Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  The waiter brought in the stews, and a moment later Mr Poole came over and sat down. He is a paunchy, red-haired, freckled man. His hair is thinning and the freckles on his scalp show through. He has drooping eyelids; they make his eyes look sleepy and sad. He remarked on the weather; he said he expected snow. Then he tasted his stew. It was too hot for him, and he put his spoon down. ‘I didn’t rest so good last night,’ he said. ‘I had a dream. In this dream, a great earthquake had shook the world and had upset the sea level, and New York Harbor had been drained as dry as a bathtub when the plug is pulled. I was down on the bottom, poking around, looking things over. There were hundreds of ships of all kinds lying on their sides in the mud, and among them were some wormy old wrecks that went down long years ago, and there were rusty anchors down there and dunnage and driftwood and old hawsers and tugboat bumpers and baling wire and tin cans and bottles and stranded eels and a skeleton standing waist-deep in a barrel of cement that the barrel had rotted off of. The rats had left the piers and were down on the bottom, eating the eels, and the gulls were flopping about, jerking eels away from the rats. I came across an old wooden wreck all grown over with seaweed, an old, old Dutch wreck. She had a hole in her, and I pulled the seaweed away and looked in and I saw some chests in there that had money spilling out of them, and I tried my best to crawl in. The dream was so strong that I crawled up under the headboard of the bed, trying to get my hands on the Dutch money, and I damn near scraped an ear off.’

  ‘Eat your stew, Roy,’ Mr Zimmer said, ‘before it gets cold.’

  ‘Pass me the salt,’ said Mr Poole. We ate in silence. It isn’t easy to carry on a conversation while eating oyster stew. Mr Poole finished first. He tilted his bowl and worked the last spoonful of the stew into his spoon. He swallowed it, and then he said, ‘Happy, you’ve studied the harbor charts a lot in your time. Where would you say is the deepest spot in the harbor?’

  ‘Offhand,’ said Mr Zimmer, ‘I just don’t know.’

  ‘One of the deepest spots I know is a hole in the bed of the Hudson a little bit south of the George Washington Bridge,’ said Mr Poole. ‘On the dredges, we called it the Gut. It’s half full of miscellaneous junk. The city used to dump bargeloads of boulders in there, and any kind of heavy junk that wasn’t worth salvaging. Private concerns dumped in there, too, years back, but it’s against the harbor regulations now. During the worst part of the last war, when the dredges cleaned sludge out of the ship channel in the Hudson, they had the right to dump it in the Gut – save them from taking it out to sea. The old-timers say the Gut used to go down a hundred and eighty feet. The last sounding I heard, it was around ninety feet. I know where the shallowest spot in the harbor is. I’ve sounded it myself with a boat hook. It’s a spot on Romer Shoal, out in the middle of the Lower Bay, that’s only four feet deep at low tide.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Mr Zimmer. ‘I’ve seen it on the charts. It’s called a lump.’

  ‘It’s right on the edge of Ambrose Channel, the channel that the big liners use,’ continued Mr Poole. ‘I told my mate I want him to take me out there someday when the Queen Mary is due to come upchannel, and leave me standing there with a flag in my hand.’

  ‘What in hell would you do that for?’ asked Mr Zimmer.

  ‘I’d just like to,’ said Mr Poole. ‘I’d like to wave the flag and make the people on the Queen Mary wonder what I was standing on – shoulder-deep, out there in the middle of the Lower Bay. I’d wear a top hat, and I’d smoke a big cigar. I’d like to see what would happen.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what would happen,’ said Mr Zimmer. ‘The wash from the Queen Mary would drown you. Did you think of that?’

  ‘I thought of it,’ said Mr Poole. ‘I didn’t do it, did I?’ He crumpled up his napkin and tossed it on the table. ‘Another queer spot in the harbor,’ he said, ‘is Potter’s Field. It’s in the East River, in between Williamsburg Bridge and Manhattan Bridge. The river makes a sharp bend there, an elbow. On an ebb tide, there’s an eddy in the elbow that picks up anything loose coming downriver, afloat or submerged, and sweeps it into a stretch of backwater on the Brooklyn side. This backwater is called Wallabout Bay on charts; the men on the dredges call it Potter’s Field. The eddy sweeps driftwood into the backwater. Also, it sweeps drownded bodies into there. As a rule, people that drown in the harbor in winter stay down until spring. When the water begins to get warm, gas forms in them and that makes them buoyant and they rise to the surface. Every year, without fail, on or about the fifteenth of April, bodies start showing up, and more of them show up in Potter’s Field than any other place. In a couple of weeks or so, the Harbor Police always finds ten to two dozen over there – suicides, bastard babies, old barge captains that lost their balance out on a sleety night attending to towropes, now and then some gangster or other. The police launch that runs out of Pier A on the Battery – Launch One – goes over and takes them out of the water with a kind of dip-net contraption that the Police Department blacksmith made out of tire chains. I ride the Staten Island ferry a good deal, and I’m forever hearing the tourists remark how beautiful the harbor is, and I always wish they could see Potter’s Field some mornings in April – either that or the Gowanus Canal in August, when the sludge bubbles are popping like whips; they’d get a brand-new idea how beautiful the harbor is.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, Roy,’ said Mr Zimmer. ‘They’ve stopped dumping garbage out in the harbor approaches, where the tide washes it right back, and they’re putting in a lot of sewage-disposal plants. The water’s getting cleaner every year.’

  ‘I’ve read that,’ said Mr Poole, ‘and I’ve heard it. Only I don’t believe it. Did you eat any shad last spring – Staten Island shad or Hudson River shad? They’ve still got that kerosene taste. It was worse last spring than it ever was. Also, have you been up the Gowanus Canal lately? On the dredges, they used to say that the smell in the Gowanus would make the flag on a mast hang limp in a high wind. They used to tell about a tug that was freshly painted yellow and made a run up the Gowanus and came out painted green. I was up there last summer, and I didn’t notice any change.’

  ‘Seriously, Roy,’ said Mr Zimmer, ‘don’t you think the water’s getting cleaner?’

  ‘Of course it isn’t,’ said Mr Poole. ‘It’s getting worse and worse. Everything is getting worse everywhere. When I was young, I used to dream the time would come when we could bed oysters in the harbor again. Now I’m satisfied that that time will never come. I don’t even worry about the pollution any more. My only hope, I hope they don’t pollute the harbor with something a million times worse than pollution.’

  ‘Let’s don’t get on that subject,’ said Mr Zimmer.

  ‘Sometimes I’m walking along the street,’ continued Mr Poole, ‘and I wonder why the people don’t just stand still and throw their heads back and open their mouths and howl.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Mr Zimmer.

  ‘I’ll tell you why,’ said Mr Poole. ‘On account of the Goddamned craziness of everything.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Mr Zimmer, glancing at the empty stew bowls, ‘we can still eat.’

  Mr Poole grunted. He looked at his wristwatch. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this ain’t making me any money.’ He got up and put on his hat. ‘Thanks for the stew,’ he said. ‘I enjoyed it. My treat next time. Take care, all.’

  ‘That’s right, Roy,’ said Mr Zimmer. ‘You take care of yourself.’

  ‘Thanks again,’ said Mr Poole. ‘Give my regards home. Take care. Take care. Take care.’

  (1951)

  The Rats on the Waterfront

  IN NEW YORK city, as in all great seaports, rats abound. One is occasionally in their presence without being aware of it. In the whole city relatively few blocks are entirely free of them. They have diminished greatly in the last twenty-five years, but there still are millions here; some authorities believe that in the five boroughs there is a rat for every human being. During wars, the rat populations of seaports and ships always shoo
t up. A steady increase in shipboard rats began to be noticed in New York Harbor in the summer of 1940, less than a year after the war started in Europe. Rats and rat fleas in many foreign ports are at times infected with the plague, an extraordinarily ugly disease that occurs in several forms, of which the bubonic, the Black Death of the Middle Ages, is the most common. Consequently, all ships that enter the harbor after touching at a foreign port are examined for rats or for signs of rat infestation by officials of the United States Public Health Service, who go out in cutters from a quarantine station on the Staten Island bank of the Narrows. If a ship appears to be excessively infested, it is anchored in one of the bays, its crew is taken off, and its holds and cabins are fumigated with a gas so poisonous that a whiff or two will quickly kill a man, let alone a rat. In 1939 the average number of rats killed in a fumigation was 12.4. In 1940 the average rose abruptly to 21, and two years later it reached 32.1. In 1943, furthermore, rats infected with the plague bacteria, Pasteurella pestis, were discovered in the harbor for the first time since 1900. They were taken out of an old French tramp, the Wyoming, in from Casablanca, where the Black Death has been intermittent for centuries.

  The biggest rat colonies in the city are found in run-down structures on or near the waterfront, especially in tenements, live-poultry markets, wholesale produce markets, slaughterhouses, warehouses, stables, and garages. They also turn up in more surprising places. Department of Health inspectors have found their claw and tail tracks in the basements of some of the best restaurants in the city. A few weeks ago, in the basement and sub-basement of a good old hotel in the East Forties, a crew of exterminators trapped two hundred and thirty-six in three nights. Many live in crannies in the subways; in the early-morning hours, during the long lulls between trains, they climb to the platforms and forage among the candy-bar wrappers and peanut hulls. There are old rat paths beneath the benches in at least two ferry sheds. In the spring and summer, multitudes of one species, the brown rat, live in twisting, many-chambered burrows in vacant lots and parks. There are great colonies of this kind of rat in Central Park. After the first cold snap they begin to migrate, hunting for warm basements. Packs have been seen on autumn nights scuttering across the boulevards and transverses in the Park and across Fifth Avenue and across Central Park West. All through October and November, exterminating firms get frantic calls from the superintendents of many of the older apartment houses on the avenues and streets adjacent to the Park; the majority of the newer houses were ratproofed when built. The rats come out by twos and threes in some side streets in the theatrical district practically every morning around four-thirty. The scow-shaped trucks that collect kitchen scraps from restaurants, night clubs, and saloons all over Manhattan for pig farms and soap factories in New Jersey roll into these streets at that time. Shortly after the trucks have made their pick-ups, if no people are stirring, the rats appear and search for dropped scraps; they seem to pop out of the air.

  The rats of New York are quicker-witted than those on farms, and they can outthink any man who has not made a study of their habits. Even so, they spend most of their lives in a state of extreme anxiety, the black rats dreading the brown and both species dreading human beings. Away from their nests, they are usually on the edge of hysteria. They will bite babies (now and then, they bite one to death), and they will bite sleeping adults, but ordinarily they flee from people. If hemmed in, and sometimes if too suddenly come upon, they will attack. They fight savagely and blindly, in the manner of mad dogs; they bare their teeth and leap about every which way, snarling and snapping and clawing the air. A full-grown black rat, when desperate, can jump three feet horizontally and make a vertical leap of two feet two inches, and a brown rat is nearly as spry. They are greatly feared by firemen. One of the hazards of fighting a fire in a junk shop or in an old warehouse is the crazed rats. It is dangerous to poke at them. They are able to run right up a cane or a broomstick and inflict deep, gashlike bites on their assailant’s hands. A month or so ago, in broad daylight, on the street in front of a riding academy on the West Side, a stableboy tried to kill a rat with a mop; it darted up the mop handle and tore the thumbnail off the boy’s left hand. This happening was unusual chiefly in that the rat was foraging in the open in the daytime. As a rule, New York rats are nocturnal. They rove in the streets in many neighborhoods, but only after the sun has set. They steal along as quietly as spooks in the shadows close to the building line, or in the gutters, peering this way and that, sniffing, quivering, conscious every moment of all that is going on around them. They are least cautious in the two or three hours before dawn, and they are encountered most often by milkmen, night watchmen, scrubwomen, policemen, and other people who are regularly abroad in those hours. The average person rarely sees one. When he does, it is a disquieting experience. Anyone who has been confronted by a rat in the bleakness of a Manhattan dawn and has seen it whirl and slink away, its claws rasping against the pavement, thereafter understands fully why this beast has been for centuries a symbol of the Judas and the stool pigeon, of soullessness in general. Veteran exterminators say that even they are unable to be calm around rats. ‘I’ve been in this business thirty-one years and I must’ve seen fifty thousand rats, but I’ve never got accustomed to the look of them,’ one elderly exterminator said recently. ‘Every time I see one my heart sinks and I get the belly flutters.’ In alcoholic wards the rat is the animal that most frequently appears in the visual hallucinations of patients with delirium tremens. In these wards, in fact, the D.T.’s are often referred to as ‘seeing the rat.’

  There are three kinds of rats in the city – the brown (Rattus norvegicus), which is also known as the house, gray, sewer, or Norway rat; the black (Rattus rattus), which is also known as the ship or English rat; and the Alexandrian (Rattus rattus alexandrinus), which is also known as the roof or Egyptian rat and is a variety of the black rat. In recent years they have been killed here in the approximate proportion of ninety brown to nine black and one Alexandrian. The brown is hostile to the other kinds; it usually attacks them on sight. It kills them by biting their throats or by clawing them to pieces, and, if hungry, it eats them.

  The behavior and some of the characteristics of the three kinds are dissimilar, but all are exceedingly destructive, all are hard to exterminate, all are monstrously procreative, all are badly flea-bitten, and all are able to carry a number of agonizing diseases. Among these diseases, in addition to the plague, are a form of typhus fever called Brill’s disease, which is quite common in several ratty ports in the South; spirochetal jaundice, rat-bite fever, trichinosis, and tularemia. The plague is the worst. Human beings develop it in from two to five days after they have been bitten by a flea that has fed on the blood of a plague-infected rat. The onset is sudden, and the classic symptoms are complete exhaustion, mental confusion, and black, intensely painful swellings (called buboes) of the lymph glands in the groin and under the arms. The mortality is high. The rats of New York are all ridden with a flea, the Xenopsylla cheopis, which is by far the most frequent transmitting agent of the plague. Several surveys of the prevalence in the city of the cheopis have been made by Benjamin E. Holsendorf, a consultant on the staff of the Department of Health. Mr Holsendorf, an elderly Virginian, is a retired Passed Assistant Pharmacist in the Public Health Service and an international authority on the ratproofing of ships and buildings. He recently supervised the trapping of many thousands of rats in the area between Thirty-third Street and the bottom of Manhattan, and found that these rats had an average of eight cheopis fleas on them. ‘Some of these rats had three fleas, some had fifteen, and some had forty,’ Mr Holsendorf says, ‘and one old rat had hundreds on him; his left hind leg was missing – probably lost it in a trap, probably gnawed it off himself – and he’d take a tumble every time he tried to scratch. However, the average was eight. None of these fleas were plague-infected, of course. I don’t care to generalize about this, but I will say that if just one plague-infested rat got ashore from a ship at a
New York dock and roamed for only a few hours among our local, uninfected rats, the resulting situation might be, to say the least, quite sinister.’

  Rats are almost as fecund as germs. In New York, under fair conditions, they bear from three to five times a year, in litters of from five to twenty-two. There is a record of seven litters in seven months from a single captured pair. The period of gestation is between twenty-one and twenty-five days. They grow rapidly and are able to breed when four months old. They live to be three or four years old, although now and then one may live somewhat longer; a rat at four is older than a man at ninety. ‘Rats that survive to the age of four are the wisest and the most cynical beasts on earth,’ one exterminator says. ‘A trap means nothing to them, no matter how skillfully set. They just kick it around until it snaps; then they eat the bait. And they can detect poisoned bait a yard off. I believe some of them can read.’ In fighting the rat, exterminating companies use a wide variety of traps, gases, and poisons. There are about three hundred of these companies in the city, ranging in size from hole-in-the-wall, boss-and-a-helper outfits to corporations with whole floors in midtown office buildings, large laboratories, and staffs of carefully trained employees, many of whom have scientific degrees. One of the largest is the Guarantee Exterminating Company (‘America’s Pied Piper’), at 500 Fifth Avenue. Among its clients are hospitals, steamship lines, railroad terminals, department stores, office buildings, hotels, and apartment houses. Its head is E. R. Jennings, a second-generation exterminator; his father started the business in Chicago, in 1888. Mr Jennings says that the most effective rat traps are the old-fashioned snap or break-back ones and a thing called the glueboard.