Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  ‘Out on the road, for all I know, gypsies may be happy-go-lucky, rolling along, not a care in the world, the way gypsies are supposed to be, but here in the city, my experience with them, they’re not happy-go-lucky. They’re always complaining about the way they feel, and they’ve always got something; if it isn’t pinkeye, it’s the itch. One thing you’ll always notice in the trash that gypsies leave behind anyplace they’ve been living is a lot of empty patent-medicine bottles. They’re afraid of doctors, and they’re always running to the drugstore and asking the druggist to give them something to settle their stomachs, or their nerves – they’ve got a pain here, a pain there, what’s good for it. And one reason they understand superstitious people, they’re about as superstitious as they can be themselves. They see signs everywhere, signs and warnings, especially the women. Every so often gypsy women have dreams that terrify them, the way they interpret them, and next day they keep the whole family in – nobody’s allowed to go out and nobody’s allowed to come in; you can knock and knock, and you can see them moving around in there, but they won’t come to the door. Sometimes one of them has a premonition, and the family suddenly packs up and moves. And one thing you’re always sure to find when you search a gypsy is a good-luck charm of some kind. There’s an old building on the Bowery just below Canal, 42 Bowery, that’s had a dozen ofisas in it in the last six or seven years, and they’ve all been run by women in the Bimbo family – some of old man Tene Bimbo’s daughters and daughters-in-law and granddaughters; he’s got an army of them. A pair of Bimbos will open an ofisa in there and run it awhile and all of a sudden they’re gone, and it’ll be empty a few weeks or months, and then another pair of Bimbos will turn up and take it over. They draw most of their customers from the Italian neighborhood down around here, the Mulberry Street neighborhood. They always keep a couple of cardboard signs in the window, and if you go in and they suspect you’re a detective, they’ll snatch them out and tear them up. One says, “DREAM BOOKS. LADY FROM JERUSALEM. SPEAKS SEVEN LANGUAGES.” The other is in Italian, and it says, “VIENI QUI CHE DIVINA LA FORTUNA,” which means “Come here that I may tell your fortune.” There’s an old Italian woman down here who peddles evil-eye charms. She has a little satchel that hangs from her neck and opens up into a tray, and at night she makes the rounds of the Grotta Azzurra and the Villa Penza and the Antica Roma and the Nuova Napoli and Angelo’s and the other restaurants in the neighborhood that attract people from uptown, and goes from table to table showing the charms; people buy them for ornaments or souvenirs. One night I was standing in a doorway on Mulberry Street, working on a job that had nothing to do with gypsies. I was back in the shadows, watching the street, and I saw two women approaching each other over on the opposite side. One was the old charm woman making the rounds with her tray, and the other was one of the gypsy women from the ofisa on the Bowery, one of the Bimbos. Just as they were about to go past each other, the gypsy woman stopped the old charm woman and bent over and looked in her tray, and the two of them stood there several minutes with their heads close together, talking very seriously, and then the gypsy picked out a charm and paid for it, and I thought to myself, “I’ve seen everything now.”’

  ‘Taking in each other’s washing,’ said Detective Kane.

  ‘Either that,’ said Captain Campion, ‘or the blind leading the blind. One reason they’re so superstitious, they’re gypsies, it’s the atmosphere they live in, and another reason, they’re illiterate. They don’t believe in education, and they won’t send their children to school unless they’re forced to. I’ve had them tell me that going to school is all right for gajos, they’ve been going for hundreds of years and they’re used to it, but gypsies aren’t used to it and the strain it puts on their minds is liable to lead to epileptic fits. I doubt if more than one out of ten of them knows how to read and write, but arithmetic is something else again; all of them seem to know enough arithmetic to take care of themselves, it’s a mystery to me how they learn it.

  ‘As far as religion, the great majority of them are Russian Orthodox or Serbian Orthodox. The Russians go to two small churches in Russian neighborhoods – St Peter and St Paul, which is on Seventh Street, over between First Avenue and Avenue A, and Carpatho-Russian Holy Trinity, which is on Fourth Street, over near the East River. The Serbians go to St Sava’s, which is on West Twenty-sixth Street; it’s the Serbian Orthodox cathedral. I’ve given up trying to understand how gypsies feel about religion. It seems to be a matter each one makes up his own rules. Some get married by a priest, and some don’t. Some have their children baptized, and some don’t. Very few ever go to confession. The Orthodox people bring bottles to church on the Feast of Saint John the Baptist – old medicine bottles, old whiskey bottles, old bottles of every description – and the priest fills them with holy water and the people take them home, and a good many gypsies show up that day, the most that ever do, only where the ordinary person brings one bottle, the gypsy brings two or three. A good many also show up on Easter Eve and Easter. And now and then a gypsy woman shows up and buys a candle and lights it before some particular icon. Otherwise, the bulk of them, the principal contact they have with religion is at funerals. Gypsies have the regulation Orthodox funeral services, but the heart of their funerals is at the grave. They open the coffin at the grave, even if they’ve already had it open at the services, and all of them crowd around it to take a last look, and then they begin to cry out in the gypsy language and moan and wail, the men and the women. The women sometimes let themselves go to such an extent it’s pitiful; I’ve seen them run over and fall on their knees and butt their heads against tombstones, and when they stood up they’d be so dazed they’d walk around in circles and stumble into each other. And before they close the coffin for good, they drop coins in it. And after it’s been lowered into the grave and the gravediggers start shovelling the dirt in, they throw coins into the grave. One of the wildest sights I’ve ever seen, it was in a cemetery over in New Jersey late one afternoon in February, and it was bitter cold and windy, and two gravediggers were working on one side of a gypsy grave, shovelling the dirt in, and the gypsies were crowded together on the other side, moaning and crying out, some with babies in their arms, and an old man among them was leaning over pouring wine into the grave from a gallon jug that was resting on his shoulder, cheap red wine, and one moment the wind blew some of the wine on the gravediggers and the next moment it blew some on the gypsies. After a grave has been filled, they usually spread a cloth on the ground nearby and have a funeral feast. If the family is prosperous, they’ll have cold turkeys and hams and legs of lamb; if they’re poor, they’ll have cold cuts. And if it rains, they’ll put up a tent.

  ‘Back around 1900, gypsies started burying in Evergreen Cemetery in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and some still do, but during the thirties the Linden Cemetery in Linden, New Jersey, became more popular, and now it’s used by gypsies all over the East. Evergreen is a beautiful old cemetery; it’s like the deep woods, it has so many big old trees in it, and that appeals to gypsies. Linden doesn’t have as many trees, but it’s easier to get to; U.S. I passes right by it. The burial of a prominent gypsy will draw a couple of hundred cars loaded with gypsies to Linden, and the cars will have licenses on them from a dozen states. Steve Kaslov is buried over there, the old king of the Poopeschti. He’s lying in a two-thousand-dollar coffin, and he’s got a red granite tombstone on top of him that cost six hundred dollars, and a photograph of him covered with some kind of plastic material that you can see through is cemented to the tombstone; he’s got a grin on his face. And Uwano Ufie, who was better known as Cockeye Johnny Nikanov, is buried over there. Cockeye Johnny was one of the Frinkuleschti kings, and he was quite powerful during the depression. He could read a little, and he learned the relief regulations inside out, and he was the scourge of the Welfare Department; there wasn’t a regulation in the book that he couldn’t get around. It was his dream to attract all the gypsies in North and South America to New York Cit
y and get them on relief, and then he’d become the supreme ruler of the whole lot of them, the Emperor of the Gypsies. He died during a heat wave in the summer of 1944; he overexerted himself carrying a heavy watermelon home to his grandchildren and had a heart attack. And Marta Evans is buried over there, who used to be the queen of the gypsies in Philadelphia. And Little Nina Marks is buried over there, the most beautiful gypsy girl I ever saw. Little Nina was an Argentino married to a Kalderash. She was one of the best of the gypsy pickpockets, and she was very good at what the gypsies call winking at a man. If a man stopped in front of her ofisa and stood there, peering in, she’d size him up, and if he looked as if he could be taken, she’d get up from her chair and bend over very low and rearrange the books in the show window and let the man get a good look at her and then she’d give him a wink and he’d come right in and she’d lead him into one of the booths and they’d start wrestling around and while they were wrestling she’d pick his pockets and then she’d scream rape and her husband would rush in with a knife and start slashing the air, just barely missing the man, and the man would leap out of the booth and run like a rat. She died of cancer of the breast in Memorial Hospital in 1952, when she was only twenty-seven, and she’s buried on the side of a hill facing U.S. 1, under a horse-chestnut tree. And old Matrona Nicholas is over there, and Repanka Zlotkovich and Elaina Thompson and Sabinka Miller and Mary Demetro who grabbed my necktie in court one day and jerked the breath out of me and Birka Vlado who used to smoke a pipe, and dozens of other women that I spent a good part of the last twenty-five years tracking down and keeping under surveillance and apprehending and interrogating. Some of them, the first time I saw them, they were young women, young or just getting middle-aged, and they were walking around with their heads held high, wearing flashy skirts and switching their tails, and the last time I saw them, they were old and ugly and full of spite. Sometimes, on a Sunday afternoon, I drive over there and look at their graves and see if any new ones have turned up. There’s women lying over there that I stood in doorways across the street from their ofisas many a cold night waiting and watching for the right moment to go in and nail them, and they despised me and I despised them, but I knew them very well, and I remember so many things about them, and when I look at their tombstones and read their names and dates, after all they’re dead and gone, I must admit it makes me sad.’

  Captain Campion stood up again, and put the vitsa chart back in his briefcase. Then he sat down. ‘Now we come to the bajour,’ he said. ‘The first thing I want to impress on you is that the majority of those who visit gypsies for any purpose at all – to have their fortunes told, to seek advice, to have a dream interpreted, to ask for a good number to play in the numbers game, just to have somebody to talk to, or just blind curiosity – are women. And the great majority of those who end up as bajour victims are women between the ages of forty and fifty-five, a high proportion of whom are in the change of life. After you’ve interrogated a few of these victims, and I’ve interrogated hundreds, you begin to realize that they have things in common. Most of them are unhappily married or they’ve never been married or they’re divorced or they’re widows. Most of them are deeply depressed, and they either don’t know why, just everything in general, or they lay it to something in their past – it might be something very complicated, or it might be something as simple as they once had an illegitimate baby and let it be adopted and never saw it again. Most of them are worried about their health – the fact is most of them are more than halfway convinced they have cancer. Most of them have a passion to talk about themselves, a passion to confess – it’s probably the strain they’re under, and they probably don’t know they’re doing it, but they talk about themselves all the time, or all the time they can get anybody to listen; they just can’t stop. And most of them, they may be smart in some ways, but they’re fundamentally ignorant; if it’s presented to them the right way, they’ll believe anything. And a good many are the kind of women who if they go out at night to walk a dog they’ll unerringly head for some vacant lot or some dark corner in a park, or if they have to be out late and go home alone they’ll take shortcuts through blocks that the ordinary person wouldn’t go through at that hour fully armed, or if they’re sitting in a barroom and it gets late and some stranger on the next bar stool offers to see them home they’ll go right along.

  ‘The second thing I want to impress on you is that gypsy women are shrewd, really shrewd, and don’t make any mistake about that. When they’re tiny little girls, their mothers and grandmothers and aunts start drilling the facts of life into them, and as soon as they’re old enough to keep quiet and be still they’re allowed to hide behind the curtains and eavesdrop while gajo women tell their innermost secrets; that’s part of their training. By the time they’re twenty, they’re well acquainted with the fears that lurk around in the minds of middle-aged women, and the crazy ideas, and by the time they’re middle-aged themselves they can just look at a woman and observe the expression in her eyes and the set of her mouth and the sags and wrinkles in her face and the way she holds herself and find out a good deal about her past, particularly her past in relation to men.

  ‘The third thing I want to impress on you is that gypsy women are very skillful at making ordinary, everyday objects seem highly mysterious. The bajour is a flexible confidence game, and it’s up to the individual gypsy’s imagination how she does it. However, in recent years, in and around New York City, the majority of the women have been doing it the same way. They’ve been doing it with an egg, an ordinary white egg.