The Captain turned abruptly and scrutinized the woman visitor to make sure that she wasn’t stealing anything. He believes every person who enters the museum plans to rob it. The woman pretended to be examining a stuffed crocodile, but from the perplexed look on her face I knew that she had been listening to everything the Captain said.
‘The world owes me a lot,’ continued the Captain, ‘but I’ll never collect. Owes me a lot of sleep. I don’t get out of bed until high noon; sometimes I don’t even get out of bed then. There’s times I get so disgusted I just stay in bed three, four days hand running. Somebody knocks on the door, I holler out, “Go ’way, go ’way! There’s an old man in here with a severe case of the blue-green leprosy. Run for your life, whoever you are.” I just lie in bed and study over a long list of people I wish was dead. Sometimes I sit up and put a mirror in my lap and wax my mustache, wax it so sharp it’s dangerous. Sometimes I sing to myself. You know that old number called “Mother”?’ The Captain threw his head back and began to sing in a quavering voice. ‘“M is for the many things she gave me, O means only that she’s growing old, T is for the tears she shed to save me, H is for her heart of purest gold …”’ His voice broke, and he snorted angrily and spat on the floor. ‘Oh, the hell with it. Use to run with the rowdiest women in this country until I took and married a Buffalo girl. I was up in Buffalo on political business and I seen her and I took and married her. She gave me two beautiful daughters and when they was grown I set them up in a candy store on Amsterdam Avenue, share and share alike, but they was too stuck up to wait on the customers, so I married them off to post office clerks. I didn’t see no certain future in doctors or lawyers, so I married them off to post office clerks in the Bronx. Working for the government is sure and certain. If I had to do it all over again, I’d get me a good hold on the public teat and I wouldn’t let loose until death do us part. Always been a leader of men, always had high-class people for my friends. Use to know O. Henry right well. Use to ask me questions about countries I had travelled in, and when I gave him an answer he’d give me a dollar. When the first bicycles came out he bought me a bicycle, bought me a suit of clothes. He was that kind of a man. Use to work for a man that ran a hotel. At 10 P.M. he’d go upstairs and leave me to run the damned hotel. I ran it, all right. Never had so much to drink before or since. I use to wash my socks in good liquor. I’m just a case of cabin boy to captain. Where in the hell is that old Arab bone? I hope the cat didn’t drag it out of here. My cat’s name is Steamboat Bill. I was the first man to collect stamps. If you doubt my statement, disprove it. Try to disprove me, I’ll make a monkey out of you. When you think of all the things I’ve done, people ought to respect me more’n they do. A man don’t pay me my due respect, I knock his slats in.’
The woman visitor left. The cowbell on the doorknob tinkled as she shut the door.
‘I bet she stole something,’ said the Captain, smacking a fist against a knee in a petulant, childish gesture. ‘They all steal something. I got a fine cat, best cat I ever had. Jumps up and pulls the electric-light cord. Jumps in bed and scratches my back. Use to have a monkey for a house pet. I got rid of him; monkeys stink. When I talk I get excited. Had so many knocks on the head in saloon fights I don’t always remember. It’s a nuisance when you can’t remember, I be damned if it ain’t. It makes you mad. Look at this here snakeskin. South American boa constrictor. You could make a woman fifty-five pairs of pretty shoes out of that snakeskin. Longest damned snakeskin in the United States. Show me any millionaire that’s got a snakeskin as long as that. I’m disgusted to the full with this world. What I’d like is an expedition, a scientific expedition. I like brains. I’d kill a man for being stupid or give him credit for robbing me because that would demonstrate he had sense. Brains is what counts. I got a pension from the Brooklyn Navy Yard and I got a pension from the Spanish-American War, and I don’t trust nobody. Don’t trust the preacher, don’t trust the newspaper, don’t trust the radio set, don’t trust the billboards, don’t trust the pretty label on the liquor bottle where it says eight years old; it’s all big black lies. When I hear the whistle, I don’t even believe the train’s coming. I got a radical nature, and I can’t help it. When I went to sea, I was always making trouble. I was a scrapper. When I hit a port, the population scattered inland. In some towns, a half hour after I hit port there wouldn’t be nobody there but me. The people would take themselves a blanket to lie on and enough groceries to last them, and they’d hide out in the hills until I went back to sea. Once I was a cook on a scientific expedition to the Arctic. I found a mastodon bone and I wanted it. It was just exactly what I wanted. I was always on the lookout for bones and historical odds and ends; even when I was a young man with my head full of women worry I was planning ahead for my museum. But it was a rule you had to turn in everything you found. So a sailor said to me, ‘Break it, cook, and they’ll let you keep it.’ So I hefted this valuable bone high over my head and I slammed it on the deck and it cracked all to hell and gone. Then they let me keep it. That’s a piece of it over there in the far corner. Worth fifteen hundred dollars if it’s worth a cent.’
That is a fair example of the way the Captain answers a question. If you remember, all I asked him was ‘Where were you born, Captain Charley?’ After my last visit I checked up on several of the Captain’s remarks, not that it makes any difference to me if they are true or false. First I checked up on his boast that he drinks nothing but champagne wine and brandy. The bartender in a saloon on Columbus Avenue around the corner from the museum said, ‘Sometimes that old boy comes in here to make a phone call and I invite him to have a beer, and he sure don’t refuse.’ The bartender said he once visited the museum. ‘Jeez,’ he said, ‘what a place! If they really want to find Judge Crater, that’s the place to look.’ Later I telephoned Alfred E. Smith and asked him if he was aware that his old tin lunch bucket was in a museum. ‘It couldn’t be my lunch bucket,’ said Mr Smith, ‘because I never owned a lunch bucket. When I was working in the fish market I always went home to eat.’
The Captain becomes evasive and hostile when any one tries to pin him down. Once I asked him the name of the ship of which he was captain.
‘It was in 1917,’ he said. ‘War time.’
‘What was the name of the ship?’
‘Like I said, it was war time. They called it the World War; to me, it was just a fuss, a commotion.’
‘What was the name of the ship?’
‘Number Four.’
‘What kind of a ship was Number Four?’
‘God damn it, sir, don’t interrupt me. Haven’t you got any respect for old age?’
‘What kind of a ship was Number Four?’
‘It was a barge. It was a munitions barge. It was towed between Wilmington and the Navy Yard in Brooklyn, and I was captain. Everybody took orders from Captain Charley. Half of Brooklyn would of blowed up one night if I hadn’t cut the barge loose from the tug. The tide was throwing her around, and I took charge and cut her loose. If she’d a bumped into Brooklyn it would of been goodbye Brooklyn. Might of been a good thing. Thinned out some of them slums. I been mixed up in everything. I even been kidnapped. When my museum was situated up in Harlem a fellow and a girl I never seen before came and stood over my bed, and the fellow said, “Are you the man that took advantage of this here girl?” And I said, “I don’t know. I might be. I’m a mean old man.” And the girl said, “Let’s slit his throat for him.” Then they kidnapped me and took me to the bank and made me draw out my account, two hundred and some odd dollars. Said they’d slit my throat if I told. I found out who the fellow was; he was a brush-boy in a barber shop four or five blocks up the street from my museum. I seen him on the street a couple of times, but I was afraid to notify the Police Department. I never said a mumbling word. I didn’t care to risk it. I need my throat to swallow with. There’s something about a knife that makes me shrink right up. Like that old saying my mamma use to have, “When the big bulldog gets in trouble
, puppy-dog britches fit him fine.”’
I was surprised to find out about the Captain’s streak of timidity. He is small and frail-looking, but he is bellicose. He likes to push his captain’s cap on the back of his head, put his fists up like a prizefighter, and give a frightful account of the way he maimed a disrespectful shipmate by throwing pepper in his eyes and striking him in the face with ‘the business end of a broken beer bottle.’ He is proud of his captain’s cap. He says, ‘This cap takes me anywhere, right past the ticket window.’ The Captain seeks to give visitors the impression that he once was a great lover; tacked up in the museum is the old saloon wall-motto which states, ‘The happiest moments of my life were spent in the arms of another man’s wife.’ This motto usually ends with a dash and ‘My mother,’ but the Captain chopped off the last two words. He becomes rather wistful when he tells about his conquests in Paris, among the Eskimos, and on various South Sea islands. He shakes his head, cackles, and says, ‘I still got the passion, but I ain’t got the power. My race is run.’ He tells visitors that he is ‘seventy-seven years old, more or less.’ ‘I’m not long for this world,’ he likes to say. ‘I give myself three more years they’ll have me in a box.’ However, there is still plenty of grit and gristle in him. The basement is so crowded he has to wrestle with exhibits to get from the museum proper back to the tiny room in which he sleeps and eats, and he shoves a massive, old-fashioned bureau or a heavy sea chest out of his way with ease a young pug might envy. He is conscious of his strength and is always threatening to let loose and knock somebody’s head off. Like the museum, the room in the rear is stuffed to the ceiling with junk. He has his meals sitting on the bed. The last time I visited him there was a platter on the bed bearing the head and bones of a fish off which his cat was feeding.
Captain Charley has a good reason for his robbery phobia because the museum is frequently entered by petty burglars, a state of things for which he himself is responsible; in talking to visitors he always attributes a fabulous value to even the most worthless trinket. Naturally, some of his visitors believe him when he boasts, holding up a valueless gimcrack, ‘This is worth fifteen hundred and seventy-five dollars.’ Occasionally a visitor comes back at night, when the Captain is away, and walks right into the museum and steals a few things. I am certain these thieves are furious after they try to pawn their loot. When the Captain goes away from the museum he usually leaves it unlocked and sticks up a sign just inside the door which warns, ‘BEWARE OF THE ALIVE SNAKES LOOSE IN HERE.’ In the daytime the sign is effective, but at night, of course, it does no good. Paradoxically the Captain is proud of the frequency with which he is robbed. He laughs his high, goatlike laugh and says, ‘Everybody robs Captain Charley!’
Captain Charley’s most remarkable possessions are two objects which look like ironing boards wrapped with strips of brown cloth. The museum is too crowded for chairs, and I sometimes use one of these objects for a seat.
‘You know what you sitting on?’ the Captain asked me one day.
‘No, sir,’ I said. ‘What?’
‘A Egyptian mummy.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Yes, God damn it, that’s right.’
‘Where did you get it?’
‘Got it in Egypt. My boat was tied up in Alexandria and I took a turn around Egypt. They was pulling old mummies out of the tombs by the thousands, so I took three. I took three of the middle-sized ones. I think they’re he-mummies. I don’t think they mummied no women. I was cook on this boat and I stood ’em up in the kitchen, in the galley. I had ’em stood up in corners. When the crew found out I had the galley full of Egyptian mummies, they became disagreeable to me. They was going to throw my mummies overboard, but that night I took and hid ’em in the lifeboats, under canvas. We was months and months getting back to the United States and it use to give me the snickers every time I thought about them three mummies hiding up in the lifeboats like stowaways. When I went to sneak my mummies ashore a queer thing happened. One of ’em was missing.’
‘What do you think happened to it?’
‘Oh, hell, I don’t know. Something real peculiar. When a man takes to meddling with Egyptian mummies fresh out of the tomb, damn near anything’s apt to happen.’
(1938)
Professor Sea Gull
JOE GOULD IS a blithe and emaciated little man who has been a notable in the cafeterias, diners, barrooms, and dumps of Greenwich Village for a quarter of a century. He sometimes brags rather wryly that he is the last of the bohemians. ‘All the others fell by the wayside,’ he says. ‘Some are in the grave, some are in the loony bin, and some are in the advertising business.’ Gould’s life is by no means carefree; he is constantly tormented by what he calls ‘the three H’s’ – homelessness, hunger, and hangovers. He sleeps on benches in subway stations, on the floor in the studios of friends, and in quarter-a-night flophouses on the Bowery. Once in a while he trudges up to Harlem and goes to one of the establishments known as ‘Extension Heavens’ that are operated by followers of Father Divine, the Negro evangelist, and gets a night’s lodging for fifteen cents. He is five feet four and he hardly ever weighs more than a hundred pounds. Not long ago he told a friend that he hadn’t eaten a square meal since June, 1936, when he bummed up to Cambridge and attended a banquet during a reunion of the Harvard class of 1911, of which he is a member. ‘I’m the foremost authority in the United States,’ he says, ‘on the subject of doing without.’ He tells people that he lives on ‘air, self-esteem, cigarette butts, cowboy coffee, fried-egg sandwiches, and ketchup.’ Cowboy coffee, he says, is strong coffee drunk black without sugar. ‘I’ve long since lost my taste for good coffee,’ he says. ‘I much prefer the kind that sooner or later, if you keep on drinking it, your hands will begin to shake and the whites of your eyes will turn yellow.’ While having a sandwich, Gould customarily empties a bottle or two of ketchup on his plate and eats it with a spoon. The countermen in the Jefferson Diner, on Village Square, which is one of his hangouts, gather up the ketchup bottles and hide them the moment he puts his head in the door. ‘I don’t particularly like the confounded stuff,’ he says, ‘but I make it a practice to eat all I can get. It’s the only grub I know of that’s free of charge.’
Gould is a Yankee. His branch of the Goulds has been in New England since 1635, and he is related to many of the other early New England families, such as the Lawrences, the Clarkes, and the Storers. ‘There’s nothing accidental about me,’ he once said. ‘I’ll tell you what it took to make me what I am today. It took old Yankee blood, an overwhelming aversion to possessions, four years of Harvard, and twenty-five years of beating the living hell out of my insides with bad hooch and bad food.’ He says that he is out of joint with the rest of the human race because he doesn’t want to own anything. ‘If Mr Chrysler tried to make me a present of the Chrysler Building,’ he says, ‘I’d damn near break my neck fleeing from him. I wouldn’t own it; it’d own me. Back home in Massachusetts I’d be called an old Yankee crank. Here I’m called a bohemian. It’s six of one, half a dozen of the other.’ Gould has a twangy voice and a Harvard accent. Bartenders and countermen in the Village refer to him as the Professor, the Sea Gull, Professor Sea Gull, the Mongoose, Professor, Mongoose, or the Bellevue Boy. He dresses in the castoff clothes of his friends. His overcoat, suit, shirt, and even his shoes are all invariably a size or two too large, but he wears them with a kind of forlorn rakishness. ‘Just look at me,’ he says. ‘The only thing that fits is the necktie.’ On bitter winter days he puts a layer of newspapers between his shirt and undershirt. ‘I’m snobbish,’ he says. ‘I only use the Times.’ He is fond of unusual headgear – a toboggan, a beret, or a yachting cap. One summer evening he appeared at a party in a seersucker suit, a polo shirt, a scarlet cummerbund, sandals, and a yachting cap, all hand-me-downs. He uses a long black cigarette holder, and a good deal of the time he smokes butts picked up off the sidewalks.
Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) Page 7