My Ears Are Bent Read Online Free Page A

third degree, slowly tearing fresh bandages off wounds in the Negro’s back, but for unnecessary inhumanity I do not believe I ever saw anything which surpassed the Hauptmann trial—Mrs. Lindbergh on the witness stand, for example, identifying her murdered child’s sleeping suit, or Mrs. Hauptmann the night the jury came in, the night she heard that her husband was to be electrocuted. The older I get the less I care to see suchthings. I am callous enough to remember, however, that the trial gave me respite from the city room and a lot of country air and country food. It was a mess, but I had fun covering it, and there will never be anything like it again, God willing. That is the way I feel about many of the stories I have worked on.

CHAPTER II
Drunks
1. B AR AND G RILL
    Within a few blocks of virtually every large newspaper in the United States except The Christian Science Monitor there is a saloon haunted by reporters, a saloon which also functions as a bank, as a sanitarium, as a gymnasium and sometimes as a home. Dick’s Bar and Grill is such a place. It is sometimes possible to see more amazing sights in fifteen minutes in Dick’s—especially on a night when Jim Howard, the rewrite man, finds it difficult to roll anything but five aces in one, or on a night when the city editor of the greatest afternoon newspaper in the United States imitates a tree frog, or on a night when Louie, the bartender who likes Chinese food, describes his last square meal at Tingyatsak’s, or on a night when Elmer Roessner, the feature editor, gets on all fours to locate a die he has rolled into the fantastic debris behind the bar—than it is in an entireperformance of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.
    While I never drink anything stronger than Moxie, I often go into Dick’s to observe life, a subject in which I have been deeply interested since childhood. This place is down on a narrow street near the Brooklyn Bridge; it is one of those places with a twitchy neon sign, a bar which sags here and there, possibly because it was moved in and out of several speakeasies during prohibition, and a grimy window on which are stuck greasy cardboard signs advertising specials, such as “Special Today. Chicken Pot Pie. Bread & Butter. 35c.” There are a big bowl of fresh roasted peanuts and a bottle of mulligan on the bar, and the tile floor is littered with peanut hulls and cigarette ends and bologna rinds from the free lunch. The cook uses olive oil for frying, and he burns a lot of it during the day. On damp days the place smells like a stable, and there is a legend in the neighborhood that truck-drivers in the street outside have to restrain their horses from entering.
    The proprietor, Dick, is a sad-eyed and broad-beamed Italian who often shakes his fat, hairy fists at the fly-specked ceiling and screams, “I am being crucified.” He hates all his customers, but he is liberal with credit and has a cigar box under the bar full of tabs. If he is feeling good, he slides the bottletoward the customer every third drink and says, “This is on me.”
    One time Dorothy Hall, a society reporter, took Dick with her to the Beaux Arts Ball. The costumes were supposed to be Oriental, and she got him a eunuch costume. She told him to speak nothing but Italian and introduced him as a big Italian nobleman from Naples. He danced with Elsa Maxwell, who was dressed as a Grand Eunuch.
    “She sure did have good manners,” he said later.
    When he buys a newspaper, he spreads it out on the bar and looks for girls in bathing suits. When he finds one he likes, he says, “My God! Look at this baby. My God! This baby has everything. My God! I would die for her.”
    The customers hardly ever call him by his name. He is called “The House.” For example, a customer will say to a bartender, “Go see if The House will cash a check for me.” When he is shaking dice, he always sings. He believes he has a good voice, and his favorite song is