My Ears Are Bent

by Joseph Mitchell

  “What the hell!” she shouts, eyeing the bum. “Maybe them other guys in there want to sleep.”

  Each morning Mazie gives away a double handful of currency to the inhabitants of the Bowery. A man comes up and stands before her, expectant. He is bleary-eyed. He takes off his hat and bows to Mazie.

  “I thought I’d come to see you this morning,” he says. “Could you let me have a nickel, Mazie, please?”

  “Why don’t you go die?” says Mazie, pushing two dimes through the slot in her ticket window.

  “Thank you, Mazie,” says the drunken man, making a speech. “Got a heart of gold. Best friend I got. Thanks, Mazie. You my girl, Mazie. See you tomorrow.”

  He moves off, heading for the nearest saloon.

  “I got a good show on today,” says Mazie. “Don’t you want to see the show?”

  “No, thanks,” says the bum, anxious for his morning alcohol. “I got to see a man about a job.”

  “So long,” says Mazie, closing the slot in her window.

  She rubs the ears of her dog. Perhaps she takes a piece of chamois cloth from her bag and polishes her diamond rings. Perhaps she lets the usher take the window while she goes back for a drink. Perhaps she takes down one of the lives of the saints from a shelf in her booth and reads it, making change and selling tickets automatically. Mazie is Jewish, but she wants to be a nun. She admires nuns. She knows scores of nuns and many Mother Superiors, and when “The White Sister” was playing at her theater she telephoned them all and told them to come see it free.

  “I would like to be a nun and live a life of sacrifice,” she says. “I am practically a nun now. The only difference between me and a nun is that I smoke, and drink a little booze, and talk rough. Except for things like that, I am a nun.”

  The only thing the people of the Bowery know about Mazie is that she is very kind. At night they see her take her dog for a walk in Park Row. They remember when she used to go up to Perry’s drugstore in the Pulitzer Building (they are making a sporting goods store out of it now) for a cup of coffee, and they remember that she gave a nickel to every man that asked for it. Some of them know, perhaps, that she lives in Coney Island, has four sisters and four brothers. But no one knows about the days when she worked in the burlesque houses. Was she a singer? Was she a girl in the chorus? Mazie won’t tell you.

  “None of your damned business!” she says.

  Is she married?

  “I never saw a man good enough to marry, and it’s none of your damned business,” says Mazie.

  The shopkeepers in the neighborhood—the clerks in the flophouses, the dealers in second-hand clothes, the waiters in the joints that sell a whole meal with French-fried potatoes for 15 cents—all tell stories about Mazie’s generosity.

  They recite with pride the remark she made to the corpulent director of one of the Bowery missions, who objected to her language.

  “What makes you so damned cut up about my cherce of words?” said Mazie. “How I talk is none of your pot-bellied business.”

  And on the cold nights, the nights when the Bowery is the coldest street in the city, Mazie takes the bums into the Greek’s on Chatham Square and buys them stew and coffee, and sometimes Mazie sees a man with busted shoes, and she turns her ticket window over to an usher and goes with the man and sees that he is shod against the wet pavements, and there is many a day when Mazie finds she has given away her profits.

  But Mazie says she worries a lot, and some nights she goes home to Coney Island and cannot sleep, and for peace she looks at her religious medals and dreams of becoming a nun and reads the not especially eventful lives of the saints.

  “What worries you, Mazie?”

  “What worries me is none of your damned business.”

  CHAPTER V

  Sports Section

  1. “SOME BUM MIGHT MISTOOK ME

  FOR A WRESTLER”

  One Sunday afternoon I went to see Mr. Jack Pfefer, an importer of freaks for the wrestling business. He sat with his feet on the desk in a red-walled office on the tenth floor of the Times Building and carefully combed his long black hair with a pocket comb. He has worn his hair long and flowing ever since he left Warsaw to take over the management of a company of itinerant Russian opera singers.

  He wore a wilted white carnation in his lapel. Some of his obese, no-necked wrestlers call him “Carnation Jack,” but he does not approve of the nickname; he insists on being known as Mr. Jack Pfefer.

  The red walls of his office were littered with framed photographs of wrestlers and opera singers. A sign was tacked above the rows of photographs on one wall. It read: “Dead wrestlers.” Among them were photographs of several living wrestlers. When a wrestler wrongs Mr. Pfefer his photograph is immediately tacked up on the “dead wall.” It is a way Mr. Pfefer has of getting even.

  While the little man combed his hair he whistled a tune from “Boris Godunov.” He impresses his wrestlers by whistling tunes from operas. When he finally got his hair arranged the way he wanted it, he tucked his comb into one of the pockets of his vest.

  “I got to wear my hair long, like I was a poet,” he said, sighing. “I don’t want to be mistook for a wrestler. Some bum might come in here and mistook me for a wrestler.”

  The door opened and in came a member of Mr. Pfefer’s herd, a mournful, furtive-mannered wrestler with a long beard who is billed only as “King Kong, the Abyssinian Gorilla Man.” Even Mr. Pfefer does not know his correct name. He is a Greek, but his greatest popularity coincided with the Ethiopian war and Mr. Pfefer changed his nationality to Abyssinian. He did not mind. King Kong always looks as if he is expecting someone to hit him over the head with a chair. He always looks as if he is ready to dodge. He is popular in New Jersey arenas because of the plaintive screech he lets out when some other wrestler begins to twist his feet. He shuffled into the room and looked through a pile of letters on the desk. Mr. Pfefer jumped to his feet.

  “Take off your lousy hat, you bum,” he yelled.

  King Kong, the “Gorilla Man” who weighs 202 pounds, obediently took off his hat.

  “Go into the other room,” yelled Mr. Pfefer, who weighs 125 pounds on his best days. “There’s a couple more gorillas in the other room. Go inside, like I told you.”

  “Yes, Mr. Pfefer,” said King Kong, shuffling out of the room.

  “I got to handle these freaks like I was a father,” said the fearless Mr. Pfefer. “They are like my little children, the bums. One day I beat them up and yell their ears off, and next day I am with them gentle like a father.”

  Mr. Pfefer sighed. He sighed so deeply that his wilted carnation opened up.

  “This is a nervous-wrecking business,” he said. “With freaks, with politics from the Athletic Commission, with fights against me all the time by the wrestling trust. Them schemers! Them manipulators! Them bums! All the time they want to squeeze me out. I lost in three years $75,000 cash fighting with them schemers, which my books can prove. They should squeeze me out! Not when I got one breath in me they should squeeze me out.”

  Mr. Pfefer used to be allied with the late Jack Curley, wrestling promoter and friend of the former Prince of Wales. They fought all the time, however, and now Mr. Pfefer is alone. He calls himself a booking agent for wrestlers. Sometimes he promotes a match himself, but usually he only supplies wrestlers to matchmakers of the Garden, of Ridgewood Grove, of the Bronx Coliseum, and of the Mecca Arena, a new club which has opened up in an old theater on Fourteenth Street. Some of his boys can really wrestle, but he would not be angered if you told him that most of them could not wrestle their way out of a bathing suit, catch as catch can.

  “I’m in the show business, like Ringling Brothers,” he says. “The show must go on. The main thing what the public wants is freaks, a good laugh.”

  Mr. Pfefer claims credit for the boom in wrestling which has lasted for the last twelve years, more or less.

  “On the level, on account of it’s a fact,” he said, “when I came on the
scene the wrestling business was dead like a cemetery. Jack Curley’s office was a cemetery. With me it is an art to make things boom. I have to send right away pictures to the papers. I have to change right away the names of the wrestlers. Suppose I got a boy named Alexander Garkowienko, which I did have. All right, I name him Alexander the Great, the Russian Giant. I get from Europe freaks like nobody ever saw before. Phooey! So wrestling booms. From my first match we take in from the box office a couple grand, maybe more. Before I come eight hundred dollars was wonderful like heaven. So the wrestling trust gets the credit and the glory. Do I care? The main thing what I want to make is money.”

  He is proud of the freaks he has imported by the ton. Sometimes he will stare at a photograph of one of his bearded, corpulent pets and shout, giggling, “Boy, what a freak.” A wrestler has to be an exceedingly grotesque person to win Mr. Pfefer’s respect. The wrestling business may appear wretched to some, but he usually thinks it is wonderful. Sometimes even he has a fit of loathing. He knows, however, that there is a kind of mass sadism rampant in the country, and so long as citizens will pay to see wrestlers moan and grunt and burp and slap the mat in agony he is willing to take their dollar bills. It is not a pretty business, with its epidemics of trachoma (which is an occupational disease), and its phony champions, and its catfights among promoters, and its shabby theatricalisms. It is not like prizefighting, where the best man quite often wins. About it is the furtive air of the sideshow, the flea circus.

  “Oh, hell,” Mr. Pfefer said, generalizing about his business, “it is like the circus with elephants that wear shoes and eat off plates. I am so sick of freaks sometimes I have to go to the opera to quit my nerves from jumping. Right now my boys are clean-living American boys. Clean-cut. One hundred percent.”

  A moment later, however, he was again enthusiastic about his freaks.

  “I have a new monster,” he said, “a freak with class. His name is Martin Levy from Boston. He has trained three months, and we got him down to 625 pounds. That is the most meat which ever stepped into a ring. He is twenty-five years old. He could not wrestle a baby-carriage but what’s the difference?

  “Suppose a wrestler makes a flying tackle against him, he is so big it’s the same thing like you would flying-tackle the wall. Can you throw the wall? Can you pin the wall to the mat? He is expensive to me. It costs me ten, twelve dollars by the day to feed him. He eats vegetables and eggs by the dozen. He pours olive oil into his soup. He has to travel around with a truck on account of no hotel bed would hold him. By train he can’t travel. It takes a half-hour to push him through the door, and suppose the train don’t stop in the station only a minute? He’s going to draw, you know, tremendous. If he don’t draw I’m going to took him and chalk him on the wall, the bum.”

  For many years Mr. Pfefer had agents in Europe, men he met when he was touring with his Russian opera singers, and they would cable him whenever they caught sight of a giant who might be persuaded to come to America and wrestle. He imported his first wrestler in 1922.

  “I always love sport like I love music,” he said, “and I was very proud when my first giant arrived. He was Garkowienko, which I called Alexander the Great. I imported him from the Ukraine. He weighed 425 pounds when he came, but when I shipped him home he was down to 235, a ghost. Once to amuse me he took a big steel beam like they use to make skyscrapers, and he balanced it on his shoulders and sixty people stood on it, thirty on each side. He was always homesick.

  “After him I bring in Ivan Poddubny, which I called Ivan the Terrible. He is dead now. He had a big mustache. His real name was Zaikin, but I thought Poddubny sounded better, more class. He was also a Russian, a real Volga boatman.

  “After him I bring in the famous wrestler without a neck, Ferenc Holuban, from Budapest. He was built like a barrel without no neck, shaved bald-headed. Nobody could take a headlock on him. Each time I brought in a freak with a different style, and my next one was Fritz Kley, a German, a contortionist. Like a snake you couldn’t hold him. As a wrestler he was fair, not good, not bad. What I didn’t like with him and with all these freaks was the minute they got paid it was rush off to the post office for a foreign money order. They didn’t invest a cent in this country. Also, they ate too much.

  “Oh, well, my friend, the show must go on, like with Ringling Brothers. The next one was Leo Pinetzki, a Polish boy. He had the longest arms in the world, an arm reach of eight feet. He was from Lodz. His disposition was good, for a freak. Next I brought in a wrestler which started the epidemic of whiskers. I give him the name of Sergei Kalmikoff, after a famous Cossack big general in Siberia. His real name was Orloff, no class. He was the original first man I brought with whiskers. After him we got a deluge. He wore a Russian blouse, and we called him the Siberian Gorilla, which he liked. He didn’t know what it meant. He thought it was a title like General or Mister.

  “After Kalmikoff all wrestlers had to have whiskers. You would see these college boys that took up wrestling. They would be clean-shaven, and they would look human. Then they took to leaving the hair on their faces. To make a few dollars they would look ugly. Their wives they hated them, and the children were scared. They looked like ugly monkeys. I started the style and I should complain.

  “Kalmikoff was my last gorilla from Europe. After him I use only clean-cut American boys. Like I used college boys from football teams, flying tacklers. No grunts. They was like rubber balls in the ring. But sooner or later most of them got whiskers. When he sets his mind to it nobody can look so mean and ugly as a college boy.”

  Mr. Pfefer is a paradox. He actually does like music, and he turns up at quite a few concerts and operas. He thinks of himself as an artist, and he has a blown-up photograph of himself in a Russian blouse, staring into space—“Me when I was with the opera,” he says. He used to play the piano.

  “I give it up as I am a palooka player,” he said. “I don’t like no palooka jobs.”

  He carries an ivory-headed stick with a flourish, and he is sometimes mistaken for Morris Gest, which pleases him. He looks like Morris Gest with a hangover. He dresses like an opera star. He sits around his reasonably fantastic office in shirtsleeves, and he wears elastic bands around his sleeves. When he gets nervous he snaps the bands. He is intensely religious, he says. There is a mezuzah nailed up on his office door, and he touches it every time he goes out or comes in. He also has a mezuzah nailed up beside the door of his hotel room, he said. A mezuzah is a Jewish religious object, a metal strip with a tiny scroll inside. He kisses his fingers before he touches it. He is a member of Congregation Ezrath Israel, a synagogue popular with theatrical people, at 339 West Forty-seventh Street.

  “I’m a steady there for years,” he said. “I have my steady seat.”

  He said that some of his wrestlers are impressed by his piety. His father was Schoel Pfefer, one of Warsaw’s sternest rabbis. He was born in Warsaw when it was still a part of Russia. He says that he sleeps only four hours a day, working twenty. He likes to eat in delicatessens around Broadway, and it delights him when a boxing writer describes the way he rips a herring asunder.

  It angered him when Jim Londos, with whom he is on terrible terms, had a photograph taken sitting in meditation like Rodin’s “Thinker.” He thought Londos was presumptive. He tacked the photograph up among the dead wrestlers and wrote this legend on it:—“Jeemy, no use scheming. You will never come back like all this fellows on the same wall.” He writes the same way he talks. The worst thing he can think to call an enemy is “schemer.”

  “Londos is so far from Rodin like I am from Governor Lehman,” he said, snorting angrily. “He is not ‘The Thinker’ but The Schemer. I just changed a little bit the title.”

  With his stable of wrestlers—he has about sixty on his string now—Mr. Pfefer has traveled all over the republic. However, he will not stay away from Manhattan long. He thinks it is a perfect city for a man who lives by his wits, and he is content when he can sit in his office above Times Square
among his photographs, among his respectful wrestlers, five minutes away from his favorite delicatessen. He expects to make another trip to Europe soon, a sentimental trip to Palestine, where his sister, Tauba Pfefer, teaches in a Hebrew school in Tel-Aviv. He carries a Palestinian coin around in his pocket for good luck. He will not stay long, however.

  “With a derrick they couldn’t get me from this city,” he said, snapping the pink elastic band around his left sleeve. “No difference if they make me Governor of California and give me with salary an automobile.”

  2. FEMALE PUG

  The only lady prizefighter I ever saw was Countess Jeanne Vina La Mar. I saw her in a room at the St. Moritz. The room smelled like a gymnasium. She was wearing cleated shoes, gym pants, two sweaters and a sweatshirt. She had just come in from a jog around the Reservoir in Central Park and was sweating like a field hand. For the first ten minutes I was in the room the Countess sat placidly on a sofa, her hands folded demurely in the lap of her gym pants, and told how she had been persecuted by Jack Dempsey (he wouldn’t help her get fights), the owners of Madison Square Garden, the New York State Boxing Commission, Hollywood and the American public.

  Suddenly she leaped upon a rug and began shadow boxing. Following up a terrific left jab, the Countess knocked a painting of a pirate off her grand piano. Then, mildly startled, she sat down again. She explained how it feels to be the unchallenged champion female bantamweight and featherweight boxer of the civilized world.

  “Look at me!” she cried, thumping her stomach to show that it is as substantial as it was in 1923, when she began begging female cinema stars to challenge her. “Look at me! I am quick as a panther. In all my years in the ring I have never been smacked down. I am ladylike, modest and a world’s sensation. I have made boxing a beautiful sport.

  “Look at those muscles! How do you think I got them? I got them fighting with plug-uglies. Always with men. I can’t get a fight with a woman. I brought boxing into the realm of art, and what did I get out of it? Not a cent and no appreciation and no respect. They still consider it no good for women to box. Has it hurt me? I ask you. Are my ears cauliflowered? Don’t I look like a lady?”