Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) by Joseph Mitchell Read Free Book Online

the tires?’ he was asked. ‘Why, hell no!’ he said. ‘At the drivers. Figure I could kill four or five before they arrested me. Might kill more if I could reload fast enough.’
    Only a few of the old men have enough interest in the present to read newspapers. These patrons sit up front, to get the light that comes through the grimy street windows. When they grow tired of reading, they stare for hours into the street. There is always something worth looking at on Seventh Street. It is one of those East Side streets completely under the domination of kids. While playing stickball, they keep great packing-box fires going in the gutter; sometimes they roast mickies in the gutter fires. In McSorley’s the free-lunch platters are kept at the end of the bar nearer the street door, and several times every afternoon kids sidle in, snatch handfuls of cheese and slices of onion, and dash out, slamming the door. This never fails to amuse the old men.
    The stove overheats the place and some of the old men are able to sleep in their chairs for long periods. Occasionally one will snore, and Kelly will rouse him, saying, ‘You making enough racket to wake the dead.’ Once Kelly got interested in a sleeper and clocked him. Two hours and forty minutes after the man dozed off, Kelly became uneasy – ‘Maybe he died,’ he said – and shook him awake. ‘How long did I sleep?’ the man asked. ‘Since the parade,’ Kelly said. The man rubbed his eyes and asked, ‘Which parade?’ ‘The Paddy’s Day parade, two weeks ago,’ Kelly said scornfully. ‘Jeez!’ the man said. Then he yawned and went back to sleep. Kelly makes jokes about the constancy of the old men. ‘Hey, Eddie,’ he said one morning, ‘old man Ryan must be dead!’ ‘Why?’ Mullins asked. ‘Well,’ Kelly said, ‘he ain’t been in all week.’ In summer they sit in the back room, which is as cool as a cellar. In winter they grab the chairs nearest the stove and sit in them, as motionless as barnacles, until around six, when they yawn, stretch, and start for home, insulated with ale against the dreadful loneliness of the old. ‘God be wit’ yez,’ Kelly says as they go out the door.
    (1940)

 
    Mazie
    A BOSSY, YELLOW-HAIRED blonde named Mazie P. Gordon is a celebrity on the Bowery. In the nickel-a-drink saloons and in the all-night restaurants which specialize in pig snouts and cabbage at a dime a platter, she is known by her first name. She makes a round of these establishments practically every night, and drunken bums sometimes come up behind her, slap her on the back, and call her sweetheart. This never annoys her. She has a wry but genuine fondness for bums and is undoubtedly acquainted with more of them than any other person in the city. Each day she gives them between five and fifteen dollars in small change, which is a lot of money on the Bowery. ‘In my time I been as free with my dimes as old John D. himself,’ she says. Mazie has presided for twenty-one years over the ticket cage of the Venice Theatre, at 209 Park Row, a few doors west of Chatham Square, where the Bowery begins.
    The Venice is a small, seedy moving-picture theatre, which opens at 8 A.M. and closes at midnight. It is a dime house. For this sum a customer sees two features, a newsreel, a cartoon, a short, and a serial episode. The Venice is not a ‘scratch house.’ In fact, it is highly esteemed by its customers, because its seats get a scrubbing at least once a week. Mazie brags that it is as sanitary as the Paramount. ‘Nobody ever got loused up in the Venice,’ she says. On the Bowery, cheap movies rank just below cheap alcohol as an escape, and most bums are movie fans. In the clientele of the Venice they are numerous. The Venice is also frequented by people from the tenement neighborhoods in the vicinity of Chatham Square, such as Chinatown, the Little Italy on lower Mulberry Street, and the Spanish section on Cherry Street. Two-thirds of its customers are males.