Old Mr. Flood by Joseph Mitchell Read Free Book Online Page A

about got to the point where they were spitting in each other’s eye. One afternoon around four I walked in and they were all up atthe bar, the whole, entire mob, buying each other drinks, whacking each other on the shoulder. Two or three had reached the singing stage. Everybody was friends again. I asked one what happened, and he said to me, ‘Didn’t you hear the news? Old Dan up the street dropped dead an hour ago, the poor man. In the middle of cutting a customer’s hair he keeled over and passed away.’ Old Dan was a barber on Fulton Street; had a two-chair shop down here for fifty years; all the Hartford crowd went to him; a highly dignified man; everybody liked him; not an enemy in the world. I thought to myself, ‘You heathen monsters! A poor old soul drops dead on the floor and it cheers you up!’ But I got to be honest. In a minute I was hanging on the bar with the rest of them, going on about how sad it was, and what a fine man Old Dan had been, and how he’d given me a shave and a shampoo only the day before, and drinking more than I could handle, and feeling the best I had in I don’t know when.
    “Well, Mr. P. J. Mooney has an awful, awful case of what I’m talking about, the worst by far I ever saw. He comes downstairs in the morning in a hell of a hurry, and he grabs the
Times
and opens it upto the obituaries and death notices. The
Times
has the best death notices, all the details. And he sits there, drinking his coffee, happy, humming a song, reading up on who died since yesterday. And he talks to himself. He says, ‘Well, my friend,’ he says, looking at the picture of some poor deceased or other, ‘I outlived you. You may have been one of the biggest investment bankers of our time, you may have left a thirty-million estate, you may have been a leader in social and financial circles in New York and Palm Beach, but I outlived you. You’re in the funeral parlor, you old s.o.b., you and your thirty million, and here I am, P. J. Mooney, esquire, eating a fine big plate of ham and eggs, and I’m not going to have two cups of coffee this morning, I’m going to have three.’ All that used to tickle me somewhat. I’d come downstairs and I’d say to him, ‘Any good ones this morning, P. J.?’ And he’d answer back, real cheerful, ‘The president of a big steel company, well along in years, eighty-seven, fell and broke his hip, and a big doctor, a stomach specialist, seventy-three, had a stroke. It’s sad,’ he’d say, ‘real sad.’ And he’d sit there and give you all the details, the name of the undertaker that had the job, the name of the cemetery,how long was the final illness, who survived and the like of that.
    “Here lately, the past month or so, in addition to studying the obituaries, P. J. has taken to studying the old men at the Hartford. I caught him several times staring at this one and that one, looking them over, eying them, and I knew for certain what he was doing; he was estimating how much longer they had to live. One day I caught him eying me. It gave me a turn. It made me uneasy. It upset me. And he’s taken to inquiring about people’s health; takes a great interest in how you feel. He says, ‘Did you rest well last night?’ And he says, ‘You sure got the trembles. You can’t drink nowhere near as much as you used to, can you?’ And he says, ‘Mr. Flood, it seems to me you’re showing your age this morning. We’re not getting any younger, none of us.’ And last night he came out with a mighty upsetting question. ‘Mr. Flood,’ he said, ‘if you were flat on your back with a serious illness and the doctor told you there was no hope left, what would you do?’ And I said to him, ‘Why, P. J., I would put on the God-damnedest exhibition that ever a dying man put on in the history of thehuman race. I would moan and groan and blubber and boohoo until the bricks came loose in the wall. I wouldn’t remain in bed. I would get up from there and put me on a pair