My Ears Are Bent Read Online Free PDF Page B

place.
    A lot of fights start in Dick’s Bar and Grill, but they do not end there. There is a vacant loft upstairs, and when customers begin taking pokes at one another, The House makes them go up there and fight it out. One of the bartenders will help them up thestairs, and soon the sound of scuffling and swearing will reach the customers below. Once a man was knocked out on a Friday night, and his opponent came downstairs and continued his drinking. Sunday morning the bartender went upstairs for something and found the loser on the floor, still asleep. When he was aroused and told about the passage of time, he took it all right.
    “I needed sleep anyway,” he said.
2. T HE Y EAR OF O UR L ORD 1936, OR H IT M E , W ILLIAM
    Saloonkeepers are extremely useful to reporters in New York City. The dreary business of locating people takes up most of a reporter’s time, and in many neighborhoods, especially in tenement neighborhoods, the saloonkeeper is apt to know the address or hangout of any citizen dopey enough or unlucky enough to be of interest to a great metropolitan newspaper. When a person suddenly gets into the news—a happy idiot who wins an Irish Sweepstakes prize, for instance, or a woman who murders her sweetheart because she loves him so—the reporter is frequently able to piece together an accurate picture of the person by talking with the saloonkeeper, the delicatessen proprietor, the undertaker (half the people in any poor neighborhood owe money to the undertaker), and the grocer. In any neighborhoodthese gentlemen know all the gossip, and unlike the priest, who also knows all the gossip, they do not mind talking, giving you the worst they know. Of these, however, the saloonkeeper is usually the best informed.
    The saloonkeeper is also useful because he can be interviewed about anything. This is an example: If a war breaks out anywhere in the world an idea for a local story always takes form in the frenzied brain of the feature editor, and the idea is always the same. If the war is between Italy and Ethiopia, for instance, the idea is, “How do the Italians in New York City feel about the war?” When a reporter is assigned to such a story he goes on a hurried tour of the ginmills in the nearest Italian neighborhood (Mulberry Street if he works for The World-Telegram and Harlem’s Little Italy if he works for The Herald Tribune) and in his story each saloonkeeper is identified as “a community leader.”
    When I am assigned to interview an “authority” on anything I sometimes find it wise to head for the nearest saloon and interview the bartender. One bitter afternoon in December 1936, I was told to find “an authority on mass insanity” and ask him to review the insane happenings of 1936. The best authority on mass insanity I could think of was Gilligan F. Holton, an eccentric Negro saloonkeeper and gambler, who ran the Broken Leg and Busted Bar & Grill in a basementon West 138th Street until the end of 1931 when the cops tore the door down and put him in jail for seven months because he could not keep order among the society matrons who frequented the establishment.
    I located Mr. Holton in a bar and grill operated by one of his former bartenders, a corner bar and grill on Third Avenue. He said he was completing a dissertation in which he expected to prove that William Shakespeare was a Moor, a dissertation he began years ago while working as a servant for David Belasco, but that he was willing to knock off work for a few hours and give me a discourse on certain examples of mass insanity in 1936. Before he began the discourse he ordered a beer. The bartender pushed the glass across the bar. Mr. Holton picked it up and called for a soup spoon. Holding the spoon daintily, with his little finger outstretched, he scooped the foam off the top of the beer.
    “I never could stand whipped cream,” he said. “It don’t agree with me.”
    When he had removed the collar from his beer Mr. Holton drank it