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

walks like a woman and she dresses like a woman, but when she talks I get the feeling that she’s a man.’
    Most nights, before going home to bed, which is usually around two o’clock, Mazie makes brief stops in several saloons and all-night restaurants. She does not mind the reek of stale beer, greasy cabbage, and disinfectant in them. ‘After you been around the Bowery a few years, your nose gets all wore out,’ she says. She goes into these places not to eat or drink but to gossip with bartenders and countermen and to listen to the conversation of drunken bums. She has found that bums do not talk much about sex, sports, politics, or business, the normal saloon topics. She says most of them are far too undernourished to have any interest in sex. They talk, instead, about what big shots they were before they hit the Bowery. Although their stories fascinate her, Mazie is generally cynical. ‘To hear them tell it,’ she says, ‘all the bums on the Bowery were knocking off millions down in Wall Street when they were young, else they were senators, else they were the general manager of something real big, but, poor fellows, the most of them they wasn’t ever nothing but drunks.’
    (1940)

 
    Hit on the Head with a Cow
    WHEN I HAVE time to kill, I sometimes go to the basement of a brownstone tenement on Fifty-ninth Street, three-quarters of a block west of Columbus Circle, and sit on a rat-gnawed Egyptian mummy and cut up touches with Charles Eugene Cassell, an old Yankee for whose bitter and disorderly mind I have great respect. Mr Cassell has Negro, French, Portuguese, and English blood. He calls himself Captain Charley because he had charge of an ammunition barge for a brief period during the First World War and saw no reason why he shouldn’t have a title. About fifteen years ago, after he got too contrary to hold down a steady job, he took out some of his savings and opened a museum – Captain Charley’s Private Museum for Intelligent People – in a Harlem apartment house; some time later, after a series of robberies, he moved to the basement on Fifty-ninth Street. The Captain is a relentless and indiscriminate collector, and stored in his place are thousands of curious odds and ends he gathered during the fifty-five years he worked as a sailor or cook on navy and merchant ships, and during other years when he was a servant in clubs and hotels in Manhattan. The most valuable exhibit is a group of stuffed animals. They are moth-cut and mangy, but several times a year the Captain is able to rent them to moving picture theatres for lobby displays during the showing of jungle films. The Captain charges fifteen cents admission to his museum, but half the time he forgets to collect it. The majority of his visitors are passers-by attracted by big cardboard signs which he puts up at the head of the steps leading down to the basement – signs such as ‘IF YOU CONSIDER YOURSELF INTELLIGENT, STEP INSIDE,’ ‘CAPTAIN CHARLEY WILL SELL A FEW ODDS AND ENDS FROM TEN CENTS TO FIFTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS,’ and ‘IF YOU ARE SO DAMN SMART, WHY AIN’T YOU RICH?’ A few of the visitors are women hunting for bargains in antiques.
    I like to sit in the gloomy, moldy basement and listen to the Captain. After I have listened to him for fifteen minutes or so, I get to thinking about something that happened to me when I was ten years old. My father and a hired man named Alonzo were butchering a cow in the hall of the barn in back of our house in the small town in North Carolina that I come from, and I was helping. We were hoisting the cow up in the air with a block and tackle so we could skin her, and Alonzo and I had hold of the rope. We had the cow off the ground when something went wrong with the gear, and when I came to I was out in the barnyard running around in circles and screeching, and my head was bloody. When I was caught and subdued by Alonzo and stretched out on the green grass under a pecan tree, I looked up at my