Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  Captain Campion got to his feet. ‘Before I go any further,’ he said, ‘there’s something I’ll just have to explain, or try to, and that’s the divisions and subdivisions among these gypsies.’ He took a rolled-up paper from his briefcase and unrolled it and smoothed it out on the desk. It was a piece of wrapping paper about a yard long, and it was wrinkled and dog-eared and coffee-spotted, and drawn on it in ink was a chart consisting of lists of names enclosed in boxes. The boxes varied in size, and were arranged in groups, and lines linked some boxes to others. It was an untidy chart; scores of interlinear corrections had been made in the lists of names, and a number of corrections had been pasted on. In one place, a pasted-on correction had been crossed out and an arrow ran from it to a new correction, on the margin. Captain Campion studied the chart for several minutes, refreshing his memory. ‘This is the third one of these things I’ve drawn up,’ he remarked. ‘I wore out the others, correcting them and adding new information. Sometimes I wish I’d never heard the word gypsy.’ He sat back down.

  ‘To continue,’ he said, ‘the nomad coppersmith gypsies are pretty much alike in appearance, they speak the same dialect of the gypsy language, and they have the same general customs and beliefs, but during the years they’ve been in the United States they’ve gradually divided themselves into tribes. The principal tribes, and they’re all represented here in the city, are the Russians, the Serbians, the Kalderash, the Argentines, the Argentinos, the Mexicans, the Machwaya, and the Greeks. Don’t take some of these names at face value. As I told you, the nomads came mostly from Russia and Serbia. The Argentines are Serbians that roamed in Spain and South America before coming here. The Argentinos are also Serbians. After they left Serbia, and they’ll give you twenty dates when that was, they went to Brazil and then came to the United States and then went to Argentina and then came back to the United States. The Mexicans are Russians and Serbians that go back and forth between Mexico and the United States. Their stamping grounds are Mexico City, three or four Texas cities, Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston. Like the Argentines and the Argentinos, they not only speak gypsy and English and a little Serbian and a little Russian but they also speak Spanish, and up around here, in recent years, they’ve specialized in skinning Puerto Ricans. The Kalderash are Russians and Serbians – in gypsy a kalderash is a coppersmith. The Machwaya are Serbians. They take their name from a region in West Serbia named Machva, where they roamed for generations upon generations before coming here. The Greeks are Russians who came here via Greece.

  ‘Those are the tribes, but that’s not the end of it. The tribes are subdivided into bands, or what we call bands – the gypsies call them vitsas. They pronounce it several ways – vitsa, veetsa, witsa, weetsa. In most cases, the vitsa is more important than the tribe. Some vitsas are small and compact. They consist of a few families that are closely related and that always travel together, and they generally have one leader. Other vitsas are big and loose and split up. Their members travel in families or in groups of families that are really vitsas within a vitsa, and about the only time the vitsa gathers together in anything like its full strength is when some prominent old gypsy dies and his or her family decides to hold a big funeral. The families in a vitsa may be scattered from Mexico City to some small town in Michigan, and it always surprises me how fast they spread the word around that So-and-So is dead and a big funeral is going to be held and when and where, but there’s really nothing mysterious about it. One family knows where another family is, and gets word to it, even if they have to phone the mayor of the town or the chief of police and talk him into relaying the information, and that family knows where a couple of other families are, and gets word to them, and in a day or so, all over everywhere, everybody has been notified and everybody that can is on the way. In the big vitsas, there are generally several leaders, one of whom is the head leader, or king. Some vitsas hate other vitsas, and all of them are suspicious of each other; they trust each other about as much as they trust the police. If a woman in one vitsa pulls off a big bajour and the leader of a rival vitsa finds out about it, he’s likely to walk in and demand a cut, else he’ll inform, but don’t worry, sooner or later, it may take years, the leader of the woman’s vitsa will even matters up. Also, all of them are snobbish and superior; the people in each and every vitsa look down on the people in all the other vitsas. At the same time, all of them intermarry. The way gypsy marriages are arranged, a boy’s parents have to buy him a wife, and they buy him the smartest girl they can afford, no matter what vitsa she’s in. They may buy a girl from a family in another vitsa in their own tribe or from a family in a vitsa in some other tribe. The price depends on how good a money-maker the girl promises to be. If she can probably support a family telling fortunes but obviously doesn’t have the nerve and the initiative to pull off bajours, she’ll cost only a few hundred dollars; if she’s cold-blooded and sharp and greedy, and if her mother and her aunts are good bajour women, she’ll cost from two to five thousand.

  ‘A few vitsas have descriptive names, such as the Saporeschti, or the Snakes; the Cuneschti, or the Knifers; and the Foosoo Yarri, or the Bean Eaters. But the majority are named after highly respected old gypsies in the past, patriarchs and matriarchs, all of whom, the way the gypsies tell it, were twice or three times as big as ordinary people and very rich and very wise and lived to be at least a hundred. The biggest of the vitsas that hang out in New York City is a Russian vitsa, the Frinkuleschti, and it’s named after Frinka, or Frinkulo, Mikhailovich. I once asked one of the leaders of the Frinkuleschti, a skinny little fellow with stomach ulcers named Frank Ranko, what did he know about Frinka, who was he. “All I know,” Frank said, “he was my father’s grandfather or great-grandfather, and my father told me his father told him he was the biggest gypsy in Russia. He was seven feet three, and one time when he was quite an old man, up around a hundred and ten, they put him on some scales in a hay market and he weighed four hundred and sixty.” There’ve been twenty-five or thirty Frinkuleschti families holed up in the city ever since the depression, and a good many others come and go. You’ll always find some in Brooklyn, usually in Red Hook, the Navy Yard district, or Williamsburg, but they mostly live within twenty blocks of each other in a section of the lower East Side that’s the gypsiest section in the city. This section is bounded by Houston Street, the Bowery, Canal Street, Pike Street, and the river, and families belonging to a dozen or more vitsas live in there. The Frinkuleschti are poor gypsies. They can’t spend much on wives for their sons, and every generation they get poorer. Sometimes a family gets down to the point where they’re feeding the children on bread soaked in tea. The women tell fortunes but they’re no good at bajours; they’re just too clumsy. And the men are so clumsy I’ve known them to get in trouble stealing canned goods in supermarkets. The next-biggest vitsa is the Mineschti, another Russian vitsa. It’s named after a woman, Mina Demetro. Mina lived to be a hundred and twenty. I’ve never heard the exact figures on how big she was, but I’ve heard she had thirty children, the last one when she was sixty-five. Some say she died in the far-distant past, centuries ago, and some say she died around 1880; some say she died in Russia and some say Serbia and some say Poland; every old gypsy in the Mineschti will give you a different story. Anyway, four brothers who were direct descendants of hers left Russia with their families in the late eighties and came to the United States via Canada and spread out and multiplied. Their names were Zlatcho, Groffo, Bortchi, and Wasso, and I’ve arrested children of theirs, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. The richest of the vitsas is one named the Koleschti, only the people in it don’t use that name much any more. They prefer to use their tribe name. They belong to the Machwaya tribe, and they’re very proud of it. The Machwaya are West Coast gypsies primarily, but in recent years they’ve been extending their range and showing up in Reno, Las Vegas, the big cities in Texas, the Florida resort cities, Atlantic City, and New York City. Their women, the Machvankas, are the best-looking gyps
y women in the country, and the sharpest. The Machwaya are big-car gypsies. They drive Cadillacs and Packards and Lincolns. The other gypsies have a saying that if a Machwaya had to choose between a brand-new Ford and an old wreck of a Cadillac that you’d have trouble even getting it to start, he’d choose the Cadillac. There’s usually at least a dozen families of them in the city. They run ofisas the same as the others, and they also run gypsy tearooms – not those places where when a woman finishes her sandwiches and tea some woman dressed up like a gypsy comes over and stares at the leaves in the bottom of the cup and reels off some fortune-telling talk that she thinks sounds like gypsy talk and then she gets a tip, but ratty little second-floor-front places on side streets in the theatrical district and along Eighth Avenue and Sixth Avenue and Third Avenue that look like tearooms but don’t make any real pretense of being tearooms beyond they’ll bring out one cup of tea solely for the purposes of tea-leaf reading, and when the Machvanka finishes with the tea-leaf nonsense she really starts talking to the woman, and if the woman listens and keeps on listening and gets involved and comes back a time or two the Machvanka will take everything she has but her back teeth maybe and her corset and her eyeballs.

  ‘I don’t know how many gypsies there are in the United States. The gypsies themselves certainly don’t know, although gypsy leaders are always willing to give you a figure, the first big round figure that pops in their minds. I’ve seen a wide variety of estimates, but it was all too obvious they were based on the wildest kind of guesswork. The fact is nobody knows, and not only that, nobody is capable of making a good guess. I don’t even know how many there are in New York City. There may be two hundred families in the city tonight, or there may be less; there may be six hundred, or there may be more. Some families stay here years at a time, but they move so often from borough to borough and neighborhood to neighborhood that you couldn’t begin to keep up with them; a family that was up some side street in the upper Bronx last week may be down on the lower end of Staten Island this week, down in Tottenville, or it may be over in Long Island City, or then again, it may be out in Akron, Ohio. Some families spend the winter here, or part of it, and some spend the summer, or part of it, and some come in and go out several times a year, and some might show up once in five years. Even to give the loosest kind of approximate figure how many are here at any one particular time, I’d just about as soon try to estimate how many English sparrows were sitting in a certain bush in Central Park at high noon last Tuesday. Furthermore, I’m not at all sure how many vitsas there are in the United States, and I’ll confine my remarks to the ones I’m closely acquainted with. I’m closely acquainted with twenty-three, and that’s because all or most or many or some of the families that belong to them either hang out in New York City a good part of the time or show up here fairly often. I’ll give you the names of these vitsas, and the names of their principal families. Seven are Russian vitsas – the Frinkuleschti, the Mineschti, the Mitteleschti, the Gooneschti, the Goneschti, the Chookooriah, and the Lydakurschti, and the names of the principal families in them are Thompson, Demetro, Ranko, Ufie, Siganoff, Vladochakowski, Vlado, Costello, Mikhailovich, Mitchell, Magill, Mittilo, Merchon, Marko, Martino, Nicholas, Stokes, Guy, Petro, and Bimbo. Some of these names are Anglicized versions of Russian, Serbian, and gypsy names – after the Mikhailovich family got to be very big and branched out, for example, one branch changed Mikhail into Mitchell and another branch changed it into Magill. A number of names, such as Nicholas and Costello, are used by families in the vitsas of several tribes. Also, another thing, it’s hard to make a flat statement about gypsies; you have to qualify practically everything you say, and I better mention that the families in two or three of the big vitsas, particularly the Mineschti, don’t all belong to the same tribe, or claim they don’t; some families in the Mineschti claim they are Russian and some claim they are Kalderash. As I said, sometimes I wish I’d never heard the word gypsy. We’ll take up the Kalderash next. Six of the twenty-three vitsas are Kalderash – the Risturschti, the Jaikurschti, the Macholeschti, the Wankurschti, the Gureschti, and the Yotzurschti – and the names of the principal families in them are Stevens, Stevenson, Thompson, Ristick, Johnson, Marks, Evans, Wanko, Eli, Stanley, Demetro, Urich, Costello, Ephraim, and Morgan. Three are Serbian – the Lameschti, the Tooteschti, and the Rishtoni – and their principal family names are Evans, Lee, Stevens, Uwanawich, Miller, Marino, and Marinko. Three are Mexican – the Bokurschti, the Chokurschti, and the Yonkurschti – and their principal family names are Flores, Spiro, Costello, Yonko, Steve, and John. One is Machwaya – the Koleschti – and the principal family names in it are Adams, Uwanawich, Marks, Williams, Lee, Yankovich, Stevens, Miller, and George. One is Greek – the Poopeschti. It takes its name from an old hellcat of a fortune-teller named Poopa. It’s a small vitsa, and its principal family name is Kaslov. One is Argentine – the Cuneschti – and the names of the principal families in it are Montez, George, and Miller. One is Argentino, but it doesn’t have a vitsa name; the families in it simply call themselves the Argentinos. Their names are Christo, Miller, Toney, and Nicholas.

  ‘When it comes to first names, most of these gypsies have two. A man may be Joe this or John that when he’s dealing with gajos, or non-gypsies, but when he’s among his own he’s Uwano or Mitya or Spirako, or some such. Likewise, a woman who may be known to the police in sixteen cities as Annie this or Rosie that, when she’s home she’s Repanka or Troka or Pavlena. To complicate matters, a good many have gypsy nicknames. Take a man we’ve often had dealings with whose gajo name is George Adams. I don’t know his proper gypsy name, and he himself, if he was asked, he’d probably have to stop and think. He’s always Bongo Nock, or Broken Nose, and if you’ll look up his photograph in the gallery in the squad office – look under Male Gypsies, File 1, Tray 1 – you’ll see why. To further complicate matters, most of the women and many of the men have a string of aliases – gajo aliases and gypsy aliases.

  ‘Now I want to give you a few details concerning the way gypsies live in the city, and then I’ll describe the bajour, and then we’ll go get some coffee. The first thing to remember, you’ll almost always find gypsies living close to the street. They prefer to live in old stores, or in first-floor-front flats in tenements, or in parlor-front flats in brownstones. I’ve very seldom found them above the second floor. I used to think they wanted to be as close as possible to Mother Earth, but all it is, they want to be where people passing by can see them who might be interested in having their fortunes told. It’s a form of advertising. More often than not, two or three families live together and operate an ofisa on shares. If they’re prosperous, they may have the ofisa at one address and live at another, but in most cases they live right in the ofisa, back behind the curtained-off fortune-telling booths. If it’s a store, they do their best to conceal this; it’s illegal to live in a store. When a family or two or three families travelling together arrive in the city, they pile in with other families in their vitsa, if any are here, and stay with them until they can rent a place of their own, and if none are here, they ride around during the day looking at old stores with ‘FOR RENT’ signs on them and sleep in their cars at night. It’s sometimes very hard for them to find a place; most landlords have to be tricked into renting to them. They like a location that’s conspicuous but not too conspicuous; they’re well aware that women don’t want to be seen entering or leaving a gypsy place. What they like best is a low-rent store in a run-down block right off a busy crosstown street, such as Fourteenth or Twenty-third. I’ve known a Machwaya family to pay six hundred a month for a good location, but that’s unusual, even for them, and the others won’t pay anywhere near that. When they find a store that suits them, the man gypsy among them who looks least like a gypsy goes to the landlord or the renting agent and says he wants to open a rug store in the place, or sometimes it’s a mill-remnants store or a lampshade store or a toy store. If they can come to terms, the gypsy puts down a month’s rent and gets a rece
ipt and a key. Next morning, two or three cars with trunks and bedrolls strapped on top of them park in front of the store, or maybe it’s two or three station wagons, and what at first glance looks like a thousand gypsies get out and start carrying things in. They’re systematic. First they bring in some folding chairs and some folding tables and some gonyas. A gonya is a pair of capacious big canvas bags joined with a strap that fits over the shoulder, and they hold a surprising amount; if a gypsy woman was determined to, she could stuff most of Macy’s into one of them. The women do two-thirds of the work. They stand on the chairs and hammer nails in the walls and run wires from the nails. Then they take some curtains and draperies from the gonyas, yards and yards and yards of them, and hang them on the wires, dividing the store into a maze of rooms and booths. They may decorate the walls up front with some of those fake tapestries that auction joints sell on boardwalks, or they may tack up one of those pictures that they have sign painters paint for them on oilcloth – a giant human palm, or a phrenological head, or a zodiac, or a crescent and star. Next they take out a stack of moldy old paper-backed palmistry, horoscope and dream books that they’ve been carrying around for years, and arrange them in the front window. That’s a form of camouflage. Fortune-telling is illegal in the city, and when gypsies are brought into court for it, it’s their practice to screech and scream and swear to God they didn’t tell the woman’s fortune, far from it, they just sold her a book and showed her how to use it, if she thought she was having her fortune told she must be crazy. They work fast. They can have an ofisa rigged up and ready for business in an hour, and later on, if they pull off a bajour and have to get out in a hurry, they can unrig it down in much less time than that. They sometimes buy a couple of overstuffed chairs from a junk store and put them up front to sit on while waiting for customers, but they always leave them behind when they move on. The last things they carry in are their trunks and bedrolls – that is, if they’re going to live in the ofisa. The bedrolls are quilts stuffed with feathers; they spread them on the floor at night and sleep between them, and in the morning they roll them up and pile them in a corner. Quite often, in one corner, they put up something, it’s like a little shrine. They put a box in the corner, a box or an orange crate, and they stand a photograph on it of the last person in the family group who died. The photograph is in a frame with a prop in back. It generally shows the person lying in state in his or her coffin. Gypsies go in for such photographs – they hire photographers to come to the funeral parlor and make them; they have them made in color, or tinted. They stand icons on both sides of the photograph – pictures of saints, Orthodox Catholic saints. And they stand a candle in front of it, usually it’s a big, thick candle trimmed down at the base and fitted into the mouth of a quart milk bottle, and on certain days connected with the dead person they light the candle. For cooking facilities, if there isn’t a gas stove in the place, they plug in a pair of hot plates, one for the goulash pot and one to boil water on for tea. That’s the backbone of their diet – goulash and tea. That, and candy bars. They spend a good part of their time sitting around drinking tea. They make good tea, good and hot and strong, and then they spoil it. They drink it from glasses, and they not only put slices of lemon in it, they put slices of orange or apple or peach or pear in it, or most any other fruit that’s in season. I’ve seen them take a ripe plum, one of those big purple plums, and poke holes in it with a fork until the juice was dripping out and drop it in a glass of tea. I’ve seen them drop strawberries in and press them against the side of the glass with the spoon until the tea was red. I’ve seen them put jam in their tea, spoonfuls of jam. And the amount of sugar they put in, it’s a wonder they have any teeth at all, instead of which they have beautiful, strong, shiny white teeth; their teeth are far and away the healthiest things about them. If the women are making money, the men eat out quite a lot. Oh, sometimes they take the women along. They mainly eat in two kinds of places. They eat in Jewish restaurants on the lower East Side, the kind that have a sign in the window saying “RUMANIAN BROILINGS,” and they eat in Italian restaurants, not the kind of Italian restaurants Americans know anything about but places in Italian neighborhoods, mostly in basements, called capozzelle places, where they specialize in sheeps-heads, or capozzelle, that they buy in slaughterhouses for next to nothing and saw in two and broil, and various inner organs, such as lungs and tripe.