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

afternoon recently to a drunk she had chased out because he had been screaming ‘Sissy! Sissy!’ at George Raft during the showing of a prison picture called ‘Each Dawn I Die.’ ‘If you didn’t see the whole show,’ she continued, ‘you can go back in.’ ‘Hell, Mazie,’ said the drunk, ‘I seen it three times.’ ‘Here, then,’ she said, handing him a dime. ‘Go get yourself a drink.’ Although the drunk’s ears were still red from Mazie’s blows, he grinned. ‘You got a heart of gold, Mazie,’ he said. ‘You my sweetheart.’ ‘O.K., buddy,’ Mazie said, stepping back into the cage. ‘You quit acting like a god-damn jackass and I’ll be your sweetheart.’
    The Venice is a family enterprise. It is owned by Mazie and two sisters – Rosie, the widow of a horse-race gambler, and Jeanie, an acrobatic dancer. Mazie’s sisters let her run things to suit herself. She is profoundly uninterested in moving pictures and is seldom able to sit through one. ‘They make me sick,’ she says. Consequently, she employs a manager and leaves the selection and ordering of films entirely up to him. For a theatre of its class, the Venice is prosperous, and Mazie could afford to hire a ticket girl and take things easy, but she enjoys the job and will not relinquish it, as her sisters often urge her to do. From her cage she has a good view of Chatham Square, which is the favorite promenade of Bowery drunks and eccentrics. ‘The things I see, by God, you wouldn’t believe it,’ she says proudly. When she catches sight of a person she knows among the passers-by, she sticks her face up to the round hole in the front window of her cage and shouts a greeting. Sometimes she discusses exceedingly personal matters with people out on the sidewalk. ‘Hey there, Squatty,’ she yelled one afternoon to a dreamy-eyed little man, ‘I thought you was in Bellevue.’ ‘I was, Mazie,’ the man said. ‘They turned me loose yesterday.’ ‘Where’d they put you this time – the drunk ward or the nut ward?’ ‘I was in with the drunks this time.’ ‘How’d they treat you?’ ‘They didn’t do me no harm, I guess.’ ‘You get drunk last night, Squatty?’ ‘Sure did.’ ‘Guess you had to celebrate.’ ‘Sure did.’ ‘Well, take care yourself, Squatty.’ ‘Thanks, Mazie. You do the same.’
    Sitting majestically in her cage like a raffish queen, Mazie is one of the few pleasant sights of the Bowery. She is a short, bosomy woman in her middle forties. Some people believe she has a blurry resemblance to Mae West. Her hair is the color of sulphur. Her face is dead white, and she wears a smudge of rouge the size of a silver dollar on each cheek. Her eyes are sleepy and droopy-lidded. On duty, she often wears a green celluloid eyeshade. She almost always has a cigarette hanging from a corner of her mouth, and this makes her look haughty. Like a movie croupier, she can smoke a cigarette down to the end and not take it from her mouth once, even while talking. She has a deep cigarette cough; she smokes three and a half packs a day and says tobacco is murdering her. On her right hand she wears four diamond rings. She likes vigorous colors, and her dresses are spectacular; they come from shops on Division Street. The glass-topped Bowery and Chinatown rubberneck wagons often park in front of the Venice, and now and then a band of sightseers stand on the sidewalk and stare at Mazie. She despises sightseers and says they give the Bowery a black eye. Sometimes she thumbs her nose at them. Actually, however, she does not mind being stared at. ‘People walk past here just to give me the eye,’ she once said. ‘I got a public of my own, just like a god-damn movie-pitcher star.’
    Mazie is a talkative woman, and on most subjects she is remarkably frank, but she rarely says anything about her private life, and some people on the Bowery consider her a mystery woman. A man who had been stopping by to chat with her several times