'Tis a Memoir

by Frank McCourt

  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 they 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?

  The professor is saying the Pilgrims left England to escape religious persecution and that puzzles me because the Pilgrims were English themselves and the English were always the ones who persecuted everyone else, especially the Irish. I'd like to raise my hand and tell the professor how the Irish suffered for centuries under English rule but I'm sure everyone in this class has a high school diploma and if I open my mouth they'll know I'm not one of them.

  Other students are easy about raising their hands and they always say, Well, I think.

  Some day I'll raise my hand and say, Well, I think, but I don't know what to think about Pilgrims and their education. Then the professor tells us ideas don't drop fully formed from the skies, that the Pilgrims were, in the long run, children of the Reformation with an accompanying worldview and their attitudes to children were so informed.

  There is more notebook scribbling around the room, the women busier than the men. The women scribble as if every word out of Professor Green's mouth were important.

  Then I wonder why I have this fat textbook on American education which I carry in the subways so that people can admire me for being a college student. I know there will be examinations, a midterm and a final, but where will the questions come from? If the professor talks and talks and the textbook is seven hundred pages I'll surely be lost.

  There are good-looking girls in the class and I'd like to ask one if she knows what I should know before the midterm exam in seven weeks. I'd like to go to the university cafeteria or a Greenwich Village coffee shop and chat with the girl about the Pilgrims and their Puritan ways and how they frightened the life out of their children. I could tell the girl how I read Dostoyevsky and Melville and she'd be impressed and fall in love with me and we'd study the history of education in America together. She'd make spaghetti and we'd go to bed for the excitement and then we'd sit up in the bed reading the fat textbook and wondering why people in old New England made themselves so miserable.

  Men in the class look at the scribbling women and you know they're not paying the professor a scrap of attention. You know they're deciding which girls they'll talk to afterward and when this first class ends they move toward the good-looking ones. They smile easily with their fine white teeth and they're used to chatting because that's what they did in high school where boys and girls sit together. A good-looking girl will always have someone waiting for her in the hall outside and the man in the class who started chatting with her will lose his smile.

  The lecturer in the Saturday morning class is Mr. Herbert. The girls in the class seem to like him and they must know him from other classes because they ask him about his honeymoon. He smiles and jingles the change in his trouser pocket and tells us about his honeymoon and I wonder what this has to do with Introduction to Literature. Then he asks us to write two hundred words on an author we'd like to meet and why. My author is Jonathan Swift and I write that I'd like to meet him because of Gulliver's Travels. A man with an imagination like that would be a great one to have a cup of tea or a pint with.

  Mr. Herbert stands on his platform, looks through the essays, and says, Hmmm, Frank McCourt. Where is Frank McCourt?

  I raise my hand and feel my face turning red. Ah, says Mr. Herbert, you like Jonathan Swift?

  I do.

  For his imagination, eh?

  Yes.

  His smile is gone and his voice doesn't sound friendly and I feel uncomfortable with the way everyone in the class is looking at me. He says, You do know that Swift was a satirist, don't you?

  I have no notion of what he's talking about. I have to lie and say, I do.

  He says, You do know he was perhaps the greatest satirist in English literature.

  I thought he was Irish.

  Mr. Herbert looks at the class and smiles. Does that mean, Mr. McCourt, that if I'm from the Virgin Islands I'm a virgin?

  There is laughter around the room and I feel my face on fire. I know they're laughing at me because of the way Mr. Herbert toyed with me and put me in my place. Now he tells the class that my essay is a perfect example of a simplistic approach to literature, that while Gulliver's Travels may be enjoyed as a children's story it is important in English literature, not Irish, ladies and gentlemen, for its satiric brilliance. He says, When we read great works of literature in college we endeavor to rise above the mundane and the childish, and when he says that he looks at me.

  The class ends and the girls gather around Mr. Herbert to smile and tell him how they enjoyed his honeymoon story and I feel so ashamed I walk down six flights of stairs so that I don't have to be in the elevator with students who might despise me for enjoying Gulliver's Travels for the wrong reasons or even students who might feel sorry for me. I put my books in a bag because I don't care anymore if people in the subway look at me admiringly. I can't hold on to a girl, I can't keep an office job, I make a fool of myself in my first literature class and I wonder why I left Limerick at all. If I'd stayed there and taken the exam I'd be a postman now strolling from street to street, handing out letters, chatting with the women, going home for my tea without a worry in the world. I could have read Jonathan Swift to my heart's content not giving a fiddler's fart whether he was a satirist or a seanachie.

  24

  Tom is in the apartment singing, making Irish stew, chatting with the wife of the landlord, the Greek downstairs with the dry cleaning shop. The landlord's wife is a thin blonde and I can see she doesn't want me to be there. I walk through Woodside to the library to borrow a book I looked at the last time I was there, Sean O'Casey's I Knock at the Door. It's a book about growing up poor in Dublin and I never knew you could write about things like that. It was all right for Charles Dickens to write about poor people in London but his books always end with characters discovering they're the long-lost sons of the Duke of Somerset and everyone lives happily ever after.

  There is no happily ever after in Sean O'Casey. His eyes are worse than mine, so bad he can barely go to school. Still he manages to read, teaches himself to write, teaches himself Irish, writes plays for the Abbey Theatre, meets Lady Gregory and the poet Yeats, but has to leave Ireland when everyone turns against him. He would never sit in a class and let someone mock him over Jonathan Swift. He'd fight back and then walk out even if he walked into the wall with his bad eyes. He's the first Irish writer I ever read who writes about rags, dirt, hunger, babies dying. The other writers go on about farms and fairies and the mist that do be on the bog and it's a relief to discover one with bad eyes and a suffering mother.

  What I'm discovering now is that one thing leads to another. When Sean O'Casey writes about Lady Gregory or Yeats I have to look them up in the Encyclopedia Britannica and that keeps me busy till the librarian starts turning the light on and off. I don't know how I could have reached the age of nineteen in Limerick ignorant of all that went on
in Dublin before my time. I have to go to the Encyclopedia Britannica to learn how famous the Irish writers were, Yeats, Lady Gregory, AE and John Millington Synge who wrote plays where the people talk in a way I never heard in Limerick or anywhere else.

  Here I am in a library in Queens discovering Irish literature, wondering why the schoolmaster never told us about these writers till I discover they were all Protestants, even Sean O'Casey whose father came from Limerick. No one in Limerick would want to give Protestants credit for being great Irish writers.

  The second week of Introduction to Literature Mr. Herbert says that from his personal point of view one of the most desirable ingredients in a work of literature is gusto and that is certainly found in the works of Jonathan Swift and his admirer, our friend Mr. McCourt. If there is a certain innocence in Mr. McCourt's apprehension of Swift it is leavened with enthusiasm. Mr. Herbert tells the class I was the only one of thirty-three people who selected a truly great writer, that it discourages him to think there are people in this class who consider Lloyd Douglas or Henry Morton Robinson great writers. Now he wants to know how and when I first read Swift and I have to tell him how a blind man in Limerick paid me to read Swift to him when I was twelve.

  I don't want to talk in class like this because of the shame last week but I have to do what I'm told or I might be kicked out of the university. The other students are looking at me and whispering to each other and I don't know whether they're sneering at me or admiring me. When the class ends I take the stairs again instead of the elevator but I can't get out the door at the bottom because of the sign that says Fire Exit and warns me if I push anything there will be alarms. I climb back to the sixth floor to take the elevator but that door and the doors on the other floors are locked and there's nothing to do but push the door on the ground floor till the alarm goes off and I'm taken to an office to fill out a form and write a statement as to what I was doing in that place causing alarms to go off.