ABSTRACT
Joe Gould is a blithe and emaciated little man who has been a notable in the cafeterias, diners, barrooms, and dumps of Greenwich Village for a quarter of a century. He sometimes brags rather wryly that he is the last of the bohemians. “All the others fell by the wayside,” he says. “Some are in the grave, some are in the loony bin, and some are in the advertising business.” Gould's life is by no means carefree; he is constantly tormented by what he calls “the three H's”—homelessness, hunger, and hangovers. He sleeps on benches in subway stations, on the floor in the studios of friends, and in quarter-a-night flophouses on the Bowery. Once in a while he trudges up to one of Father Divine's Extension Heavens in lower Harlem and gets a night's lodging for fifteen cents. He is five feet four and he hardly ever weighs more than ninety-five pounds. Not long ago he told a friend that he hadn't eaten a square meal since June, 1936, when he bummed up to Cambridge and attended a banquet during a reunion of the Harvard class of 1911, of which he is a member. “I'm the foremost authority in the U.S. on the subject of doing without,” he says. He tells people that he lives on “air, self-esteem, cigarette butts, cowboy coffee, fried-egg sandwiches, and ketchup.” Cowboy coffee is black coffee without sugar. After finishing a sandwich, Gould customarily empties a bottle or two of ketchup on his plate and eats it with a spoon. The countermen in the Jefferson Diner, on Village Square, which is one of his hangouts, gather up the ketchup bottles and hide them the moment he puts his head in the door. “I don't particularly like the confounded stuff,” he says, “but I make it a practice to eat all I can get. It's the only grub I know of that's free of charge.”
