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

change, she gives a bum a cake of soap. ‘
Please
use it, buddy,’ she says pleadingly. Here and there she gets out her flashlight and peers into a doorway. She pays particular attention to the drunken or exhausted bums who sleep in doorways, on loading platforms, and on sidewalks. She always tries to arouse them and stake them to flops. In warm weather, if they don’t seem disposed to stir, she leaves them where they are. ‘A sidewalk is about as nice as a flophouse cot in the summertime,’ she says. ‘You may get up stiff, but you won’t get up crummy.’ In the winter, however, she badgers them until they awaken. She punches them in the ribs with her umbrella and, if necessary, gets down on her knees and slaps their faces. ‘When a bum is sleeping off his load, you could saw off his leg and he wouldn’t notice nothing,’ she says. Sometimes a bum who has been awakened by Mazie tries to take a poke at her. When this happens, she assumes a spraddle-legged stance, like a fencer, and jabs the air viciously with her umbrella. ‘Stand back,’ she cries, ‘or I’ll put your eyes out.’ If a man is too weak, sodden, or spiritless to get up, Mazie grabs his elbows and heaves him to his feet. Holding him erect, she guides him to the nearest flophouse and pulls and pushes him up the stairs to the lobby. She pays the clerk for the man’s lodging (thirty cents is the customary price) and insists on his having at least two blankets. Then, with the help of the clerk or the bouncer, she takes off the man’s shoes, unbuttons his collar, loosens his belt, and puts him to bed with his clothes on. This is usually a tumultuous process, and sometimes many of the lodgers are awakened. They stick their heads out of the doors of their cubicles. ‘It’s Mazie!’ they shout. ‘Hello, Mazie!’ Now and then an emotional bum will walk out in his underwear and insist on shaking Mazie’s hand. ‘God bless you, Mazie, old girl!’ he will cry. Mazie does not approve of such antics. ‘Go back to bed, you old goat,’ she says. If she is acquainted with the clerk and trusts him, she leaves some change with him and asks that it be given to the bum when he wakes up. Flophouses are for-men-only establishments, and Mazie is the only female who has ever crossed the threshold of many of them.
    At least a couple of times a week, Mazie finds injured men lying in the street. On these occasions she telephones Police Headquarters and asks for an ambulance from Gouverneur or Beekman Street, the hospitals which take care of most Bowery cases. She knows many of the drivers from these hospitals by name and orders them around. Police say she summons more ambulances than any other private citizen in town, and she is proud of this. ‘I don’t over-do it,’ she says. ‘Unless a man is all stove-up and bloody, I don’t put in a call, but if I had my way, the wagons would be rolling all night long. There’s hardly a bum on the Bowery who don’t belong in a hospital.’
    On her walk, Mazie usually tries to steer clear of other well-known nocturnal Bowery characters. Among these are the Widow Woman and the Crybaby. The Crybaby is an old mission bum who sits on the curb for hours with his feet in the gutter, sobbing brokenly. Once Mazie nudged him on the shoulder and asked, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ ‘I committed the unforgivable sin,’ he said. Mazie asked him what the sin consisted of, and he began a theological description of it which she didn’t understand and which she interrupted after a few minutes, remarking, ‘Hell, Crybaby, you didn’t commit no sin. You just prob’ly got the stomach ulsters.’ The Widow Woman is a bent, whining crone who wears a mourning veil, a Queen Mary hat, and a rusty black coat, and comes hobbling down the Bowery around midnight giving bums little slips of paper on which are scribbled such statements as ‘God is love’ and ‘The fires of Hell will burn forever.’ Mazie is afraid of her. ‘She