Collected Fictions Read Online Free PDF

brilliantined forelock, the monkey-headed walking sticks he carried, and the delicate copper pick he wore on his thumb to gouge out his enemies' eyes; men like Kit Burns, who was known to bite the head off live rats; and men like blind Danny Lyons, a towheaded kid with huge dead eyes who pimped for three whores that proudly walked the streets for him. There were rows of red-light houses, such as those run by the seven New England sisters that gave all the profits from their Christ-mas Eves to charity; rat fights and dog fights; Chinese gambling dens; women like the oft-widowed Red Norah, who was squired about and loved by every leader of the famous Gophers, or Lizzy the Dove, who put on black when Danny Lyons was murdered and got her throat cut for it by Gentle Maggie, who took exception to Lizzy's old affair with the dead blind man; riots such as that of the savage week of 1863 when a hundred buildings were burned to the ground and the entire city was lucky to escape the flames; street brawls when a man would be as lost as if he'd drowned, for he'd be stomped to death; and thieves and horse poisoners like Yoske Nigger. The most famous hero of the story of the New York City underworld is Edward Delaney, alias William Delaney, alias Joseph Marvin, alias Joseph Morris— alias Monk Eastman, the leader of a gang of twelve hundred men.

    THE HERO
    Those shifting "dodges" (as tedious as a game of masks in which one can never be certain who is who) fail to include the man's true name—if we allow ourselves to believe that there is such a thing as "a man's true name." The fact is, the name given in the Records Division of the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn is Edward Ostermann, later Americanized to Eastman. Odd—this brawling and tempestuous hoodlum was Jewish. He was the son of the owner of a restaurant that billed itself as kosher, where men with rabbinical beards might trustingly consume the bled and thrice-clean meat of calves whose throats had been slit with righteousness. With his father's backing, in 1892, at the age of nineteen, he opened a pet shop specializing in birds. Observing the life of animals, studying their small decisions, their inscrutable innocence, was a passion that accompanied Monk Eastman to the end. In later times of magnificence, when he scorned the cigars of the freckled sachems of Tammany Hall and pulled up to the finest whorehouses in one of New York's first automobiles (a machine that looked like the by-blow of a Venetian gondola), he opened a second establishment, this one a front, that was home to a hundred purebred cats and more than four hundred pigeons—none of which were for sale at any price. He loved every one of the creatures, and would often stroll through the streets of the neighborhood with one purring cat on his arm and others trailing along ambitiously in his wake.
    He was a battered and monumental man. He had a short, bull neck, an unassailable chest, the long arms of a boxer, a broken nose; his face, though legended with scars, was less imposing than his body. He was bowlegged, like a jockey or a sailor. He might go shirtless or collarless, and often went without a coat, but he was never seen without a narrow-brimmed derby atop his enormous head. He is still remembered. Physically, the conventional gunman of the moving pictures is modeled after him, not the flabby and epicene Capone. It has been said that Louis Wolheim was used in Hollywood films because his features reminded people of the deplorable Monk Eastman.... Eastman would leave his house to inspect his gangster empire with a blue-feathered pigeon perched on his shoulder, like a bull with a heron on its hump.
    In 1894 there were many dance halls in New York City; Eastman was a bouncer in one of them. Legend has it that the manager wouldn't talk to him about the job, so Monk showed his qualifications by roundly demolishing the two gorillas that stood in the way of his employment. He held the job until 1899—feared, and