Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

‘Well, I do,’ said the landlady.

  She wouldn’t let my wife go upstairs with me.

  ‘You’ll have to wait down here, young lady,’ she said severely.

  I went on upstairs, carrying the fistful of letters. I knocked on their door and someone shouted, ‘Come on in!’ I opened the door. The room was in magnificent disorder. On the table were two big steamer baskets, cellophane-wrapped, with red ribbons tied to their handles. The steamer baskets looked odd in the shabby room. Also on the table were bottles of beer and gin and ginger ale and some half-eaten sandwiches. The floor was strewn with wrapping paper and boxes and cigar butts. Mrs Hollinan was sitting on the bed with a tumbler in her hand. A cigar was sticking out of a corner of Mr Hollinan’s mouth and he was pouring himself a drink of gin. They were quite drunk, without a doubt. Mr Hollinan looked at me, but he didn’t seem to recognize me.

  ‘Sit down and make yourself at home,’ he said, waving me to the bed. ‘Have a drink? Have a cigar?’

  ‘It’s that sneak from the newspaper,’ said Mrs Hollinan. ‘Give him hell, Jim.’

  Mr Hollinan stood up. He wasn’t very steady on his feet.

  ‘What did you mean,’ he said, ‘putting that writeup in the paper?’

  ‘What was wrong with it?’ I asked.

  ‘You said in that writeup we only had seven cents left, you liar.’

  ‘Well, that’s what your wife told me.’

  ‘I did not,’ said Mrs Hollinan, indignantly. She got up and waved her tumbler, spilling gin and ginger ale all over the bed. ‘I told you we had seventy cents left,’ she said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mr Hollinan. ‘What do you mean, putting lies about us in the paper?’

  Mr Hollinan took a square bottle of gin off the table. He got a good grip on it and started toward me, waving the bottle in the air.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said, edging toward the door. ‘I brought you some money.’

  ‘I don’t want your money,’ he said. ‘I got money.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, holding out the telegrams, ‘I think I have a job for you.’

  ‘I don’t want your help,’ he said. ‘You put a lie about us in the paper.’

  ‘That’s right, Jim,’ said Mrs Hollinan, giggling. ‘Give him hell.’

  I closed the door and hurried to the stairs. Mr Hollinan stumbled out of the room and stood at the head of the stairs, clutching for the railing with one hand. Just as I reached the landing on the second floor he threw the bottle of gin. It hit the wall above my head and broke into pieces. I was sprayed with gin and bits of wet glass. I ran on down the stairs, getting out of Mr Hollinan’s range. All the way down the stairs I could hear Mrs Hollinan up in the room, yelling, ‘Give him hell, Jim!’

  ‘Mother of God,’ said the landlady when I got downstairs, ‘what happened? What was that crash?’

  ‘You smell like a distillery,’ said my wife.

  I was laughing. ‘Mr Hollinan threw a bottle of gin at me,’ I said.

  ‘That’s nothing to laugh about,’ said the landlady sharply. ‘Why don’t you call an officer?’

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said to my wife.

  We went to a liquor store over on Columbus Circle. I bought a bottle of Holland gin and had it wrapped in Christmas-gift paper, and I gave the liquor-store man Mr Hollinan’s address and told him to deliver the order. My wife thought I was crazy, but I didn’t mind. It was the first time I had laughed in weeks.

  Early the following morning I went back to the rooming house. I had decided it was my duty to make another attempt to give the money to Mr and Mrs Hollinan.

  ‘Those cave people are gone,’ the landlady told me. ‘A gentleman came here last night in a limousine, with a chauffeur. He took them away. I had a talk with him before he went upstairs, and I told him how they’d been cutting up, but he didn’t care. He gave me a five-dollar bill. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘take this for your trouble. If any mail comes for these good people, send it along to me, and I’ll see they get it.’ He put them in the back seat with him. He told me he was going to give Mr Hollinan a job on his farm.’

  The landlady was quite angry. ‘They were still drunk,’ she said, ‘but that man in the limousine didn’t seem to care. He was drunk, too. Drunker than they were, if you ask me. He kept slapping them on the back, first one and then the other. And when they got in the limousine they were laughing and falling all over theirselves, and that Mrs Hollinan, that lowdown woman, she rolled down the window and thumbed her nose at me.’

  She had the benefactor’s name and address written down and I made a note of them. It was a New Jersey address. I went back to the office and wrote letters to all the people who had sent money to Mr and Mrs Hollinan, returning it. I told them Mr Hollinan had found a job and had declined their contributions.

  Until perhaps a week before Christmas of the following year, I forgot about Mr and Mrs Hollinan. Then I recalled the experience and began to wonder about them. I wondered if the man in the limousine did give Mr Hollinan a job and if he was getting along all right. I kept thinking about them all that week and on Christmas Eve I decided to try and get in touch with them and wish them a merry Christmas and a happy New Year. I searched through a stack of old notebooks in the bottom drawer of my desk and finally found their benefactor’s name and address. I asked Information to get me his telephone number in New Jersey and I put in a call for him. He answered the telephone himself. I told him I was the reporter who wrote the story about the man and woman he had befriended last Christmas, the cave dwellers. I started to ask him if he would let Mr Hollinan come to the telephone, but he interrupted me.

  ‘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 ne
ver 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 s
chool. 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.