One of the Blue Cross trainees passes me on his way back to the office.
Yo, McCourt, it’s two o’clock. You coming?
He says yo because he drove a tank in a cavalry outfit in Korea and that’s how they talked when the cavalry had horses. He says yo because that tells the world he wasn’t an ordinary infantry soldier.
We walk to the insurance building and I know I can’t go through that cathedral entrance. I know I’m not cut out for the world of insurance.
Yo, McCourt, come on, it’s late. Puglio will have a shit fit.
I’m not going in.
What?
Not going in.
I walk away down Fourth Avenue.
Yo, McCourt, you crazy, man? You gonna be fired. Shit, man, I gotta go.
I keep going in the bright July sun till I reach Union Square where I sit and wonder what have I done. They say if you quit a job in any big firm or get fired all the other firms are informed and doors are closed to you forever. Blue Cross is a big firm and I might as well give up hope of ever having a big job in any big firm. But it’s a good thing I quit now rather than wait to have the lies on my application form discovered. Mr. Puglio told us that was such a serious offense you’d not only be fired but Blue Cross would demand repayment of the wages paid for the training session and on top of that your name is sent to all the other big firms with a little red flag waving at the top of the page to warn them. That little red flag, said Mr. Puglio, means you’re forever barred from the American corporate system and you might as well move to Russia.
Mr. Puglio loved talking like that and I’m glad I’m away from him, leaving Union Square to stroll down Broadway with all the other New Yorkers who don’t seem to have anything to do. It’s easy to see that some have that little red flag on their names, men with beards and jewelry and women with long hair and sandals who would never be allowed inside the door of the American corporate system.
There are New York places I’m seeing today for the first time, City Hall, the Brooklyn Bridge in the distance, a Protestant church, St. Paul’s, which has the grave of Thomas Addis Emmet, brother of Robert who was hanged for Ireland, and farther down Broadway, Trinity Church, looking the length of Wall Street.
Down where the Staten Island Ferries come and go there’s a bar, the Bean Pot, where I have the appetite for a whole liverwurst sandwich and a stein of beer because my tie is off and my jacket is over the back of a chair and I feel relieved I escaped with the little red flag on my name. There’s something about finishing the liverwurst sandwich that tells me I’ve lost Emer forever. If she ever hears of my troubles with the American corporate system she might shed a tear of pity for me though she’ll be grateful in the long run she settled for the insurance man from the Bronx. She’ll be secure knowing she’s insured for everything, that she can’t take a step that’s not covered by insurance.
It’s a nickel for the Staten Island Ferry and the sight of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island reminds me of the morning in October 1949 I sailed into New York on the Irish Oak, past the city and up the river to anchor that night in Poughkeepsie and on the next day to Albany where I took the train back down to New York.
That was nearly four years ago and here I am on the Staten Island Ferry with my tie stuffed in the pocket of the jacket hanging from my shoulder. Here I am without a job in the world, my girlfriend gone, and the little red flag waving on my name. I could go back to the Biltmore Hotel and take up where I left off, cleaning the lobby, scouring toilet bowls, laying carpet, but no, a man who was a corporal can never sink that low again.
Looking at Ellis Island and an old wooden ferry rotting between two buildings makes me think of all the people who passed here before me, before my father and mother, all the people escaping the Famine in Ireland, all the people from all over Europe landing here with their hearts in their mouths for fear they might be caught with diseases and sent back and when you think of that a great moaning moves across the water from Ellis Island and you wonder if the people sent back had to return with their babies to places like Czechoslovakia and Hungary. People who were sent back like that were the saddest people in all of history, worse than people like me who might have bad eyes and the little red flag but are still secure with the American passport.
They won’t let you stay on the ferry when it docks. You have to go inside, pay your nickel and wait for the next ferry and while I’m there I might as well have a beer at the terminal bar. I keep thinking about my mother and father sailing into this harbor over twenty-five years ago and as I sail back and forth on the ferry, six times, having a beer at each end, I keep thinking of the people with diseases who were sent back and that makes me so sad I leave the ferry altogether to call Tom Clifford at Port Warehouses and ask him to meet me at the Bean Pot so that I’ll know how to get home to the small apartment in Queens.
He meets me at the Bean Pot and when I tell him the liverwurst sandwiches here are delicious he says he’s finished with liverwurst, he’s moving on. Then he laughs and tells me I must have had a few, that I’m having trouble getting my tongue around the word liverwurst and I tell him, no, it’s the day I’ve had with Puglio and the Blue Cross and the airless room and the little red flag and the ones who were sent back, the saddest of all.
He doesn’t know what I’m talking about. He tells me my eyes are crossing in my head, put on my jacket, home to Queens and into the bed.
Mr. Campbell Groel takes me back at Port Warehouses and I’m glad to be getting decent wages again, seventy-five dollars a week going up to seventy-seven for operating the forklift truck two days a week. Regular platform work means you’re on your feet in the truck loading pallets with boxes, crates, sacks of fruits and peppers. Working the forklift is easier. You hoist up the loaded pallets, store them inside and wait for the next load. No one minds if you read the paper while you wait but if you read the New York Times they laugh and say, Look at the big intellectual on the forklift.
One of my jobs is to store bags of hot peppers off United Fruit ships in the fumigation room. On a slow day it’s a good place to bring in a beer, read the paper, take a nap and no one seems to mind. Even Mr. Campbell Groel on his way out of the office might look in and smile, Take it easy, men. It’s a hot day.
Horace, the black man, sits on a bag of peppers and reads a paper from Jamaica or he reads a letter over and over from his son who is in university in Canada. When he reads that letter he slaps his thigh and laughs, Oh, mon, oh, mon. The first time I ever heard him talk his accent sounded so Irish I asked him if he was from County Cork and he couldn’t stop laughing. He said, All people from the islands have Irish blood, mon.
Horace and I nearly died together in that fumigation room. The beer and the heat made us so drowsy we fell asleep on the floor till we heard the door slam shut and the gas hissing into the room. We tried to push the door back but it was jammed and the gas was making us sick till Horace climbed up on a mound of pepper sacks, broke a window and called for help. Eddie Lynch was closing up outside and heard us and slid the door back.
You’re two lucky bastards, he said, and he wanted to take us up the street for a few beers to clear our lungs and to celebrate. Horace says, No, mon, I can’t go to that bar.
What the hell you talking about? says Eddie.
Black man not welcome in that bar.
Fuck that for a story, says Eddie.
No, mon, no trouble. There’s another place we have a beer, mon.
I don’t know why Horace has to give in like that. He has a son in university in Canada and he can’t have a beer himself in a New York bar. He tells me I don’t understand, that I’m young and I can’t fight the black man’s fight.
Eddie says, Yeah, you’re right, Horace.
In a few weeks Mr. Campbell Groel says the Port of New York is not what it used to be, business is slow, he has to lay off a few men and, of course, I’m the junior man, the first to go.
A few blocks away is Merchants Refrigerating Company and the
y need a platform man to fill in for men on summer vacation. They tell me, We might be having a heat wave but dress warm.
My job is unloading meat from the freezer trucks that bring sides of beef from Chicago. It’s August on the platform but inside where we hang the meat it’s freezing. The men laugh and say we’re the only workers who travel so fast from the North Pole to the equator and back.
Peter McNamee is platform boss while the regular man is on vacation and when he sees me he says, What in the name of the crucified Jesus are you doing here? I thought you had a brain in your head.
He tells me I should be going to school, that there’s no excuse for me humping sides of beef in and out in and out when I could be using the GI Bill and moving up in the world. He says this is no job for the Irish. They come here and the next thing they’re hacking and coughing up blood discovering they had TB all along, the curse of the Irish race but the last generation to be afflicted. It’s Peter’s job to report if anyone is hacking or coughing all over the sides of beef. Board of Health inspectors would close the place down in a minute and we’d be on the street scratching our arses looking for work.
Peter tells me he’s weary of the whole game himself. He couldn’t get along with the cousin on Long Island and now he’s back in another boarding house in the Bronx and it’s the same old game, bring home the side of beef or any kind of meat on a Friday night and he gets the free lodging. His mother torments him with her letters. Why can’t he find a nice girl and settle down and give her a grandson or is he waiting for her to sink into the grave? She nags him so much about finding a wife he doesn’t want to read her letters anymore.
My second Friday at Merchants Refrigerating Peter wraps the side of beef in newspaper and asks me if I’d like a drink up the street. He rests the side of beef on a bar stool but the meat begins to defrost and there are blood spots and that upsets the bartender. He tells Peter he can’t have that kind of thing in the bar and he’d better put it somewhere. Peter says, All right, all right, and when the bartender isn’t looking he takes the side of beef into the men’s lavatory and leaves it there. He returns to the bar and when he starts talking about the way his mother nags him he shifts from beer to whiskey. The bartender sympathizes with him because they’re both from the County Cavan and they tell me I wouldn’t understand.
There’s a sudden roar from the men’s lavatory and a big man stumbles out yelling that there’s a huge rat sitting on the toilet seat. The bartender barks at Peter, Damn it to hell, McNamee, is that where you put that goddam meat? Get it outa this bar.
Peter retrieves his meat. Come on, McCourt, that’s the end of it. I’m worn out dragging the meat around on Friday nights. I’m going to a dance to get a wife.
We take a taxi to the Jaeger House but they won’t let Peter in with the meat. He offers to leave it at the coat check but they won’t accept it. He creates a disturbance and when the manager says, Come on, come on, get that meat outa here, Peter swings at him with the side of beef. The manager calls for help and Peter and I are pushed down the stairs by two big men from Kerry. Peter yells that he’s only looking for a wife and they should be ashamed of themselves. The Kerrymen laugh and tell him he’s an arsehole and if he doesn’t behave himself they’ll wrap that meat around his head. Peter stands still in the middle of the sidewalk and gives the Kerrymen a peculiar sober look. You’re right, he says, and offers them the meat. They won’t take it. He offers it to people passing by but they shake their heads and hurry past him.
I don’t know what to do with this meat, he says. Half the world is starving but no one wants my meat.
We go to Wright’s Restaurant on Eighty-sixth Street and Peter asks if they’d give us two dinners in exchange for a side of beef. No, they can’t do that. Board of Health regulations. He runs to the middle of the street, lays the meat on the center line, runs back and laughs at the way cars swerve to avoid the meat, laughs even more when there’s the sound of sirens and a police car and an ambulance scream around the corner and stop with flashing lights and men stand around the meat scratching their heads and then laughing till they drive away with the meat in the back of the police car.
He seems to be sober now and we order eggs and bacon at Wright’s. It’s Friday, says Peter, but I don’t give a shit. That’s the last time I’ll drag meat through the streets and subways of New York. I’m tired of being Irish anyway. I’d like to wake up in the morning and be nothing or some kind of American Protestant. So will you pay for my eggs because I have to save my money and go to Vermont and be nothing.
And he walks out the door.
23
On a slow day at Merchants Refrigerating we’re told we can go home. Instead of taking the train back to Queens I walk up Hudson Street and stop at a bar called the White Horse Tavern. I’m nearly twenty-three but I have to prove I’m eighteen before they’ll give me a beer and a knockwurst sandwich. It’s quiet in the bar even though I’ve read in the paper it’s a favorite place of poets, especially the wild man, Dylan Thomas. People sitting at tables by the windows look like poets and artists and they’re probably wondering why I’m sitting at the bar with trousers caked with beef blood. I wish I could sit there by the windows with a long-haired girl and tell her how I’ve read Dostoyevsky and how Herman Melville got me thrown out of the hospital in Munich.
There’s nothing to do but sit at the bar tormenting myself with questions. What am I doing here with this knockwurst and beer? What am I doing in the world at all? Will I spend the rest of my life hauling sides of beef from truck to freezer and vice versa? Will I end my days in a small apartment in Queens while Emer is happy raising a family in a suburb completely protected by insurance? Will I ride the subways all my life envying people carrying books from universities?
I shouldn’t be eating knockwurst at a time like this. I shouldn’t be drinking beer when I don’t have an answer in my head. I shouldn’t be in this bar with poets and artists all sitting there with their serious whispered conversations. I’m weary of knockwurst and liverwurst and the feel of frozen meat on my shoulders every day.
I push the knockwurst away and leave a half stein of beer and walk out the door, across Hudson Street, along Bleecker Street, not knowing where I’m going but knowing I have to keep walking till I know where I’m going, and here I am in Washington Square and there’s New York University and I know that’s where I have to go with my GI Bill, high school or no high school. A student points to the admissions office and the woman gives me an application. She says I didn’t fill it in properly, that they need to know my high school graduation, where and when.
I never went.
You never went to high school?
No, but I have the GI Bill and I’ve been reading books all my life.
Oh, my, but we require high school graduation or the equivalency.
But I read books. I’ve read Dostoyevsky and I’ve read Pierre, or the Ambiguities. It’s not as good as Moby Dick but I read it in a hospital in Munich.
You actually read Moby Dick?
I did and Pierre, or the Ambiguities got me thrown out of the hospital in Munich.
I can see she doesn’t understand. She goes into another office with my application and brings out the Dean of Admissions, a woman with a kind face. The dean tells me I’m an unusual case and wants to know about my schooling in Ireland. It’s her experience that European students are better prepared for college work and she will allow me to enroll at NYU if I can maintain a B average for a year. She wants to know what kind of work I do and when I tell her about the meat she says, My, my, I learn something every day.
Since I’m not a high school graduate and work full time I’m allowed to take only two courses, Introduction to Literature and the History of Education in America. I don’t know why I have to be introduced to literature but the woman in the admissions office says it’s a requirement even though I’ve read Dostoyevsky and Melville and that’s admirable for someone without a high school education. She says the History of
Education in America course will provide me with the broad cultural background I need after my inadequate European education.
I’m in heaven and the first thing to do is buy the required textbooks, cover them with the purple and white NYU book jackets so that people in the subway will look at me admiringly.
All I know of university classes is what I saw a long time ago in the movies in Limerick and here I am sitting in one, the History of Education in America, with Professor Maxine Green up there on the platform telling us how the Pilgrims educated their children. All around me are students scribbling away in their notebooks and I wish I knew what to scribble myself. How am I supposed to know what’s important out of all the things she’s saying up there? Am I supposed to remember everything? Some students raise their hands to ask questions but I could never do that. The whole class would stare at me and wonder who’s the one with the accent. I could try an American accent but that never works. When I try it people always smile and say, Do I detect an Irish brogue?
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