Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) (46 page)

Old Mr Flood

Old Mr Flood

A TOUGH SCOTCH-IRISHMAN
I know, Mr Hugh G. Flood, a retired house-wrecking contractor, aged ninety-three, often tells people that he is dead set and determined to live until the afternoon of July 27, 1965, when he will be a hundred and fifteen years old. ‘I don’t ask much here below,’ he says. ‘I just want to hit a hundred and fifteen. That’ll hold me.’ Mr Flood is small and wizened. His eyes are watchful and icy-blue, and his face is red, bony, and clean-shaven. He is old-fashioned in appearance. As a rule, he wears a high, stiff collar, a candy-striped shirt, a serge suit, and a derby. A silver watch-chain hangs across his vest. He keeps a flower in his lapel. When I am in the Fulton Fish Market neighborhood, I always drop into the Hartford House, a drowsy waterfront hotel at 309 Pearl Street, where he has a room, to see if he is still alive.

Many aged people reconcile themselves to the certainty of death and become tranquil; Mr Flood is unreconcilable. There are three reasons for this. First, he deeply enjoys living. Second, he comes of a long line of Baptists and has a nagging fear of the hereafter, complicated by the fact that the descriptions of heaven in the Bible are as forbidding to him as those of hell. ‘I don’t really want to go to either one of those places,’ he says. He broods about religion and reads a chapter of the Bible practically every day. Even so, he goes to church only on Easter. On that day he has several drinks of Scotch for breakfast and then gets in a cab and goes to a Baptist church in Chelsea. For at least a week thereafter he is gloomy and silent. ‘I’m a God-fearing man,’ he says, ‘and I believe in Jesus Christ crucified, risen, and coming again, but one sermon a year is all I can stand.’ Third, he is a diet theorist – he calls himself a seafoodetarian – and feels obliged to reach a spectacular age in order to prove his theory. He is convinced that the eating of meat and vegetables shortens life and he maintains that the only sensible
food
for man, particularly for a man who wants to hit a hundred and fifteen, is fish.

To Mr Flood, the flesh of finfish and shellfish is not only good to eat, it is an elixir. ‘When I get through tearing a lobster apart, or one of those tender West Coast octopuses,’ he says, ‘I feel like I had a drink from the fountain of youth.’ He eats with relish every kind of seafood, including sea-urchin eggs, blowfish tails, winkles, ink squids, and barn-door skates. He especially likes an ancient Boston breakfast dish – fried cod tongues, cheeks, and sounds, sounds being the gelatinous air bladders along the cod’s backbone. The more unusual a dish, the better he likes it. It makes him feel superior to eat something that most people would edge away from. He insists, however, on the plainest of cooking. In his opinion, there are only four first-class fish restaurants in the city – Sweet’s and Libby’s on Fulton Street, Gage & Tollner’s in Brooklyn, and Lundy’s in Sheepshead Bay – and even these, he says, are disinclined to let well enough alone. Consequently, he takes most of his meals in Sloppy Louie Morino’s, a busy-bee on South Street frequented almost entirely by wholesale fishmongers from Fulton Market, which is across the street. Customarily, when Mr Flood is ready for lunch, he goes to the stall of one of the big wholesalers, a friend of his, and browses among the bins for half an hour or so. Finally he picks out a fish, or an eel, or a crab, or the wing of a skate, or whatever looks best that day, buys it, carries it unwrapped to Louie’s, and tells the chef precisely how he wants it cooked. Mr Flood and the chef, a surly old Genoese, are close friends. ‘I’ve made quite a study of fish cooks,’ Mr Flood says, ‘and I’ve decided that old Italians are best. Then comes old colored men, then old mean Yankees, and then old drunk Irishmen. They have to be old; it takes almost a lifetime to learn how to do a thing simply. Even the stove has to be old. If the cook is an awful drunk, so much the better. I don’t think a teetotaler could cook a fish. Oh, if he was a mean old tobacco-chewing teetotaler, he might.’

Mr Flood’s attitude toward seafood is not altogether mystical. ‘Fish,’ he says, ‘is the only grub left that the scientists haven’t been able to get their hands on and improve. The flounder you eat today hasn’t got any more damned vitamins in it than the flounder your
great
-great-granddaddy ate, and it tastes the same. Everything else has been improved
and
improved
and
improved to such an extent that it ain’t fit to eat. Consider the egg. When I was a boy on Staten Island, hens ate grit and grasshoppers and scraps from the table and whatever they could scratch out of the ground, and a platter of scrambled eggs was a delight. Then the scientists developed a special egg-laying mash made of old corncobs and sterilized buttermilk, and nowadays you order scrambled eggs and you get a platter of yellow glue. Consider the apple. Years ago you could enjoy an apple. Then the scientists took hold and invented chemical fertilizers especially for apple trees, and apples got big and red and shiny and beautiful and absolutely tasteless. As for vegetables, vegetables have been improved until they’re downright poisonous. Two-thirds of the population has the stomach jumps, and no wonder.’

Except for bread and butter, sauces, onions, and baked potatoes, Mr Flood himself has rarely eaten anything but seafood since 1885 and he is in sound shape. For a man past ninety who worked hard in the wet and the wind from boyhood until the age of eighty, he is, in fact, a phenomenon; he has his own teeth, he hears all right, he doesn’t wear glasses, his mind seldom wanders, and his appetite is so good that immediately after lunch he begins speculating about what he will have for dinner. He walks cautiously and a little feebly, it is true, but without a stick unless there is snow on the sidewalks. ‘All I dread is accidents,’ he said recently. ‘A broken bone would most likely wind things up for me. Aside from that, I don’t fret about my health. I’m immune to the average germ; don’t even catch colds; haven’t had a cold since 1912. Only reason I caught that one, I went on a toot and it was a pouring-down rainy night in the dead of winter and my shoes were cracked and they let the damp in and I lost my balance a time or two and sloshed around in the gutter and somewhere along the line I mislaid my hat and I’d just had a haircut and I stood in a draft in one saloon an hour or more and there was a poor fellow next to me sneezing his head off and when I got home I crawled into a bed that was beside an open window like a fool and passed out with my wet clothes on, shoes and all. Also, I’d spent the night before sitting up on a train
and
hadn’t slept a wink and my resistance was low. If the good Lord can just see His way clear to protect me from accidents, no stumbling on the stairs, no hell-fired automobiles bearing down on me in the dark, no broken bones, I’ll hit a hundred and fifteen easy.’

Mr Flood doesn’t think much of doctors and never goes near one. He passes many evenings in a comfortable old spindle-back chair in the barroom of the Hartford House, drinking Scotch and tap water and arguing, and sometimes late at night he unaccountably switches to brandy and wakes up next morning with an overwhelming hangover – what he calls a katzenjammer. On these occasions he goes over to S. A. Brown’s, at 28 Fulton Street, a highly aromatic little drugstore which was opened during President Thomas Jefferson’s second term and which specializes in outfitting medicine chests for fishing boats, and buys a bottle of Dr Brown’s Next Morning, a proprietary greatly respected in the fish market. For all other ailments, physical or mental, he eats raw oysters. Once, in the Hartford barroom, a trembly fellow in his seventies, another tenant of the hotel, turned to Mr Flood and said, ‘Flood, I had a birthday last week. I’m getting on. I’m not long for this world.’

Mr Flood snorted angrily. ‘Well, by God,
I
am,’ he said. ‘I just got started.’

The trembly fellow sighed and said, ‘I’m all out of whack. I’m going uptown and see my doctor.’

Mr Flood snorted again. ‘Oh, shut up,’ he said. ‘Damn your doctor! I tell you what you do. You get right out of here and go over to Libby’s oyster house and tell the man you want to eat some of his big oysters. Don’t sit down. Stand up at that fine marble bar they got over there, where you can watch the man knife them open. And tell him you intend to drink the oyster liquor; he’ll knife them on the cup shell, so the liquor won’t spill. And be sure you get the big ones. Get them so big you’ll have to rear back to swallow, the size that most restaurants use for fries and stews; God forgive them, they don’t know any better. Ask for Robbins Islands, Mattitucks, Cape Cods, or Saddle Rocks. And don’t put any of that red sauce on them, that cocktail sauce, that mess, that gurry. Ask the man for half a lemon, poke it a time or two to free the
juice
, and squeeze it over the oysters. And the first one he knifes, pick it up and smell it, the way you’d smell a rose, or a shot of brandy. That briny, seaweedy fragrance will clear your head; it’ll make your blood run faster. And don’t just eat six; take your time and eat a dozen, eat two dozen, eat three dozen, eat four dozen. And then leave the man a generous tip and go buy yourself a fifty-cent cigar and put your hat on the side of your head and take a walk down to Bowling Green. Look at the sky! Isn’t it blue? And look at the girls a-tap-tap-tapping past on their pretty little feet! Aren’t they just the finest girls you ever saw, the bounciest, the rumpiest, the laughingest? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for even thinking about spending good money on a damned doctor? And along about here, you better be careful. You’re apt to feel so bucked-up you’ll slap strangers on the back, or kick a window in, or fight a cop, or jump on the tailboard of a truck and steal a ride.’

Mr Flood sold his house-wrecking business, the H. G. Flood Demolition & Salvage Co., Inc., a prosperous enterprise, in 1930, when he was eighty. A year and a half later, Mrs Flood, his second wife, died. Directly after the funeral he gave up his apartment in Chelsea, put his furniture in storage, and moved into the Hartford, a hotel he had known and admired for many years as a truly peaceful place. ‘I was sadly in need of peace and quiet when I moved into here,’ he once said. ‘I had a saintly wife, God rest her. She was opposed to anything and everything in the line of fun. Use to, when I showed up with a load on, she’d persecute me. She never offered to hit me. She just stood in the door with her head throwed back and howled. She used both lungs and it didn’t seem possible for all that racket to come out of one human mouth. Some nights I was afraid my eardrums wouldn’t stand the strain. Once I said to her, “Mary, dear, I’m thankful to God you ain’t a drinking woman. If you can make that much noise cold sober, just think what you could do on a little gin.”’

The Hartford stands on the southwest corner of the junction of Pearl Street, Ferry Street, and Peck Slip, down in the old city. The South Ferry branch of the Third Avenue elevated line goes past it, on Pearl Street. The fish market is a couple of blocks to
the
south of it, and The Swamp, the tannery district, is one block north. Rooms run from three-fifty to four-fifty a week. Mr Flood took one of the four-fifty rooms, and he has been happy in it. ‘You take an old retired widower crock like me,’ he says, ‘the perfect place for him is some back-alley hotel where he can be among his own kind, the rough element. I’ve got a married daughter by my first wife, and she begged me to go live with her. Praise the Lord I didn’t! Like I said to her, “Louise, in a month you’d hate the sight of me, and vice versa. You couldn’t help it. That’s nature. You’d be wanting me to die and get out of the way, and I’d probably go ahead and die, just to be accommodating.”’ Mr Flood is well off and could undoubtedly afford the Waldorf-Astoria, but newness depresses him. Like most old people, he feels best when he is around things that have lasted a long time. The Hartford is the oldest hotel in continuous operation in the city, and it just suits him. It was opened in 1836 as the Eastern Pearl Street House; the name was changed in the late sixties, when steamboats from Hartford and other New England ports docked nearby in Peck Slip. It is a shoebox-shaped building of five stories, it is surrounded by factories and hide and spice warehouses, and at night the friendly light in its combined lobby, barroom, and dining room is the only light that can be seen for blocks around. A flower-basket design is cut in the thick glass of the front door, across from the bar is a row of rickety spindle-backs, the bill of fare is scribbled in chalk on a big slate on the dining-room wall, and at the foot of the stairs is an oak rack on which the tenants hook their keys when they come down in the morning. The keys are heavy and each is attached to a serrated brass fob nearly the size of a saucer. There is no elevator. On the back-bar shelf are several photographs of the hotel. One, taken in 1901, shows Buffalo Bill and some Indians in fringed buckskins eating lobsters at a family table in the dining room. Around the margin, in a crabbed hand, someone has written, ‘Col. Buffalo Bill and 1 doz. red Indians just off the Boston boat, stayed three days, big eaters, lobster every meal, up all night, took the place.’