“She meant that thing,” said Alsop gloatingly. “Yes, suh! She meant that thing!” His great belly heaved, his throat rattled with its scream of phlegm. “God! The most beautiful damn woman that you ever saw!” said Alsop appetizingly as he shook his great jowled head. “She sure did get him told!” The scene delighted him.
All others, too: the rumors of a thousand tongues, the fruitage of a thousand whispered gossips: who slept with so-and-so; whose wife was faithless unto Caesar; whose wit had uttered such unprinted jest; what famous names, what authors, had behaved in such-and-such a way at such-and-such a party, had grown drunk there, had disappeared, had locked themselves in bedrooms with attractive women, gone into bathrooms with them, quarreled, fought with whom: what rather aged actress, famous for her lustihood in roles, had gone with boys of apple-cheeked persuasion; and who the famous fairies were, and the dance halls where they went to dance with one another, and what they said, the mincing syllables of their fond intercourse with one another—here belly heaved and Alsop screamed with choking laughter—such wickedness, together with all whimsicalities, and Morley’s columns in the purest vein of elfin whimsey—“Pure genius! Pure damned elfin genius!”—old London in the byways of New York, Dickensian bylights of the city ways, and the thronging chaoses of Herald Square, Park Row; the grime of unrubbed brasses, never noticed by the man-hordes passing by, but seen now in a certain light, and properly, the true quaintness of the world around him: the shopgirls eating sandwiches of pimento cheese among the drug store slops of luncheon hour were really like the clients of an inn in Eastcheap ninety years ago. So, all together—Ziegfeld, beautiful chorines, and ancient lechers in silk hats; hot gossip of the great, the rumor of drunken riot with the famed and few, what Miss Parker said, and so-and-so: together with the Great of the town, the men in subways and park benches—Lamb redivivus, alive and prowling among unrubbed brass in the quaint byways of Manhattan—all such as this was meat, drink, breath of life to Alsop.
So the food. His taste, like Dr. Samuel Johnson’s, was not fine—he liked abundance and he liked to slop it in. He had a love for Chinatown, chop suey, and the pungent sauce: it was abundant, it was cheap. The strange faces of the Chinks, the moisty vapors, Oriental and somewhat depressant, all delighted him. He loved to go with several other people—one could order several dishes and thus share. When it was over he would call for paper bags, slop the remainders into them, and wheeze and choke with laughter as he did so.
When all this palled, or when he felt the belly hungers for familiar food—for home to heart and stomach was still very near—he and his cronies would buy up “a mess of stuff.” There were stores everwhere, around the corner in every city block were stores, and the crowded opulence of night, and lighted windows, slanting shelves of vegetables and fruit; and butcher shops, chain groceries, bakeries, every kind of vast provisioning. They would go out upon their errands, they would buy the foods of home: a package of ground hominy—otherwise known as grits; string beans, which really were the same as they had always been, except no one knew how to cook them here, a piece of fat salt port to give them seasoning; flour for gravy and for biscuit dough—for Alsop paled not at such formidable enterprise; steak, no worse if it were cheap and tough, but with the flour gravy and the condiments; bread from the bakery, butter, coffee. Then back to the basement, the two-roomed flat, a chaos of young voices, laughter, humorous, accusal—Alsop chuckling, serious and all-governing, giving directions, bustling about in slippered feet, from whose stale socks protruded the fat hinge of his dirty heels. And then the pungency of native foods again—grits, fried steak with thick brown gravy, string beans savory, deep-hued with fatback, brown-hued biscuits, smoking hot, strong coffee, melting butter. The vigorous confusion of young, drawling voices, excited, Southern, ingrown each to each, tribal and most personal—the new adventure of each daily life told eagerly and to the common mall, with laughter, agreement, strong derision. They appraised the new world where they lived with critic tongue, and often with a strong and disapproving mockery.