The Bottle Babies
by P. A. Farrell
part 1
When I was nine years old in the long-ago middle of the 20th century, the area defining the margins of my home was peopled by a few extraordinary characters known as the “Bottle Babies.” Homeless, alcoholic men in dirty, torn clothing, they lived in a discrete two-block area that included our backyard and a large, graveled parking lot next to it.
No one seemed to know how long they’d lived there or where any of them came from. Except for a few scraps here and there, we knew nothing. One of the most cantankerous may have been a war veteran who collected his service checks from a local restaurant.
His appearance, however, caused the restaurant to issue one caveat: he could not come into the restaurant. He had to knock on the back door in the alley. They were being charitable, but everything has its limits, and once you know more about him, you’ll understand.
The parking lot abutted the back entrances to the stores on the main shopping area known simply as “the avenue.” It was home base for most of the Bottle Babies. This was where they slept in step-down doorways that they had filled with discarded cardboard boxes into which they would squirm to sleep in the evening. It was also the area where one of them, Mossy, the most formidable of the four, made “Sneaky Pete.”
I have no idea what Sneaky Pete was, but I know that it must’ve been some type of alcoholic brew that had to be initially cooked up. Mossy formulated this concoction in large fruit-juice cans, and it emitted not a scent but steam as he cooked it over a small flame. All the men would circle around in the evening darkness, daring not to enter the light. He growled and pushed them away.
“Not ready.” He fairly slurred the two words as though he were issuing a decree that was his mandate and no one else’s. No, Mossy was not the sharing type. But he also was a bit of an entrepreneur, and he knew he had something they badly wanted.
The stash of prepared drink was kept in tin cans under a scrap of tar paper in a boarded-up store’s back entrance. He’d managed to get the gallon cans from the Chinese restaurant kitchen’s back entrance just up the iron staircase from his hangout. Once they threw anything away, he pounced on it to see if it could be useful. No, not useful to anyone else, only useful to him.
Cheap wine in a pint bottle didn’t always satisfy the cravings of the Bottle Babies, nor provide the dizzying glow that made continuing life possible. They were lost souls living in a haze of alcohol as strong as they could stomach, and Mossy provided it. A dime would get you a small tin can of it, enough to provide a coma-like existence for the next six hours. Relief in a tin can. Rest in an unoccupied doorway. But somnolence wasn’t always available.
Disagreements often broke out. Almost a daily occurrence. The Bottle Baby fights were like alley cats battling over a piece of fish thrown out by the fish store. Loud curses, cracking wood, growls and yelps pierced the nighttime air after the stores had closed.
Cursing was Mossy’s primary means of communication. I don’t think I ever heard a clear sentence from him once. Either the rough liquor had scored his vocal chords or addled his brain to the point of incoherence.
Years later, I’d learn he probably had a brain disorder called Korsakoff’s Psychosis. It had been initiated through the daily use of his prized brew. The throat-roiling drink stealthily stole into the corners of his brain, picking out any vestige of sanity and replacing it with a black void.
The journey into insanity continued each day. There was never any let-up as he fell into that void. His final defeat was to be found in the bottom of a tin can. His sole verbal ability was a combination of slurred words, foul curses, and wild gestures, usually with a weapon. In its destruction, the poisonous drink was aided by rampant diabetes, which further cut away his abilities.
A large, disheveled man perpetually wearing a filthy, ragged fedora, his pants legs rolled up almost to his knees; it was obvious that he wasn’t well. Open, weeping, purplish-red sores covered his legs. A putrid mess that he rarely cleaned drained from the sores. His only attention was to wrap his legs in dirty rags, but even this wasn’t a steady habit. Too drunk to care and too impaired to notice, the legs were betraying even his ability to walk more than a few feet. He was a prisoner in his tiny fiefdom, where he sat in the step-down doorway serving as sleeping quarters, store and cooking area.
Horseflies buzzed around him and did dive bombs at his legs as he swatted them away. The smell was that of rotten garbage, but it wasn’t refuse, it was him. He could be sniffed from several feet away as if he were a decomposing corpse, but he paid no attention. Those who sought his services managed to stifle their gag reflex as they approached.
Working girls, also known as prostitutes, looking to score a quick date with one of the Chinese kitchen workers at the back staircase to the upstairs restaurant, inevitably ended up turning and running. The overwhelming odor of Mossy’s rotting flesh arrived posthaste to their nostrils as they rounded the corner of the building.
Squeals were the usual immediate response. “Oh, oh, oh, owwwww.” Then, “What the hell is that stink? Somebody dead back here? No, no, no, I’m outa here.” Spiked heels flew as they wheeled around on the gravel and went clip-clopping down the concrete drive between the stores. Word got around, and only the newest and most naïve girls ventured that way again.
Mossy, always amused, found this sheer enjoyment that sent him into repeated waves of belly laughs interspersed with throaty coughs. But he was also disappointed. The Sneaky Pete didn’t completely kill his interest in female companionship, even if he had to pay for it. But they wouldn’t even oblige him for money.
You could smell the Sneaky Pete, too, that Mossy brewed. The alcohol had to be in the proximity of 100-150 proof and could be lethal or burn the soft flesh off the inside of someone’s mouth. Yes, it might be deadly, but no one had died. At least not yet. The sole reason for their remaining on this earth was that they couldn’t get enough Sneaky Pete to send them permanently on their way to whatever they thought awaited them in the afterlife.
And the supply of this precious nectar was limited to them by the price, which varied according to Mossy’s whim, and was quite often too high for more than one or two short gulps from a tin cup. There were no handouts or freebees when it came to what Mossy had for sale.
Others, who decided not to partake of Mossy’s drink, ended up trying their luck with antifreeze, equally harmful. I’d heard about these sudden deaths, but never saw one. Antifreeze was easy enough to cadge from the car repair bays just down from Mossy’s “quarters.” Desperate drunk men would wait for their moment and slip a container under their ragged coats. Then it was off to a cement loading dock to get stoked.
Other itinerant men victimized by alcohol consumption had tried embalming fluid, but that wasn’t right either, and the morgue wagon would be their final ride along with the occasional antifreeze drinkers. Then it was a quick trip to the morgue and off to Potter’s Field on Hart Island, close to Manhattan. A clanking backhoe would perform the final honors with several buckets full of moist island sandy dirt and a number stamped on the plain wooden box that held their remains.
Death registers kept by the city were full of the final tales of the men who had drunk the elixir of the auto industry. “Male, Caucasian, probable age mid-forties, found dead on the sidewalk near...” No name, no address, just a basic description of the corpse. They were picked up off streets, piers, loading docks and in the back of open tractor trailers parked along the river: inauspicious ends to lives of desperation and another mother’s child lost to that dreary graveyard.
No longer a person, someone’s son or relative, they were placed in bags and wooden pine boxes lined up in a long row with others and covered with the backhoes. Their grave diggers were men who gave no thought to their task and saw no need for respectful composure, often yelling obscene comments to others as they worked. No, this gravesite wasn’t a quiet place of repose for anyone.
Mossy had managed to cheat that fate and outlived the prognostications of medical personnel who had the misfortune of having him in their ER. Continuously drunk on his home brew, he was an extremely unpleasant, irascible fellow who never seemed to have a good day in him. At a moment’s notice, he would snap and viciously threaten anyone with extreme physical violence. And he meant it; it wasn’t an idle threat with Mossy. The sight of blood would have no effect on his vicious attacks and might egg him on.
The menaces would be accompanied by clumsy stumbling on his unsteady, diseased legs, and he grabbed anything in the area he could lay his hands on. No, he wasn’t too fast, but he could make up for it with strength.
Upset Mossy, and he would snatch a stick, a rock, a brick, anything. You were in for a blood fight, and he wouldn’t be a gentleman by any means. The Marquis of Queensbury rules were not in Mossy’s repertoire.
Amazingly, the Bottle Babies all tolerated him because of another crucial item he could provide them on a regular basis besides the Sneaky Pete. Mossy’s recipe for Mulligan Stew was incredibly simple, but it required a bit of group cooperation. He supplied the seasonings hidden deep within his lair. No one knew or cared where he had gotten them. The stew didn’t kill them, so they accepted his stew-making and all the ingredients. Amazingly, his memory for cooking had stabilized even with his alcohol-fueled haze.
Bring a contribution for the large tin can pot and you were entitled to have something to eat. Eating was the one exception Mossy made for maintaining some degree of civility toward his fellow alcoholics. The only requirement was that Mossy wouldn’t tolerate broccoli.
One of the Bottle Babies, the Butcher, had been given broccoli by the vegetable store after he had helped clean out their storeroom. This in and of itself was quite a task because the Butcher was a goof-off when it came to work.
Give him a task and it would never be completed. The man was a compendium of excuses. Frustrated, the store owners would give up and hand him a dollar or some vegetables and be thankful that he left, cursing them all the while. The Butcher had a foul mouth, too.
Curious thing about the Bottle Babies was that they never seemed to have any possessions with them. The Butcher had pockets on his pants in which I suppose he carried something, but he never had any bags or cans or sacks or anything that would contain his stuff of life. There were no shopping carts in which things could be thrown and wheeled around; there were no carts of any description, and I wondered: What did he have, and where did he keep it?
For all I knew, the only thing the Butcher had was everything that he had on his back at that moment. He always had his one crutch; he never wore his artificial leg. Pants were always rolled up and pinned on that missing limb with the large safety pin remaining extremely prominent. The Butcher knew how to arrange himself for greatest effect. Yes, he did wear a hat, always a hat.
I suppose he didn’t have very much hair on the top of his head, but I never got a chance to see that because he never removed that hat. And it was a dirty and poorly maintained hat. The rain must’ve come down on it many a day as well as snow and dirt and grit from the locomotive engines that sped by periodically, leaving black smoke that enveloped the ground around him. Standing in the midst of all that soot, he could not have kept anything clean, especially a hat.
Rube, another Bottle Baby, never had anything, either, but I always assumed that wherever he slept — I think it must’ve been in one of the stores — that’s where his stuff was stashed. No, I never asked Rube where he slept, where he ate, or what he did when he wasn’t working in the fish store, The Derby bar or even Horowitz Hardware. Rube always had a job, nothing full-time, just small part-time jobs for which he got paid in cash. He was reliable, he was honest, and he was a friend who played catch with me.
Once, while we were playing catch, he threw too hard, my concentration was off and the ball did not hit its designated mark, the glove. Instead, it crashed into my mouth, but I stifled the cry that came, even as I tasted the salty blood on my front teeth. Rube was my friend and I saw him running toward me, tears in his eyes as he implored, “Did I hurt you? Oh, God, did I hurt you?” It was OK and it was I who comforted him. There would be other days of catch for us now.
But on this day in question, the Butcher still had his quandary, where to get rid of this vegetable? Seemingly not knowing where to put the “payment” for his labors, the Butcher knew he couldn’t bring it for Mossy’s meal. Mossy hated the vegetable and had no self-control when forced to look at it.
“What the fuck is this shit you’re trying to cram up my ass?” The entire sentence came belching out in a slush of tobacco juice and poorly controlled, rotting dentition. Yes, Mossy also chewed tobacco and spit all over the area around him. Housekeeping wasn’t his strong suit, but what was?
“You want to kill me? Is that what you’re trying to do?” A declaration of war could have been thrown on the ground and anyone with an ounce of self-preservation would move back swiftly onto the gravel. And the Butcher didn’t want to entertain that gamble now; he wanted to eat. The bit of green would bring on a fight. So, thus, wanting to avoid the wrath of Mossy, he made a hasty retreat toward our house once he was given the vegetable by the shopkeeper.
“Here,” he said as he ambled, or rather hopped on his one good leg, over to the sturdy gate leading to our backyard. Draping himself over the gate, with a flick of the hand he attempted to present the package to my mother. The piercing look she trained on him should have put him off, but it didn’t.
My mother’s rule was that none of the Bottle Babies were permitted to come into the yard, a rule he knew well. In his outstretched, dirty hand, he held the plain paper bag much like a peace offering.
“I got this for you.” Of course, he wasn’t telling the truth but, when did he?
Reluctantly and tentatively, my mother took the bag just to get rid of him without any further interaction. Keeping the bag at a distance and peering into it, she saw what looked like green flowers with thick stalks. She wasn’t sure exactly what it was. Something edible?
“What is it?” I asked, thinking that we were about to be poisoned. Why in the world would I think we were going to be poisoned? Who knows. It just came out. Kids think the strangest things.
“I don’t know, but I think it’s broccoli.”
Copyright © 2023 by P. A. Farrell
