The last time I went to the Sixty-eighth Street Playhouse the usher wouldn’t let me in with a bar of Hershey’s chocolate in my hand. He said I couldn’t bring in food or drink and I’d have to consume it outside. Consume. He couldn’t say eat, and that’s one of the things that bothers me in the world the way ushers and people in uniforms in general always like to use big words. The Sixty-eighth Street Playhouse isn’t a bit like the Lyric Cinema in Limerick where you could bring in fish and chips or a good feed of pig’s feet and a bottle of stout if the humor was on you. The night they wouldn’t let me in with the chocolate bar I had to stand outside and gobble it with the usher glaring at me and he didn’t care that I was missing funny parts of the Marx Brothers. Now I have to carry my black raincoat from Ireland over my arm so that the usher won’t spot the bag with the lemon meringue pie or the ginger ale bottle stuck in a pocket.
The minute the film starts I try to go at my pie but the box crackles and people say, Shush, we’re trying to watch this film. I know they’re not the ordinary type of people who go to gangster films or musicals. These are people who probably graduated from college and live on Park Avenue and know every line of Hamlet. They’ll never say they go to movies, only films. I’ll never be able to open the box silently and my mouth is watering with the hunger and I don’t know what to do till a man sitting next to me says, Hi, slips part of his raincoat over my lap and lets his hand wander under it. He says, Am I disturbing you? and I don’t know what to say though something tells me take my pie and move away. I tell him, Excuse me, and go by him up the aisle and out to the men’s lavatory where I’m able to open my pie box in comfort without Park Avenue shushing me. I feel sorry over missing part of Hamlet but all they were doing up there on the screen was jumping around and shouting about a ghost.
Even though the men’s lavatory is empty I don’t want to be seen opening my box and eating my pie, so I sit on the toilet in the cubicle eating quickly so that I can get back to Hamlet as long as I don’t have to sit beside the man with the coat on his lap and the wandering hand. The pie makes my mouth dry and I think I’ll have a nice drink of ginger ale till I realize you have to have some class of a church key to lift off the cap. There’s no use going to an usher because they’re always barking and telling people they’re not supposed to be bringing in food or drink from the outside even if they’re from Park Avenue. I lay the pie box on the floor and decide the only way to knock the cap off the ginger ale bottle is to place it against the sink and give it a good rap with the back of my hand and when I do the neck of the bottle breaks and the ginger ale gushes up in my face and there’s blood on the sink where I cut my hand on the bottle and I feel sad with all the things happening to me that my pie is being drowned on the floor with blood and ginger ale and wondering at the same time will I ever be able to see Hamlet with all the troubles I’m having when a desperate-looking gray-haired man rushes in nearly knocking me over and steps on my pie box destroying it entirely. He stands at the urinal firing away, trying to shake the box off his shoe, and barking at me, Goddam, goddam, what the hell, what the hell. He stands away and swings his leg so that the pie box flies off his shoe and hits the wall all squashed and beyond eating. The man says, What the hell is going on here? and I don’t know what to tell him because it seems like a long story going all the way back to how excited I was weeks ago about coming to see Hamlet and how I didn’t eat all day because I had a delicious feeling about doing everything at the same time, eating my pie, drinking ginger ale, seeing Hamlet and hearing all the glorious speeches. I don’t think the man is in the mood from the way he dances from one foot to the other telling me the toilet is not a goddam restaurant, that I have no goddam business hanging around public bathrooms eating and drinking and I’d better get my ass outa there. I tell him I had an accident trying to open the ginger ale bottle and he says, Didn’t you ever hear of an opener or are you just off the goddam boat? He leaves the lavatory and just as I’m wrapping toilet paper around my cut the usher comes in and says there’s a customer complaint about my behavior in here. He’s like the gray-haired man with his goddam and what the hell and when I try to explain what happened he says, Get your ass outa here. I tell him I paid to see Hamlet and I came in here so that I wouldn’t be disturbing all the Park Avenue people around me who know Hamlet backward and forward but he says, I don’t give a shit, get out before I call the manager or the cops who will surely be interested in the blood all over the place.
Then he points to my black raincoat draped on the sink. Take that goddam raincoat outa here. Whaddya doin’ with a raincoat on a day there ain’t a cloud in the sky? We know the raincoat trick and we’re watching. We know the whole raincoat brigade. We’re on to your little queer games. You sit there lookin’ innocent and the next thing the hand is wandering over to innocent kids. So get your raincoat outa here, buddy, before I call the cops, you goddam pervert.
I take the broken ginger ale bottle with the drop left and walk down Sixty-eighth Street and sit on the steps of my rooming house till Mrs. Austin calls through the basement window there is to be no eating or drinking on the steps, cockroaches will come running from all over and people will say we’re a bunch of Puerto Ricans who don’t care where they eat or drink or sleep.
There is no place to sit anywhere along the street with landladies peering and watching and there’s nothing to do but to wander over to a park by the East River and wonder why America is so hard and complicated that I have trouble going to see Hamlet with a lemon meringue pie and a bottle of ginger ale.
6
The worst part of getting up and going to work in New York is the way my eyes are so infected I have to pull the lids apart with thumb and forefinger. I’m tempted to pick at the hard yellow crust but if I do the eyelashes will come away with it and leave my eyelids red and sore, worse than they were before. I can stand in the shower and let hot water run on my eyes till they feel warm and clean even if they’re still blazing red in my head. I try to freeze the red away with icy cold water but it never works. It just makes my eyeballs ache and things are bad enough without me going to the Biltmore lobby with an ache in the eyeball.
I could put up with the aching eyeballs if I didn’t have the soreness and the redness and the yellow ooze. At least people wouldn’t be staring at me as if I were some class of a leper.
It’s shameful enough going around the Palm Court in the black houseman’s uniform which means I’m just above the Puerto Rican dishwashers in the eyes of the world. Even the porters have a touch of gold on their uniforms and the doormen themselves look like admirals of the fleet. Eddie Gilligan, the union shop steward, says it’s a good thing I’m Irish or it’s down in the kitchen I’d be with the spics. That’s a new word, spics, and I know from the way he says it that he doesn’t like Puerto Ricans. He tells me Mr. Carey takes good care of his own people and that’s why I’m a houseman with a uniform instead of an apron down there with the PRs singing and yelling Mira mira all day. I’d like to ask him what’s wrong with singing when you’re washing dishes and yelling Mira mira when the humor is on you but I’m wary of asking questions for fear of being foolish. At least the Puerto Ricans are together down there singing and banging away on pots and pans, carried away with their own music and dancing around the kitchen till the bosses tell them cut it out. Sometimes I go down to the kitchen and they give me bits of leftover food and call me Frankie, Frankie, Irish boy, we teach you Sponish. Eddie Gilligan says I’m paid two dollars and fifty cents a week more than the dishwashers and I have opportunities for advancement they’ll never have because all they want to do is not learn English and make enough money to go back to Puerto Rico and sit under trees drinking beer and having big families because that’s all they’re good for, drinking and screwing till their wives are worn out and die before their time and their kids run the streets ready to come to New York and wash dishes and start the whole goddam thing over again and if they can’t get jobs we have to support them, you an’ me, so they can
sit on their stoops up in East Harlem playing their goddam guitars and drinking beer outa paper bags. That’s the spics, kid, and don’t you forget it. Stay away from that kitchen because they wouldn’t think twice about pissing in your coffee. He says he saw them pissing in the coffee urn that was being sent to a big lunch for the Daughters of the British Empire and the Daughters never guessed for one second they were drinking Puerto Rican piss.
Then Eddie smiles and laughs and chokes on his cigarette because he’s Irish-American and he thinks the PRs are great for what they did to the Daughters of the British Empire. He calls them PRs now instead of spics because they did something patriotic the Irish should have thought of in the first place. Next year he’ll piss in the coffee urns himself and laugh himself to death watching the Daughters drink coffee that’s Puerto Rican and Irish piss. He says it’s a great pity the Daughters will never know. He’d like to get up there on the balcony of the nineteenth-floor ballroom and make a general announcement, Daughters of the British Empire, you have just drank coffee filled with spick-mick piss and how does that feel after what you did to the Irish for eight hundred years? Oh, that’d be a sight, the Daughters clutching each other and throwing up all over the ballroom and Irish patriots dancing jigs in their graves. That’d be something, says Eddie, that’d be really something.
Now Eddie says maybe the PRs aren’t that bad at all. He wouldn’t want them marrying his daughter or moving into his neighborhood but you have to admit they’re musical and they send up some pretty good baseball players, you have to admit that. You go down to that kitchen and they’re always happy like kids. He says, They’re like the Negroes, they don’t take nothin’ serious. Not like the Irish. We take everything serious.
The bad days in the lobby are Thursday and Friday when the boys and girls meet and sit and drink and laugh, nothing on their minds but college and romance, sailing around in the summer, skiing in the winter, and marrying each other so that they’ll have children who will come to the Biltmore and do the same. I know they don’t even see me in my houseman’s uniform with my dustpan and broom and I’m glad because there are days my eyes are so red they look bloody and I dread it when a girl might say, Excuse me where is the rest room? It’s hard to point with your dustpan and say, Over there beyond the elevators, and keep your face turned away at the same time. I tried that with one girl but she went to the maître d’ and complained I was rude and now I have to look at everyone who asks a question and when they stare at me I blush so hard I’m sure my skin matches my eyes in the redness department. Sometimes I blush out of pure anger and I want to snarl at the people who stare but if I did I’d be fired on the spot.
They shouldn’t stare. They should know better the way their mothers and fathers are spending fortunes to make them educated and what’s the use of all that education if you’re so ignorant you stare at people just off the boat with red eyes? You’d think the professors would be standing in front of their classes telling them that if you go to the Biltmore Hotel lobby or any lobby you’re not to be staring at people with red eyes or one leg or any class of a disfigurement.
The girls stare anyway and the boys are worse the way they look at me and smile and nudge and pass remarks that make everyone laugh and I’d like to break my dustpan and broom over their heads till blood spurted and they begged me to stop and promise they’ll never again pass remarks on anyone’s sore eyes.
One day there’s a yelp from a college girl and the maître d’ rushes over. She’s crying and he’s moving things around on the table before her and looking under it, shaking his head. He calls across the lobby, McCourt, get over here right now. Did you clean up around this table?
I think I did.
You think you did? Goddammit, excuse me, miss, don’t you know?
I did, sir.
Did you remove a paper napkin?
I cleaned up. I emptied the ashtrays.
Paper napkin that was here. Did you take it?
I don’t know.
Well, lemme tell you something, McCourt. This young lady here is the daughter of the president of the Traffic Club that rents a huge space in this hotel and she had a paper napkin with a phone number from a Princeton boy and if you don’t find that piece of paper your ass is in hot water, excuse me, miss. Now what did you do with the trash you took away?
It’s gone down to the big garbage bins near the kitchen.
All right. Go down there and search for that paper napkin and don’t come back without it.
The girl who lost the napkin sobs and tells me her father has a lotta influence here and she wouldn’t want to be me if I don’t find that piece of paper. Her friends are looking at me and I feel my face is on fire with my eyes.
The maître d’ snaps at me again. Go get it, McCourt, and report back here.
The garbage bins by the kitchen are overflowing and I don’t know how I’m going to find a small piece of paper lost in all that waste, coffee grounds, bits of toast, fishbones, eggshells, grapefruit skins. I’m on my knees poking and separating with a fork from the kitchen where the Puerto Ricans are singing and laughing and banging on pots and that makes me wonder what I’m doing on my knees.
So I get up and go into the kitchen saying nothing to the Puerto Ricans calling to me, Frankie, Frankie, Irish boy, we teach you Sponish. I find a clean paper napkin, write a made-up phone number on it, stain it with coffee, hand it to the maître d’ who hands it to the girl with her friends cheering on all sides. She thanks the maître d’ and passes him a tip, a whole dollar, and my only sorrow is that I won’t be there when she calls that number.
7
There’s a letter from my mother to say times are hard at home. She knows my wages aren’t great and she’s grateful for the ten dollars every week but could I spare an extra few dollars for shoes for Michael and Alphie? She had a job taking care of an old man but he was a great disappointment the way he died unexpected when she thought he’d hang on till the New Year so that she’d have a few shillings for shoes and a Christmas dinner, ham or something with a bit of dignity in it. She says sick people shouldn’t hire people to take care of them and give them false hope of a job when they know very well they’re in the throes. There’s nothing coming in now but the money I’m sending and it looks as if poor Michael will have to leave school and get a job the minute he turns fourteen next year and that’s a shame and she’d like to know, Is this what we fought the English for that half the children of Ireland should be wandering street, field and boreen with nothing between them and their feet but the skin?
I’m already sending her the ten dollars out of the thirty-two I get at the Biltmore Hotel though it’s more like twenty-six when they deduct the Social Security and the income tax. After the rent I have twenty dollars and my mother gets ten of that and I have ten for food and the subway when it rains. The rest of the time I walk to save the nickel. Now and then I go mad with myself and go to a film at the Sixty-eighth Street Playhouse and I know enough to sneak in a Hershey bar or two bananas which is the cheapest food on earth. Sometimes when I peel my banana people from Park Avenue with sensitive noses will sniff and whisper to each other, Is that a banana I’m smelling? and the next thing is they’re threatening to complain to the management.
But I don’t care anymore. If they go to the usher to complain I’m not going to skulk in the men’s room eating my banana. I’ll go to the Democratic Party in the Biltmore Hotel and tell them I’m an American citizen with an Irish accent and why am I being tormented over eating a banana during a Gary Cooper film?
The winter might be coming in Ireland but it’s colder here and the clothes I brought from Ireland are useless for a New York winter. Eddie Gilligan says if that’s all I’m going to wear on the streets I’ll be dead before I’m twenty. He says if I’m not too proud I can go to that big Salvation Army place on the West Side and get all the winter clothes I need for a few dollars. He says make sure I get clothes that make me look like an American and not the Paddy-from-the-bog stuff
that makes me look like a turnip farmer.
But I can’t go to the Salvation Army now because of the fifteen-dollar international money order for my mother and I can’t get leftovers from the Puerto Ricans in the Biltmore kitchen anymore for fear they might catch my eye disease.
Eddie Gilligan says there’s talk about my eyes. He was called in by personnel because he’s the shop steward and they told him I’m never to go near the kitchen again in case I might touch a towel or something and leave all the Puerto Rican dishwashers and Italian cooks half blind with conjunctivitis or whatever I have. The only reason I’m kept on the job at all is that I was sent by the Democratic Party and they pay plenty for the big offices they rent in the hotel. Eddie says Mr. Carey might be a tough boss but he stands up for his own kind and tells personnel where to get off, tells them the minute they try to lay off a kid with bad eyes the Democratic Party will know about it and that will be the end of the Biltmore Hotel. They’ll see a strike that’ll bring out the whole goddam Hotel Workers’ Union. No more room service. No elevators. Eddie says, Fat bastards will have to walk and the chambermaids won’t be putting toilet paper in the bathrooms. Imagine that: fat old bastards stuck with nothing to wipe their asses and all because of your bad eyes, kid.
We’ll walk, says Eddie, the whole goddam union. We’ll close down every hotel in the city. But I gotta tell you they gave me the name of this eye doctor on Lexington Avenue. You gotta see him and report back in a week.
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