'Tis a Memoir

by Frank McCourt

  My ILA card expired.

  That's okay. I'm an organizer and we're trying to break into these fucking banks, excuse the language. Are you on for that?

  Oh, sure.

  I mean you're the only one we could get on your shift with any kind of union history and what we'd like you to do is just drop little hints. You know and they know the banks pay shit wages. So, just a little hint here and there, not too many, not too soon, and I'll see you in a few weeks. Here, I'll take care of the bill.

  Next night is Thursday, pay night, and when we receive our checks the supervisor says, You've got the rest of the night off, McCourt.

  He makes sure everyone on the shift hears him. You're off tonight, McCourt, and all the other nights and you can tell that to your union friends. This is a bank and we don't need any goddam unions.

  They say nothing, the typists, the clerks. They nod. Andy Peters would say something but he's still on the four to twelve shift.

  I take my check and as I wait for the elevator an executive comes out of his office. McCourt, right?

  I nod.

  So, you're finishing college, right?

  I am.

  Ever think of joining us here? You could come aboard and we'd have you up to a nice five-figure salary in three years. I mean you're one of our own, right? Irish?

  I am.

  Me, too. Father from Wicklow, mom from Dublin, and when you work at a bank like this doors open, you know, AOH, Knights of Columbus, all that there. We take care of our own. If we don't, who will?

  I was just fired.

  Fired? What the hell you talking about? Fired for what?

  For letting a union organizer talk to me in a coffee shop.

  You did that? Let a union organizer talk to you?

  I did.

  That was a stupid damn thing to do. Look, pal, we're outa the coal mines, we're outa the kitchens and the ditches. We don't need unions. Will the Irish ever get sense? Asking you a question. Talkin' a yeh.

  I say nothing here and on the elevator going down. I say nothing because I've been fired from this bank and there's nothing to say anyway. I don't want to talk about the Irish getting sense and I don't know why everyone I meet has to tell me where his father and mother came from in Ireland.

  The man wants to argue with me but I won't give him the satisfaction. It's better to walk away and leave him to the height he grew, as my mother used to say. He calls after me to tell me I'm an asshole, that I'll wind up digging ditches, delivering beer barrels, pouring whiskey for boozy micks in a Blarney Stone bar. He says, Jesus, is there anything wrong with looking after your own kind? and the strange thing is there's something in his voice that's sad as if I were a son that disappointed him.

  Mike Small meets my train in Providence, Rhode Island, and takes me by bus to Tiverton. On the way we stop at a liquor store for a bottle of Pilgrim's rum, Grandma's favorite. Zoe, the grandmother, says hi but doesn't offer hand or cheek. It's dinnertime and there's corned beef and cabbage and boiled potatoes because that's what the Irish like to eat, according to Zoe. She says I must be tired from the trip and surely I'd like a drink. Mike looks at me and smiles and we know it's Zoe who wants a drink, rum and Coke.

  How about you, Grandma? Would you like a drink?

  Well, I dunno, but all right. Are you making the drinks, Alberta?

  Yes.

  Well, go easy with the Coke. It kills my stomach.

  We sit in a living room dark from layers of blinds, curtains, drapes. There are no books, magazines, newspapers and the only pictures are of the Captain in his army lieutenant's uniform and one of Mike, a blonde angel of a child.

  We sip our drinks and there's a silence because Mike is in the hallway answering the phone and Zoe and I have nothing to say to each other. I wish I could say, This is a nice house, but I can't because I don't like the darkness of this room when the sun is beaming outside. Then Zoe calls out, Alberta, you gonna stay on that goddam phone all night? You have a guest. She says to me, That's Charlie Moran she's talking to. They was great friends all through school but goddam he likes to talk.

  Charlie Moran, is it? Mike leaves me here in this gloomy room with Grandma while she chatters away with her old boyfriend. All these weeks in Rhode Island she's been having a grand time of it with Charlie while I'm slaving away in banks and warehouses.

  Zoe says, Make yourself another drink, Frank. That means she wants one, too, and when she tells me go easy on the Coke, it kills her stomach, I double her rum dosage hoping it will knock her out so that I can have my way with her granddaughter.

  But no, the drink makes her livelier and after a few swallows she says, Let's eat, goddammit. Irishmen like to eat, and while we're eating, she says, Do you like that, Frank?

  I do.

  Well, then, eat it. You know what I always say. A meal ain't a meal without a potato and I'm not even Irish. No, goddammit, not a drop of Irish though there's a bit of Scotch. MacDonald was my mother's name. That's Scotch, isn't it?

  'Tis.

  Not Irish?

  No.

  After dinner we watch television and she falls asleep in her armchair after telling me that Louis Armstrong there on the screen is ugly as sin and can't sing worth a damn. Mike shakes her and tells her go to bed.

  Don't tell me go to bed, goddammit. You might be a college student but I'm still your grandmother, isn't that right, Bob?

  I'm not Bob.

  You're not? Well, who are you?

  I'm Frank.

  Oh, the Irishman. Well, Bob's a nice fellow. He's gonna be an officer. What are you gonna be?

  A teacher.

  A teacher? Oh, well, you won't be drivin' no Cadillac, and she pulls herself up the stairs to bed.

  Now, surely, with Zoe snoring away in her room Mike will visit my bed but, no, she's too nervous. What if Zoe woke suddenly and discovered us? I'd be out on the road hailing the bus to Providence. It's a torment when Mike comes to kiss good night and even in the dark I know she's in her pink baby doll pajamas. She won't stay, oh, no, Grandma might hear and I tell her I wouldn't care if God Himself were in the next room. No, no, she says, and leaves, and I wonder what kind of world is this where people will walk away from a chance of a wild fling in the bed.

  At dawn Zoe runs the vacuum cleaner upstairs and downstairs and complains, This goddam house looks like Hogan's Alley. The house is spotless because she has nothing else to do but clean it and she barks about Hogan's Alley to put me in my place because she knows I know it was a dangerous Irish slum in New York. She complains the vacuum cleaner doesn't pick up the way it used to though it's easy to see there's nothing to pick up. She complains that Alberta sleeps too late and is she supposed to make three separate breakfasts, her own, mine, Alberta's?

  Her neighbor, Abbie, drops in and they drink coffee and complain about kids, dirt, television, that goddam ugly Louis Armstrong who can't sing, dirt, the price of food and clothes, kids, the goddam Portuguese taking over everything in Fall River and surrounding towns, bad enough when the Irish ran everything, at least they could speak English long as they were sober. They complain about hairdressers who charge a fortune and can't tell a decent hairdo from a donkey's ass.

  Oh, Zoe, says Abbie, your language.

  Well, I mean it, goddammit.

  If my mother were here she'd be puzzled. She'd wonder why these women complain. Lord above, she'd say, they have everything. They're warm and clean and well fed and they complain about everything. My mother and the women in the slums of Limerick had nothing and rarely complained. They said it was the will of God.

  Zoe has everything but complains with the music of the vacuum cleaner and that may be her way of prayer, goddammit.

  In Tiverton Mike is Alberta. Zoe complains she doesn't know why a girl would want to use a goddam name like Mike when she has her own name, Agnes Alberta.

  We walk around Tiverton and I imagine again what it would be like to be a teacher here, married to Alberta. We'd have a sparkling kitchen
where every morning I'd have my coffee and an egg and read the Providence Journal. We'd have a big bathroom with plenty of hot water and thick towels with powerful naps and I might loll there in the tub and gaze on the Narragansett River through little curtains billowing gently in the morning sun. We'd have a car for trips to Horseneck Beach and Block Island, and we'd visit Alberta's mother's relations in Nantucket. As the years passed my hair would recede, my belly protrude. Friday nights we'd attend local high school basketball games and I'd meet someone who might sponsor me for the country club. If they admitted me I'd have to take up golf and that would surely be the end of me, the first step toward the grave.

  A visit to Tiverton is enough to drive me back to New York.

  35

  In the summer of 1957 I complete my degree courses at NYU and in the autumn pass the Board of Education exams for teaching high school English.

  An afternoon newspaper, the World-Telegram and Sun, has a School Page where teachers can find jobs. Most of the vacancies are for vocational high schools and friends have already warned me, Don't go near those vocational high schools. The kids are killers. They'll chew you up and spit you out. Look at that movie The Blackboard Jungle, where a teacher says vocational schools are the garbage cans of the school system and the teachers are there to sit on the lids. See that movie and you'll run in the other direction.

  There is a vacancy for an English teacher at Samuel Gompers Vocational High School in the Bronx but the chairman of the Academic Department tells me I look too young and the kids would give me a hard time. He says his father was from Donegal, his mother from Kilkenny, and he'd like to help me. We should take care of our own but his hands are tied and the way he shrugs and extends his open palms contradicts what he said entirely. Still, he heaves himself from his chair and walks me to the front door with his arm across my shoulders, tells me I should try Samuel Gompers again, maybe in a year or two I'd fill out and lose that innocent look, and he'd keep me in mind though I needn't bother to come back if I grew a beard. He can't stand beards and he wants no goddam beatniks in his department. Meanwhile, he says, I might try the Catholic high schools where the pay wasn't that good but I'd be with my own kind of people and a nice Irish kid should stick with his own.

  The Academic Chairman at Grady Vocational High School in Brooklyn says, yeah, he'd like to help me out but, You know, with that brogue you'd have trouble with the kids, they might think you talk funny and teaching is hard enough when you speak properly and doubly hard with a brogue. He wants to know how I passed the speech part of the teachers' license examination and when I tell him I was issued a substitute license on condition I take remedial speech he says, Yeah, maybe you could come back when you don't sound like Paddy-off-the-boat, ha ha ha. He tells me in the meantime I should stick with my own people, he's Irish himself, well, three-quarters Irish and you never know with other people.

  When I meet Andy Peters for a beer I tell him I can't get a teaching job till I fill out and look older and talk like an American and he says, Shit. Forget the teaching. Go into business. Specialize in something. Hubcaps. Corner the market. Get a job in a garage and learn all you can about hubcaps. People come into the garage and hubcaps are mentioned and everyone turns to you. A hubcap crisis, you know? where a hubcap falls off, flies through the air and decapitates a model housewife and all the TV stations call you for your expert opinion. Then you go out on your own. McCourt's Hubcap Emporium. Foreign and Domestic Hubcaps New and Old. Antique Hubcaps for the Discerning Collector.

  Is he serious?

  Maybe not about hubcaps. He says, Look at what they do in the academic world. You corner a half-acre of human knowledge, Chaucer's phallic imagery in "The Wife of Bath," or Swift's devotion to shit, and you build a fence around it. Decorate the fence with footnotes and bibliographies. Post a sign, Keep Off, Trespassers Will Lose Their Tenure. I'm engaged myself in a noble search for a Mongolian philosopher. I thought of cornering the market on an Irish philosopher but all I could find was Berkeley and they've got their claws into him already. One Irish philosopher, for Christ's sakes. One. Don't you people ever ponder? So I'm stuck with the Mongolians or the Chinese and I'll probably have to learn Mongolian or Chinese or whatever the hell they speak there and when I find him he'll be my very own. When was the last time you heard a Mongolian philosopher mentioned at those East Side cocktail parties you like so much? I'll get my Ph.D., write a few articles on my Mongolian in obscure scholarly journals. I'll deliver learned lectures to drunken Orientalists at MLA conventions and wait for the job offers to pour in from the Ivy League and its cousins. I'll get a tweed jacket, a pipe and a pompous manner, and faculty wives will be throwing themselves at me, begging me to recite, in English, erotic Mongolian verses smuggled into the country up the ass of a yak or a panda at the Bronx Zoo. And I'll tell you another thing, piece advice in case you go to graduate school. When you take a course always find out what the professor wrote his doctoral dissertation on and give it back to him. If the guy specializes in Tennyson's water images then pour it all over him. If the guy specializes in George Berkeley give him the sound of one hand clapping while a tree falls in the forest. How do you think I got through these fucking philosophy courses at NYU? If the guy's a Catholic I give him Aquinas. Jewish? I give him Maimonides. Agnostic? You never know what to tell an agnostic. You never know where you stand with them though you can always try old Nietzsche. You can bend that old fucker any way you like.

  Andy tells me Bird was the greatest American who ever lived, right up there with Abraham Lincoln and Max Kiss, the guy who invented Ex-Lax. Bird should be given the Nobel Prize and a seat in the House of Lords.

  Who's Bird?

  For Christ's sakes, McCourt. I worry about you. You tell me you love jazz and you don't know from Bird. Charlie Parker, man. Mozart. You listenin' to me? You dig? Mozart, for Christ's sakes. That's Charlie Parker.

  What does Charlie Parker have to do with teaching jobs or hubcaps or Maimonides or anything else?

  You see, McCourt, that's your problem, always looking for relevance, a sucker for logic. That's why the Irish don't have philosophers. Lotta goddam barroom theologians and shithouse lawyers. Loosen up, man. Thursday night I finish early and we'll take a trip to Fifty-second Street for a little music. Okay?

  We go from club to club till we come to one place where a black woman in a white dress croaks into a microphone and holds on to it as if she were on a swaying ship. Andy whispers, That's Billie and it's a disgrace they're letting her make an ass of herself up there.

  He marches to the stage and tries to take her hand to help her down but she curses him and swings at him till she stumbles and falls off the stage. Another man leaves his bar stool and leads her out the door and I know from the clear sounds between her croaks that was Billie Holiday, the voice I heard on the Armed Forces Network when I was a boy in Limerick, a pure voice telling me, "I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby."

  Andy says, That's what happens.

  What do you mean, that's what happens?

  I mean that's what happens, that's all. Jesus, do I have to write a book?

  How is it you know Billie Holiday?

  I have loved Billie Holiday since I was a child. I come to Fifty-second Street to catch glimpses of her. I would hold her coat. I would scour her toilet bowl. I would run her bathwater. I would kiss the ground she walks on. I told her I got a dishonorable discharge for not fucking a French sheep and she thought it should be made into a song. I don't know what God intends to do with me in the next life but I'm not going unless I can sit between Billie and Bird for eternity.

  In the middle of March 1958, there's another notice in the paper, Vacancy for English teacher at McKee Vocational and Technical High School, Staten Island. The assistant principal, Miss Seested, examines my license and takes me to see the principal, Moses Sorola, who doesn't move from his chair behind the desk where he squints at me through a cloud of smoke drifting from his nose and from the cigarette in his hand. He sa
ys this is an emergency situation. The teacher I'd be replacing, Miss Mudd, has made an abrupt decision to retire in the middle of the term. He says teachers like that are inconsiderate and make life hard for a principal. He doesn't have a full English program for me, that I'd have to teach three classes in Social Studies every day, two in English.

  But I don't know anything about Social Studies.

  He puffs and squints and says, Don't worry about it, and takes me to the office of the Academic Chairman, Acting, who says I'd be teaching three classes of Economic Citizenship and here's the textbook, Your World and You. Mr. Sorola smiles through the smoke and says, Your World and You. That should cover just about everything.

  I tell him I know nothing about economics or citizenship and he says, Just stay a few pages ahead of the kids. Everything you tell them will be news. Tell them this is 1958, tell them their names, tell them they live on Staten Island, and they'll be surprised and grateful for the information. By the end of the year even your name will be news to them. Forget your college literature courses. This is not high IQ plateau.

  He takes me to see Miss Mudd, the teacher I'm replacing. When he opens the classroom door boys and girls are leaning out the windows calling to others across the school yard. Miss Mudd sits at her desk, reading travel brochures, ignoring the paper airplane that zooms over her head.