My Ears Are Bent

by Joseph Mitchell

  The customers hardly ever call him by his name. He is called “The House.” For example, a customer will say to a bartender, “Go see if The House will cash a check for me.” When he is shaking dice, he always sings. He believes he has a good voice, and his favorite song is “Love in Bloom.” When he comes to work, he ties on his apron and looks down the bar at his customers. Then he shakes his head and says, “They must have forgot to lock the doors at the asylum.” However, he believes he runs a classy place. He will say with pride, “The last time Mr. Heywood Broun was in here, he said I make the best gin rickey he ever tasted.” One time someone stole a sign from one of the chain nut stores, the Chock Full o’ Nuts Company, and hung it on his door, and he was angry for days.

  The place was once a speakeasy, and twenty minutes after repeal The House had broken all the 1,117 new alcohol regulations. In most of the new saloons, the bartenders reek with the idea of Service and treat the customers with respect, but here the bartenders also hate the customers. This hatred is mutual, and each night the bar is the barrier between two hostile camps. The bartenders do not sympathize with a customer who comes in with a hangover, and they do not prescribe remedies.

  “I hope you die,” The House often says. “You should leave the state for what you did last night.”

  There are two steady waiters, and they also hate the customers. One is named Horace. He is an Italian who suffers from adenoids and never shuts his mouth. He has a delusion about his head. He was in the Italian Army during the war, and he believes his head was shot off and that the doctors got the head of an Austrian and sewed it on his neck. He claims that the new head is not satisfactory because it is the head of a young man and often urges him into adventures in which the rest of his body is not particularly interested.

  “My other head had a big mustache,” he said one night.

  The other waiter is a Norwegian named Eddie, whose feet hurt. Fifteen minutes after he is given an order, he comes back and says, “What was it you ordered?” He keeps a bottle of gin on the roof of the icebox and takes a drink every thirty minutes. On Saturday nights, when the rush is over, he puts a raincoat over his waiter’s jacket and goes out to look up his enemies. Sometimes after such errands he does not show up for several days, and if a customer inquires, The House says, “He’s in Bellevue. I am being crucified.”

  The cook has a bad temper. One noon a customer came in and looked at the mimeographed menu.

  “How is the London broil?” he asked Eddie.

  “I’ll go see,” he said.

  In a moment Eddie returned.

  “The cook says it’s no good,” he said.

  “Go ask him what is good,” commanded the customer.

  A few minutes later Eddie came back again.

  “The cook says nothing’s no good,” he said.

  Among the customers are four members of a federal inspection service, who are known in the place as “the G-men.” When one of them gets a telephone call, he hurries to the booth in the rear and slams the door. This is a signal for the others to rush forward and bang on the wooden sides of the booth with telephone books. One night they tore a booth down. They keep yelling, “Listen to the tom-tom in the jungle.” They keep slamming the booth until their enraged colleague rushes out, and then they grab him. They throw him on the floor and sit on him. When he is exhausted and lies still, they take turns talking double-talk into the mouthpiece until the person on the other end hangs up. The fight is repeated three times each night, with a different G-man as the victim each time. The other customers rarely notice the fights any more.

  There are two Southerners among the customers. One is from a state which still secedes from the Union at least once every fortnight, and he often talks in a very high-class Southern accent so people will ask him, “Are you from the South?” He is afraid to walk the streets after dark because of Yankees, and always carries a whistle he stole from a drunken policeman. Sometimes on the way home he thinks a Yankee is after him and blows his whistle, summoning police from blocks around. He used to say that corn whiskey was the only whiskey fit to drink and complain bitterly because The House refused to carry it. One night one of the bartenders went up to Harlem and bought a quart, and when the Southerner began complaining about never getting any good old corn whiskey any more, he brought it out. The Southerner felt compelled to buy several drinks of it, and was sick for four days. When The House heard about it, he said, “We always try to please our customers.”

  The other Southerner is known in the place as Jeeter Lester. He does not like the South, because he could never make a living down there, and now he claims he was born at the northeast corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street. The small, sylvan Southern town in which he was born was so quiet that he takes a psychopathic delight in noise. When he empties a beer glass, he often buys it from the bartender and throws it on the floor. Sometimes the floor around his feet is ankle-deep in broken glass. He was once converted to the Baptist Church by a tent revivalist, and when he is blue he sings hymns. His favorite hymn is “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder I’ll Be There.”

  “I hope to God you don’t favor us with no hymns tonight,” The House says when he enters the place.

  Jeeter is an expert at snapping a coin, hidden between his fingers, against a highball glass the moment it touches his lips, making a noise as if he had bit a piece out of the glass. Then he screams and spits out a mouthful of ice, which looks a great deal like glass when it is flying through the air. It frightens new customers.

  “My God, man,” they say, “are you hurt?”

  “I am bleeding to death,” Jeeter moans, clasping his hand to his mouth and simulating expressions of extreme pain.

  There are quite a few women among the regular customers. About once a month a stout bookkeeper for a religious-goods house over on Barclay Street shows up. She used to be a singer in vaudeville. She is a matronly person, and she says she had rickets when she was a child and it left her with a nervous disorder. She has windshield scars running from ear to mouth on both sides of her face, but they do not make her self-conscious. She often points them out to people and says, “I am streamlined.” When she is full of beer, she climbs up on the bar and pretends she is sitting on a piano.

  “I got ants in my pants,” she sings in her lovely soprano voice. “I got a turtle in my girdle.”

  “I am being crucified,” The House screams, pushing her off the bar.

  The only man who ever died in this ginmill was a Mr. Friedman. He was extraordinarily fat. He ran a newsstand on West Street and sold newspapers to the New Jersey ferryboat commuters. He was a hardworking man during prohibition, when beer cost a quarter a glass, but when repeal brought the price down to ten cents, he would quit selling papers in the middle of the day and hurry off to Dick’s. The night he died was after the day Wiley Post and Will Rogers crashed in Alaska. Everybody who passed the stand bought a paper, and by 3 P.M. he figured he had enough money in his coin apron to finance a night of beer-drinking. Every time Mr. Friedman finished a glass of beer, he would grunt and say, “Well, they can’t take that away from me.” He often complained about the steaks in the place.

  “This steak wasn’t hung long enough,” he would yell, stabbing the thick air with his fork. “I can’t eat this fresh meat. I ain’t no cannibal.”

  In the summer he slept in City Hall Park. Walking across the park to the Third Avenue El, I have often seen him stretched out on a bench, snoring to the moon. The place was full the night he died. He fell off his stool at the bar and began to gasp. The House ran to the booth and called the police. An ambulance doctor examined him while he was stretched out on the tile floor.

  “You can hardly call him a man,” said the young doctor. “He is just a living barrel of beer.”

  Just before he died he looked up at the customers gathered around him with drinks in their hands and said, “I drank thirty-two beers tonight.” Those were his last words.

  “I guess Mr. Friedman is a dea
d barrel of beer now,” said The House as a committee of customers wrapped up the drunken newsdealer in two tablecloths and carried him out.

  An old printer spends whole days and nights in the place, holding to the bar with one hand and making oratorical gestures with the other. He makes a speech which never ends, muttering to himself, and no one knows what he is talking about, except that he is denouncing something.

  “What’s the matter with him?” new customers ask, staring.

  “I never been able to figure out what he’s talking about,” The House answers. “Hey, Jimmy, tell the man what you’re talking about. My God, Jimmy, let us in on the secret.”

  A cabdriver who was born in England hangs out in the place. His only name is Liverpool. He is probably the only cabdriver in the city doing a credit business. He even sells Irish Sweepstakes tickets on credit. When he is in the place, he makes it his business to answer the telephone. It is practically impossible to reach anybody in the place by telephone. Liverpool will answer a call and yell from the booth, “It’s for you, Mr. Kennedy. Are you here?” Mr. Kennedy will shake his head and say, “I ain’t here. You haven’t seen me since Labor Day.” Then you hear Liverpool saying, “No, Miss, he ain’t been in since Labor Day.”

  When Liverpool comes into the place, he looks scornfully at the row of drinkers. He never drinks anything, and when he hauls a drunken customer home on credit he gives him a temperance lecture. Sometimes he has the fare screaming in horror.

  “You are a fool to drink,” he will yell through the cab window while waiting for a light to change. “You should let it alone. What do you think your liver looks like now? In the morning you will have a bad headache. Now, take me. I don’t drink, and I feel fine, just fine. If I didn’t have to in the line of business, I would never put my foot in a barroom. My mamma didn’t raise no crazy children.”

  Shaking for drinks by way of a game called Indian Dice is always going on in Dick’s. Sometimes as many as fifteen people are shaking in one game, and it costs the man who gets stuck a day’s wages to pay the round. The House always shakes. He is a wizard with a dicebox, and sometimes customers drink themselves blind trying to stick him. The game is played with five dice, and no set lasts longer than one night. The losers get mad and throw them into the spittoon just to hear The House scream.

  “Listen to him yell,” they say. “He got those dice from the five-and-dime, but to hear him yell you would think they was made from precious ivory from the Sudan or someplace.”

  The House does not have any trouble with policemen. He knows them all. One rainy night a policeman came in and got drunk. Then he took out his revolver and began to have target practice, using the telephone booth for a target. The House sidled out of the place and telephoned the police station, and two other policemen came and took the marksman away. The House keeps a bottle under the bar for them and calls it “the cops’ bottle.” This bottle contains a blend of Scotch and rye, made up of drinks left unfinished by paying customers. One big cop always snorts when he has his drink and says, “This must be some of that new kind of whiskey which they distill from axle grease.”

  There used to be a pin game in the place which paid off beginning at a score of 13,500, but one night the customer called Jeeter Lester got a screwdriver and fixed up some bolts on the machine. He fixed it so you got at least 30,000, even if you shot wild, and everybody who played it collected at least a quarter before The House found out why there were so many expert pin-game players among his customers and called the company to take the damned thing out of his place.

  A lot of fights start in Dick’s Bar and Grill, but they do not end there. There is a vacant loft upstairs, and when customers begin taking pokes at one another, The House makes them go up there and fight it out. One of the bartenders will help them up the stairs, and soon the sound of scuffling and swearing will reach the customers below. Once a man was knocked out on a Friday night, and his opponent came downstairs and continued his drinking. Sunday morning the bartender went upstairs for something and found the loser on the floor, still asleep. When he was aroused and told about the passage of time, he took it all right.

  “I needed sleep anyway,” he said.

  2. THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1936, OR HIT ME, WILLIAM

  Saloonkeepers are extremely useful to reporters in New York City. The dreary business of locating people takes up most of a reporter’s time, and in many neighborhoods, especially in tenement neighborhoods, the saloonkeeper is apt to know the address or hangout of any citizen dopey enough or unlucky enough to be of interest to a great metropolitan newspaper. When a person suddenly gets into the news—a happy idiot who wins an Irish Sweepstakes prize, for instance, or a woman who murders her sweetheart because she loves him so—the reporter is frequently able to piece together an accurate picture of the person by talking with the saloonkeeper, the delicatessen proprietor, the undertaker (half the people in any poor neighborhood owe money to the undertaker), and the grocer. In any neighborhood these gentlemen know all the gossip, and unlike the priest, who also knows all the gossip, they do not mind talking, giving you the worst they know. Of these, however, the saloonkeeper is usually the best informed.

  The saloonkeeper is also useful because he can be interviewed about anything. This is an example: If a war breaks out anywhere in the world an idea for a local story always takes form in the frenzied brain of the feature editor, and the idea is always the same. If the war is between Italy and Ethiopia, for instance, the idea is, “How do the Italians in New York City feel about the war?” When a reporter is assigned to such a story he goes on a hurried tour of the ginmills in the nearest Italian neighborhood (Mulberry Street if he works for The World-Telegram and Harlem’s Little Italy if he works for The Herald Tribune) and in his story each saloonkeeper is identified as “a community leader.”

  When I am assigned to interview an “authority” on anything I sometimes find it wise to head for the nearest saloon and interview the bartender. One bitter afternoon in December 1936, I was told to find “an authority on mass insanity” and ask him to review the insane happenings of 1936. The best authority on mass insanity I could think of was Gilligan F. Holton, an eccentric Negro saloonkeeper and gambler, who ran the Broken Leg and Busted Bar & Grill in a basement on West 138th Street until the end of 1931 when the cops tore the door down and put him in jail for seven months because he could not keep order among the society matrons who frequented the establishment.

  I located Mr. Holton in a bar and grill operated by one of his former bartenders, a corner bar and grill on Third Avenue. He said he was completing a dissertation in which he expected to prove that William Shakespeare was a Moor, a dissertation he began years ago while working as a servant for David Belasco, but that he was willing to knock off work for a few hours and give me a discourse on certain examples of mass insanity in 1936. Before he began the discourse he ordered a beer. The bartender pushed the glass across the bar. Mr. Holton picked it up and called for a soup spoon. Holding the spoon daintily, with his little finger outstretched, he scooped the foam off the top of the beer.

  “I never could stand whipped cream,” he said. “It don’t agree with me.”

  When he had removed the collar from his beer Mr. Holton drank it with one triumphant gulp. Then he looked scornfully at the bartender and said, “Put it on my tab, you bum.”

  Then he sat down at a table.

  “It sure was a nutty year,” he said, gazing into the distance like a seer. “More high-class nuts running around than you would think the world would hold. There was times when I thought the whole damned population had gone off and ate themselves a bait of loco weed. Each time some new thing came up my wife, Mrs. Ida, would try it out on me. Like one night she woke me up and said, ‘Knock, knock.’ I knew she was trying to get me to say, ‘Who’s there?’ But I just said, ‘Shut up, Mrs. Ida.’ She kept on knock-knocking, and I picked up an automobile jack I keep handy beside the bed and hit her over the head with it.

  “The
next night she came in and began to wiggle her fingers and stick out her tongue. I said to her, ‘What’s the matter this time, Mrs. Ida?’ She said, ‘What’s this?’ She kept on wiggling her fingers and I just looked at her. Then she said, ‘Don’t you catch on? I am imitating a cash register.’ I picked up my automobile jack and let her have it right where it would do the most good. I am too old for that sort of by-play. I reached my majority years and years ago. I do not wear long pants just because they become me.”

  Mr. Holton sighed and shook his head. He said things got so bad at home that he wrote Santa Claus and asked him to give Mrs. Ida “a new set of brains.” He said he believed the song “The Music Goes ’Round and ’Round” had an effect on his mind which would last for many years.

  “There was a time when I thought the dogcatcher would come for me at any moment,” he said. “I could just see myself up at the State asylum, the star freshman at the State asylum.”

  He began to bang on the table and the bartender rushed forward with a beer and a soup spoon. However, Mr. Holton disregarded the beer. He jumped up and began to scamper about the tiled floor of the bar and grill.

  “You push the middle valve down,” he yelled. “Boom, boom.”

  He jumped up and down as he sang.

  “The music goes ’round and ’round,” he yelled. “Boom, boom.”

  He ran over to the bartender and said, “Hit me, William, hit me.”

  The bartender hit him over the head with a chair. Then Mr. Holton smiled happily.

  “I feel better now,” he said, sitting down and drinking his beer.

  He said that during the forthcoming year he hoped to establish himself as a cult leader.

  “Sort of on the order of Father Divine, but more refined,” he said. “Now, there’s a man who contributed a lot to 1936. I won’t say what he contributed, but he sure did contribute. My cult will be a thing of beauty. I’m going to get a lot of doll-babies gathered around me, the fattest bunch of women I can find. I like fat women. I’m going to teach them to yell, ‘Thank you, Father,’ every time I draw in my breath. On second thought I think I’ll teach them to say, ‘Thank you, Papa.’ That will improve on Father Divine.