One man‘s NYC

From Big City Blues (dir. Meryn LeRoy, 1932), screenplay by Ward Morehouse and Lillie Hayward, from New York Town, an unproduced Morehouse play. Young Bud Reeves (Eric Linden) is waiting on a train to take him from small-town Indiana to New York City. He's going to stay, he says. The station agent (Grant Mitchell) went there twenty-five years ago and would never go back, he says, not even if they made him the commissioner of public works. “I don’t think you really got to know New York,” says Bud. And the station agent replies:

“I wonder if I didn't. I was a telegraph operator and a process server. I was a part-time lifeguard at Rockaway Beach. I worked on the BMT and drove a taxi and was a rubber in a Turkish bath. Had a job on the dayshift in a hymnbook factory and on the night shift in a Bowery flophouse, a job they handed me to let me work out my rent. I drew wages in a hash house and a c---- laundry and a pet shop. For a week I sorted stiffs in the morgue, and for a month worked on a coal barge. I delivered gin for a drugstore in Astoria and had my own ice business in the Bronx. I met cramps and bootleggers and bishops and reporters and gun men and borough presidents. And you, you come a-tellin’ me I didn’t get to know New York.”

[A train whistle blows.]

“That’s 26. She’s on time too.”

[I’ve omitted a word that I don’t want here. Jonathon Green glosses cramp : “an unpleasant, unpopular person.” Tramps might make better sense, but the word is definitely cramps.]