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716 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
At that time, in 1894, the Bowery was just beginning to go to seed; it was declining as a theatrical street, but its saloons, dance halls, dime museums, gambling rooms, and brothels were still thriving. In that year, in fact, according to a police census, there were eighty-nine drinking establishments on the street, and it is only a mile long." p. 128
People looked after things in those days. They patched and mended and made do, and they kept their yards clean, and they burned their trash. And they taught their children how to conduct themselves. And they held their heads up; they were as good as anybody, and better than some. And they got along with each other; they knew each other’s peculiarities and took them into consideration.
Gould is toothless, and his lower jaw swivels from side to side when he talks. He is bald on top, but the hair at the back of his head is long and frizzly, and he has a bushy, cinnamon-colored beard. He wears a pair of spectacles that are loose and lopsided and that slip down to the end of his nose a moment after he puts them on. He doesn’t always wear them on the street and without them he has the wild, unfocussed stare of an old scholar who has strained his eyes on small print. Even in the Village many people turn and look at him. He is stooped and he moves rapidly, grumbling to himself, with his head thrust forward and held to one side. Under his left arm he usually carries a bulging, greasy, brown pasteboard portfolio, and he swings his right arm aggressively.
‘What we used to think was history – kings and queens, treaties, inventions, big battles, beheadings, Caesar, Napoleon, Pontius Pilate, Columbus, William Jennings Bryan – is only formal history and largely false. I’ll put down the informal history of the shirt-sleeved multitude – what they had to say about their jobs, love affairs, vittles, sprees, scrapes, and sorrows – or I’ll perish in the attempt.’ The Oral History is a great hodgepodge and kitchen midden of hearsay, a repository of jabber, an omnium-gatherum of bushwa, gab, palaver, hogwash, flapdoodle, and malarkey, the fruit, according to Gould’s estimate, of more than twenty thousand conversations.
He is profoundly discursive. This particular evening, in the course of one block, the block between Fiftieth and Forty-ninth, he made the following remarks: “A lost city, hungry for destruction, aching for destruction, the entire population in a fuss and a fret, a twit and a twitter, a squit and a squat, a hip and a hop, a snig and a snaggle, a spism and a spasm, a sweat and a swivet. Can’t wait for night to fall, can’t wait for day to break. Even the church bells sound jangly in New York City; they ring them too fast. And the women! Into everything! Free livers! They’ve gone hog-proud and hog-wild. Wearing britches, wearing uniforms, straining their joints for generations to come with high-heel shoes. They’re turning into Indians. Their mouths smeared and smiddled and smoodled with paint, and their cheeks, and their fingernails. And what color do they pick? Old Scratch’s favorite. The mark of the beast, that’s what it is. And they’ve taken to painting their toenails! Why don’t they get a bucket of paint and turn it over on themselves, top to bottom, like a whooping red Indian, and be done with it? Save time and trouble. Oh, my! Tell you what I saw last Sunday! I visited St Bartholomew’s, and there was an old sister in the pew in front of me with her hair dyed blue, and I mean blue! Call the doctor!…