gastronome”?’ The question made Dick uncomfortable. ‘It means meat sauce,’ he said.

Before the night of the grand opening was half over, one of the customers, an amateur evangelist who used to deliver burlesque sermons regularly in the old place, climbed up on the shiny new bar and began to preach. He had given out his text for the evening and was shouting ‘Brothers and sisters! You full of sin! You full of gin! You and the Devil are real close kin! Are you ready for the Judgment Day? Where will you spend eternity? Ain’t it awful?’ when Dick came out of the kitchen and caught sight of him. ‘Oh, my God! Dick screamed. ‘Do you want to ruin me? I can’t have such monkey business in here. I got a big investment in here.’ There was so much genuine agony in his voice that the amateur evangelist jumped down from his pulpit and apologized. Thereupon the old customers felt sorry for Dick. Sitting behind his bar on a busy night in the old joint, Dick used to have the aplomb of a sow on her belly in a bog, but in the new place he soon became apprehensive and haggard. One night the kitchen door swung open and the old customers saw Dick bent over a big ledger, struggling with his cost accounting. From the look on his face they knew he was quite sick of the chromium stools and the French menu. ‘He don’t
like
this joint, either,’ one of them said. From then on they would tone down anyone who started to holler and throw glasses when Dick insisted on obeying the letter and the spirit of one of the alcohol laws. ‘After all,’ they would say, ‘he’s got a big investment in here. He don’t want to lose his license.’ However, no matter how big the investment, I never felt the same about the new Dick’s.

When he is asked why he moved, Dick grunts and mutters, ‘It was time to change the sheets,’ but I have learned that he opened the new place only because he wanted a bigger kitchen. Soon after he made up his mind to move, however, a salesman for a bar-fixtures concern got hold of him and sold him a bill of goods. I believe that bar-equipment salesmen have done more to destroy the independence and individuality of New York gin mills and their customers than prohibition or repeal; there is nothing that will make a gin mill look so cheap and spurious as a modernistic bar and a lot of chairs made of chromium tubing. Dick’s old place was dirty and it smelled like the zoo, but it was genuine; his new place is as shiny and undistinguished as a two-dollar alarm clock. The bar-equipment salesman was so relentless that Dick, who merely wanted a bigger kitchen, ended up by keeping nothing from the old place but the big, greasy, iron safe and a framed and fly-specked photograph of Gallant Fox. He even threw away all the photographs of Lupe Velez, his favourite movie actress. He used to have about a dozen pictures of Miss Velez tacked up on the wall, and sometimes he would gaze at one of them, shake his head, and say, ‘I would crawl a mile over broken beer bottles just to get one look at her in the flesh.’

Dick is proud of his new kitchen. Food always interested him more than alcohol. He used to say, ‘I keep an A-1 kitchen.’ Once I saw him stand at the bar and eat an eight-pound turkey the chef had cooked for the luncheon trade. Dick had intended to eat only a drumstick, but after he had satisfied himself there was nothing left but a plateful of bones. Maxie, the tub-bellied head bartender, watched admiringly as Dick dismantled the turkey. ‘The boss sure does have a passion for groceries,’ he said. Even in the old days Dick often put strange dishes on his mimeographed menu. He had a friend who worked in a soup cannery up the street and one day
the
friend gave him a bucket of turtle livers. Dick put them on the menu. A customer said, ‘Well, that’s something I never et.’ He ordered them, and while he ate, Dick watched intently. When the man put down his fork Dick went over to his table.

‘How were them turtle livers?’ he asked.

The customer deliberated for a moment.

‘Fact of the matter is,’ he said, ‘they were kind of unusual.’

‘Well,’ said Dick proudly, ‘I want you to know that you’re the first man in New York to eat turtle livers, so far as I know.’

The customer shuddered.

A few nights ago I saw turtle livers on the menu in the new place. They were listed as ‘Pâté de Foie de Tortue Verte.’ Until I saw those pretenious words I never fully realized how dead and gone were the days when Dick was the plain-spoken proprietor of a dirty, lawless, back-street gin mill. I am aware that it is childish, but sometimes, leaning against the spick-and-span new bar, I am overcome by nostalgia for the gutter; I long for a ‘cabaret night’ in Dick’s old place. Friday was pay day in many of the offices and factories in the neighborhood and Friday night was ‘cabaret night’ in Dick’s. A beery old saloon musician would show up with an accordion and a mob of maudlin rummies would surround him to sing hymns and Irish songs. The place would be full of hard-drinking, pretty stenographers from the financial district, and they would be dragged off the bar stools to dance on the tiled floor. The dancers would grind peanut hulls under their shoes, making a strange, scratchy noise.

Some of the drunks would try to push the bar over, putting their shoulders to it and heaving-to as they hummed the ‘Volga Boatmen.’ Dick often threatened to use a seltzer siphon on their heads. ‘I’ll knock some sense in your heads someday, you goats!’ he would yell at his straining customers. He once classified the nuts in his place as the barwalkers, the firebugs, the weepers, and the Carusos. The barwalker was a type of drunk who was not happy unless he was up on the sagging bar, arms akimbo, dancing a Cossack dance and kicking over glasses of beer. The most unusual barwalker was the ordinarily dignified city editor of an afternoon newspaper. He would crawl up and down the bar, making a peculiar,
dreadful
screech. Dick was always fascinated by him. One night he stared at him and said, ‘What in the hell is that noise you’re making?’ The city editor stopped screeching for a moment. ‘I’m a tree frog,’ he said, happily. The firebugs were those who found it impossible to spill whiskey on the bar without setting it afire. The bartenders would come running and slap out the fitful blue flames with bar towels. One drunk used to pour whole glasses of brandy on the bar and ignite it just to hear Dick yell. Once Dick hit this firebug over the head with a seltzer siphon. The blow would have fractured the firebug’s skull if he hadn’t been wearing a derby.

On those lovely, irretrievable nights a kind of mass hysteria would sweep through the establishment. The customers would tire of singing and dancing and shaking dice. There would be a lull. Then, all of a sudden, they would start bellowing and throwing their drinks on the floor. Arguments would commence. Someone would shout, ‘Take off your glasses!’ One night an ambulance from Broad Street Hospital had to come and get two men who had differed over which had the more nourishment in it: buttermilk or beer. As in a comic strip, the air on these occasions would be full of missiles. Once a customer who had been standing moodily at the bar for hours suddenly let go with a little, heavy-bottomed whiskey glass and knocked a big, jagged hole in the mirror behind the bar. Maxie, the bartender, dodged out of the way. Then he remembered that the mirror cost fifty-five dollars. ‘Dick’s going to dock me a week’s pay because I ducked,’ said Maxie, groaning.

On cabaret nights one customer, an oyster shucker from Washington Market, would go off in a corner by himself, smiling happily, and lead an invisible jazz band, using a swizzle stick for a baton and sometimes yelling at an invisible trombone player, ‘Get hot, you bum!’ Another customer, a tall, emaciated accountant, would hold up whatever object he got his hands on first and shout, ‘How much am I offered? Going, going, gone! Sold to that big dope over there with a cigar in his mouth.’ The accountant’s name was Peterson, but Dick always called him Mr St Peter because he was so thin and old. Mr St Peter lived in a furnished room and spent whole days and nights in Dick’s. Dick used to say that he had a bar-rail foot, that his right foot had become twisted by resting
on
the rail so much. Dick would point at him proudly and say, ‘Look at old Mr St Peter. When he goes home he walks on one heel.’ Mr St Peter’s principal failing was an inability to make up his mind. For years he complained about the rolls in Dick’s, wanting the poppy-seed variety. Dick finally ordered some and at lunch Mr St Peter said, ‘These sure are fine rolls.’ A moment later he added, ‘And then again, they ain’t.’

When he got tired of imitating an auctioneer, Mr St Peter would sidle over to the coat rack and slip such objects as beer pads and salt shakers into people’s overcoat pockets. In Dick’s, the customers wandered in and out of the kitchen at will, and once Mr St Peter got a mackerel out of the icebox and slipped it into someone’s pocket. One cabaret night Dick got suspicious of Mr St Peter and found that the thin, undernourished rummy had slipped enough food into his own pockets to last him several days. In the old man’s ragged overcoat Dick found eight cans of sardines and a big hunk of Swiss cheese. Dick was not angry. He was amused. ‘Mr St Peter reminds me,’ he said, ‘of a squirrel storing away nuts for a rainy day.’ In one stage of drunkenness Mr St Peter would spray people with a Flit gun; once he took the fire extinguisher off the kitchen wall and came out with it going full blast. Mr St Peter showed up for the grand opening night in Dick’s new place, but I never saw him there again.

It was dangerous to pass out in Dick’s old gin mill on a cabaret night. His customers thought there was nothing quite so funny as an unconscious man. They would strip him of his clothes and outfit him in a waiter’s uniform or whatever garments, including raincoats, they could find in the lockers in the kitchen. Then they would stuff his pockets full of cryptic notes and drag him up the block, depositing him in a doorway and forgetting all about him. When the man woke up he would begin to scream and would never be the same again. I kept some of the slips one victim found in his pockets. They include the following: ‘The Shadow called. Said for you to call back.’ ‘Well, old boy, I guess your number is up this time.’ ‘Thursday afternoon at three. Make haste. The F.B.I. knows all about it.’ One man woke up with a rope around his neck.

There are never any good fist fights among the dried-up, mannerly men and women who hang out in Dick’s new place. In the old saloon people were always slugging away at each other. The only rule of behavior Dick ever tried to enforce was ‘No fights outside on the street. It don’t look nice. I don’t want my store to get a bad name.’ (Like many old-fashioned saloonkeepers, Dick always referred to his place as ‘the store.’) When a particularly violent cabaret-night seizure struck the gin mill, Dick usually locked the doors, knowing from experience that each newcomer would be infected with the hysteria and join right in. Dick would yell, ‘Lock the doors! We’re having a nervous breakdown in here! Lock the doors!’ Maxie was never unnerved. He would sometimes grin at the antics of a customer, shake his head, and say, ‘This place is a regular Bellevue Island.’ Once, in the middle of a furious Thanksgiving Eve, I saw him hunched over the bar reading a sports section and peacefully singing a song he learned in public school: ‘Glow, little glowworm, glisten, glisten.’