He tells me he went to confession to a bishop in Virginia and even though he received absolution and spent four months in work and prayer he feels it wasn’t enough. He has given up his parish and he’ll spend the rest of his days with the poor Mexicans and Negroes in Los Angeles. He calls for the bill, tells me he never wants to see me again, it’s too painful, but he’ll remember me in his Masses. He says I should be careful of the Irish curse, the drink, and whenever I’m tempted to sin I should meditate like him on the purity of the Virgin Mary, good luck, God bless, go to night school, and he’s into a taxi to Idlewild Airport.
There are days the rain is so heavy I have to spend a dime on the subway and I see people my own age with books and bags that say Columbia, Fordham, NYU, City College, and I know I want to be one of them, a student.
I know I don’t want to spend years in the Biltmore Hotel setting up banquets and meetings and I don’t want to be the houseman cleaning up in the Palm Court. I don’t even want to be a busboy getting a share of the waiters’ tips which they get from the rich students who drink their gin and tonic, talk about Hemingway and where should they have dinner and should they go to Vanessa’s party on Sutton Place, it was such a bore last year.
I don’t want to be houseman where people look at me as if I were part of a wall.
I see the college students in the subway and I dream that some day I’ll be like them, carrying my books, listening to professors, graduating with a cap and gown, going on to a job where I’ll wear a suit and tie and carry a briefcase, go home on the train every night, kiss the wife, eat my dinner, play with the kids, read a book, have the excitement with the wife, go to sleep so that I’ll be rested and fresh the next day.
I’d like to be a college student in the subway because you can see from the books they’re carrying their heads must be stuffed with all kinds of knowledge, that they could sit down with you and chat forever about Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson and Dostoyevsky. If I could go to college I’d make sure to ride the subways and let people see my books so that they could admire me and wish they could go to college, too. I’d hold up the books to let people see I was reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It must be grand to be a student with nothing to do but listen to professors, read in libraries, sit under campus trees and discuss what you’re learning. It must be grand to know you’ll be getting a degree that puts you ahead of the rest of the world, that you’ll marry a girl with a degree and you’ll be sitting up in bed the rest of your life having great chats about the important matters.
But I don’t know how I’ll ever get a college degree and rise in the world with no high school diploma and two eyes like piss holes in the snow, as everyone tells me. Some old Irishmen tell me there’s nothing wrong with hard work. Many a man made his way in America by the sweat of his brow and his strong back and it’s a good thing to learn your station in life and not be getting above yourself. They tell me that’s why God put the pride at the top of the Seven Deadly Sins so that young fellas like me won’t be getting off the boat with big notions. There’s plenty of work in this country for anyone who wants to earn an honest dollar with his two hands and the sweat of his brow and no getting above himself.
The Greek in the diner on Third Avenue tells me his cleaning-up Puerto Rican quit on him and would I like to work an hour every morning, come in at six, sweep out the place, mop it, clean out the toilets. I could have an egg, a roll, a cup of coffe and two dollars and, who knows, it might lead to something permanent. He says he likes the Irish, they’re like the Greeks, and that’s because they came from Greece a long time ago. That’s what a professor at Hunter College told him though when I said this to Eddie Gilligan at the hotel he said the Greek and the professor were full of shit, that the Irish were always there on their little island since the beginning of time and what the hell do Greeks know anyway? If they knew anything they wouldn’t be slinging hash in restaurants and babbling in their own language that no one understands.
I don’t care where the Irish came from with the Greek feeding me every morning and paying me two dollars adding up to ten for the week, five for my mother and her shoes and five for me so that I can get proper clothes for myself and not look like Paddy-off-the-boat.
I’m lucky to have an extra few dollars a week especially after Tom Clifford knocked on my door at Mrs. Austin’s and said, Let’s get the hell outa here. He says there’s a huge room the size of an apartment for rent up on Third Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street over a shop called Harry’s Hats and if we shared the rent we’d still be paying six dollars a week and we wouldn’t have Mrs. Austin watching every move. We could bring in anything we liked, food, drink, girls.
Yeah, says Tom, girls.
The new room has a front and a back and looks out on Third Avenue where we can watch the El pass right before us. We wave at the passengers and discover they don’t mind waving back in the evening on the way home from work though very few wave in the morning because of the bad mood they’re in going to work.
Tom works on the night shift at an apartment building and that leaves me on my own in the room. It’s the first time in my life I ever had the feeling of freedom, no bosses, no Mrs. Austin telling me put out the light. I can walk around the neighborhood and look at the German shops, bars, cafés and all the Irish bars on Third Avenue. There are Irish dances at the Caravan, the Tuxedo, the Leitrim House, the Sligo House. Tom won’t go to the Irish dances. He wants to meet German girls because of his three happy years in Germany and because he’s able to speak German. He says the Irish can kiss his ass and I don’t understand that because every time I hear Irish music I feel tears coming and I want to be standing on the banks of the Shannon looking at swans. It’s easy for Tom to talk to German girls or Irish girls when he’s in the mood but it’s never easy for me to talk to anyone because I know they’re looking at my eyes.
Tom had a better education in Ireland than I did and he could go to college if he liked. He says he’d rather make money, that’s what America is there for. He tells me I’m a fool for breaking my ass working at the Biltmore Hotel when I could look around and find a job with a decent wage.
He’s right. I hate working at the Biltmore Hotel and cleaning up for the Greek every morning. When I clean the toilet bowls I feel angry with myself because it reminds me of the time I had to empty the chamber pot of my mother’s cousin Laman Griffin for a few pennies and the loan of his bike. And I wonder why I’m so particular about the toilet bowls, why I want them to be spotless when I could give them a swish of the mop and let them be. No, I have to use plenty of detergent and make them sparkle as if people were going to have their dinners out of them. The Greek is pleased though he gives me strange looks that say, Very nice but why? I could tell him this extra ten dollars a week and the morning food is a gift and I don’t want to lose it. Then he wants to know what I’m doing here in the first place. I’m a nice Irish boy, I know English, I’m intelligent, and why am I cleaning toilet bowls and working in hotels when I could be getting an education. If he knew English he’d be in a university studying the wonderful history of Greece and Plato and Socrates and all the great Greek writers. He wouldn’t be cleaning toilet bowls. Anyone who knows English should not be cleaning toilet bowls.
11
Tom dances with Emer, a girl at the Tuxedo Ballroom, who is there with her brother, Liam, and when Tom and Liam go for a drink she dances with me even though I don’t know how. I like her because she’s kind even when I step on her feet and when she presses my arm or my back to go in the right direction for fear of colliding with the men and women of Kerry, Cork, Mayo and other counties. I like her because she laughs easily even though I feel sometimes she’s laughing at my awkward ways. I’m twenty years of age and I never in my life took a girl to a dance or a film or even a cup of tea and now I have to learn how to do it. I don’t even know how to talk to girls because we never had one in the house except my mother. I don’t know anything after growing up in Limerick and listening to priests on Sundays thundering against dancing and walking out the road with girls.