My Ears Are Bent

by Joseph Mitchell

  An evangelist has opened up on Surf Avenue. He calls his place “God’s Power House.” At night his sign blazes out in the midst of neon lights advertising frankfurters and frozen custards. In his raucous window are posters in a variety of languages inviting the sick, blind and lame to come and get healed. And on the Boardwalk is a new sideshow billed as “Life” in large letters. Inside there is a row of human embryos in alcohol.

  However, the 1,000,000 who go to Coney Island on hot afternoons are only indirectly interested in the freaks. They came for the salt water. Many of them will spend the day and night and spend no more than 25 cents. They came with their bathing suits under their clothes, or they negotiated a furtive quick change under the Boardwalk. Perhaps they brought a few sandwiches. Or maybe they will buy a few frankfurters.

  Hundreds sleep all night on the strand. At any hour on weekend nights one may see young men and women dancing around fires built on the sand. One plays a mandolin. Two jump up and dance an Apache dance. Others stray away to sit beside the dubious sea water. The beach policemen testify that there are youths who spend the whole summer on the beach and never pay a nickel’s rent.

  A Naked Butcher on a Roof in Hester Street

  The plentiful inhabitants of the lower East Side sit on the shady side of their disheveled streets and make no unessential motions.

  No breezes stir. Even the gestures of the sidewalk peddlers are half-hearted. Food is cheaper on stoop stands and pushcarts in the afternoon, and now the women are going home from market—going home to their hot little kitchens. Each one carries a bulging market sack—a brown-paper sack filled with frayed vegetables.

  The string of a market sack clutched in each wrinkled hand, an old wife walks slowly up Eldridge Street. Here she stops and passes a few words concerning the hot weather with another old one. Here she stops and argues for a moment with a peddler of pans.

  Just above Delancey Street she pauses and gazes into the interior of a café that advertises Roumanian broilings. The establishment is alive with men. They sit around bare tables, studiously playing stuss, pinochle and Russian bank. All the hot day they have been sitting there, arguing and gambling for pennies and drinking coffee from little white cups with no handles on them. The fat proprietor sits at the cash register, drinking white wine and seltzer and grunting. The old woman walks to the doorway and peers in, frowning severely. She sees her man, a bent old person with a rusty skullcap pushed to the back of his bald head.

  “So?” she says. “So you don’t come home no more, is it?”

  The old man grunts, tosses a card on the table.

  “So you got to sit here all day?” she says, irritably. “Why? What’s the reason? Don’t you got a home yet?”

  “Get away,” the old man orders.

  Muttering, the old woman moves away. Hours later the old man is still at the little table, bent over the cards. There is not much conversation in the room. An argument starts. It does not last long. The heat kills it. Most of the men are stout, but the biggest man there is Abe Haimowitz. He carries 297 pounds around with him summer and winter.

  Haimowitz is proprietor of the Roumanian Grill, in the basement at 106 Forsyth Street, the lower East Side’s most popular cabaret. Judges, politicians, actors and other persons of consequence go down to look at the hard-working girls in his floor show and to argue with his six waiters, all named Itzig. Haimowitz, also Mayor of Forsyth Street, looks disgusted when asked to tell how he and his neighbors spend the summer.

  “At such a time you should come and ask me that,” he says, rubbing his expansive forehead with a wet handkerchief. “This is the way we spend it. Pinochle. Stuss. Pinochle. Stuss. All day long. See that guy. He played three days solid now and lost eleven cents and now he howls loud. I guess there are a whole million cafés down here, and in the summer they are full with cards. Is there anything better? You go to the shore, I ask. All right, you get burns all over. You get sand in your shoes. You get sand in your bed and do not sleep. You get stomach-ache. It is better to stay here with pinochle.”

  The Mayor of Forsyth Street squirts some seltzer into his white wine. The bubbles please him.

  “It is hot and humidity all day down here, yes, but at night you sleep on the roof. Nothing better at all. We lay blankets down in the dark and go to sleep, everybody, all the families. The other night something terrible happened on a roof in Hester Street. There is a fat guy, so big as me almost, a butcher. He has too much to drink. He goes home and takes off his clothes. He knows his wife is up on the roof.

  “He goes stumbling up there and he lifts up a blanket. It is the wrong blanket, but he does not know it. It is some other lady, not his wife. He goes right to sleep and snores very big. The lady wakes up and takes a look at him. She screams and she yells. She flees away in a hurry and almost falls off the roof. Then his right wife she gets out from under her blanket and sees him. She gives a scream. She gives him a kick, but it is no good. He snores. They call a cop, and they pull him away to his own blanket. He does not wake up. He just dreams and snores. The whole neighborhood wakes up, but not him. It is good to sleep on roof. So cool. Better yet than any shore.”

  The rheumatic old men shuffle their cards and mothers tote kitchen chairs into the street, and sighing, sit down, and the children play among the pushcarts. In summer the East Side lives in the street. The young mothers are in love with the sun, but the old ones sit in the shade. The babies doze in their carriages and whimper and play with their toes. The old mothers mutter unceasingly, but the young ones sit in the sun in clean print dresses and read confession magazines.

  At the corner, at the foot of the elevated station stairway, there is a watermelon peddler. He has just sliced up a long, striped one, a beauty. A long slice is a nickel; a cross-slice is 3 cents. A little boy runs up to his mother and begs for a nickel. She tells him to go ask his pa. He runs into one of the stores, and his pa gives him what he wants. A moment later he imprisons his face in a slice of watermelon.

  And in front of all the grimy stationery-candy stores are little pot-bellied slot machines full of sunflower seed. And the pushcart men have pans full of sliced coconut meat. The white slices float in the ice water. And children jump into the concrete troughs at which truck-horses are watered and cool themselves. And kids with shoe-shine boxes slung over their skinny shoulders make their headquarters on the stoop of the Bank of United States, at Allen and Delancey Streets. The windows are dusty, and papers are scattered about the floor inside, and the head bankers are in jail.

  Down on Mulberry Street the peddlers have a round tub of ice and several bottles of flavors. They fill paper cups with shaved ice and pour the requested flavor over the steaming ice. That is gelati. And pop is more popular here than in the Jewish streets. Each store has an icebox full of pop bottles.

  Angelo Rizzo sits in the cool of the afternoon beneath the electric shrine light in his undertaking parlor at 178 Mulberry Street. He smokes his cigar and plays with a tom cat.

  “Not many down here go away for the summer,” says Rizzo, who is Mayor of Mulberry Street. “Only to Coney. Only to Palisades Park for the day. Or maybe some families have relatives on farms up in Connecticut, and they go up to visit. And the young ones with cars go to South Beach and Midland Beach on Staten Island. The Jewish people down here they all go up to the Catskills. They got camps all through there. All over East Side is bus stations to take them to the Catskills. But the people on these streets here mostly stay home.

  “The block parties and feast days they come mostly at winter. In the hot weather, myself, I eat broccoli and sheep-heads, drink barbera, do not have too much exercise, and I stand the heat with great pleasure. Barbera is the summer wine. You go into a grotto, one of them cool basement cafés, and they have a wine bottle for you. It has a compartment for ice, and one for wine. You tilt it up, and you spray your gullet. Wine is much more useful than electric fans.”

  Near the tenement windows bearded scholars sit in straight-backed chairs
and read the Jewish holy books. They drink hot tea in glasses. The tea is so hot that a napkin is wrapped around the glass so it will not burn the fingers. It is an old East Side belief that the hotter the drink the cooler it makes you.

  And in the wine stores muscatel sells for $1.50 a gallon jug, and the pushcarts stretching in a jagged line from Fifth Street to Fourteenth Street on First Avenue are piled with big onions, and bunches of dandelion, and fat snails, and bins of hardshell clams, and great wooden buckets of new pickles swimming in lukewarm brine, and dried beans in water, and twenty varieties of sun-dried fish, and grapes, and pears, and fragrant herbs.

  And at night Allen Street is the promenade. At dusk it is one of the city’s most beautiful avenues. In the middle is a plaza fringed with two rows of green trees and two rows of benches. Above it clatters the Second Avenue El. At night the street is crowded with young men and young women, arm in arm, or arms around each other, walking up to Fourteenth Street to see a movie, or to sit in one of the new frowsy beer gardens, or just to walk. And the kids with cars take their girls down to South Street. Mayor Rizzo says that the first few blocks of South Street are the lovers’ lane of the East Side. There is a long row of parked cars there every night.

  And everywhere are peddlers of kwass, the Russian beer made from bread. (“Kwass, my friends, like in Odessa,” yell the peddlers.) And knishes. And ice-cream pies. And until they are too tired to see the old men sit in the cafés, drinking coffee and playing stuss. And the rabbis in shiny black coats walk by the cafés, where the old men are studiously peering at handfuls of greasy cards, and they look in wistfully. And this, vaguely, is the way the people of the East Side spend the hot days.

  At the Battery Spraddle-Legged Babies

  Play on the Green Gras

  It is Saturday afternoon in the metropolis, and all the fortunate inhabitants have made their getaway.

  The financial streets are deserted. Now and then a coatless policeman walks through Wall Street, swinging his club by its leather strap. It is so quiet one can hear, walking through a narrow street, the staccato noise of a typewriter in one of the few offices in which people still are working. No flags fly from the plentiful flagpoles. The jewelers on lower Broadway have removed their prim window displays for the weekend and pulled their shades. All the restaurants are closed. They will not open again until Monday morning.

  In these narrow streets of corporations and ticker-tape there is no life.

  Then one walks through Bowling Green and comes out on the Battery. The dirty, steel-blue water of the bay gleams through green trees, and the sun is on it. On the curb an aged Syrian is selling paper bags of fresh-roasted jumbo peanuts, 5 cents. The steam escapes through the little copper pipe on the peanut roaster, making a cheerful sound, and the hot peanuts smell good.

  The woman at the newsstand throws grain on the pavement and the fat pigeons that roost in the eaves of the Custom House fly down, making ugly noises in their throats, and pick up the cracked corn.

  And the green grass of the Battery is covered with humans. Arrogant, spraddle-legged babies run across the green grass, both arms outstretched, laughing.

  Derelicts lie in the shades of the statues, sleeping off their hangovers. Now and then one of them pulls out one of the little half-pint bottles in which waterfront saloons sell whiskey to the poor and takes a drink. He snorts, shakes his head and goes back to sleep. Here and there on the Battery grass one comes across one of the bottles, empty.

  And the playground at the east side of the park, under the elevated tracks, is alive with children. Clerks place their babies in the swings and push them up and down, tirelessly. Kids squirm around in the skeleton-like playground contraption made of steel pipes. Little girls sit around the wooden benches and play checkers and bridge.

  In one corner, aloof, a throng of older kids play the old street-game Going to Town. One kid stands still, asking questions. The others, with locked arms, dance up, answering his questions.

  “What are you coming here for?” the kid sings.

  “We’re coming here to get married,” sing the others, dancing up. “A-ransom, a-tansom, a turnable-tee.”

  And the park gardeners are rooting up the dead hedges. They have stacked a great, gaunt pile of hedge-bushes under the elevated tracks. And peddlers in white coats with boxes slung over their shoulders rush through the park.

  “Get an Alaska pop,” they yell. “Get an ice-cream sandwich. Fi’ cents.”

  And all the benches fringing the grass are occupied. The people have had their Saturday baths and they are conscious of their cleanliness. All the colors under the sun are in the dresses of the girls on the benches.

  And throngs of people from out of town are talking excitedly beneath the two bronze sea horses at the entrance of the Aquarium. Here are the people who believe that Manhattan is a good summer resort, and it is. Listen to them, and you will be bewildered by their accents.

  Every hour or so one of the sightseeing buses from uptown parks near the diner at the north side of the park and a crowd gets out and walks across to stare self-consciously at the fishes. And when they come out the sidewalk photographers and the pennant peddlers and the old women with baskets of postcards and gilt souvenirs get busy.

  “Get a souvenir of New York,” the old women yell, proffering their baskets of gilt ashtrays decorated with the Statue of Liberty or the skyline. “Get something to take home. Only a dime.”

  And citizens are crowding into the Staten Island ferryboats, bound for Midland Beach, New Dorp Beach and South Beach and the other beaches on the Staten Island shore.

  And all the fishing boats have pulled away from the Battery long ago. At 7 o’clock Captain Dan Bailey’s Edith left with a full load of anticipatory anglers, well equipped with sand worms and blood worms and rye whiskey. And nine times a day the white boats of the Rainbow Fleet leave Pier 1 for Coney Island, and twice a day they set off for Rockaway Beach. And when the sun goes down the hawkers for the excursion boats get busy.

  “This way to the Mandalay,” one shouts. “This way for the moonlight sail on the Mandalay.”

  Bands are playing on all the boats.

  “This way to the Americana. Take a moonlight sail up the Hudson and see a Broadway showboat revue on the Americana.”

  On the steamer Bear Mountain there is a banner advertising the Cotton Blossom Show Boat. The decks of the excursion boats quickly become packed. And below them, on the concrete beach, ragged kids turn handsprings and beg the passengers to toss coins at them.

  “Throw down a nickel,” yells a kid, turning a handspring.

  Someone tosses a handful of pennies. The kids fight for them. They are as fierce as fighting monkeys. If one kid gets too many the others gang and beat him. Like the boys that dive for coins off the Day Line pier at Poughkeepsie, they keep the pennies in their mouths. By the time the excursion boats leave their mouths are full.

  And when the boats pull away, crowds move toward the bandstand in the middle of the Battery. It is an old-fashioned wooden bandstand in the fashion of 1900, with palings and scroll work. There are green trees with peeling trunks around the stand and the street lights throw the shadows of their green leaves on the concrete sidewalks.

  And the proprietor of the refreshment stand has placed tables and the kind of twisted-wire chairs one used to see only in drugstores around his stand, and people sit there and have imitation orange drinks and listen to the music. And the sailors and their girls walk along, awkwardly kissing as they walk.

  And, cursing loudly, two men begin to slug each other. They fight with abandon. A crowd gathers to give advice. Presently a policeman comes, not running, taking his time. He punches them apart with his club. They go off in opposite directions, muttering curses. The crowd dissolves.

  “Song hits!” a peddler shouts. “Fi’ cents.”

  9. NO SATURDAY NIGHT SIN ON THE NIGHT LINE

  One Saturday night in the month of May I was assigned to find out if it is true what they s
ay about the Night Line. I went up the river on the side-wheeler Trojan, of Sam Rosoff’s Hudson River Navigation Corporation, the oldest steamboat line in existence.It was the Trojan’s first voyage of the season, and I spent a chaste, sober night.

  The creaking old side-wheeler made a tranquil run, transporting forty-nine sedate beer-drinking passengers and a cargo of hides and wood pulp from Pier 52 in Manhattan, hard by the chicken and duck sheds of Gansevoort Market, to Steamboat Square in Albany. The Trojan has 229 staterooms and an excursion capacity of 2,000, and the forty-nine citizens who made the first trip had plenty of elbow room. Apparently it was too early in the season for Saturday night sin on the Hudson. At no time during the run were there more than seven persons sitting around the steamer’s square bar, and John Quinn, the bartender, took his apron off at 11 P.M., drank a glass of Guinness for a nightcap and locked up his stock of bottles. The majority of the passengers were middle-aged and by midnight they were all in bed, and when the steamer tied up in Albany on Sunday at 6 A.M. there was not one hangover on board.

  The Night Line has a wanton reputation, and I was disappointed. In burlesque the Night Line is synonymous with lechery. Remembering dozens of vaudeville and burlesque jokes about the lusty, uninhibited activities of Night Line passengers, I wandered forlornly about the windy decks for hours, witnessing nothing more pagan than a woman smoking a cigarette, the hussy. By 10 P.M. the decks were deserted. Amazed by the purity of the passengers, I retired to the saloon deck and played a pinball game with the purser at a dime a game.

  The purser won eight games in a row. Then I went up to the pilot house, where bald, talkative Captain George H. Warner sat in his high chair and watched the second pilot, William Burlingham, follow the Hudson’s winding channel, swinging the steamer from one side of the river to the other. As the old sideheeler—it was built in Hoboken in 1909—moved up the river, making sixteen miles an hour, he pointed out landmarks. He pointed to a tiny red light in the middle of the river and said, “That’s a lantern hung to one of the stakes on a shad net. The river’s full of shad this year. A fine fish; nothing better than a plate of shad for breakfast.”