Up Christopher to Madness

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GuidedRoman circii tours—those on wheels—of Greenwich Village and the Bowery, invariably include visits to (or passing notice of) such taverns as The White Horse, McSorley’s, Julius’s, Leo’s, The Jumble Shop. But only Red Fred’s Village Voyages takes out-of-towners and uptowners to Aunt Annie’s Ale House. Which is, perhaps, the reason so few out-of-towners and uptowners are found weighted down with old typewriters in the East River. The Ale House’s clientele is—in the parlance of the fuzz—unsavory. A mugging-cum-swimfest w/typewriter was, therefore, not uncommon at Aunt Annie’s. (Times, of course, change, and He Who Would Stay Abreast must change with them: In the good bad old days a man who had been weighted down with an Oliver the size of a small threshing machine stayed weighted. Try that with an Olivetti or a Hermes thin as a wafer, and the victim-elect is not only likely to decline the nomination but to emerge, damp and annoyed, and start grinding an ice-pick point—or other uncivil, though not altogether unexpected, behavior.)

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