My Ears Are Bent Read Online Free Page B

“Love in Bloom.” When he comes to work, he ties on his apron and looks down the bar at his customers. Then he shakes his head and says, “They must have forgot to lock the doors at the asylum.” However, he believes he runs a classy place. He will say with pride, “The last time Mr. Heywood Broun was in here, he said I make the best gin rickeyhe ever tasted.” One time someone stole a sign from one of the chain nut stores, the Chock Full o’ Nuts Company, and hung it on his door, and he was angry for days.
    The place was once a speakeasy, and twenty minutes after repeal The House had broken all the 1,117 new alcohol regulations. In most of the new saloons, the bartenders reek with the idea of Service and treat the customers with respect, but here the bartenders also hate the customers. This hatred is mutual, and each night the bar is the barrier between two hostile camps. The bartenders do not sympathize with a customer who comes in with a hangover, and they do not prescribe remedies.
    “I hope you die,” The House often says. “You should leave the state for what you did last night.”
    There are two steady waiters, and they also hate the customers. One is named Horace. He is an Italian who suffers from adenoids and never shuts his mouth. He has a delusion about his head. He was in the Italian Army during the war, and he believes his head was shot off and that the doctors got the head of an Austrian and sewed it on his neck. He claims that the new head is not satisfactory because it is the head of a young man and often urges him into adventures in which the rest of his body is not particularly interested.
    “My other head had a big mustache,” he said one night.
    The other waiter is a Norwegian named Eddie, whose feet hurt. Fifteen minutes after he is given an order, he comes back and says, “What was it you ordered?” He keeps a bottle of gin on the roof of the icebox and takes a drink every thirty minutes. On Saturday nights, when the rush is over, he puts a raincoat over his waiter’s jacket and goes out to look up his enemies. Sometimes after such errands he does not show up for several days, and if a customer inquires, The House says, “He’s in Bellevue. I am being crucified.”
    The cook has a bad temper. One noon a customer came in and looked at the mimeographed menu.
    “How is the London broil?” he asked Eddie.
    “I’ll go see,” he said.
    In a moment Eddie returned.
    “The cook says it’s no good,” he said.
    “Go ask him what is good,” commanded the customer.
    A few minutes later Eddie came back again.
    “The cook says nothing’s no good,” he said.
    Among the customers are four members of a federal inspection service, who are known in the place as “the G-men.” When one of them gets a telephone call, he hurries to the booth in the rear and slams thedoor. This is a signal for the others to rush forward and bang on the wooden sides of the booth with telephone books. One night they tore a booth down. They keep yelling, “Listen to the tom-tom in the jungle.” They keep slamming the booth until their enraged colleague rushes out, and then they grab him. They throw him on the floor and sit on him. When he is exhausted and lies still, they take turns talking double-talk into the mouthpiece until the person on the other end hangs up. The fight is repeated three times each night, with a different G-man as the victim each time. The other customers rarely notice the fights any more.
    There are two Southerners among the customers. One is from a state which still secedes from the Union at least once every fortnight, and he often talks in a very high-class Southern accent so people will ask him, “Are you from the South?” He is afraid to walk the streets after dark because of Yankees, and always carries a whistle he stole from a drunken policeman. Sometimes on the way home he thinks a Yankee is after him and blows his whistle, summoning police from blocks around. He used to say that