My Ears Are Bent Read Online Free PDF

up at the customers gathered around him with drinks in their hands and said, “I drank thirty-two beers tonight.” Those were his last words.
    “I guess Mr. Friedman is a dead barrel of beernow,” said The House as a committee of customers wrapped up the drunken newsdealer in two tablecloths and carried him out.
    An old printer spends whole days and nights in the place, holding to the bar with one hand and making oratorical gestures with the other. He makes a speech which never ends, muttering to himself, and no one knows what he is talking about, except that he is denouncing something.
    “What’s the matter with him?” new customers ask, staring.
    “I never been able to figure out what he’s talking about,” The House answers. “Hey, Jimmy, tell the man what you’re talking about. My God, Jimmy, let us in on the secret.”
    A cabdriver who was born in England hangs out in the place. His only name is Liverpool. He is probably the only cabdriver in the city doing a credit business. He even sells Irish Sweepstakes tickets on credit. When he is in the place, he makes it his business to answer the telephone. It is practically impossible to reach anybody in the place by telephone. Liverpool will answer a call and yell from the booth, “It’s for you, Mr. Kennedy. Are you here?” Mr. Kennedy will shake his head and say, “I ain’t here. You haven’t seen me since Labor Day.” Then you hear Liverpool saying, “No, Miss, he ain’t been in since Labor Day.”
    When Liverpool comes into the place, he looks scornfully at the row of drinkers. He never drinks anything, and when he hauls a drunken customer home on credit he gives him a temperance lecture. Sometimes he has the fare screaming in horror.
    “You are a fool to drink,” he will yell through the cab window while waiting for a light to change. “You should let it alone. What do you think your liver looks like now? In the morning you will have a bad headache. Now, take me. I don’t drink, and I feel fine, just fine. If I didn’t have to in the line of business, I would never put my foot in a barroom. My mamma didn’t raise no crazy children.”
    Shaking for drinks by way of a game called Indian Dice is always going on in Dick’s. Sometimes as many as fifteen people are shaking in one game, and it costs the man who gets stuck a day’s wages to pay the round. The House always shakes. He is a wizard with a dicebox, and sometimes customers drink themselves blind trying to stick him. The game is played with five dice, and no set lasts longer than one night. The losers get mad and throw them into the spittoon just to hear The House scream.
    “Listen to him yell,” they say. “He got those dice from the five-and-dime, but to hear him yell you would think they was made from precious ivory from the Sudan or someplace.”
    The House does not have any trouble with policemen.He knows them all. One rainy night a policeman came in and got drunk. Then he took out his revolver and began to have target practice, using the telephone booth for a target. The House sidled out of the place and telephoned the police station, and two other policemen came and took the marksman away. The House keeps a bottle under the bar for them and calls it “the cops’ bottle.” This bottle contains a blend of Scotch and rye, made up of drinks left unfinished by paying customers. One big cop always snorts when he has his drink and says, “This must be some of that new kind of whiskey which they distill from axle grease.”
    There used to be a pin game in the place which paid off beginning at a score of 13,500, but one night the customer called Jeeter Lester got a screwdriver and fixed up some bolts on the machine. He fixed it so you got at least 30,000, even if you shot wild, and everybody who played it collected at least a quarter before The House found out why there were so many expert pin-game players among his customers and called the company to take the damned thing out of his