Joseph Mitchell, “Mazie"
Joseph Mitchell’s classic profile of a famous denizen of the 1930s Bowery.
Annotated Version
Mazie (excerpts)
A BOSSY, YELLOW-HAIRED BLONDE named Mazie P. Gordon is a celebrity on the Bowery. In the nickel-a-drink saloons and in the all-night restaurants which specialize in pig snouts and cabbage at a dime a platter, she is known by her first name. She makes a round of these establishments practically every night, and drunken bums sometimes come up behind her, slap her on the back, and call her sweetheart. This never annoys her. She has a wry but genuine fondness for bums and is undoubtedly acquainted with more of them than any other person in the city. Each day she gives them between five and fifteen dollars in small change, which is a lot of money on the Bowery. “In my time I been as free with my dimes as old John D. himself,” she says. Mazie has presided for twenty-one years over the ticket cage of the Venice Theatre, at 209 Park Row, a few doors west of Chatham Square, where the Bowery begins.
The Venice is a small, seedy moving-picture theatre, which opens at 8 A.M. and closes at midnight. It is a dime house. For this sum a customer sees two features, a newsreel, a cartoon, a short, and a serial episode. The Venice is not a “scratch house.” In fact, it is highly esteemed by its customers, because its seats get a scrubbing at least once a week. Mazie brags that it is as sanitary as the Paramount. “Nobody ever got loused up in the Venice,” she says. On the Bowery, cheap movies rank just below cheap alcohol as an escape, and most bums are movie fans. In the clientele of the Venice they are numerous. The Venice is also frequented by people from the tenement neighborhoods in the vicinity of Chatham Square, such as Chinatown, the Little Italy on lower Mulberry Street, and the Spanish section on Cherry Street. Two-thirds of its customers are males. Children and most women sit in a reserved section under the eyes of a matron. Once, in an elegant mood, Mazie boasted that she never admits intoxicated persons. “When do you consider a person intoxicated?” she was asked. Mazie snickered. “When he has to get down on all fours and crawl,” she said. In any case, there are drunks in practically every Venice audience. When the liquor in them dies down they become fretful and mumble to themselves, and during romantic pictures they make loud, crazy, derogatory remarks to the actors on the screen, but by and large they are not as troublesome as a class of bums Mazie calls “the stiffs.” These are the most listless of bums. They are blank-eyed and slow-moving, and they have no strong desire for anything but sleep. Some are able to doze while leaning against a wall, even in freezing weather. Many stiffs habitually go into the Venice early in the day and slumber in their seats until they are driven out at midnight. “Some days I don’t know which this is, a movie-pitcher theatre or a flophouse,” Mazie once remarked. “Other day I told the manager pitchers with shooting in them are bad for business. They wake up the customers.”
Most Bowery movie houses employ bouncers. At the Venice, Mazie is the bouncer. She tells intimates that she feels fighting is unladylike but that she considers it her duty to throw at least one customer out of the theatre every day. “If I didn’t put my foot down, the customers would take the place,” she says. “I don’t get any fun out of fighting. I always lose my temper. When I start swinging, I taste blood, and I can’t stop. Sometimes I get beside myself. Also, a lot of the bums are so weak they don’t fight back, and that makes me feel like a heel.” Mazie is small, but she is wiry and fearless, and she has a frightening voice. Her ticket cage is in the shadow of the tracks of the City Hall spur of the Third Avenue elevated line, and two decades of talking above the screeching of the trains have left her with a rasping bass, with which she can dominate men twice her size. Now and then, in the Venice, a stiff throws his head back and begins to snore so blatantly that he can be heard all over the place, especially during tense moments in the picture. When this happens, or when one of the drunks gets into a bellowing mood, the women and children in the reserved section stamp on the floor and chant, “Mazie! Mazie! We want Mazie!” The instant this chant goes up, the matron hastens out to the lobby and raps on the side window of Mazie’s cage. Mazie locks the cash drawer, grabs a bludgeon she keeps around, made of a couple of copies of True Romances rolled up tightly and held together by rubber bands, and strides into the theatre. As she goes down the aisle, peering this way and that, women and children jump to their feet, point fingers in the direction of the offender, and cry, “There he is, Mazie! There he is!” Mazie gives the man a resounding whack on the head with her bludgeon and keeps on whacking him until he seems willing to behave. Between blows, she threatens him with worse punishment. Her threats are fierce and not altogether coherent. “Outa here on a stretcher!” she yells. “Knock your eyeballs out! Big baboon! Every tooth in your head! Bone in your body!” The women and children enjoy this, particularly if Mazie gets the wrong man, as she sometimes does. In action, Mazie is an alarming sight. Her face becomes flushed, her hair flies every which way, and her slip begins to show. If a man defends himself or is otherwise contrary, she harries him out of his seat and drives him from the theatre. As he scampers up the aisle, with Mazie right behind him, whacking away, the women and children applaud.
Mazie’s animosity toward a stiff or a drunk usually lasts until she has driven him out to the sidewalk. Then, almost invariably, she becomes contrite and apologetic. “Look, buddy, I’m sorry,” she said one afternoon recently to a drunk she had chased out because he had been screaming “Sissy! Sissy!” at George Raft during the showing of a prison picture called “Each Dawn I Die.” “If you didn’t see the whole show,” she continued, “you can go back in.” “Hell, Mazie,” said the drunk, “I seen it three times.” “Here, then,” she said, handing him a dime. “Go get yourself a drink.” Although the drunk’s ears were still red from Mazie’s blows, he grinned. “You got a heart of gold, Mazie,” he said. “You my sweetheart.” “O.K., buddy,” Mazie said, stepping back into the cage. “You quit acting like a god-damn jackass and I’ll be your sweetheart.”
The Venice is a family enterprise. It is owned by Mazie and two sisters—Rosie, the widow of a horse-race gambler, and Jeanie, an acrobatic dancer. Mazie’s sisters let her run things to suit herself. She is profoundly uninterested in moving pictures and is seldom able to sit through one. “They make me sick,” she says. Consequently, she employs a manager and leaves the selection and ordering of films entirely up to him. For a theatre of its class, the Venice is prosperous, and Mazie could afford to hire a ticket girl and take things easy, but she enjoys the job and will not relinquish it, as her sisters often urge her to do. From her cage she has a good view of Chatham Square, which is the favorite promenade of Bowery drunks and eccentrics. “The things I see, by God, you wouldn’t believe it,” she says proudly. When she catches sight of a person she knows among the passers-by, she sticks her face up to the round hole in the front window of her cage and shouts a greeting. Sometimes she discusses exceedingly personal matters with people out on the sidewalk. “Hey there, Squatty,” she yelled one afternoon to a dreamy-eyed little man, “I thought you was in Bellevue.” “I was, Mazie,” the man said. “They turned me loose yesterday.” “Where’d they put you this time—the drunk ward or the nut ward?” “I was in with the drunks this time.” “How’d they treat you?” “They didn’t do me no harm, I guess.” “You get drunk last night, Squatty?” “Sure did.” “Guess you had to celebrate.” “Sure did.” “Well, take care yourself, Squatty.” “Thanks, Mazie. You do the same.”
Sitting majestically in her cage like a raffish queen, Mazie is one of the few pleasant sights of the Bowery. She is a short, bosomy woman in her middle forties. Some people believe she has a blurry resemblance to Mae West. Her hair is the color of sulphur. Her face is dead white, and she wears a smudge of rouge the size of a silver dollar on each cheek. Her eyes are sleepy and droopy-lidded. On duty, she often wears a green celluloid eyeshade. She almost always has a cigarette hanging from a corner of her mouth, and this makes her look haughty. Like a movie croupier, she can smoke a cigarette down to the end and not take it from her mouth once, even while talking. She has a deep cigarette cough; she smokes three and a half packs a day and says tobacco is murdering her. On her right hand she wears four diamond rings. She likes vigorous colors, and her dresses are spectacular; they come from shops on Division Street. The glass-topped Bowery and Chinatown rubberneck wagons often park in front of the Venice, and now and then a band of sightseers stand on the sidewalk and stare at Mazie. She despises sightseers and says they give the Bowery a black eye. Sometimes she thumbs her nose at them. Actually, however, she does not mind being stared at. “People walk past here just to give me the eye,” she once said. “I got a public of my own, just like a god-damn movie-pitcher star.”
Mazie is a talkative woman, and on most subjects she is remarkably frank, but she rarely says anything about her private life, and some people on the Bowery consider her a mystery woman. A man who had been stopping by to chat with her several times a week for years suddenly realized recently that he did not know whether she was Miss or Mrs. Gordon. “You ever been married, Mazie?” he asked. “That’s for me to know, you to find out,” she said sharply. A moment later she added, “I’ll ask you this. Do I look and act like a girl that never had a date?” People around Chatham Square believe, among other things, that she was a belly dancer in the Hurtig & Seamon burlesque houses when she was a young woman, which isn’t true. They claim, with not much relevance, that she gives her spare money to bums because she was once disappointed in a love affair. Furthermore, they believe she was born in Chinatown. Actually, she is a native of Boston, a fact which gives her a lot of satisfaction. Every winter she takes a week off and spends it in Boston, just walking around. She believes the people of Boston are superior to the people elsewhere. One night a blind-drunk bum stumbled into an “L” pillar in front of the Venice, skinning his nose, and she rushed out and dragged him into her lobby. Then she went into a nearby saloon and yelled, “Gimme some hot water and a clean rag!” “You want to take a bath, Mazie?” asked the bartender. This remark enraged her. “Don’t you talk like that to me, you yellow-bellied jerk,” she said. “I come from Boston, and I’m a lady.”
[…]
Mazie’s hours would kill most women. She works seven days a week, seldom taking a day off, and is usually on duty from 9:30 A.M. until 11 P.M. Her cage is not much more spacious than a telephone booth, but she long ago learned how to make herself comfortable in it. She sits on two thick pillows in a swivel chair and wears bedroom slippers. In summer she keeps an electric fan, aimed upward, on the floor, replacing it in winter with an electric heater. When the weather is especially cold she brings her dog, Fluffy, an old, wheezy Pomeranian bitch, to the theatre. She lets Fluffy sleep in her lap, and this keeps both of them warm. Mazie makes change as automatically as she breathes, and she finds time for many domestic chores while on duty. She mends clothes, puts red polish on her fingernails, reads a little, and occasionally spends half an hour or so cleaning her diamonds with a scrap of chamois skin. On rainy days she sends out for her meals, eating them right in the cage. She uses the marble change counter for a table. Once, hunched over a plate of roast-beef hash, she looked up and said to a visitor, “I do light housekeeping in here.” When she gets thirsty she sends an usher across the street to the King Kong Bar & Grill for a cardboard container of beer. She used to keep a bottle of Canadian whiskey, which she calls “smoke,” hidden in her cash drawer, but since an appendix operation in 1939 she has limited herself to celery tonic and beer.
There are two cluttered shelves on one wall of her cage. On the bottom shelf are a glass jar of “jawbreakers,” a kind of hard candy which she passes out to children, a clamshell that serves as an ashtray, a hind leg of a rabbit, a stack of paper towels, and a box of soap. When a bum with an exceptionally grimy face steps up to buy a ticket, Mazie places a couple of paper towels and a cake of soap before him and says, “Look, buddy, I’ll make a bargain with you. If you’ll take this and go in the gents’ room and wash your face, I’ll let you in free.” Few bums are offended by this offer; most of them accept willingly. Occasionally she gives one fifteen cents and sends him to a barber college on Chatham Square for a shave and a haircut. If she is in a good humor, Mazie will admit a bum free without much argument. However, she says she can tell a bum by the look in his eyes, and ordinary citizens who have heard of her generosity and try to get passed in outrage her. “If you haven’t got any money,” she tells such people, “go steal a watch.”
[…]
Mazie does not spend much time at home, so she encourages people to visit her while she is working. Her visitors stand around in the lobby at the rear door of her cage. She frequently gets so interested in a caller that she swings completely around in her swivel chair and presents her back to customers, who have to shout and rap on the window before she will turn and sell them tickets. In the morning, practically all of her visitors are bums with hangovers who come to her, scratching themselves and twitching, and ask for money with which to get their first drinks of the day. She passes out dimes regularly to about twenty-five of these men. Because of this, she is disliked by many of the hard-shell evangelists who hold hymn-singings in the gutters of the Bowery every evening. One of them, a grim, elderly woman, came to the cage not long ago and shook a finger at Mazie. “We sacrifice our nights to come down here and encourage these unfortunates to turn over a new leaf,” she said. “Then you give them money and they begin using intoxicants all over again.” When Mazie is faced with such a situation, she makes irrelevant or vulgar remarks until the complainant leaves. On this occasion she leaned forward and said, “Par’n me, Madam, but it sounds like your guts are growling. What you need is a beer.”
[…]
Mazie closes her cage shortly after 11 P.M., when the final show is under way, and goes to an all-night diner near Brooklyn Bridge, where she glances through the Daily News while having a couple of cups of coffee and a honey bun. The only things in the News that she regularly reads from beginning to end are the comics, the “Voice of the People,” and “The Inquiring Fotographer.” She says she doesn’t read political or war stories because she can’t understand them and because they make her blue. “The world is all bitched up,” she once said. “Always was, always will be.” “Do you really believe that?” she was asked. “No,” she said, after a moment of deliberation, “I guess I don’t.” She spends half an hour in the diner. Then, practically every night, before going home to bed, she makes a Samaritan tour of the Bowery and its environs. She carries an umbrella and a large handbag, which contains a flashlight, a number of cakes of soap of the size found in hotel bathrooms, and a supply of nickels, dimes, and quarters.
If it is a cold night, she goes first to an alley near the steps leading to the footwalk of Manhattan Bridge. Bums like to keep fires going in discarded oil drums in this alley. She distributes some change. Then she inspects Columbus Park, a block west of Chatham Square, where every winter a few bums pass out on benches and die of exposure. The police say Mazie has rescued scores of men in this park. Then, passing through Chinatown, she returns to the Bowery and heads uptown, pausing whenever she recognizes a bum and giving him enough money for a meal, a drink, or a flop. Frequently, in addition to small change, she gives a bum a cake of soap. “Please use it, buddy,” she says pleadingly. Here and there she gets out her flashlight and peers into a doorway. She pays particular attention to the drunken or exhausted bums who sleep in doorways, on loading platforms, and on sidewalks. She always tries to arouse them and stake them to flops. In warm weather, if they don’t seem disposed to stir, she leaves them where they are. “A sidewalk is about as nice as a flophouse cot in the summertime,” she says. “You may get up stiff, but you won’t get up crummy.” In the winter, however, she badgers them until they awaken. She punches them in the ribs with her umbrella and, if necessary, gets down on her knees and slaps their faces. “When a bum is sleeping off his load, you could saw off his leg and he wouldn’t notice nothing,” she says. Sometimes a bum who has been awakened by Mazie tries to take a poke at her. When this happens, she assumes a spraddle-legged stance, like a fencer, and jabs the air viciously with her umbrella. “Stand back,” she cries, “or I’ll put your eyes out.” If a man is too weak, sodden, or spiritless to get up, Mazie grabs his elbows and heaves him to his feet. Holding him erect, she guides him to the nearest flophouse and pulls and pushes him up the stairs to the lobby. She pays the clerk for the man’s lodging (thirty cents is the customary price) and insists on his having at least two blankets. Then, with the help of the clerk or the bouncer, she takes off the man’s shoes, unbuttons his collar, loosens his belt, and puts him to bed with his clothes on. This is usually a tumultuous process, and sometimes many of the lodgers are awakened. They stick their heads out of the doors of their cubicles. “It’s Mazie!” they shout. “Hello, Mazie!” Now and then an emotional bum will walk out in his underwear and insist on shaking Mazie’s hand. “God bless you, Mazie, old girl!” he will cry. Mazie does not approve of such antics. “Go back to bed, you old goat,” she says. If she is acquainted with the clerk and trusts him, she leaves some change with him and asks that it be given to the bum when he wakes up. Flophouses are for-men-only establishments, and Mazie is the only female who has ever crossed the threshold of many of them.
At least a couple of times a week, Mazie finds injured men lying in the street. On these occasions she telephones Police Headquarters and asks for an ambulance from Gouverneur or Beekman Street, the hospitals which take care of most Bowery cases. She knows many of the drivers from these hospitals by name and orders them around. Police say she summons more ambulances than any other private citizen in town, and she is proud of this. “I don’t over-do it,” she says. “Unless a man is all stove-up and bloody, I don’t put in a call, but if I had my way, the wagons would be rolling all night long. There’s hardly a bum on the Bowery who don’t belong in a hospital.”
[…]
Most nights, before going home to bed, which is usually around two o’clock, Mazie makes brief stops in several saloons and all-night restaurants. She does not mind the reek of stale beer, greasy cabbage, and disinfectant in them. “After you been around the Bowery a few years, your nose gets all wore out,” she says. She goes into these places not to eat or drink but to gossip with bartenders and countermen and to listen to the conversation of drunken bums. She has found that bums do not talk much about sex, sports, politics, or business, the normal saloon topics. She says most of them are far too undernourished to have any interest in sex. They talk, instead, about what big shots they were before they hit the Bowery. Although their stories fascinate her, Mazie is generally cynical. “To hear them tell it,” she says, “all the bums on the Bowery were knocking off millions down in Wall Street when they were young, else they were senators, else they were the general manager of something real big, but, poor fellows, the most of them they wasn’t ever nothing but drunks.”