Old Mr. Flood (3 page)

Mr. Flood visits the fish market every weekday morning. He rises at five, has a cup of black coffee in the Hartford dining room, lights a cigar, and begins a leisurely tour of the fish stalls, the oyster sheds, the flounder-filleting houses, the smoking lofts, and the piers. When he reaches Fulton Street, the pandemonium in the market invigorates him. He throws his shoulders back, sniffs the salty air, and rubs his palms together. To him, the reek of the fish houses is not unpleasant. “I’ll tell you a valuable secret,” he once said. “The Fulton Fish Market smell will cure a cold within twenty minutes. Nobody that works in the market ever has a cold. They don’t know what a cold is. The fishmongers are afraid the general public will find this out. It’s too crowded around here as it is, and if the public took to coming down here to cure their colds there wouldn’t be room enough to turn around in.” When making his tour, he dresses like a boss fishmonger
, wearing a full-length white apron and knee-high rubber boots. The streets down there, as well as the floors of the stalls, are constantly being hosed down, and he believes in heeding the old market proverb, “Keep your feet dry and you’ll never die.” He goes first to the piers and looks on as the trawlers, draggers, and scallop dredges are unloaded. The fishermen treat him with respect and answer all his questions. They seem to think that he is an official of some kind. The call him Pop or Commissioner. One morning I was standing on the Fulton Street pier with Edmond Irwin, supervisor of the Fishery Council, when Mr. Flood came poking along. He looked down into an unloading trawler from New Bedford and yelled, “Hey, Captain, step over here!” The captain stopped what he was doing, obediently crossed his deck, and peered up at Mr. Flood, who asked, “What you got today, Captain?”

“Nothing to speak of, sir,” the captain said. “Just a load of flounders—blackbacks and yellowtails.”

“Fine, fine, Captain,” said Mr. Flood. “You got enough filly of sole in that load for five thousand dinners. Where’d you go this trip?”

“We was up north of Brown’s Bank.”

“Up in The Gully?”

“That’s right. We was up in The Gully.”

“Fine, fine, Captain!” said Mr. Flood, beaming and rubbing his hands. “That’s just fine!”

Mr. Flood moved on down the pier. The captain stared after him for a moment, obviously puzzled, and then turned to Mr. Irwin and said, “Ed, who in hell is that man, anyway? Does he work for the government, or what?”

“It’s hard to say,” Mr. Irwin said. “All I know he’s an old boy who’s trying to live to be a hundred and fifteen years old by eating fish.”

“God bless us!” said the captain. “How far along is he?”

“He’s way past ninety,” Mr. Irwin said.

“I declare to Jesus!” the captain said. “Well, we live and learn. Maybe I ought to start eating fish.”

After Mr. Flood has inspected the boats, he goes into the shed of the Fishmongers Association. He listens to the blasphemous haggling between the fishmongers and the buyers from the retail fish stores, asks scores of questions, peers into bins, hefts and admires a striped bass here and a red
snapper there, and carries market gossip from one stall to the next. He has so much curiosity that a few of the fishmongers look the other way when they see him coming, but the others treat him considerately and sometimes introduce him to visitors as the Mayor of the Fish Market. Presently he leaves the shed and steps into one of the filleting houses on South Street and helps himself to a bucket of gurry, or fish scraps, with which to feed some one-legged gulls that he has adopted. The fish market supports a flock of several hundred gulls and there are always a few crippled ones among them. “This condition,” Mr. Flood says, “is due to the fact that sea gulls don’t understand traffic lights. There’s a stretch of South Street running through the market that’s paved with Belgian blocks. And every so often during the morning rush a fish or two and sometimes a whole slew of them drop off a truck and are ground up by the wheels and packed down tight into the cracks between the blocks. The gulls go wild when they see this. They wait until traffic gets halted by a red light, and then they drop out of the sky like bats out of hell and try to worry the fish from between the cracks with their beaks and
claws. They’re stubborn birds. They get so interested they don’t notice when the light changes and all of a sudden, wham bang, the heavy truck traffic is right on top of them. Some get killed outright. Some get broken wings and flop off and hide somewhere and starve to death. Those that lose only one leg are able to keep going, but the other gulls peck them and claw them and treat them as outcasts and they have a hard, hard time.” The crippled gulls are extremely distrustful, but Mr. Flood has been able to make friends with a few of them. When he strides onto a pier toting a bucket of gurry they circle down and surround him. One or two will eat from his hands.

Mr. Flood finishes feeding his gulls around nine o’clock. Then he is ready for his first drink of the day. He is opposed to drinking alone—he says it leads to the mumbles—so he proceeds along South Street, hunting for company. He often goes to the freshwater branch of the market, in Peck Slip, and invites Mrs. Birdy Treppel, a veteran fishwife, to step into a bar and grill near her stand and have one. “I
do
need a little something,” she usually says, “to thaw me out.” Mr. Flood and Mrs. Treppel are
old friends. She fascinates him because she is always cold. Mrs. Treppel handles a variety of fresh-water fish, including carp, whitefish, pike, buffaloes, and red horses, and her stand, a three-bin affair partly on the sidewalk under a tarpaulin shelter and partly in the gutter, is in Peck Slip, just below Water Street, right in the path of the wind from the harbor. “I am beautifully situated,” she says, “on the corner of Influenza Street and Pneumonia Slip.” In the wintertime, Mrs. Treppel lets an assistant handle the bulk of her trade, while she keeps a fire jumping in an old oil drum beside her stand, feeding it with barrel staves and discarded fish boxes. She says that it doesn’t do much good. She hovers near the fire, shivering, with her arms in her apron, which she rolls up and uses as a muff. She has a nervous habit of hopping up and down and stamping her feet. She does this in the heat of the summer as well as in the winter; she can’t seem to stop. She appears to be unusually corpulent, but she says that this is misleading. “I’m really a thin little thing, nothing but skin and bones,” she says, “but I got on twelve layers of clothes—thirteen, counting my shimmy. If you was to see me undressed you wouldn’t know
me.” One morning I was going through the market with Mr. Flood. We paused beside Mrs. Treppel’s fire and he said, “Birdy, tell the man how cold it gets in Peck Slip.” “Well, son, I tell you,” she said, hopping up and down as she talked, “if you went up to the North Pole in the dead of December and stripped to the drawers and picked out the biggest iceberg up there and dug a hole right down to the heart of it and crawled in that hole and put a handful of snow under each arm and sat on a block of ice and et a dish of ice cream, why, you wouldn’t be nowhere near as cold as you’d be in Peck Slip in a sheepskin coat with a box fire in the gutter.”

Another fish-market notable with whom Mr. Flood occasionally takes a first-today drink is Mr. Ah Got Um, a high-spirited Savannah Negro who operates a retail fish store on Lenox Avenue in Harlem and who attends the market two mornings a week to do his buying. If he feels good, he chants as he walks through the stalls:

Around eleven o’clock, Mr. Flood shows up for lunch at Sloppy Louie’s. The last time I visited him, we had lunch together. He had decided on a blue-black sea bass that day, and while the chef was broiling it we sat at a table up front, talking. A young fishmonger in an Army uniform, on furlough and looking up his colleagues in the market, came in. Mr. Flood hadn’t seen him in a year or so. “Why, hello, Pop,” the soldier said. “Are
you
still alive?” Mr. Flood’s face fell. “Look here, son,” he said. “That’s a rather personal question.” He became gloomy and didn’t say anything for a while. When the chef brought his fish in, however, he started talking again. “You’re damned right I’m still alive,” he said, opening his fish and deftly removing its spine and fin bones. “Fact of the matter is, I feel the best I’ve felt in years. I et four dozen oysters last night and I felt so good I almost had an oyster fit.” He stared at me for a moment. “Did you ever see anybody have an oyster fit?” he asked.

“No, sir,” I said.

“My boy,” Mr. Flood said, “people who are unaccustomed to oysters sometimes behave real queer after putting away a few dozen. I’ve witnessed many seizures of this nature. I’ll tell you about one. My daughter Louise lives up in South Norwalk, Connecticut, and I visit her once a year, the first week in September, when the oysters come back in season. I’ve got a good friend in South Norwalk, Mr. Drew Radel, president of the Andrew Radel Oyster Company. Drew owns twenty-two thousand acres of oyster beds in the Sound and he produces the biggest oyster in the United States, the Robbins Island. Some get as big as omelettes. His main dock is located on the Norwalk River, and when I’m visiting my daughter I walk down there every day and Drew and I sit around and talk and eat oysters.

“Well, back in September, 1934, during the depression, Drew and I were on the dock, talking, and up walked three fellows said they were from Brooklyn. They took off their hats and asked for deckhand jobs on one of Drew’s dredge boats. They were weevily fellows, pale, stoop-shouldered, and clerky-looking, three runts, no life in them at all. I don’t believe a one of them had cracked a smile
in months. Drew took pity on them and hired them. And before they went out to bring in a load of oysters, he took the captain aside and told him to let those Brooklyn boys eat all the oysters they could hold as soon as the dredge got out on the beds. ‘Let them stuff themselves,’ Drew said. ‘It might possibly put some life into them.’

“Well, when the dredge came back the first time, I noticed that those Brooklyn boys were whistling. When it came back the second time, I noticed that they were singing. Late in the afternoon, Drew and I were sitting in his office on the dock when the dredge came back the third time. Shortly after it tied up, I heard a hullabaloo on the dock and I went to the window. Those Brooklyn boys were laughing and shouting and wrestling and throwing each other’s hats in the water. They were flinging themselves head over heels. The air was full of Brooklyn boys. One picked up a tin bucket and began to bang on it with a stick—a-rumpatiddy-rumpatiddy-rump-a-tump. He marched up the dock, drumming on the bucket and yodeling, stepping high, a regular one-man band. Another one turned a double somerset and stood on his head
right on the edge of the dock. He got up, shook himself, and began to sing a song called ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips with Me.’ ‘Uh-oh!’ I said to Drew. ‘The oysters have caught up with them.’

“In a little while they came trooping into Drew’s office, whistling. Drew was dictating an important letter and he frowned at them. ‘Boys,’ he said, ‘what in the hell do you want here?’ One of them, the littlest, snickered and said, ‘We want to throw you off the dock.’ ‘At the present moment,’ Drew said, ‘I’m far too busy. You’ll have to excuse me.’ ‘Well, then,’ this fellow said, ‘we’ll box you.’ Drew told them he didn’t have time right then to do any boxing, and this fellow said, ‘In that case, we’ll go up the street and find somebody else to box. Will that be all right?’ ‘Why, yes indeed,’ Drew said, ‘that’ll be all right.’ In about half an hour the phone rang and I answered it. It was the sergeant at the police station in South Norwalk, and he said he’d just locked up two men who claimed they worked for the Radel Company. ‘That’s funny,’ I said. ‘There should be three of them.’ ‘Hold the phone a minute,’ the sergeant said. ‘There’s a dreadful racket out in the street.’ I held the phone
and presently the sergeant came back. ‘Everything’s O.K.,’ he said. ‘They’re bringing the third man in now, and it’s taking four patrolmen, three detectives, and a couple of civilians to do it.’”

Mr. Flood cackled. “Drew and I were so proud of those Brooklyn boys,” he said, “we went right over and bailed them out.” —
(1944)

ONE NOVEMBER MORNING I
got a letter from Mr. Flood, inviting me to come down to the Hartford House and help him eat a bushel of black clams. “Hope this finds you well and enjoying life to the full,” he wrote. “I am well, can’t complain. On Friday the next I’ll have something down here I want to show you, something highly unusual in the eating line, a bushel of black clams, the mysterious
Arctica islandica
. It’s also known as the ocean, or deep-sea, quahog. I doubt you ever even heard of the beast. Until here lately only a few people in the world had seen one, let alone eaten one. Now and then a fisherman would find a nest of empty black clam shells in the belly of a cod or a haddock (these fishes root them off the bottom of the ocean and
swallow them whole and naturally the shells don’t digest), and every year or so along certain stretches of the New England coast a hurricane or a freaky storm with an onshore wind would tear a small quantity off the bottom somewhere and wash them ashore. A few would be undamaged, and people who picked these up and ate them always spoke highly of their flavor, better than bay quahogs, or steamers, or skimmers, or razor-shells, better than cockles, or winkles, or scallops, or whelks, better than mussels, better than most oysters you get nowadays. All up and down the coast from Boston to Sheepshead Bay the oystermen and clammers tried their best for generations to find out where the black clams come from. They dredged here and they dredged there, but they couldn’t locate a bed anywhere at all. It was one of the secrets of the old briny. Now at last they have succeeded. In fact, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have just discovered thirteen beds out in the open ocean off Point Judith, Rhode Island. As far as the financial end is concerned, it is like they brought in an oil well. The beds are whoppers. One bed is about as big as R.I. itself, tons of clams, mountains
of clams, millions upon millions, untold boatloads, a bellyful of clams for
EVERYBODY
, glory be to God. One of the fishmongers down here got hold of some last week and we ate them on the half shell. No fault to find. A friend of mine in Warren, R.I., is going to get me a bushel of them on Thursday the next and put them on The Round-Up, the fish train that the N.Y., New Haven & H. runs down five nights a week from Boston. I will pick them up in the market Friday
A.M.
Come down around noon and meet me in the lobby of the H. H. and we will eat some clams and drink some whiskey and tell some lies and sing the One-eyed Riley. I remain, yrs. very truly, H. G. Flood.”