The monkey, the snake and Rose Gridinsky

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The Monkey, the snake and Rose Gridinski
by Stephen D. Gross

What gives a neighborhood character and distinction is not so much the flora or the architecture so much as the people who live there. Inwood, at Manhattan's northern tip was, when I lived there in the Fifties, mostly Irish Catholic with a liberal sprinkling of Jews, a few Greeks and Poles, and one very quiet Black family.
Looking like a pebble-skinned lizard, Tenth Avenue with its cobblestones and trolley tracks lay beneath the rickety 7th Ave. El which rumbled past the city train yards, the Harlem River, and a million six-story tenements on its way up to Van Cortlandt Park. Three immense smokestacks which continuously belched noxious gases in the direction of the Kingsbridge Veterans Hospital crowned the sanitation department's huge charnel-house of rusty Kelvinators and broken toys. Flatulent buses wheezed up and down Upper Broadway day and night mixing with the metallic waterfall rush of the elevated trains' ebb and flow through the old wooden platform serving the 215th street station.

As is the case with most old neighborhoods, Inwood has been around long enough to develop legends and hero(in)es all its own. The following is a small contribution to the written legacy of Inwood.

In the six-story building next to ours, there lived a caring gamin of a woman, a dynamo named Rose Gridinsky. She loved animals and had an amazing reservoir of patience when it came to their health and well-being.
My mother told me she once got into the elevator in the adjacent building, the one in which Rose lives, on her way up to visit her sister who was also named Rose. There in the elevator was Rose Gridinsky "shushing her" and urging her to be quiet and not awaken her pet collie which was asleep on the floor of the car. The collie was still anesthetized after a visit to the vet and Rose didn't want her disturbed. When Mom took the elevator down two hours later, there was Rose, still riding the elevator, with her collie snoozing contentedly.

And so it was, that when a friend brought her a squirrel monkey one day, she was more than happy to nurture it and give it a warm, loving home. As much as Rose wanted that monkey to be a tiny, little person, it wasn't, and this is what led to the incident at The Lakes one fragrant April Sunday.

The bar closest to our apartment house was called the Lakes of Killarney Tavern and it was very popular, particularly on Sundays. After the neighborhood throngs were done with their Hail Marys and genuflection over at the Church of the Good Shepherd, most of them would seek out a bit of porter at McSherry's Charcoal Pit, the Cork Inn, Flannery's or another of the nine thousand local ale houses. The Lakes was a block from the church and had a new Admiral TV which afforded those who could focus a 17-inch view of the Polo Grounds and Ebbetts Field. Rose lived on the fifth floor, directly above the bar, in an apartment facing Broadway. Figuring it was a warm sunny day and therefore a good day to bathe her monkey, Rose got herself a tub of lukewarm soapy and a washcloth and got down to scrubbing. The monkey was unused to all this washing business and nowhere near as patient as Rose...so he withstood a couple of strokes with the washcloth and then promptly bit Rose's finger. The unsuspecting Rose howled mightily in surprise, and the monkey decided she had taken leave of her senses. So he left. It's a long way from the fifth floor to the cracked pavement below but the simian had it under control. He'd been a city dweller long enough to know that all buildings hosted a maze of parasitic iron branches called fire escapes. It took him no time at all to reach the bustling sidewalk below. Sunday strollers were stunned to suddenly find wildlife among them. A few shrieked in horror. Sensing panic and danger in these large, irrational creatures, the monkey took one look around and decided to get the Hell out of there.

Meanwhile, the post-novena crowd was well into it at the Lakes. The rancid bar was littered with empty bottles of Ballantine and Rheingold, the local bookmaker, with an Old Gold pasted to his lower lip was explaining where he got his latest black eye, O'Brien the cop was boosting a free sandwich, and the neighborhood kids were hitting Frankie the Cook up for handsful of salty pretzels. Little Frankie, a recent immigrant from Italy, sweated over a bottomless pot of spaghetti in the rank kitchen, and was responsible for keeping the pretzel bowls on the bar full. Every youngster in the neighborhood knew he adored kids so two or three times a day we would all run back into the kitchen where Frankie would stuff our fists with all the pretzels we could hold. The season had recently opened and the local rooters craned their necks in the direction of the new Admiral where the Giants and the Dodgers were playing some very serious baseball Pretzel crumbs mingled with saw dust and ciggie butts, the smell of cheap lager put an edge on the stale, motionless air, and the April sun rose high over the tar roofs on upper Broadway.

Fearing for his tiny life, the monkey whirled around on the pavement looking for an avenue of escape. Rose Gridinsky screamed, pointed, and issued orders from her post at her fifth floor window. By now people in the street were jumping and hollering and trying to figure out what Rose was trying to say. The monkey saw a cave; some sort of opening that led to a dark place where he could hide and find sanctuary from these wailing monsters. He plunged ahead, right through the open door and into the Lakes of Sligo Tavern. An eerie hush enveloped the room.

Rose Gridinsky continued to shout instructions from her perch on the fifth floor . My mother was coming back from a shmooze session with her friends on the park benches and walked into the midst of the tumult. She saw and heard her friend, Rose, shrieking and yelled up at her, "what happened?". Rose screamed down to her that her monkey was loose and then proceeded to relate to her, from a height of about seventy feet, the story of Alger the snake. It was remarkably, spookily similar to what was happening at that very moment with the escaped monkey. If you want to hear about Alger, stick around until after we finish with the monkey.

Rose was a lively person and a very fast talker, so she was able to relate this entire episode to my mother from her fifth floor window in just a few short minutes. Meanwhile, the brief, heavy silence in the Lakes of Sligo was about to come to an end.
Mr. Petersen, who owned the clock shop two doors down was sitting at the end of the bar near the door, and was the first to see the monkey. A big favorite of every kid in the neighborhood, Petersen carried hundreds of cuckoo clocks in his shop which he dutifully kept well -wound and in sync with one another so that they squawked, cheeped, and chimed the hour roughly at the same time. If you timed your visit to his shop just right, you would be treated to one of the grandest cacophonies ever to play Broadway. Some of the timepieces featured kinetic displays more complex than birds such as lumberjacks sawing wood and a hatchet-wielding, bonneted fish-wife chasing her lazy husband around a woodland cabin. What Petersen did in the repair shop in back was both a mystery and a source of much animated discussion. The older teens swore Petersen carved lewd figures of naked nuns and masked priests which he made to leap wildly in and out of clock faces. A few of the older men such as One-Eye Reilly claimed to have seen Petersen at the post office looking furtively over his shoulder, while sending well-tuned clockworks in plain brown wrappers ("and jayzus knows what else") to some address in Belfast. Reilly claimed "Petersen' wasn't his real name at all, that his name was Jimmy Phelan and he'd been "active as a 'Patriot' for a long time". Had me fooled! Petersen cared more about the goings and comings at the Lakes than he did about baseball so he generally sat at the end of the bar close to the front door and happened to be watching the street when the monkey bounced into the smoky room. Unable to accept the possibility of such an animal leaping onto a bar on upper Broadway, Petersen instead must have believed it was some kind of insidious explosive device because, word has it, he yelled, "look out!", jumped off his stool and dashed outside.

Flanagan the Bookie had been jumpy and skittish all morning.(he owed some Westies a bundle) and was making a big show out of nursing his latest shiner. While one hand tenderly rubbed the discolored patch around his eye the other nervously tapped the ash from the end of his Lucky Strike. Out of the corner of the same eye that he was attempting to keep focused on Duke Snider, Flanagan spied a dark form move jerkily atop the bar just as Petersen exploded off his stool. Reflexively fending off what must be a terrorist attack, Flanagan quickly threw both arms up to protect his face. With the knuckles of one hand he smartly rapped the cheekbone below his injured eye, while at the same time poking what was left of his Lucky into his other eye.
His scream of surprise and pain awoke the old firehorse spirit asleep within O'Brien the Cop's breast. O'Brien was about six-foot-four, with a beet-colored face and a full head of snowy white hair. Since O'Brien "kept his eye on things" around the neighborhood, he and his wife got into movies, ball games, and shows for free and seldom had to pay for meals or groceries. The O'Briens didn't trust a baby-sitter with their son Joey (who at age twelve was already six-foot-one), so they dragged him around with them wherever they went, which usually meant he didn't get to sleep until three in the morning. Joey was asthmatic, adenoidal and allergic to almost everything and spent most of his class time hours at Good Shepherd either scratching, snuffling or asleep. Behavior of this sort usually resulted in bloody knuckles and detention, but Joey was the son of a cop. So the Brothers put up with his asthmatic snoring and instead laid their yardsticks on somebody else's neck...

So Joey, Jr. was sitting in the Lakes with Big Joe, stuffing his freckled face with pretzels and Pepsi when he saw his father lurch and blare. Some folks yell, some holler, others mewl and still others scream or shriek. O'Brien the Cop blared. It was an unintelligible stentorian blast that sounded like a blend of rusty old tugboat horns, and desperate elephants in heat. Mrs. Bramley once described it as a chorus of constipated Sumo wrestlers trying out for the part of Eliza Doolittle. This blare not only scared the hell out of the poor monkey (who had never heard such a thing), but most of the people living on that part of upper Broadway. (After finally conceding, months later, that he did in fact 'blare', O'Brien proudly referred to it as his "personal best"). Joey, Jr., recognizing the blare as a harbinger of disaster, reacted immediately by going into a semi-comatose state. His Irish eyes stopped smiling and became flat and glassy and his mouth, packed with partially-chewed pretzels which he could no longer swallow, laboriously opened and closed like a grouper on reds.

Fortunately, Mrs. O'Brien, who's asthma made her sound like a busy dry cleaner's, had gone home earlier because the smoke in the Lakes bothered her. The wife of a cop and the mother of a sickly child, she tended toward hysteria and was stiflingly pious. Just after my mother's sister Blanche succumbed to cancer Maggie O'Brien told her, "Don't feel bad Pauline, God just needed another angel". A woman of infinite patience, Mom acted as if the good news cheered her right up.
Having never before been confronted with an even remotely similar situation, Big Joe dealt with it by making mouth movements which were remarkably similar to Joey Junior's. For a few seconds, in fact, it appeared that the big guy was mocking his son. But that wasn't the case; Big Joe was just not used to thinking. Now he had to weigh the gravity of his son's attack against his duty (albeit, retired) to protect the local publicans from this obviously dangerous beast. Grabbing Joey's arm O'Brien yelled to no one in particular, "I think I better bring Joey up to the Missus!" and was out in the bright April sunlight before anyone could blink.

By now the panicking monkey had knocked over several Ballantine Ales ("purity, body, and flavor!", decried their labels) and was flinging his feces at whomever moved, as frightened or angry monkeys are wont to do. The few remaining customers were ducking and laughing except for Kelly the bartender. His attitude soured when one well-placed handful of monkey-doo splattered all over Dodger catcher Roy Campanella's face via the Admiral's 17" screen.
Most of the Lakes of Sligo's patrons had made it to the safety of the giant sycamore outside and were standing in the dappled shadows with one eye on Rose Gridinsky and the other on the action inside the dusky grill. Rose had come down from her fifth floor perch and planned to take the monkey's rescue into her own hands. In the doorway of the bar's kitchen stood little Frankie who had left his spaghetti to see what the ruckus was about. His curls lay in a sweaty tangle and he brandished a big wooden spoon in one hand while he wiped the other on his sauce-smeared apron.

Possibly tuning in to Frankie's innate kindness or perhaps sensing that here was someone who could offer sanctuary, the simian leaped off the bar and into Frankie's arms just as Rose walked through the Lakes' door. Frankie did what he usually does when he's set upon by Little People which is, he shoved a bunch of pretzels into the monkey's tiny hand. The monk jumped onto a nearby stool and was inhaling his third pretzel when Rose rushed over and embraced him. Cooing comfortingly, she quickly wheeled and stepped out onto a sidewalk abuzz with the stunned and curious. Without hesitation Rose bounced up the front steps and into her apartment house and rode the elevator back up to her fifth floor apartment.
Half the people who were in the tavern that morning swear there never was a monkey at all - they claim that certain regular patrons suffering from delirium tremens imagined the whole thing. No one ever called Rose to demand payment for damages and breakage, and only one or two people (my mother included) asked her how her monkey was doing. Of course it was very happy to be home in the safety of Rose's sanctuary, but as far as most people who were there that day are concerned, nothing unusual or strange happened at all. .Just ask them. They'll swear It was just an ordinary After-Church Sunday drinking beer and watching baseball at the Lakes of Killarney Bar and Grill.

If you're still with me and would like to hear about Rosie's snake, here's the story:
It seems, recounted Rose, that her neighbor's son, Jason, found and brought home from the park a harmless garter snake. When Rose's neighbor discovered it in her son's toy box, her usual propensity for hospitality swiftly abandoned her. Naturally, Rose adopted the snake, naming it Alger after Alger Hiss, the well-known Nazi spy. After a few weeks of affectionate exchanges between the pair, Rose noticed the snake's abdomen was slowly swelling and decided the little reptile was pregnant. To ease Alger's labor Rose emptied a Breakstone's cottage cheese box and made a little lying-in bed for her.. She placed the wooden box on the window sill where the mommie-to-be could enjoy the sounds of car horns and air brakes as well as the occasional freshets that blew west off the river. Rose must have thought her cheese box was so comfy and appealing, Alger would just kick back and not even think of leaving. Alger apparently didn't agree. She might have been drawn to the flies in the web at the top of the window. More likely she was just seeking the warmth of the sunbaked windowsill. Rose turned back to her charge in time to see just the tip of Alger's tail as she slipped over the ledge.
Up to this point this all sounds quite odd, but given Rose's propensity for nurturing critters, it's really quite believable. But what happened next might be hard to swallow unless you knew Rosie and how straightforward she was. A very happy, perky woman, she was about as naive and simple as they come.

As poor Alger's writhing body pitched toward her destiny, Rose explained to mom, God must have decided that she didn't want to waste a perfectly good snake. God is frugal. God is good. Quite lost in thought, a lady slowly pushed her baby stroller down Broadway. God also has a sense of humor. A rope drops mysteriously from the cloudless sky and thuds firmly against her right shoulder and breast. An shocking event under any circumstances and enough to squeeze a first rate yell out of anyone. The woman was about half way through a resounding inter-borough shout when the rope from the sky lifted its little head and looked her in her saucer-sized eye.

To hear Mr. L. Dominic Shapira, the druggist, tell it, she was like a weasel on methedrine. She jumped about eight feet in the air and amplified her shout into a concrete-cracker that vibrated his plate glass window. "All I could think about was, 'save the poor girl, save her!', he told people later. "I'm a professional and I just acted on instinct". He rushed out of his drug store and grabbed Alger from around the wildly twitching woman's shoulder, and rushing back inside he ran to the bathroom in the rear and shook Alger off his arm and into the toilet which he immediately flushed without looking into it. Slamming the lid down, Mr. Shapira then rushed back outside to see if he could help the hysterical young mother who was still screaming. Bordering on hysteria herself, Rose reached the street just as Mr. L. Dominic was exiting his shop for the second time. Yes, yes the woman is alright now, no harm done, so where's my Alger?, she wanted to know. Between the rise and ebb of noise Mr. Shapira impatiently motioned with his arm toward his shop and Rose heard the word, "toilet". Fearing the worst, she raced inside, into the back room and lifted the commode's lid. There was this little snake face staring up at her affecting as annoyed and pissed off a look as a snake can manage with those expressionless eyes. So Alger's tale ends happily. Except the five-story fall, the horrendous screaming and the good soaking she got apparently caused Alger to miscarry because she never did have any baby snakes.