I’m to report on Monday morning to Mr. Carey on the twenty-second floor and he’ll put me to work right here in the Biltmore Hotel and aren’t I a lucky kid walking into a job right off the boat. That’s what she says and the priest tells her, This is a great country and the Irish owe everything to the Democratic Party, Maureen, and you just clinched another vote for the party if the kid here ever votes, ha ha ha.
The priest tells me go back to the hotel and he’ll come for me later to go to dinner. He says I can walk, that the streets run east and west, the avenues north and south, and I’ll have no trouble. Just walk across Forty-second to Eighth Avenue and south till I come to the New Yorker Hotel. I can read a paper or a book or take a shower if I promise to stay away from the bath mat, ha ha. He says, If we’re lucky we might meet the great Jack Dempsey himself. I tell him I’d rather meet Joe Louis if that’s possible and he snaps at me, You better learn to stick with your own kind.
At night the waiter at Dempsey’s smiles at the priest. Jack’s not here, Fawdah. He’s over to the Gawden checkin’ out a middleweight from New Joisey.
Gawden. Joisey. My first day in New York and already people are talking like gangsters from the films I saw in Limerick.
The priest says, My young friend here is from the Old Country and he’d prefer to meet Joe Louis. He laughs and the waiter laughs and says, Well, that’s a greenhorn talkin’, Fawdah. He’ll loin. Give him six months in this country and he’ll run like hell when he sees a darky. An’ what would you like to order, Fawdah? Little something before dinner?
I’ll have a double martini dry and I mean dry straight up with a twist.
And the greenhorn?
He’ll have a . . . well, what’ll you have?
A beer, please.
You eighteen, kid?
Nineteen.
You don’t look it though it don’t matter nohow long as you with the fawdah. Right, Fawdah?
Right. I’ll keep an eye on him. He doesn’t know a soul in New York and I’m going to settle him in before I leave.
The priest drinks his double martini and orders another with his steak. He tells me I should think of becoming a priest. He could get me a job in Los Angeles and I’d live the life of Riley with widows dying and leaving me everything including their daughters, ha ha, this is one hell of a martini excuse the language. He eats most of his steak and tells the waiter bring two apple pies with ice cream and he’ll have a double Hennessy to wash it down. He eats only the ice cream, drinks half the Hennessy and falls asleep with his chin on his chest moving up and down.
The waiter loses his smile. Goddam, he’s gotta pay his check. Where’s his goddam wallet? Back pocket, kid. Hand it to me.
I can’t rob a priest.
You’re not robbing. He’s paying his goddam check and you’re gonna need a taxi to take him home.
Two waiters help him to a taxi and two bellhops at the Hotel New Yorker haul him through the lobby, up the elevator and dump him on the bed. The bellhops tell me, A buck tip would be nice, a buck each, kid.
They leave and I wonder what I’m supposed to do with a drunken priest. I remove his shoes the way they do when someone passes out in the films but he sits up and runs to the bathroom where he’s sick a long time and when he comes out he’s pulling at his clothes, throwing them on the floor, collar, shirt, trousers, underwear. He collapses on the bed on his back and I can see he’s in a state of excitement with his hand on himself. Come here to me, he says, and I back away. Ah, no, Father, and he rolls out of the bed, slobbering and stinking of drink and puke and tries to grab my hand to put it on him but I back away even faster till I’m out the door to the hallway with him standing in the door, a little fat priest crying to me, Ah, come back, son, come back, it was the drink. Mother o’ God, I’m sorry.
But the elevator is open and I can’t tell the respectable people already in it and looking at me that I changed my mind, that I’m running back to this priest who, in the first place, wanted me to be polite to rich Kentucky Protestants so that I could get a job cleaning stables and now waggles his thing at me in a way that’s surely a mortal sin. Not that I’m in a state of grace myself, no I’m not, but you’d expect a priest to set a good example and not make a holy show of himself my second night in America. I have to step into the elevator and pretend I don’t hear the priest slobbering and crying, naked at the door of his room.
There’s a man at the front door of the hotel dressed up like an admiral and he says, Taxi, sir. I tell him, No, thanks, and he says, Where you from? Oh, Limerick. I’m from Roscommon myself, over here four years.
I have to ask the man from Roscommon how to get to East Sixty-eighth Street and he tells me walk east on Thirty-fourth Street which is wide and well lit till I come to Third Avenue and I can get the El or if I’m anyway lively I can walk straight up till I come to my street. He tells me, Good luck, stick with your own kind and watch out for the Puerto Ricans, they all carry knives and that’s a known fact, they got that hot blood. Walk in the light along the edge of the sidewalk or they’ll be leppin’ at you from dark doorways.
Next morning the priest calls Mrs. Austin and tells her I should come get my suitcase. He tells me, Come in, the door is open. He’s in his black suit sitting on the far side of the bed with his back to me and my suitcase is just inside the door. Take it, he says. I’m going to a retreat house in Virginia for a few months. I don’t want to look at you and I don’t want to see you ever again because what happened was terrible and it wouldn’t have happened if you’d used your head and gone off with the rich Protestants from Kentucky. Good-bye.
It’s hard to know what to say to a priest in a bad mood with his back to you who’s blaming you for everything so all I can do is go down in the elevator with my suitcase wondering how a man like that who forgives sins can sin himself and then blame me. I know if I did something like that, getting drunk and bothering people to put their hands on me, I’d say I did it. That’s all, I did it. And how can he blame me just because I refused to talk to rich Protestants from Kentucky? Maybe that’s the way priests are trained. Maybe it’s hard listening to people’s sins day in day out when there’s a few you’d like to commit yourself and then when you have a drink all the sins you’ve heard explode inside you and you’re like everyone else. I know I could never be a priest listening to those sins all the time. I’d be in a constant state of excitement and the bishop would be worn out shipping me off to the retreat house in Virginia.
3
When you’re Irish and you don’t know a soul in New York and you’re walking along Third Avenue with trains rattling along on the El above there’s great comfort in discovering there’s hardly a block without an Irish bar: Costello’s, the Blarney Stone, the Blarney Rose, P. J. Clarke’s, the Breffni, the Leitrim House, the Sligo House, Shannon’s, Ireland’s Thirty-Two, the All Ireland. I had my first pint in Limerick the day before I turned sixteen and it made me sick and my father nearly destroyed the family and himself with the drink but I’m lonely in New York and I’m lured in by Bing Crosby on jukeboxes singing “Galway Bay” and blinking green shamrocks the likes of which you’d never see in Ireland.
There’s an angry-looking man behind the end of the bar in Costello’s and he’s saying to a customer, I don’t give a tinker’s damn if you have ten pee haitch dees. I know more about Samuel Johnson than you know about your hand and if you don’t comport yourself properly you’ll be out on the sidewalk. I’ll say no more.
The customer says, But.
Out, says the angry man. Out. You’ll get no more drink in this house.
The customer claps on his hat and stalks out and the angry man turns to me. And you, he says, are you eighteen?