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

father and said, ‘What happened, Daddy?’ My father had a faraway look in his eyes and he said, ‘Son, you were hit on the head with a cow.’ For at least a week after I received the blow on the head everything people said to me seemed illogical or disconnected; every conversation I heard seemed to end unerringly and pleasantly in confusion. That is the way I feel after I have listened to Captain Charley for a little while. I feel as if I had been hit on the head with a cow.
    The last time I went to see him I took a notebook along, and while he rummaged through the museum – he was searching for a bone which he said he hacked off an Arab around 9 P.M. one full-moon night in 1907 after the Arab had been murdered for signing a treaty – I wrote down everything he said. He didn’t pay much attention to me while he talked; most of the time he was talking to himself. And while he rambled along he kept plucking objects out of the clutter on the floor of the basement. He said he wanted to find the Arab’s bone and send it to Police Commissioner Grover A. Whalen by parcel post. ‘I dreamt about old Grover last night, and I made up my mind to send him a present,’ he said. ‘In this dream old Grover was a engineer on a fast freight on the New York Central, and I was the fireman, and we was arguing over who had the right to blow the whistle. Toot! Toot! Old Grover won.’ (Captain Charley is a great admirer of Mr Whalen, and I once asked him why. Mr Whalen is noted for his sartorial daring, and it turned out that that is the reason. ‘I like the way old Grover dresses,’ Captain Charley said. ‘He dresses like he means it.’) Before long the Captain had piled up a dusty mound of objects which included a stuffed barn owl, an old gilt picture frame, a tin lunch bucket, a stack of theatre programs and restaurant menus of the 1890’s, a woman’s hat with a green ostrich feather on it, a dirty beaded bag, a bashed-in pith helmet, a cigar box full of seashells, political campaign buttons, and Chinese coins; a big roll of yellowed newspapers around which a necktie had been knotted, a cutlass, a parasol which he said was once the property of a famous New Orleans madam named Mrs Lilly-belle Sue-belle Russell, and the lengthy skin of a boa constrictor that killed a girl and a goat in South America at a moment when the girl was milking the goat.
    ‘Where were you born, Captain Charley?’ I asked.
    ‘I’m born in Boston,’ he said. ‘I’m born in the Hub. I’m a bluenosed Yankee, fed on codfish and cranberries. My type of people are all dead. They broke the mold. I consider myself different from other men, on a higher plane, always been a boss, never wore overalls. Take the biggest man in the country and no matter what big deeds he did, I did twice as much. I don’t smoke and I don’t hang out in none of them low-down Columbus Avenue saloons. I drink in high-class places. Nothing but champagne wine and brandy, that’s all I drink. High-class people invite me to their houses for dinner, just for the honor of it, send me home full of brandy. I’m very particular about my something to eat. When I got cash on hand I set a fine table, don’t eat nothing but lobsters and fresh peaches and T-bone steaks. There’s people that could live high on what I throw away. Use to take advantage of women, but somewhere along the line I lost my animal spirits. I can look a gangster in the eye and make him change his mind, but I can’t do a thing with a woman no more. At one time I had nine big switch-tail women on my personal payroll and they all stole from me, picked me clean. Buzzards! One of these days I’m going to pack my grip and go up to Boston and die. Won’t even bother to get me a cemetery lot; I’ll just find me a convenient gutter and lie down in it and die. Sad, sad! Made up my mind to die in Boston because I was born there. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Older I get the more disgusted I get. I’m yet to find a honest