Sometimes, leaning against the spick-and-span new bar, I am overcome by nostalgia for the gutter.
Dick’s prospered as a lock-and-chain speakeasy throughout prohibition; after repeal it became one of the most lawless saloons in the city. Early last year, however, when Dick opened his new place, things changed. Dick began obeying the New York State Liquor Authority’s regulations one by one: he refused to let his customers shake dice on the bar for rounds of drinks; he refused to put drinks on the tab; he refused to sell liquor by the bottle. In the old days Dick was an absolutely independent man. He was delighted when he got an opportunity to tell a customer to go to hell. He and his bartenders, in fact, usually acted as if they loathed their customers and the customers liked it because it made them feel at home; most of them were men who were made ill at ease by solicitude or service. When Dick started abiding by the liquor laws, however, a hunted look appeared on his fat, Neapolitan face. He began to cringe and bow and shake hands with the customers, and he would even help them on with their coats, When they finished eating, he would go over, smile with effort, and ask, “Was the pot roast O.K.?” In the old days he never acted that way. If someone complained about a gristly steak or a baked potato raw in the middle, he would grunt and say, “If you don’t like my grub, you don’t have to eat in here. I’d just as soon I never saw you again.”
The change in Dick reflects the innovations in his new saloon, which is six blocks away from the old one—a big, classy place with a chromium and glass-brick front, a neon sign in four colors, a mahogany bar, a row of chromium bar stools with red-leather seats like those in the uptown cocktail lounges, a kitchen full of gleaming copper pots, a moody chef who once worked in Moneta’s, a printed menu with French all over it, and seven new brands of Scotch. He told the bartenders they would have to shave every morning and made them put on starched white coats. For several days thereafter they looked clean and aloof, like people when they first get out of the hospital. The place was so stylish that Dick did not, for good luck, frame the first dollar bill passed across the bar; he framed the first five-dollar bill.
Dick’s regular customers had always been clannish—hanging together two and three deep at the end of the bar near the greasy swinging door to the kitchen—and some of them began to congregate at the fancy bar in Dick’s new place. Here they resented everything. They snickered at the French on the menu, they sneered at the bartenders in their starched white coats. One of them waved a menu in Dick’s face. “What the hell does this mean,” he demanded, “this here ‘Country Sausage Gastronome’?” The question made Dick uncomfortable. “It means meat sauce,” he said.
Before the night of the grand opening was half over, one of the customers, an amateur minister who used to preach regularly in the old place, climbed up on the shiny new bar and began to deliver a revival sermon. He had given his text for the evening and was shouting “Where will ye spend eternity, you dirty bums?” when Dick caught sight of him. “Oh, my God!” he screamed. “Do you want to ruin me? I can’t have such monkey business in here. I got a big investment in here.” There was so much genuine agony in his voice that the saloon preacher jumped down from his pulpit and apologized. Thereupon the old customers felt sorry for Dick. Sitting behind his bar on a busy night in the old joint, Dick used to have the aplomb of a sow on her belly in a bog, but in the new place he soon became apprehensive and haggard. One night the kitchen door swung open and the old customers saw Dick bent over a big ledger, struggling with his cost accounting. From the look on his face they knew he was quite sick of the chromium stools and the French menu. “He don’t like this joint, either,” one of them said. From then on they would tone down anyone who started to holler and throw glasses when Dick insisted on obeying the letter and the spirit of one of the alcohol laws. “After all,” they would say, “he’s got a big investment in here. He don’t want to lose his licence.” However, no matter how big the investment, I never felt the same about the new Dick’s.
When he is asked why he moved, Dick grunts and mutters, “It was time to change the sheets,” but I have learned that he opened the new place only because he wanted a bigger kitchen. Soon after he made up his mind to move, however, a salesman for a bar-fixtures concern got hold of him and sold him a bill of goods. I believe that bar-equipment salesmen have done more to destroy the independence and individuality of New York gin mills and their customers than prohibition or repeal; there is nothing that will make a gin mill look so cheap and spurious as a modernistic bar and a lot of chairs made of chromium tubing. Dick’s old place was dirty and it smelled like the zoo, but it was genuine; his new place is as shiny and undistinguished as a two-dollar alarm clock. The bar-equipment salesman was so relentless that Dick, who merely wanted a bigger kitchen, ended up by keeping nothing from the old place but the big, greasy, iron safe and a framed and fly-specked photograph of Charles A. Lindbergh. He even threw away all the photographs of Lupe Velez, his favorite movie actress. He used to have about a dozen pictures of Miss Velez tacked up on the wall, and sometimes he would gaze at one of them, shake his head, and say, “I would crawl a mile over broken beer bottles just to get one look at her in the flesh.”
Dick is proud of his new kitchen. Food always interested him more than alcohol. He used to say, “I keep an A-1 kitchen.” Once I saw him stand at the bar and eat a nine-pound turkey the chef had cooked for the luncheon trade. Dick had intended to eat only a drumstick, but when he finished the whole turkey was gone. Maxie, the tub-bellied head bartender, watched admiringly as Dick dismantled the turkey. “The boss sure does have a passion for groceries,” he said. Even in the old days Dick often put strange dishes on his mimeographed menu. He had a friend who worked in a soup cannery up the street and one day the friend gave him a bucket of turtle livers. Dick put them on the menu. A customer said, “Well, that’s something I never et.” He ordered them, and while he ate, Dick watched intently. When the man put down his fork Dick went over to his table.
“How were them turtle livers?” he asked.
The customer deliberated for a moment.
“Fact of the matter is,” he said, “they were kind of unusual.”
“Well,” said Dick proudly, “I want you to know that you’re the first man in New York to eat turtle livers, so far as I know.”
The customer shuddered.
A few nights ago I saw turtle livers on the menu in the new place. They were listed as “Pâté de Foie de Tortue Verte.” Until I saw those pretentious words I never fully realized how dead and gone were the days when Dick was the plain-spoken proprietor of a dirty, lawless, back-street gin mill. I am aware that it is childish, but sometimes, leaning against the spick-and-span new bar, I am overcome by nostalgia for the gutter; I long for a “cabaret night” in Dick’s old place. Friday was pay day in many of the offices and factories in the neighborhood and Friday night was “cabaret night” in Dick’s. A beery old saloon musician would show up with an accordion and a mob of maudlin rummies would surround him to sing hymns and Irish songs. The place would be full of hard-drinking, pretty stenographers from the financial district, and they would be dragged off the bar stools to dance on the tiled floor. The dancers would grind peanut hulls under their shoes, making a strange, scratchy noise.
Some of the drunks would try to push the bar over, putting their shoulders to it and heaving-to as they hummed the “Volga Boatmen.” Dick often threatened to use a seltzer siphon on their heads. “I’ll knock some sense in your heads someday, you goats!” he would yell at his straining customers. He once classified the nuts in his place as the barwalkers, the firebugs, the weepers, and the Carusos. The barwalker was a type of drunk who was not happy unless he was up on the sagging bar, arms akimbo, dancing a Cossack dance and kicking over glasses of beer. The most unusual barwalker was the ordinarily dignified city editor of an afternoon newspaper. He would crawl up and down the bar, making a peculiar, dreadful screech. Dick was always fascinated by him. One night he stared at him and said, “What in the hell is that noise you’re making?” The city editor stopped screeching for a moment. “I’m a tree frog,” he said, happily. The firebugs were those who found it impossible to spill whiskey on the bar without setting it afire. The bartenders would come running and slap out the fitful blue flames with bar towels. One drunk used to pour whole glasses of brandy on the bar and ignite it just to hear Dick yell. Once Dick hit this firebug over the head with a seltzer siphon. The blow would have fractured the firebug’s skull if he hadn’t been wearing a derby.
On those lovely, irretrievable nights a kind of mass hysteria would sweep through the establishment. The customers would tire of singing and dancing and shaking dice. There would be a lull. Then, all of a sudden, they would start bellowing and throwing their drinks on the floor. Arguments would commence. Someone would shout, “Take off your glasses!” One night an ambulance from Broad Street Hospital had to come and get two men who had differed over which had the more nourishment in it: buttermilk or beer. As in a comic strip, the air on other occasions would be full of missiles. Once a customer who had been standing moodily at the bar for hours suddenly let go with a little, heavy-bottomed whiskey glass and knocked a big, jagged hole in the mirror behind the bar. Maxie, the bartender, dodged out of the way. Then he remembered that the mirror cost fifty-five dollars. “Dick’s going to dock me a week’s pay because I ducked,” said Maxie, groaning.
When he got tired of imitating an auctioneer, Mr. St. Peter would sidle over to the coat rack and slip such objects as beer pads and salt shakers into people’s overcoat pockets. In Dick’s, the customers wandered in and out of the kitchen at will, and once Mr. St. Peter got a mackerel out of the icebox and slipped it into someone’s pocket. One cabaret night Dick got suspicious of Mr. St. Peter and found that the thin, undernourished rummy had slipped enough food into his own pockets to last him several days. In the old man’s ragged overcoat Dick found eight cans of sardines and a big hunk of Swiss cheese. Dick was not angry. He was amused. “Mr. St. Peter reminds me,” he said, “of a squirrel storing away nuts for a rainy day.” In one stage of drunkenness Mr. St. Peter would spray people with a Flit gun; once he took the fire extinguisher off the kitchen wall and came out with it going full blast. Mr. St. Peter showed up for the grand opening night in Dick’s new place, but I never saw him there again. I don’t think he felt at home.
It was dangerous to pass out in Dick’s old gin mill on a cabaret night. His customers thought there was nothing quite so funny as an unconscious man. They would strip him of his clothes and outfit him in a waiter’s uniform or whatever garments, including raincoats, they could find in the lockers in the kitchen. Then they would stuff his pockets full of cryptic notes and drag him up the block, depositing him in a doorway and forgetting all about him. When the man woke up he would begin to scream and would never be the same again. I kept some of the slips one victim found in his pockets. They include the following: “The Shadow called. Said for you to call back.” “Well, old boy, I guess your number is up this time.” “Thursday afternoon at three. Make haste. Too late.” One man woke up with a rope around his neck.
There are never any good fist fights among the dried-up, mannerly men and women who hang out in Dick’s new place. In the old saloon people were always slugging away at each other. The only rule of behavior Dick ever tried to enforce was “No fights outside on the street. It don’t look nice. I don’t want my store to get a bad name.” (Like many old-fashioned saloon keepers, Dick always referred to his place as “the store.”) When a particularly violent cabaret-night seizure struck the gin mill, Dick usually locked the doors, knowing from experience that each newcomer would be infected with the hysteria and join right in. Dick was the only one to worry. He would yell, “I’m having a nervous breakdown! Lock the doors!” Maxie was never unnerved. He would sometimes grin at the antics of a customer, shake his head, and say, “This place is a regular Bellevue Island.” Once, in the middle of a furious Thanksgiving Eve, I saw him hunched over the bar reading a sports section and peacefully singing a song he learned in public school: “Glow, little glowworm, glisten, glisten.”
In the new place, dressed like a drug clerk, Maxie is called a sourpuss, but he laughed a lot in the old days. Nothing amused him so much as a customer with a hangover. “Did the Brooklyn boys get you?” he would ask. He would sing, “Shut the door, they’re coming through the window. Shut the window, they’re coming through the door.” The suffering customer would shudder and beseech him to stop, but Maxie would keep on singing. “My God,” he would wind up, triumphantly, “they’re coming through the floor!”
Dick’s old place was isolated; at night the streets surrounding it were deserted. Consequently there was always the fear of a holdup. When Maxie had the late trick and things were dull, he would take the money out of the cash register, hide it under the bar in a trash bucket, stretch out on the bar, and go to sleep, using his rolled-up overcoat for a pillow. “Let the robbers come,” he would say, yawning. If more customers arrived, they would have to put pieces of ice in his ears to arouse him.
You never hear any conversation worth listening to in Dick’s new place. In the old gin mill, when the customers got tired of whooping and sat down to talk to each other, they really had something to say. I remember a conversation I heard between two drunks in Dick’s.
“So this friend of yours died, you mean?”
“Sure, she was murdered.”
“How do you know she was murdered?”
“If you’re murdered, you die, don’t you, for God’s sake?”
For a moment the two men were quiet, thinking.
“I’m preparing evidence,” said the friend of the dead woman.
“What you got to do with it?”
“I’m afraid they might suspect me.”
“Why should they suspect you?”
“Well, I’m getting everything ready in case they do.”
Obeying the law spoiled Dick. Now he is just another gloomy small businessman, the same one day as the next. In the old days he was unpredictable. One night he would be as generous as a happy idiot, next night he would be stingy, setting up no drinks on the house at all.
Usually, when a customer came in, Dick would be expansive. He would call the customer by his first name and inquire about his health. However, if the customer got short of cash and began to put drinks on the tab, Dick would become distant in manner. His hearing would seem to fail. Soon he would begin using the customer’s last name and putting an emphatic “Mister” in front of it. After a while the customer would be a total stranger to Dick. Then all Dick’s civility would vanish and he would call the customer “You bum” or “You goat.” If the customer got angry and said, “I’ll never come into this place again,” Dick’s fat face would harden and he would lean forward and say, “Will you put that in writing?”
One time Dick got drunk. Ordinarily Dick was able to withstand an enormous amount of liquor, but this time he got drunk. He had mixed up a big tub of May wine on a warm day and had sampled the brew as he mixed it. He developed fits of laughter, as though he were a schoolgirl with her first drink. The customers who came in looked funny to him. He pointed at them, slapped a thigh, and shook with laughter. Somebody suggested that he should buy drinks for everybody if he felt that good and he sobered up immediately. However, even on his stingy nights, Dick always gave a quarter to the grim Salvation Army women who came into the place, half-heartedly shaking tambourines. And I always liked the way he treated the scrub women from the skyscrapers in the financial district who would come in the place late at night for beer. Dick used to give them gin and say, “This is on the house. Drink hearty.” He knew the old women really wanted gin but could not afford it.
You had to respect Dick, too, when you saw the way he behaved when one of his customers died. He would order a big, expensive wreath. Just before the funeral he and Maxie and the other bartenders would take off their aprons and shave themselves carefully at the sink in the kitchen. Then they would put on dark suits, and with solemn looks on their faces, they would get into Dick’s automobile and go to the funeral, leaving the gin mill in the hands of the cook. Sometimes, particularly on dull, rainy nights, Dick would close up early and take all the customers left in the place to a burlesque show or to a basement chow-mein restaurant in Chinatown. He would take along a couple of bottles of Scotch and pay all the bills.
In the old days Dick often took part in the incessant dice game. He was an intense gambler. “This ain’t ping-pong,” he would yell when an unsteady player rolled the dice off the uneven bar. In the old gin mill they used to gamble for drinks and for money every night, but around Thanksgiving and Christmas they would have pig and turkey pools. For a quarter, a customer would get three throws of the dice. The dice would be thrown into a soup dish. After a certain number of games the customer with the highest score would get a live turkey or a suckling pig. One Christmas Dick kept the suckling pig in the window of the gin mill. The man who won the pig lifted it out of the window and named it Dick. He took off his necktie and tied it around the pig’s belly. Then he lost interest in the pig and it ran around the saloon for hours, squealing and sniffing at the customers’ shoes. Late that night the customer took the pig home with him in a taxicab. The customer lived in a hotel, and he put the pig in his bathroom. Next morning his wife found the pig and telephoned the A.S.P.C.A. to come and take it away.
The customers in the old place were always playing jokes on Dick. One night a man left the saloon, ostensibly to buy some aspirin. Instead, he went up the street to a telephone booth and called Dick, posing as a gangster. Warning Dick that he would have to pay for protection in the future, the customer said that two of the boys would be around to collect and for Dick to have fifty dollars in five-dollar bills ready to hand over. Otherwise it would be just too bad. Dick came out of the telephone booth with a frightened look on his face. After a while two strangers did happen to come in. They ordered beers. Trembling, Dick served them with the utmost courtesy. He had the money ready to hand over. When they finished their beers, the strangers went out, leaving two dimes on the bar. Dick sighed with relief. Presently one of the customers said, “Say, Dick, have you heard about the trick a lot of drunks have been playing on bartenders? They call them up and pose as gangsters. They tell them they have to pay protection or it will be just too bad.”
“Yeh?” said Dick, his face brightening.
“Yeh,” said the customer. “It’s going on all over town. I’m surprised they haven’t tried it on you.”
“Yeh,” said Dick, laughing heartily. “I’m surprised, too.”
His worried look vanished. He even bought a round of drinks.
“Say, Dick,” said the customer, after a while, “what would you do if some gangsters really tried to shake you down, God forbid?”
“Why,” said Dick, “if any of them bums ever came in here I would knock their heads off. I would take one crack at them and they would fall down dead.”
The customers in Dick’s flossy new place do not play such jokes on him. If they tried it, Dick would probably rush to the telephone and call up Mr. Thomas E. Dewey. ♦
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