"Up In the Old Hotel" - 'McSorley's Wonderful Saloon'

[fiefoe]

Among this collection of stories by Joseph Mitchell, my favorites are: Obituary of a Gin Mill/ The Mohawks in High Steel / All You can Hold for Five Bucks.

• "Good ale, raw onions, and no ladies" was the motto of his saloon.
• slum comedy / Tammany boss / Lincoln's saloon license / the bar had a deepening sag
• It is possible to relax in McSorley's. For one thing, it is dark and gloomy, and repose comes easy in a gloomy place.
• In winter they grab the chairs nearest the stove and sit in them, as motionless as barnacles, until around six, when they yawn, stretch, and start for home, insulated with ale against the dreadful loneliness of the old.
• I'm a taxidermist. I can mount a mosquito. I can mount a strawberry.
• He fed us on fish until the bones stuck out of our ears... It got so my stomach rose and fell with the tide.
• When I hear the whistle, I don't even believe the train's coming.
• Even his shoes are all invariably a size or two too large, but he wears them with a kind of forlorn rakishness.
• "The Cry of the Meat-eaters is 'MORE HOSPITALS!'
• He would (practise) scream. "Here comes a mad dog running loose!..." "After a while," he says, "I got so good I scared myself."
• Ringling's sideshow, the Congress of Strange People, is as highly esteemed by freaks as the Palace used to be by vaudeville actors.
• This spectacle (of feeding his fleas) always amazes her.. The Professor rolls up one sleeve, picks the fleas out of their mother-of-pearl boxes with tweezers, and drops them, one by one, on a forearm, where they browse for fifteen minutes.
• Miss Barnell's temper has been a blessing; it has kept her from succumbing to utter apathy, which is the occupational disease of freaks.
• Her self-esteem suffers least of all when she is working in circuses, where sideshow class distinctions are rigidly observed.. Born freaks are the aristocrats of the sideshow world.
• What they call celebrity nowadays, only a personality was somebody, but a celebrity, who the hell is he?
• Biff Ellison, a gunman who shepherded gangs of repeaters to the polls every Election Day, imitated Connors and formed a Biff Ellison Association, which ran three rackets a year.
• When any of Johnny's people, whether a man, woman or child, does not show up for supper, it is taken for granted that he or she is in the hands of the police.
• Using Romany, she calls him a rat bite, a sick toad, a blue-bellied eel, a black-yolked egg, a goat, a bat, a policeman, a gajo, and various other loathsome things.
• (Nowadays..) the entire country is overrun with private property.
• Any period where people are uneasy is good for fortune-tellers.. and then cam the A-bomb and the H-bomb and the possibility the whole world may be blown out like a light any moment now.. and things got even better still, the best yet.
• They despised me and I despised them, but I knew them very well, and I remember so many things about them, and when I look at their tombstones and read their names and dates, after all they're dead and gone, I must admit it makes me sad."
• Many deaf signs are used by the general public, and thousands of them are exactly like the signs used by the Plains Indians.
• Baseball is an incubator of profanity.
• On those lovely, irretrievable nights a kind of mass hysteria would sweep through the establishment. .. As in a comic strip, the air on these occasions would be full of missiles. .. Maxi, the bartender, dodged out of the way. Then he remembered that the mirror cost fifty-five dollars. "Dick's going to dock me a week's pay because I ducked," said Maxie, groaning.
• 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.
• A war is where three Calypsonians stand up on the platform in a tent and improvise in verse.. telling about the ugly faces and impure morals of the other two.
• The abdication was the most popular subject in the history of Calypso; every singer had a go at it.
• We picked out some and gave them a little training, and it turned out that putting riveting tools in their hands was like putting ham with eggs. In other words, they were natural-born bridgemen.
• The heater's platform stays in one place until all the work within a rivet-tossing radius of thirty to forty feet is completed.
• The next thing they did, they got in behind the men and made them split up and scatter out. That is, they wouldn't allow all the gangs to work together on one bridge any more, which, if something went wrong, it might widow half the young women on the reservation.
• And when (Indian grub)'s cooking, it smells so good. If you were breathing your last, if you had the rattle in your throat, and the wind blew you a faint suggestion of a smell of it, you'd rise and walk.
• Done by aproned, middle-aged people, ponderous with beefsteak and beer, the waltz is an appalling spectacle.
• Smith's is sixty-two years old and is one of the largest turtle firms in the world; its cable address, Turtling, is known to many European chefs.