I Could Haddat

A few nights ago I saw turtle livers on the menu in the new place. They were listed as "Pâté de Foi 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 cabaret nights one customer, an oyster shucker from Washington Market, would go off in a corner by himself, smiling happily, and lead an invisible jazz band, using a swizzle stick for a baton and sometimes yelling at an invisible trombone player, "Get hot, you bum!" Another customer, a tall, emaciated accountant, would hold up whatever object he got his hands on first and shout, "How much am I offered? Going, going, gone! Sold to that big dope over there with a cigar in his mouth." The accountant's name was Peterson, but Dick always called him Mr. St. Peter because he was so thin and old. Mr. St. Peter lived in a furnished room and spent whole days and nights in Dick's. Dick used to say that he had a bar-rail foot, that his right foot had become twisted by resting on the rail so much. Dick would point at him proudly and say, "Look at old Mr. St. Peter. When he goes home he walks on one heel." Mr. St. Peter's principal failing was an inability to make up his mind. For years he complained about the rolls in Dick's, wanting the poppy-seed variety. Dick finally ordered some and at lunch Mr. St. Peter said, "These sure are fine rolls." A moment later he added, "And then again, they ain't."

Excerpt from "Obituary of a Gin Mill" in Up In The Old Hotel, by Joseph Mitchell, written in 1939