Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  ‘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.”’

  Detective Sheehan says that now and then a man gets stung. ‘A gypsy girl stands in a tenement window and beckons to some man passing in the street,’ he says, ‘and the foolish fellow trots right in. He thinks he’s going to have some kind of sexy adventure. The gypsy girl turns on the radio and dances around with him a few minutes, just to get his mind occupied, and while they’re dancing she picks his pocket. He’s so excited he doesn’t know what’s taking place. And then she sends him on his way. That’s all that ever happens, just a dance. If he comes back looking for his money, one of the men gypsies appears and chases him off. Some of the girls are fair pickpockets, nothing to brag about. It seems to take a real one hundred per cent white man to be a good pickpocket. And all that stuff about loose, passionate gypsy girls that they have in stories is a myth. I’ve been hanging around gypsies nine long years and I’ve yet to see a real gypsy tramp. As a class, they’re the straightest women in the city so far as sex is concerned. Good wives, good mothers. So far as general crookedness is concerned, they’d barbecue their grandmother for fifty cents. I guess they can’t help it. I guess it’s their nature.’

  Johnny’s thirty-eight families live on Suffolk, Ridge, Pitt, Sheriff, Columbia, and Cannon streets, on the lower East Side. They usually haughtily refer to themselves as Russians, but all are American citizens, less than a dozen speak Russian, and only three families – the Nikanovs, the Sigilovs, and the Petrovs – still have Russian names. The others have long since translated their Russian names into English equivalents; among them are Smiths, Costellos, Thompsons, Mitchells, Johnsons, Stanleys, and Stevensons. Stefanovitch, for example, became Stevenson. Johnny says that his gypsies are the poorest in the United States. ‘If you was to turn them all upside down and give them a good shaking,’ he says, ‘you couldn’t buy a quart of gin with what fell out.’ They are almost morbidly suspicious of American officialdom, and they send for Johnny whenever they have trouble with policemen, truant officers, relief investigators, health inspectors, clinic doctors, and landlords; he interprets and advises. They have great faith in Johnny’s ability to deal shrewdly with gajos. Johnny is a passionate speechmaker, and he always presides at weddings, wakes, and parties. ‘I am the master of ceremony at everything,’ he says. ‘That’s mainly what a gypsy king is for. It’s a job, I tell you, because gypsies are serious about parties. You take the average gypsy, the main thing he wants out of life is a big, drunk party in his honor. Most of our parties don’t amount to much. They are just diwanos, what we call tongue meetings. That is, we sit around and talk. I lead the talk. A diwano is an empty-belly affair. Other kinds are better, such as pomanas, where we eat and get drunk in honor of somebody that died, and slavas, where we eat and get drunk because somebody had a birthday, and patchivs, where we eat and get drunk because there don’t seem to be anything better to do. Sometimes we hire a hall on Suffolk Street for big parties, but most any home will do. I guess that’s one reason landlords hate the sight of us. If you want to hear some noise, you get a crowd of gypsies full of wine, you’ll hear some noise.’

  Whenever there is a death in his crowd, Johnny goes from home to home and takes up a collection. He hires the undertaker and makes arrangements for the funeral with Father Alexander Chechila of the Church of St Peter and St Paul, a small, poor Russian Orthodox Catholic church on Seventh Street, between First Avenue and Avenue A. It is the mother church of all the Russian gypsies in the East and is used by those of other nationalities; in 1941 Father Alexander preached thirty gypsy funerals. ‘Mr Chechila is the only preacher I ever saw that gypsies don’t make him nervous,’ Johnny says. ‘You take the average church, the preacher gets beside hisself when a gypsy comes in. He’s afraid the gypsy might steal the bell right out of the steeple. The most of them they won’t touch a gypsy funeral. But Mr Chechila pitches right in. He speaks the words at the church and then he climbs into one of our dirty old cars and goes along to Jersey and speaks the words at the grave. All the New York gypsies bury in a graveyard in Linden, New Jersey. It’s cheap. We used to bury in Paterson, but Paterson got too dear. At a gypsy funeral everybody gets full of wine and throws their head back and wails. Sometimes it seems to get on Mr Chechila’s nerves. I guess we treat him real mean. We never go to church except for Easter and for funerals. We just ain’t godly people. Here a while back he told me to make my people go to church, and I said to him, “Mr Chechila, please excuse me, I don’t mean no disrespect, but the only kind of gypsy that needs a preacher is a corpse gypsy.”’

  Johnny’s gypsies bicker a lot and he often has to act as peacemaker. If a dispute is serious, he holds a Romany kris, or gypsy trial, in his home; each disputant and each witness is permitted to speak as fully as he wishes so long as he doesn’t bore Johnny, who presides as judge. Wine is drunk at these trials and they invariably end in an oratorical carousal. ‘Down at the bottom of every gypsy trial is womenfolks or five dollars,’ Johnny says. ‘I never yet heard a gypsy claim another one owed him three dollars or eighteen dollars. It’s always five. They five-dollar me to death.’ When any of Johnny’s people, whether a man, woman or child, does not show up for supper, it is taken for granted that he or she is in the hands of the police. In such cases Johnny puts on his black hat, picks up his copper-headed cane, and goes over to the Police Headquarters annex for a talk with Detective Sheehan. If the missing gypsy is under arrest, Johnny finds out the nature of the charge and the name of the jail; then he trudges wearily to get a lawyer. Johnny is abler at handling such matters than any of his rivals because he can read and write; he claims that he is the only gypsy king in the United States who can read well enough to dial a number on the telephone. He says he picked up his learning, out of boredom, from a cellmate in a Michigan jail where, sometime in his youth, he
spent two and a half years for stealing a horse; he has never been inside a schoolroom. ‘I can read just enough to make out the carnival news in the Billboard magazine, and I can handwrite just enough to fill out a money order, but that’s a whole lot better than the average gypsy can do,’ he says. ‘My grandmamma had a saying that fits me to a T. “In the country of the blind,” she used to say, “the man that can see out of one eye is king.”’

  Johnny seldom gets any money from his subjects. The position of gypsy king pays off not in money but in prestige. He is supported by his wife, Mrs Looba Johnny Nikanov, who is one of the best dukkerers in the city. Looba is tall, gaunt, sad-eyed, and austere; in profile she looks exactly like the old Indian on Indian-head nickels. She goes to sleep at sundown and seldom gets up before 10 A.M., but she is constantly yawning, stretching, and grunting. Looba smokes a pipe. She is extremely irritable. Johnny says that she rarely refers to him by name; instead, using Romany, she calls him a ratbite, a sick toad, a blue-bellied eel, a black-yolked egg, a goat, a bat, a policeman, a gajo, and various other loathsome things. He doesn’t mind. ‘A gypsy woman that don’t scream half the time, something is wrong with her,’ he says. ‘Screaming is their hobby.’ Johnny and Looba live in a red-brick tenement on Sheriff Street, between Rivington and Delancey, paying $14 a month for two small rooms and a kitchen. They have the parlor front. Like all gypsies of their generation, they sleep on the floor between two thick, goosefeather-stuffed quilts, called perrinas. Many younger, city-born gypsies have taken to beds, but the old ones, who spent their youths in tents, prefer the floor. ‘I don’t feel natural in a bed,’ Johnny says. ‘I feel like a fool.’ During the day the perrinas are rolled up and stacked in a corner and Johnny uses the bedroom for his headquarters. It is a sparsely furnished room. In it are an old wooden trunk, a wicker settee with a sprung bottom, and a table, on which there is a copper candlestick and a radio. The candlestick is usually surrounded by a mound of tallow drippings. The flat is wired for electricity, of course, and Johnny owns one bulb. He rarely screws it in, however. He feels that a candle throws sufficient illumination, even for a kris or a patchiv. There are no chairs. Tacked over the door is an ikon. The walls are covered with blankets and tent carpets and with a large canvas phrenological chart – a crude drawing of a human head divided into sections – that Looba once used in fortune-telling tents. Attached to the borders of the chart are a number of photographs of race horses torn out of newspapers. A dirty blanket hangs over the door. Gypsies try to make their flats look as much like the inside of a tent as possible.

  Most afternoons Johnny’s room is crowded with his subjects, who squat along the walls, sitting on their heels. Johnny reclines, barefooted and serene, on the wicker settee. Lying there, half asleep, he gossips, listens to the radio, and drinks popskull or tea. He drinks a lot of tea, taking it Russian fashion, in a tumbler. Looba has the exclusive use of the parlor; she calls it her ofisa, or office. It looks out on Sheriff Street and she sits at the window with a lapful of sewing and beckons to passers-by who look dopey enough to her to be interested in a fortune-telling. She has a rather high opinion of human intelligence; she beckons to about two passers-by in ten. Most dukkerers speak of themselves as Egyptians, doubtless feeling that this identifies them with mystery. The custom had its origin in the belief, once generally held, that gypsies sprang from Egypt; anthropologists now are pretty certain that they came from northern India, leaving it for good about a thousand years ago. Looba is known professionally as Madame Johnson and she has printed cards which read, ‘MADAME JOHNSON. REAL EGYPTIAN FROM EGYPT. YOUR HEAD IS LIKE AN OPEN BOOK TO ME. IF YOU HAVE TROUBLES OF A LOVE OR MONEY NATURE GIVE ME A TRY.’ She has been arrested nine times in the last five years for wallet-switching.

  Like most gypsy women, Looba is skillful with the needle. She sews all her own clothes, using extravagantly colored curtain and drapery material, some of which she shoplifts from the mill-remnants stores on First Avenue. Her costume, winter and summer, consists of a silk kerchief, a loose, low-cut blouse, and four or five skirts, the newest on the outside. The kerchief, called a diklo, signifies that she is married; no gypsy virgin would ever put one on. She also wears eight rings, a pair of earrings, ten copper bracelets shaped like snakes and lizards, which Johnny hammered for her years ago, and a necklace of old coins from half a dozen European countries. Clients are often inquisitive about the coin necklace, and she usually tells them that it is worth $11,300 but that she will sell it for $23 with a fortune-telling thrown in. She has never had an offer. Looba wears high-heeled shoes on the street but goes barefooted indoors. She does not spend much time in the kitchen. There is always a pot of stew on the stove and she and Johnny eat whenever they feel hungry. They may eat five meals a day, or one.

  It is customary for gypsy parents to let their married children live in the same flat with them, but Johnny and Looba do not. ‘I may be peculiar,’ Johnny says, ‘but I like to have room enough to turn around in.’ They have four sons and a daughter, all married. The sons, with their families, twenty-two persons in all, live on one floor of a ratty tenement on Cannon Street, two blocks from Johnny’s house. All of them have been on and off relief since early in the depression. In 1941 each of the sons was forced by relief officials to take a job on a WPA pick-and-shovel project, and each fainted shortly after showing up for work. ‘Gypsy men ain’t built like ordinary men,’ Johnny says solemnly. ‘They ain’t fitted for shovel work. They’re high-strung and they rupture easy. The relief people just can’t somehow seem to understand that. It ain’t that they don’t want to do shovel work. Why, they would be glad to, but they got to think about their health.’ Igor, the oldest son, was once assigned to a downtown curb-repairing project. According to Johnny, who snickers when he tells about it, Igor began to moan as soon as he was handed a shovel; after working for about ten minutes, he mumbled, ‘I just can’t stand it,’ and fainted so overwhelmingly that he frightened the foreman, who had him taken to Gouverneur Hospital in a taxicab. The daughter, Mrs Rosie Luke Stankovitch, is, like Looba, a real Egyptian from Egypt. She is known professionally as Madame Stanley. In the winter she has an ofisa on Halsted Street in Chicago. In the summer she operates a mitt joint, or fortune-telling tent, for the J. B. Jericho Kentucky Wonder Exposition, a small Southern carnival. When she was a kid Johnny made her go to P. S. 4, at Rivington and Pitt, and she is fairly literate. Johnny is proud of her. He gets a postcard from her about once a month and he carries it around in his wallet and shows it to gajo friends. ‘Rosie is probably the smartest gypsy girl in the entire U.S.,’ he says. A recent card from Rosie was mailed in Valdosta, Georgia. It said:

  DEAR PA:

  This place sure stinks. We are eating and that is about the size of it. People too smart know it all don’t trust gypsies. Sure wish I could send you a M.O. but will not be able to do so at this time. Hope the Japs doesn’t drop some burns on my tent. If I half to die I sure hope it don’t half to be in Valdosta, Ga. Take care yourself. Kiss ma.

  ROSIE

  A good deal of Johnny’s jauntiness deserted him after we entered the war. The last time I visited him he was deeply dejected. When I pushed aside the door blanket and stepped into his room he was alone, sitting on the edge of the settee with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. He lifted his head an inch or so and glanced at me, and there was an utter lack of interest in his eyes. ‘Hello,’ he said halfheartedly. He was barefoot, his eyes were bloodshot, and he needed a shave. I tore the wrapping paper off a quart of gin I had brought along as a present and he suddenly scrambled to his feet. ‘Gimme that,’ he said. He impatiently unscrewed the cap, took a couple of finger-marked glasses off the table, and slopped some gin into them. He took the gin in his glass in two gulps. He shuddered and his teeth chattered for a few moments. ‘First today,’ he said when he had his breath. ‘It ain’t the liquor that hurts. It’s the doing without that hurts. The old woman wouldn’t come across with my gin money this morning and we had an awful figh
t. It wore me out. I been sitting here two, three hours trying to get up enough strength to go in and fight some more.’ He sank back on the settee, holding the bottle in one hand and the glass in the other. I went over and sat on the window sill.

  ‘I feel sad,’ Johnny said, ‘real blue-sad.’

  ‘What seems to be the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘The same thing that seems to be the matter with the rest of the world,’ he said. ‘The war. By the time this war’s over there just won’t be no travelling gypsies left in the U.S. There might not be no gypsies of any kind. The most of us, we been bottled up in cities since the depression, and that there gas-rationing business put the stopper in the bottle. The families out on the highways, one by one they’re going to get rid of their cars and fall back on the buses and the railroad trains. And before long the ticket agents won’t be so free about selling them tickets, and when that time comes New York’s going to crawl with gypsies. All the other cities where the cops are halfway decent to us, it’ll be the same – cities like Philly, Baltimore, Paterson, Chicago, New Orleans, Mexico City, Los Angeles, and Frisco. When a war hits the world the most sensible thing a gypsy can do is head for the nearest slum and hole up. And hope for the best. What gets me, some of our coppersmiths could do real fine shipyard work, but they won’t give them a chance. Four of the coppersmiths in my crowd were taken on by a Brooklyn Navy Yard contractor, but along about noon the foreman found out they wasn’t Greek fellers, like he thought, but gypsies, and he fired them. He was afraid they’d steal the tools.’