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Frank McCourt

A M e m o i r

S C R I B N E R

SCRIBNER

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New York, NY 10020

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ISBN 0-684-84524-5

This book is dedicated to

my daughter, Maggie, for her warm, searching heart,

and to

my wife, Ellen, for joining her side to mine.

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Acknowledgments

Friends and family members have smiled and bestowed on me various graces: Nan Graham, Susan Moldow and Pat Eisemann at Scribner; Sarah Mosher, formerly at Scribner; Molly Friedrich, Aaron Priest, Paul Cirone and Lucy Childs of the Aaron Priest Literary Agency; the late Tommy Butler, Mike Reardon and Nick Browne, high priests of the long bar at the Lion’s Head; Paul Schiffman, poet and mariner, who served at that same bar but rocked with the sea; Sheila McKenna, Dennis Duggan, Dennis Smith, Mary Breasted Smyth and Ted Smyth, Jack Deacy, Pete Hamill, Bill Flanagan, Marcia Rock, Peter Quinn, Brian Brown, Terry Moran, Isaiah Sheffer, Pat Mulligan, Brian Kelly, Mary Tierney, Gene Secunda, the late Paddy Clancy, the late Kevin Sullivan, friends all from the Lion’s Head and the First Friday Club; my brothers, of course, Alphonsus, Michael, Malachy, and their wives Lynn, Joan, Diana; Robert and Cathy Frey, parents of Ellen.

My thanks, my love.

Prologue

That’s your dream out now.

That’s what my mother would say when we were children in Ireland and a dream we had came true. The one I had over and over was where I sailed into New York Harbor awed by the skyscrapers before me. I’d tell my brothers and they’d envy me for having spent a night in America till they began to claim they’d had that dream, too. They knew it was a sure way to get attention even though I’d argue with them, tell them I was the oldest, that it was my dream and they’d better stay out of it or there would be trouble. They told me I had no right to that dream for myself, that anyone could dream about America in the far reaches of the night and there was nothing I could do about it. I told them I could stop them. I’d keep them awake all night and they’d have no dreams at all. Michael was only six and here he was laughing at the picture of me going from one of them to the other trying to stop their dreams of the New York skyscrapers. Malachy said I could do nothing about his dreams because he was born in Brooklyn and could dream about America all night and well into the day if he liked. I appealed to my mother. I told her it wasn’t fair the way the whole family was invading my dreams and she said, Arrah, for the love o’ God, drink your tea and go to school and stop tormenting us with your dreams. My brother Alphie was only two and learning words and he banged a spoon on the table and chanted, Tomentin’ dreams, tomentin’ dreams, till everyone laughed and I knew I could share my dreams with him anytime, so why not with Michael, why not Malachy?

When the MS Irish Oak sailed from Cork in October 1949, we expected to be in New York City in a week. Instead, after two days at sea, we were told we were going to Montreal in Canada. I told the first officer all I had was forty dollars and would Irish Shipping pay my train fare from Montreal to New York. He said, No, the company wasn’t responsible. He said freighters are the whores of the high seas, they’ll do anything for anyone. You could say a freighter is like Murphy’s oul’ dog, he’ll go part of the road with any wanderer.

Two days later Irish Shipping changed its mind and gave us the happy news, Sail for New York City, but two days after that the captain was told, Sail for Albany.

The first officer told me Albany was a city far up the Hudson River, capital of New York State. He said Albany had all the charm of Limerick, ha ha ha, a great place to die but not a place where you’d want to get married or rear children. He was from Dublin and knew I was from Limerick and when he sneered at Limerick I didn’t know what to do. I’d like to destroy him with a smart remark but then I’d look at myself in the mirror, pimply face, sore eyes, and bad teeth and know I could never stand up to anyone, especially a first officer with a uniform and a promising future as master of his own ship. Then I’d say to myself, Why should I care what anyone says about Limerick anyway? All I had there was misery.

Then the peculiar thing would happen. I’d sit on a deck chair in the lovely October sun with the gorgeous blue Atlantic all around me and try to imagine what New York would be like. I’d try to see Fifth Avenue or Central Park or Greenwich Village where everyone looked like movie stars, powerful tans, gleaming white teeth. But Limerick would push me into the past. Instead of me sauntering up Fifth Avenue with the tan, the teeth, I’d be back in the lanes of Limerick, women standing at doors chatting away and pulling their shawls around their shoulders, children with faces dirty from bread and jam, playing and laughing and crying to their mothers. I’d see people at Mass on Sunday morning where a whisper would run through the church when someone with a hunger weakness would collapse in the pew and have to be carried outside by men from the back of the church who’d tell everyone, Stand back, stand back, for the lovea Jaysus, can’t you see she’s gasping for the air, and I wanted to be a man like that telling people stand back because that gave you the right to stay outside till the Mass was over and you could go off to the pub which is why you were standing in the back with all the other men in the first place. Men who didn’t drink always knelt right up there by the altar to show how good they were and how they didn’t care if the pubs stayed closed till Doomsday. They knew the responses to the Mass better than anyone and they’d be blessing themselves and standing and kneeling and sighing over their prayers as if they felt the pain of Our Lord more than the rest of the congregation. Some had given up the pint entirely and they were the worst, always preaching the evil of the pint and looking down on the ones still in the grip as if they were on the right track to heaven. They acted as if God Himself would turn His back on a man drinking the pint when everyone knew you’d rarely hear a priest up in the pulpit denounce the pint or the men who drank it. Men with the thirst stayed in the back ready to streak out the door the minute the priest said, Ite, missa est, Go, you are dismissed. They stayed in the back because their mouths were dry and they felt too humble to be up there with the sober ones. I stayed near the door so that I could hear the men whispering about the slow Mass. They went to Mass because it’s a mortal sin if you don’t though you’d wonder if it wasn’t a worse sin to be joking to the man next to you that if this priest didn’t hurry up you’d expire of the thirst on the spot. If Father White came out to give the sermon they’d shuffle and groan over his sermons, the slowest in the world, with him rolling his eyes to heaven and declaring we were all doomed unless we mended our ways and devoted ourselves to the Virgin Mary entirely. My Uncle Pa Keating would have the men laughing behind their hands with his, I would devote myself to the Virgin Mary if she handed me a lovely creamy black pint of porter. I wanted to be there with my Uncle Pa Keating all grown up with long trousers and stand with the men in the back with the great thirst and laugh behind my hand.

I’d sit on that deck chair and look into my head to see myself cycling around Limerick City and out into the country delivering telegrams. I’d see myself early in the morning riding along country roads with the mist rising in the fields and cows giving me the odd moo and dogs coming at me till I drove them away with rocks. I’d hear babies in farmhouses crying for their mothers and farmers whacking cows back to the fields after the milking.

And I’d start crying to myself on that deck chair with the gorgeous Atlantic all around me, New York ahead, city of my dreams where I’d have the golden tan, the dazzling white teeth. I’d wonder what in God’s name was wrong with me that I should be missing Limerick already, city of gray miseries, the place where I dreamed of escape to New York. I’d hear my mother’s warning, The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.

There were to be fourteen passengers on the ship but one canceled and we had to sail with an unlucky number. The first night out the captain stood up at dinner and welcomed us. He laughed and said he wasn’t superstitious over the number of passengers but since there was a priest among us wouldn’t it be lovely if His Reverence would say a prayer to come between us and all harm. The priest was a plump little man, born in Ireland, but so long in his Los Angeles parish he had no trace of an Irish accent. When he got up to say a prayer and blessed himself four passengers kept their hands in their laps and that told me they were Protestants. My mother used to say you could spot Protestants a mile away by their reserved manner. The priest asked Our Lord to look down on us with pity and love, that whatever happened on these stormy seas we were ready to be enfolded forever in His Divine Bosom. An old Protestant reached for his wife’s hand. She smiled and shook her head back at him and he smiled, too, as if to say, Don’t worry.

The priest sat next to me at the dinner table. He whispered that those two old Protestants were very rich from raising Thoroughbred racehorses in Kentucky and if I had any sense I’d be nice to them, you never know.

I wanted to ask what was the proper way to be nice to rich Protestants who raise racehorses but I couldn’t for fear the priest might think I was a fool. I heard the Protestants say the Irish people were so charming and their children so adorable you hardly noticed how poor they were. I knew that if I ever talked to the rich Protestants I’d have to smile and show my destroyed teeth and that would be the end of it. The minute I made some money in America I’d have to rush to a dentist to have my smile mended. You could see from the magazines and the films how the smile opened doors and brought girls running and if I didn’t have the smile I might as well go back to Limerick and get a job sorting letters in a dark back room at the post office where they wouldn’t care if you hadn’t a tooth in your head.

Before bedtime the steward served tea and biscuits in the lounge. The priest said, I’ll have a double Scotch, forget the tea, Michael, the whiskey helps me sleep. He drank his whiskey and whispered to me again, Did you talk to the rich people from Kentucky?

I didn’t.

Dammit. What’s the matter with you? Don’t you want to get ahead in the world?

I do.

Well, why don’t you talk to the rich people from Kentucky? They might take a fancy to you and give you a job as stable boy or something and you could rise in the ranks instead of going to New York which is one big occasion of sin, a sink of depravity where a Catholic has to fight day and night to keep the faith. So, why can’t you talk to the nice people from Kentucky and make something of yourself?

Whenever he brought up the rich people from Kentucky he whispered and I didn’t know what to say. If my brother Malachy were here he’d march right up to the rich people and charm them and they’d probably adopt him and leave him their millions along with stables, racehorses, a big house, and maids to clean it. I never talked to rich people in my life except to say, Telegram, ma’am, and then I’d be told go round to the servants’ entrance, this is the front door and don’t you know any better.

That is what I wanted to tell the priest but I didn’t know how to talk to him either. All I knew about priests was that they said Mass and everything else in Latin, that they heard my sins in English and forgave me in Latin on behalf of Our Lord Himself who is God anyway. It must be a strange thing to be a priest and wake up in the morning lying there in the bed knowing you have the power to forgive people or not forgive them depending on your mood. When you know Latin and forgive sins it makes you powerful and hard to talk to because you know the dark secrets of the world. Talking to a priest is like talking to God Himself and if you say the wrong thing you’re doomed.

There wasn’t a soul on that ship who could tell me how to talk to rich Protestants and demanding priests. My uncle by marriage, Pa Keating, could have told me but he was back in Limerick where he didn’t give a fiddler’s fart about anything. I knew if he were here he’d refuse to talk to the rich people entirely and then he’d tell the priest to kiss his royal Irish arse. That’s how I’d like to be myself but when your teeth and eyes are destroyed you never know what to say or what to do with yourself.

There was a book in the ship’s library, Crime and Punishment, and I thought it might be a good murder mystery even if it was filled with confusing Russian names. I tried to read it in a deck chair but the story made me feel strange, a story about a Russian student, Raskolnikov, who kills an old woman, a moneylender, and then tries to convince himself he’s entitled to the money because she’s useless to the world and her money would pay for his university expenses so that he could become a lawyer and go round defending people like himself who kill old women for their money. It made me feel strange because of the time in Limerick when I had a job writing threatening letters for an old woman moneylender, Mrs. Finucane, and when she died in a chair I took some of her money to help me pay my fare to America. I knew I didn’t kill Mrs. Finucane but I took her money and that made me almost as bad as Raskolnikov and if I died this minute he’d be the first one I’d run into in hell. I could save my soul by confessing to the priest and even though he’s supposed to forget your sins the minute he gives you absolution he’d have power over me and he’d give me strange looks and tell me go charm the rich Protestants from Kentucky.

I fell asleep reading the book and a sailor, a deckhand, woke me to tell me, Your book is getting wet in the rain, sir.

Sir. Here I was from a lane in Limerick and there’s a man with gray hair calling me sir even though he’s not supposed to say a word to me in the first place because of the rules. The first officer told me an ordinary sailor was never allowed to speak to passengers except for a Good Day or Good Night. He told me this particular sailor with the gray hair was once an officer on the Queen Elizabeth but he was fired because he was caught with a first-class passenger in her cabin and what they were doing was a cause of confession. This man’s name was Owen and he was peculiar the way he spent all his time reading below and when the ship docked he’d go ashore with a book and read in a café while the rest of the crew got roaring drunk and had to be hauled back to the ship in taxis. Our own captain had such respect for him he’d have him up to his cabin and they’d have tea and talk of the days they served together on an English destroyer that was torpedoed, the two of them hanging on to a raft in the Atlantic drifting and freezing and chatting about the time they’d get back to Ireland and have a nice pint and a mountain of bacon and cabbage.

Owen spoke to me next day. He said he knew he was breaking the rules but he couldn’t help talking to anyone on this ship who was reading Crime and Punishment. There were great readers in the crew right enough but they wouldn’t move beyond Edgar Wallace or Zane Grey and he’d give anything to be able to chat about Dostoyevsky. He wanted to know if I’d read The Possessed or The Brothers Karamazov and he looked sad when I said I’d never heard of them. He told me the minute I got to New York I should rush to a bookshop and get Dostoyevsky books and I’d never be lonely again. He said no matter what Dostoyevsky book you read he always gave you something to chew on and you can’t beat that for a bargain. That’s what Owen said though I had no notion of what he was talking about.

Then the priest came along the deck and Owen moved away. The priest said, Were you talking to that man? I could see you were. Well, I’m telling you he’s not good company. You can see that, can’t you? I heard all about him. Him with his gray hair swabbing decks at his age. It’s a strange thing you can talk to deckhands with no morals but if I ask you to talk to the rich Protestants from Kentucky you can’t find a minute.

We were only talking about Dostoyevsky.

Dostoyevsky, indeed. Lotta good that’ll do you in New York. You won’t see many Help Wanted signs requiring a knowledge of Dostoyevsky. Can’t get you to talk to the rich people from Kentucky but you sit here for hours yacking with sailors. Stay away from old sailors. You know what they are. Talk to people who’ll do you some good. Read the lives of the saints.

Along the New Jersey side of the Hudson River there were hundreds of ships docked tightly together. Owen the sailor said they were the Liberty ships that brought supplies to Europe during the war and after and it’s sad to think they’ll be hauled away any day to be broken up in shipyards. But that’s the way the world is, he said, and a ship lasts no longer than a whore’s moan.

The priest asks if I have anyone meeting me and when I tell him there’s no one he says I can travel with him on the train to New York City. He’ll keep an eye on me. When the ship docks we take a taxi to the big Union Station in Albany and while we wait for the train we have coffee in great thick cups and pie on thick plates. It’s the first time I ever had lemon meringue pie and I’m thinking if this is the way they eat all the time in America I won’t be a bit hungry and I’ll be fine and fat, as they say in Limerick. I’ll have Dostoyevsky for the loneliness and pie for the hunger.

The train isn’t like the one in Ireland where you share a carriage with five other people. This train has long cars where there are dozens of people and is so crowded some have to stand. The minute we get on people give up their seats to the priest. He says, Thank you, and points to the seat beside him and I feel the people who offered up their seats are not happy when I take one because it’s easy to see I’m nobody.

Farther up the car people are singing and laughing and calling for the church key. The priest says they’re college kids going home for the weekend and the church key is the can opener for the beer. He says they’re probably nice kids but they shouldn’t drink so much and he hopes I won’t turn out like that when I live in New York. He says I should put myself under the protection of the Virgin Mary and ask her to intercede with her Son to keep me pure and sober and out of harm’s way. He’ll pray for me all the way out there in Los Angeles and he’ll say a special Mass for me on the eighth of December, the feast of the Immaculate Conception. I want to ask him why he’d choose that feast day but I keep silent because he might start bothering me again about the rich Protestants from Kentucky.

He’s telling me this but I’m dreaming of what it would be like to be a student somewhere in America, in a college like the ones in the films where there’s always a white church spire with no cross to show it’s Protestant and there are boys and girls strolling the campus carrying great books and smiling at each other with teeth like snow drops.

When we arrive at Grand Central Station I don’t know where to go. My mother said I could try to see an old friend, Dan MacAdorey. The priest shows me how to use the telephone but there’s no answer from Dan. Well, says the priest, I can’t leave you on your own in Grand Central Station. He tells the taxi driver we’re going to the Hotel New Yorker.

We take our bags to a room where there’s one bed. The priest says, Leave the bags. We’ll get something to eat in the coffee shop downstairs. Do you like hamburgers?

I don’t know. I never had one in my life.

He rolls his eyes and tells the waitress bring me a hamburger with french fries and make sure the burger is well done because I’m Irish and we overcook everything. What the Irish do to vegetables is a crying shame. He says if you can guess what the vegetable is in an Irish restaurant you get the door prize. The waitress laughs and says she understands. She’s half-Irish on her mother’s side and her mother is the worst cook in the world. Her husband was Italian and he really knew how to cook but she lost him in the war.

Waw. That’s what she says. She really means war but she’s like all Americans who don’t like to say “r” at the end of a word. They say caw instead of car and you wonder why they can’t pronounce words the way God made them.

I like the lemon meringue pie but I don’t like the way Americans leave out the “r” at the end of a word.

While we’re eating our hamburgers the priest says I’ll have to stay the night with him and tomorrow we’ll see. It’s strange taking off my clothes in front of a priest and I wonder if I should get down on my two knees and pretend to say my prayers. He tells me I can take a shower if I like and it’s the first time in my life I ever had a shower with plenty of hot water and no shortage of soap, a bar for your body and a bottle for your head.

When I’m finished I dry myself with the thick towel draped on the bathtub and I put on my underwear before going back into the room. The priest is sitting in the bed with a towel wrapped around his fat belly, talking to someone on the phone. He puts down the phone and stares at me. My God, where did you get those drawers?

In Roche’s Stores in Limerick.

If you hung those drawers out the window of this hotel people would surrender. Piece of advice, don’t ever let Americans see you in those drawers. They’ll think you just got off Ellis Island. Get briefs. You know what briefs are?

I don’t.

Get ’em anyway. Kid like you should be wearing briefs. You’re in the U.S.A. now. Okay, hop in the bed, and that puzzles me because there’s no sign of a prayer and that’s the first thing you’d expect of a priest. He goes off to the bathroom but he’s no sooner in there than he sticks his head out and asks me if I dried myself.

I did.

Well, your towel isn’t touched so what did you dry yourself with?

The towel that’s on the side of the bathtub.

What? That’s not a towel. That’s the bath mat. That’s what you stand on when you get out of the shower.

I can see myself in a mirror over the desk and I’m turning red and wondering if I should tell the priest I’m sorry for what I did or if I should stay quiet. It’s hard to know what to do when you make a mistake your first night in America but I’m sure in no time I’ll be a regular Yank doing everything right. I’ll order my own hamburger, learn to call chips french fries, joke with waitresses, and never again dry myself with the bath mat. Some day I’ll say war and car with no “r” at the end but not if I ever go back to Limerick. If I ever went back to Limerick with an American accent they’d say I was putting on airs and tell me I had a fat arse like all the Yanks.

The priest comes out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, patting his face with his hands and there’s a lovely smell of perfume in the air. He says there’s nothing as refreshing as aftershave lotion and I can put on some if I like. It’s right there in the bathroom. I don’t know what to say or do. Should I say, No, thanks, or should I get out of the bed and go all the way to the bathroom and slather myself with aftershave lotion? I never heard of anyone in Limerick putting stuff on their faces after they shaved but I suppose it’s different in America. I’m sorry I didn’t look for a book that tells you what to do on your first night in New York in a hotel with a priest where you’re liable to make a fool of yourself right and left. He says, Well? and I tell him, Ah, no, thanks. He says, Suit yourself, and I can tell he’s a bit impatient the way he was when I didn’t talk to the rich Protestants from Kentucky. He could easily tell me leave and there I’d be out on the street with my brown suitcase and nowhere to go in New York. I don’t want to chance that so I tell him I’d like to put on the aftershave lotion after all. He shakes his head and tells me go ahead.

I can see myself in the bathroom mirror putting on the aftershave lotion and I’m shaking my head at myself feeling if this is the way it’s going to be in America I’m sorry I ever left Ireland. It’s hard enough coming here in the first place without priests criticizing you over your failure to hit it off with rich Kentucky Protestants, your ignorance of bath mats, the state of your underwear and your doubts about aftershave lotion.

The priest is in the bed and when I come out of the bathroom he tells me, Okay, into the bed. We’ve got a long day tomorrow.

He lifts the bedclothes to let me in and it’s a shock to see he’s wearing nothing. He says, Good night, turns off the light and starts snoring without even saying a Hail Mary or a prayer before sleep. I always thought priests spent hours on their knees before sleeping but this man must be in a great state of grace and not a bit afraid of dying. I wonder if all priests are like that, naked in the bed. It’s hard to fall asleep in a bed with a naked priest snoring beside you. Then I wonder if the Pope himself goes to bed in that condition or if he has a nun bring in pajamas with the Papal colors and the Papal coat of arms. I wonder how he gets out of that long white robe he wears, if he pulls it over his head or lets it drop to the floor and steps out of it. An old Pope would never be able to pull it over his head and he’d probably have to call a passing cardinal to give him a hand unless the cardinal himself was too old and he might have to call a nun unless the Pope was wearing nothing under the white robe which the cardinal would know about anyway because there isn’t a cardinal in the world that doesn’t know what the Pope wears since they all want to be Pope themselves and can’t wait for this one to die. If a nun is called in she has to take the white robe to be washed down in the steaming depths of the Vatican laundry room by other nuns and novices who sing hymns and praise the Lord for the privilege of washing all the clothes of the Pope and the College of Cardinals except for the underwear which is washed in another room by old nuns who are blind and not liable to think sinful thoughts because of what they have in their hands and what I have in my own hand is what I shouldn’t have in the presence of a priest in the bed and for once in my life I resist the sin and turn on my side and go to sleep.

Next day the priest finds a furnished room in the paper for six dollars a week and he wants to know if I can afford it till I get a job. We go to East Sixty-eighth Street and the landlady, Mrs. Austin, takes me upstairs to see the room. It’s the end of a hallway blocked off with a partition and a door with a window looking out on the street. There’s barely space for the bed and a small chest of drawers with a mirror and a table and if I stretch my arms I can touch the walls on both sides. Mrs. Austin says this is a very nice room and I’m lucky it wasn’t snapped up. She’s Swedish and she can tell I’m Irish. She hopes I don’t drink and if I do I’m not to bring girls into this room under any circumstances, drunk or sober. No girls, no food, no drink. Cockroaches smell food a mile away and once they’re in you have them forever. She says, Of course you never saw a cockroach in Ireland. There’s no food there. All you people do is drink. Cockroaches would starve to death or turn into drunks. Don’t tell me, I know. My sister is married to an Irishman, worst thing she ever did. Irishmen great to go out with but don’t marry them.

She takes the six dollars and tells me she needs another six for security, gives me a receipt and tells me I can move in anytime that day and she trusts me because I came with that nice priest even if she’s not Catholic herself, that it’s enough her sister married one, an Irishman, God help her, and she’s suffering for it.

The priest calls another taxi to take us to the Biltmore Hotel across the street from where we came out at Grand Central Station. He says it’s a famous hotel and we’re going to the headquarters of the Democratic Party and if they can’t find a job for an Irish kid no one can.

A man passes us in the hallway and the priest whispers, Do you know who that is?

I don’t.

Of course you don’t. If you don’t know the difference between a towel and a bath mat how could you know that’s the great Boss Flynn from the Bronx, the most powerful man in America next to President Truman.

The great Boss presses the button for the elevator and while he’s waiting he shoves a finger up his nose, looks at what he has on his fingertip and flicks it away on the carpet. My mother would call that digging for gold. This is the way it is in America. I’d like to tell the priest I’m sure De Valera would never pick his nose like that and you’d never find the Bishop of Limerick going to bed in a naked state. I’d like to tell the priest what I think of the world in general where God torments you with bad eyes and bad teeth but I can’t for fear he might go on about the rich Protestants from Kentucky and how I missed the opportunity of a lifetime.

The priest talks to a woman at a desk in the Democratic Party and she picks up the telephone. She says to the telephone, Got a kid here . . . just off the boat . . . you got a high school diploma? . . . na, no diploma . . . well, whaddya expect . . . Old Country still a poor country . . . yeah, I’ll send him up.

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.

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?

I am, sir. I’m nineteen.

How do I know?

I have my passport, sir.

And what is an Irishman doing with an American passport?

I was born here, sir.

He allows me to have two fifteen-cent beers and tells me I’d be better off spending my time in the library than in bars like the rest of our miserable race. He tells me Dr. Johnson drank forty cups of tea a day and his mind was clear to the end. I ask him who Dr. Johnson was and he glares at me, takes my glass away, and tells me, Leave this bar. Walk west on Forty-second till you come to Fifth. You’ll see two great stone lions. Walk up the steps between those two lions, get yourself a library card and don’t be an idiot like the rest of the bogtrotters getting off the boat and stupefying themselves with drink. Read your Johnson, read your Pope and avoid the dreamy micks. I want to ask him where he stands on Dostoyevsky till he points at the door, Don’t come back here till you’ve read The Lives of the English Poets. Go on. Get out.

It’s a warm October day and I have nothing else to do but what I’m told and what harm is there in wandering up to Fifth Avenue where the lions are. The librarians are friendly. Of course I can have a library card and it’s so nice to see young immigrants using the library. I can borrow four books if I like as long as they’re back on the due date. I ask if they have a book called The Lives of the English Poets by Samuel Johnson and they say, My, my, my, you’re reading Johnson. I want to tell them I never read Johnson before but I don’t want them to stop admiring me. They tell me feel free to walk around, take a look at the Main Reading Room on the third floor. They’re not a bit like the librarians in Ireland who stood guard and protected the books against the likes of me.

The sight of the Main Reading Room, North and South, makes me go weak at the knees. I don’t know if it’s the two beers I had or the excitement of my second day in New York but I’m near tears when I look at the miles of shelves and know I’ll never be able to read all those books if I live till the end of the century. There are acres of shiny tables where all sorts of people sit and read as long as they like seven days a week and no one bothers them unless they fall asleep and snore. There are sections with English, Irish, American books, literature, history, religion, and it makes me shiver to think I can come here anytime I like and read anything as long as I like if I don’t snore.

I stroll back to Costello’s with four books under my arm. I want to show the angry man I have The Lives of the English Poets but he’s not there. The barman says that would be Mr. Tim Costello himself that was going on about Johnson and as he’s talking the angry man comes out of the kitchen. He says, Are you back already?

I have The Lives of the English Poets, Mr. Costello.

You may have The Lives of the English Poets under your oxter, young fellow, but you don’t have them in your head so go home and read.

It’s Thursday and I have nothing to do till the job starts on Monday. For lack of a chair I sit up in the bed in my furnished room and read till Mrs. Austin knocks on my door at eleven and tells me she’s not a millionaire and it’s house policy that lights be turned off at eleven to keep down her electricity bill. I turn off the light and lie on the bed listening to New York, people talking and laughing, and I wonder if I’ll ever be part of the city, out there talking and laughing.

There’s another knock at the door and this young man with red hair and an Irish accent tells me his name is Tom Clifford and would I like a fast beer because he works in an East Side building and he has to be there in an hour. No, he won’t go to an Irish bar. He wants nothing to do with the Irish so we walk to the Rhinelander on Eighty-sixth Street where Tom tells me how he was born in America but was taken to Cork and got out as fast as he could by joining the American army for three good years in Germany when you could get laid ten times over for a carton of cigarettes or a pound of coffee. There’s a dance floor and a band in the back of the Rhinelander and Tom asks a girl from one of the tables to dance. He tells me, Come on. Ask her friend to dance.

But I don’t know how to dance and I don’t know how to ask a girl to dance. I know nothing about girls. How could I after growing up in Limerick? Tom asks the other girl to dance with me and she leads me out on the floor. I don’t know what to do. Tom is stepping and twirling and I don’t know whether to go backward or forward with this girl in my arms. She tells me I’m stepping on her shoes and when I tell her I’m sorry she says, Oh, forget it. I don’t feel like clumping around. She goes back to her table and I follow her with my face on fire. I don’t know whether to sit at her table or go back to the bar till she says, You left your beer on the bar. I’m glad I have an excuse to leave her because I wouldn’t know what to say if I sat. I’m sure she wouldn’t be interested if I told her I spent hours reading Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets or if I told her how excited I was at the Forty-second Street Library. I might have to find a book in the library on how to talk to girls or I might have to ask Tom who dances and laughs and has no trouble with the talk. He comes back to the bar and says he’s going to call in sick which means he’s not going to work. The girl likes him and says she’ll let him take her home. He whispers to me he might get laid which means he might go to bed with her. The only problem is the other girl. He calls her my girl. Go ahead, he says. Ask her if you can take her home. Let’s sit at their table and you can ask her.

The beer is working on me and I’m feeling braver and I don’t feel shy about sitting at the girls’ table and telling them about Tim Costello and Dr. Samuel Johnson. Tom nudges me and whispers, For Christ’s sake, stop the Samuel Johnson stuff, ask her home. When I look at her I see two and I wonder which I should ask home but if I look between the two I see one and that’s the one I ask.

Home? she says. You kiddin’ me. That’s a laugh. I’m a secretary, a private secretary, and you don’t even have a high school diploma. I mean, did you look in the mirror lately? She laughs and my face is on fire again. Tom takes a long drink of beer and I know I’m useless with these girls so I leave and walk down Third Avenue taking the odd look at my reflection in shop windows and giving up hope.

Monday morning my boss, Mr. Carey, tells me I’ll be a houseman, a very important job where I’ll be out front in the lobby dusting, sweeping, emptying ashtrays and it’s important because a hotel is judged by its lobby. He says we have the best lobby in the country. It’s the Palm Court and known the world over. Anyone who’s anyone knows about the Palm Court and the Biltmore clock. Chrissakes, it’s right there in books and short stories, Scott Fitzgerald, people like that. Important people say, Let’s meet under the clock at the Biltmore, and what happens if they come in and the place is covered with dust and buried in garbage. That’s my job, to keep the Biltmore famous. I’m to clean and I’m not to talk to guests, not even look at them. If they talk to me I’m to say, Yes, sir or ma’am, or No, sir or ma’am, and keep working. He says I’m to be invisible, and that makes him laugh. Imagine that, eh, you’re the invisible man cleaning the lobby. He says this is a big job and I’d never have it if I hadn’t been sent by the Democratic Party at the request of the priest from California. Mr. Carey says the last guy on this job was fired for talking to college girls under the clock but he was Italian so whaddya expect. He tells me keep my eye on the ball, don’t forget to take a shower every day, this is America, stay sober, stick with your own kind of people, you can’t go wrong with the Irish, go easy with the drink, and in a year I might rise to the rank of porter or busboy and make tips and, who knows, rise up to be a waiter and wouldn’t that be the end of all my worries. He says anything is possible in America, Look at me, I have four suits.

The headwaiter in the lobby is called maître d’. He tells me I’m to sweep up only what falls to the floor and I’m not to touch anything on the tables. If money falls to the floor or jewelry or anything like that I’m to hand it to him, the maître d’ himself, and he’ll decide what to do with it. If an ashtry is full I’m to wait for a busboy or a waiter to tell me empty it. Sometimes there are things in ashtrays that need to be taken care of. A woman might remove an earring because of the soreness and forget she left it in the ashtray and there are earrings worth thousands of dollars, not that I’d know anything about that just off the boat. It’s the job of the maître d’ to hold on to all earrings and return them to the women with the sore ears.

There are two waiters working in the lobby and they rush back and forth, running into each other and barking in Greek. They tell me, You, Irish, come ’ere, clean up, clean up, empty goddam ashtray, take garbage, come on, come on, less go, you drunk or sompin’? They yell at me in front of the college students who swarm in on Thursdays and Fridays. I wouldn’t mind Greeks yelling at me if they didn’t do it in front of the college girls who are golden. They toss their hair and smile with teeth you see only in America, white, perfect, and everyone has tanned movie star legs. The boys sport crew cuts, the teeth, football shoulders, and they’re easy with the girls. They talk and laugh and the girls lift their glasses and smile at the boys with shining eyes. They might be my age but I move among them ashamed of my uniform and my dustpan and broom. I wish I could be invisible but I can’t when the waiters yell at me in Greek and English and something in between or a busboy might accuse me of interfering with an ashtray that had something on it.

There are times when I don’t know what to do or say. A college boy with a crew cut says, Do you mind not cleaning around here just now? I’m talking to the lady. If the girl looks at me and then looks away I feel my face getting hot and I don’t know why. Sometimes a college girl will smile at me and say, Hi, and I don’t know what to say. I’m told by the hotel people above me I’m not to say a word to the guests though I wouldn’t know how to say Hi anyway because we never said it in Limerick and if I said it I might be fired from my new job and be out on the street with no priest to get me another one. I’d like to say Hi and be part of that lovely world for a minute except that a crew cut boy might think I was gawking at his girl and report me to the maître d’. I could go home tonight and sit up in the bed and practice smiling and saying Hi. If I kept at it I’d surely be able to handle the Hi but I’d have to say it without the smile for if I drew my lips back at all I’d frighten the wits out of the golden girls under the Biltmore clock.

There are days when the girls take off their coats and the way they look in sweaters and blouses is such an occasion of sin I have to lock myself in a toilet cubicle and interfere with myself and I have to be quiet for fear of being discovered by someone, a Puerto Rican busboy or a Greek waiter, who will run to the maître d’ and report that the lobby houseman is wankin’ away in the bathroom.

There’s a poster outside the Sixty-eighth Street Playhouse that says Hamlet with Laurence Olivier: Coming Next Week. I’m already planning to treat myself to a night out with a bottle of ginger ale and a lemon meringue pie fom the bakery like the one I had with the priest in Albany, the loveliest taste I ever had in my life. There I’ll be watching Hamlet on the screen tormenting himself and everybody else, and I’ll have tartness of ginger ale and sweetness of pie clashing away in my mouth. Before I go to the cinema I can sit in my room and read Hamlet to make sure I know what they’re all saying in that Old English. The only book I brought from Ireland is the Complete Works of Shakespeare which I bought in O’Mahony’s Bookshop for thirteen shillings and sixpence, half my wages when I worked at the post office delivering telegrams. The play I like best is Hamlet because of what he had to put up with when his mother carried on with her husband’s brother, Claudius, and the way my own mother in Limerick carried on with her cousin, Laman Griffin. I could understand Hamlet raging at his mother the way I did with my mother the night I had my first pint and went home drunk and slapped her face. I’ll be sorry for that till the day I die though I’d still like to go back to Limerick some day and find Laman Griffin in a pub and tell him step outside and I’d wipe the floor with him till he begged for mercy. I know it’s useless talking like that because Laman Griffin will surely be dead of the drink and the consumption by the time I return to Limerick and he’ll be a long time in hell before I ever say a prayer or light a candle for him even if Our Lord says we should forgive our enemies and turn the other cheek. No, even if Our Lord came back on earth and ordered me to forgive Laman Griffin on pain of being cast into the sea with a millstone around my neck, the thing I fear most in the world, I’d have to say, Sorry, Our Lord, I can never forgive that man for what he did to my mother and my family. Hamlet didn’t wander around Elsinore forgiving people in a made-up story, so why should I in real life.

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.

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.

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.

The doctor’s office is in an old building, up four flights of stairs. Babies are crying and a radio is playing

Boys and girls together

Me and Mamie O’Rourke

We’ll trip the light fantastic

On the sidewalks of New York.

The doctor tells me, Come in, sit in this chair, whassa matter with your eyes? You here for glasses?

I have some kind of infection, Doctor.

Jesus, yeah. That’s some infection all right. How long you had this?

Nine years, Doctor. I was in the eye hospital in Ireland when I was eleven.

He pokes at my eyes with a little piece of wood and pats them with cotton swabs which stick to the lids and make me blink. He tells me stop blinking, how the hell do I expect him to examine my eyes if I sit there blinking like a maniac? But I can’t help it. The more he pokes and swabs the more I blink till he’s so irritated he throws the stick with the swab stuck to it out the window. He pulls out drawers in his desk and curses and slams them in again till he finds a small bottle of whiskey and a cigar and that puts him in such a good humor he sits at his desk and laughs.

Still blinking, eh? Well, kid, I’ve been looking at eyes for thirty-seven years and I never saw anything like that. What are you, Mexican or something?

No, I’m Irish, Doctor.

What you have there they don’t have that in Ireland. And that’s not conjunctivitis. I know from conjunctivitis. That’s something else and I can tell you you’re lucky you have eyes at all. What you have I saw in guys coming back from the Pacific, New Guinea and places like that. You ever in New Guinea?

No, Doctor.

Now what you have to do is shave that head completely. You’ve got some kind of infectious dandruff like the guys from New Guinea and it’s falling into your eyes. That hair will have to come off and you’ll have to scrub that scalp every day with a prescription soap. Scrub that scalp till it tingles. Scrub that scalp till it shines and come back to see me. That’ll be ten dollars, kid.

The prescription soap is two dollars and the Italian barber on Third Avenue charges me another two dollars plus tip for cutting my hair and shaving my scalp. He tells me it’s a crying shame shaving off a nice head of hair, if he had a head of hair like that they’d have to cut off his head to get it, that most of these doctors don’t know shit from Shinola anyway but if that’s what I want who is he to object.

He holds up a mirror to show how bald I look in the back and I feel weak with the shame of it, the bald head, the red eyes, the pimples, the bad teeth, and if anyone looks at me on Lexington Avenue I’ll push him into traffic because I’m sorry I ever came to America which threatens to fire me over my eyes and makes me go bald through the streets of New York.

Of course they stare at me on the streets and I want to stare back in a threatening way but I can’t with the yellow ooze in my eyes mixing with strands of cotton and blinding me entirely. I look up and down side streets for the ones least crowded and I zigzag across town and up. The best street is Third Avenue with the El rattling overhead and shadows everywhere and people in bars with their own troubles minding their own business and not staring at every pair of sore eyes that passes by. People coming out of banks and dress shops always stare but people in bars brood over their drinks and wouldn’t care if you went eyeless on the avenue.

Of course Mrs. Austin is gawking out the basement window. No sooner am I in the front door than she’s up the stairs asking what happened to my head, did I have an accident, was I in a fire or something, and I want to snap at her and say, Does this look like a damn fire? But I tell her my hair was only singed in the hotel kitchen and the barber said it would be better to cut it off at the roots and start all over again. I have to be polite to Mrs. Austin for fear she might tell me pack up and leave and there I’d be out on the street on a Saturday with a brown suitcase and a bald head and three dollars to my name. She says, Well, you’re young, and goes back downstairs and all I can do is lie on my bed listening to people on the street talking and laughing, wondering how I can go to work on Monday morning in my baldy condition even if I am obeying the hotel and the doctor’s orders.

I keep going to the mirror in my room, shocking myself with the whiteness of my scalp, and wishing I could stay here till the hair comes back but I’m hungry. Mrs. Austin forbids food and drink in the room but once the darkness falls I go up the street for the big Sunday Times that will shield the bag with a sweet bun and a pint of milk from Mrs. Austin’s gawk. Now I have less than two dollars to last me till Friday and here it is only Saturday. If she stops me I’ll say, Why shouldn’t I have a sweet bun and a pint of milk after the way the doctor told me I had a New Guinea disease and a barber shaved my head to the bone? I wonder about all those films where they’re waving the Stars and Stripes and placing their hands on their chests and declaring to the world this is the land of the free and the home of the brave and you know yourself you can’t even go to see Hamlet with your lemon meringue pie and your ginger ale or a banana and you can’t go into Mrs. Austin’s with any food or drink.

But Mrs. Austin doesn’t appear. Landladies never appear when you don’t care.

I can’t read the Times unless I wash out my eyes in the bathroom with warm water and toilet paper and it’s lovely to lie in the bed with the paper and the bun and milk till Mrs. Austin calls up the stairs complaining her electric bills are sky high and would I kindly put out the light, she’s not a millionaire.

Once I switch off the light I remember it’s time to smear my scalp with ointment but then I realize if I lie down the ointment will be all over the pillow and Mrs. Austin will be at me again. The only thing to do is sit up with my head resting against the iron bedstead where I can wipe off any stray ointment. The iron is made up of little scrolls and flowers with petals that stick out and make it impossible to get a decent sleep and the only thing I can do is get out and sleep on the floor where Mrs. Austin will have nothing to complain about.

Monday morning there’s a note on my time card telling me report to the nineteenth floor. Eddie Gilligan says it’s nothing personal but they don’t want me in the lobby anymore with the bad eyes and now the bald head. It’s a well-known fact that people who lose their hair suddenly are not long for this world even if you were to stand up in the middle of the lobby and announce it was the barber who did it. People want to believe the worst and they’re in the personnel office saying, Bad eyes, bald head, put the two together and you have big problems with the guests in the lobby. When the hair grows back and the eyes clear up I might be returned to the lobby, maybe as busboy someday, and I’d be making tips so big I’d be able to support my family in Limerick in high style but not now, not with this head, these eyes.

Eddie Gilligan works on the nineteenth floor with his brother, Joe. Our job is to set up for functions, meetings in rooms and banquets and weddings in the ballroom, and Joe isn’t much use the way his hands and fingers are like roots. He walks around with a long-handled broom in one hand and a cigarette in the other pretending to look busy but he spends most of his time in the lavatory or smoking with Digger Moon the carpetman who claims he’s a Blackfoot Indian and can lay carpet faster and tighter than anyone in the U.S. of A. unless he’s had a few and then watch out because he remembers the sufferin gs of his people. When Digger remembers the sufferings of his people the only man he can talk to is Joe Gilligan because Joe himself is suffering with arthritis and Digger says Joe understands. When you have arthritis so bad you can barely wipe your ass you understand all kinds of suffering. That’s what Digger says and when Digger isn’t going from floor to floor laying carpet or pulling up carpet he sits cross-legged on the floor of the carpet room suffering with Joe, one with the past, the other with the arthritis. No one is going to bother Digger or Joe because everyone in the Biltmore Hotel knows of their suffering and they can spend days in the carpet room or stepping across the street to McAnn’s Bar for relief. Mr. Carey himself suffers with a bad stomach. He makes his inspection rounds in the morning suffering from the breakfast his wife cooks and on the afternoon inspection he’s suffering from the lunch his wife packs. He tells Eddie his wife is a beautiful woman, the only one he ever loved, but she’s killing him slowly and she’s not in such good shape herself with her legs all swollen with rheumatism. Eddie tells Mr. Carey his wife is in bad shape, too, after four miscarriages and now some kind of blood infection that has the doctor worried. The morning we set up for the annual banquet of the American-Irish Historical Society, Eddie and Mr. Carey stand at the entrance to the nineteenth-floor ballroom, Eddie smoking a cigarette and Mr. Carey in his double-breasted suit draped nicely to make you think he doesn’t have that much of a belly, stroking it to ease the pain. Eddie tells Mr. Carey he never smoked till he was hit on Omaha Beach and some asshole, excuse the language, Mr. Carey, shoved a cigarette in his mouth while he was lying there waiting for the medics. He took a drag on that cigarette and it gave him such relief lying there with his gut hanging out on Omaha Beach he’s been smoking ever since, can’t give ’em up, tried, Christ knows, but can’t. Now Digger Moon strolls up with a huge carpet on his shoulder and tells Eddie something has to be done about his brother, Joe, that that poor son-of-a-bitch is suffering more than seven Indian tribes and Digger knows something about suffering after his stint with the infantry all over the goddam Pacific when he was hit with everything the Japs could throw at him, malaria, everything. Eddie says, Yeah, yeah, he knows about Joe and he’s sorry, after all it’s his brother, but he has his own troubles with his wife and her miscarriages and blood infection and his own gut messed up from not being put back right and he worries about Joe the way he mixes alcohol and all kinds of painkillers. Mr. Carey belches and groans and Digger says, You still eating shit? because Digger isn’t afraid of Mr. Carey or anyone else. That’s how it is when you’re a great carpetman, you can say what you like to anyone and if they fire you there’s always a job in the Hotel Commodore or the Hotel Roosevelt or even, Jesus, yeah, the Waldorf-Astoria, where they’re always trying to steal Digger away. Some days Digger is so overcome by the sufferings of his people he refuses to lay any carpet and when Mr. Carey won’t fire him Digger says, That’s right. White man can’t get along without us Indians. White man gotta have Iroquois sixty floors up the skyscrapers to dance along steel beams. White man gotta have Blackfoot to lay good carpet. Every time Digger hears Mr. Carey belch he tells him stop eating shit and have a nice beer because beer never bothered nobody and it’s Mrs. Carey’s sandwiches that are killing Mr. Carey. Digger tells Mr. Carey he has a theory about women, that they’re like black widow spiders who kill the males after they screw, bite their goddam heads off, that women don’t care about men, once they’re past the age of having kids men are really useless unless they’re up on the horse attacking another tribe. Eddie Gilligan says you’d look pretty fuckin’ silly riding your horse up Madison Avenue to attack another tribe and Digger says that’s exactly what he means. He says a man is put on this earth to paint his face, ride the horse, throw the spear, kill the other tribe and when Eddie says, Aw, bullshit, Digger says, Aw, bullshit, my ass, what are you doin’, Eddie? spending your life here setting up for dinners and weddings? Is that a way for a man to live? Eddie shrugs and puffs on his cigarette and when Digger suddenly swings around to walk away he catches Mr. Carey and Eddie with the end of the carpet and knocks them five feet into the ballroom.

It’s an accident and no one says anything but still I admire the way Digger goes through the world not giving a fiddler’s fart like my Uncle Pa in Limerick just because no one can lay carpet like him. I wish I could be like Digger but not with carpets. I hate carpets.

If I had the money I could buy a torch and read till dawn. In America a torch is called a flashlight. A biscuit is called a cookie, a bun is a roll. Confectionery is pastry and minced meat is ground. Men wear pants instead of trousers and they’ll even say this pant leg is shorter than the other which is silly. When I hear them saying pant leg I feel like breathing faster. The lift is an elevator and if you want a WC or a lavatory you have to say bathroom even if there isn’t a sign of a bath there. And no one dies in America, they pass away or they’re deceased and when they die the body, which is called the remains, is taken to a funeral home where people just stand around and look at it and no one sings or tells a story or takes a drink and then it’s taken away in a casket to be interred. They don’t like saying coffin and they don’t like saying buried. They never say graveyard. Cemetery sounds nicer.

If I had the money I could buy a hat and go out but I can’t wander the streets of Manhattan in my bald state for fear people might think they were looking at a snowball on a pair of scrawny shoulders. In a week when the hair darkens my scalp I’ll be able to go out again and there’s nothing Mrs. Austin can do about that. That’s what gives me such pleasure, lying on the bed and thinking of the things you can do that nobody else can interfere with. That’s what Mr. O’Halloran, the headmaster, used to tell us in school in Limerick, Your mind is a treasure house that you should stock well and it’s the one part of you the world can’t interfere with.

New York was the city of my dreams but now I’m here the dreams are gone and it’s not what I expected at all. I never thought I’d be going around a hotel lobby cleaning up after people and scouring toilet bowls in the lavatories. How could I ever write my mother or anyone in Limerick and tell them the way I’m living in this rich land with two dollars to last me for a week, a bald head and sore eyes, and a landlady who won’t let me turn on the light? How could I ever tell them I have to eat bananas every day, the cheapest food in the world, because the hotel won’t let me near the kitchen for leftovers for fear the Puerto Ricans might catch my New Guinea infection? They’d never believe me. They’d say, Go away ower that, and they’d laugh because all you have to do is look at the films to see how well off Americans are, the way they fiddle with their food and leave something on their plate and then push the plate away. It’s hard even to feel sorry for Americans who are supposed to be poor in a film like The Grapes of Wrath when everything dries up and they have to move to California. At least they’re dry and warm. My Uncle Pa Keating used to say if we had a California in Ireland the whole country would flock there, eat oranges galore and spend the whole day swimming. When you’re in Ireland it’s hard to believe there are poor people in America because you see the Irish coming back, Returned Yanks they’re called, and you can spot them a mile away with their fat arses waggling along O’Connell Street in trousers too tight and colors you’d never see in Ireland, blues, pinks, light greens, and even flashes of puce. They always act rich and talk through their noses about their refrigerators and automobiles and if they go into a pub they want American drinks no one ever heard of, cocktails if you don’t mind, though if you act like that in a Limerick pub the barman will put you in your place and remind you how you went to America with your arse hanging out of your trousers and don’t be putting on airs here, Mick, I knew you when the snot hung from your nose to your kneecaps. You can always spot the Real Yanks, too, with their light colors and fat arses and the way they look around and smile and give pennies to raggedy children. Real Yanks don’t put on airs. They don’t have to after coming from a country where everyone has everything.

If Mrs. Austin won’t let me have a light I can still sit up in the bed or lie down or I can decide to stay in or go out. I won’t go out tonight because of my bald head and I don’t mind because I can stay here and turn my mind into a film about Limerick. This is the greatest discovery I’ve made from lying in the room, that if I can’t read because of my eyes or Mrs. Austin complaining about the light I can start any kind of a film in my head. If it’s midnight here it’s five in the morning in Limerick and I can picture my mother and brothers asleep with the dog, Lucky, growling at the world and my uncle, Ab Sheehan, snorting away in his bed from all the pints he had the night before and farting from his great feed of fish and chips.

I can float through Limerick and see people shuffling through the streets for the first Sunday Mass. I can go in and out of churches, shops, pubs, graveyards and see people asleep or groaning with pain in the hospital at the City Home. It’s magic to go back to Limerick in my mind even when it brings the tears. It’s hard to pass through the lanes of the poor and look into their houses and hear babies crying and women trying to start fires to boil water in kettles for the breakfast of tea and bread. It’s hard to see children shivering when they have to leave their beds for school or Mass and there’s no heat in the house like the heat we have here in New York with radiators singing away at six in the morning. I’d like to empty out the lanes of Limerick and bring all the poor people to America and put them in houses with heat and give them warm clothes and shoes and let them stuff themselves with porridge and sausages. Some day I’ll make millions and I’ll bring the poor people to America and send them back to Limerick fat-arsed and waddling up and down O’Connell Street in light colors.

I can do anything I like in this bed, anything. I can dream about Limerick or I can interfere with myself even if it’s a sin, and Mrs. Austin will never know. No one will ever know unless I go to confession and I’m too doomed for that.

Other nights when I have hair on my head and no money I can walk around Manhattan. I don’t mind that one bit because the streets are as lively as any film at the Sixty-eighth Street Playhouse. There’s always a fire engine screaming around a corner or an ambulance or a police car and sometimes they come screaming together and you know there’s a fire. People always watch for the fire engine to slow down and that tells you what block to go to and where to look for smoke and flames. If someone is at a window ready to jump that makes it more exciting. The ambulance will wait with flashing lights and cops will tell everyone move back. That’s the main job of cops in New York, telling everyone move back. They’re powerful with their guns and sticks but the real hero is the fireman especially if he climbs a ladder and plucks a child from a window. He could save an old man with crutches and nothing on but a nightshirt but it’s different when it’s a child sucking her thumb and resting her curly head on the fireman’s broad shoulder. That’s when we all cheer and look at each other and know we’re all happy about the same thing.

And that’s what makes us look in the Daily News the next day to see if there’s any chance we might be in the picture with the brave fireman and the curly-haired child.

Mrs. Austin tells me her sister, Hannah, that’s married to the Irishman, is coming for a little visit on Christmas before they go out to her house in Brooklyn and she’d like to meet me. We’ll have a sandwich and a Christmas drink and that will get Hannah’s mind off her troubles with that crazy Irishman. Mrs. Austin doesn’t understand herself why Hannah would want to spend Christmas Eve with the likes of me, another Irishman, but she was always a bit strange and maybe she likes the Irish after all. Their mother warned them a long time ago back in Sweden, over twenty years, would you believe it, to stay away from Irishmen and Jews, to marry their own kind and Mrs. Austin doesn’t mind telling me her husband, Eugene, was half-Swedish, half-Hungarian, that never drank a drop in his life though he loved to eat and that’s what killed him in the end. She doesn’t mind telling me he was big as a house when he died, that when she wasn’t cooking he was raiding the refrigerator and when they got a TV set that was really the end of him. He’d sit there eating and drinking and worrying about the state of the world so much his heart just stopped, just like that. She misses him and it’s hard after twenty-three years especially when they had no kids. Her sister, Hannah, has five kids and that’s because the Irishman won’t ever leave her alone, a couple of drinks and he’s jumping on her, just like a typical Irish Catholic. Eugene wasn’t like that, he had respect. In any case she’ll expect to see me after work on Christmas Eve.

On the day itself Mr. Carey invites the housemen of the hotel and four chambermaid supervisors to his office for a little Christmas drink. There’s a bottle of Paddy’s Irish whiskey and a bottle of Four Roses which Digger Moon won’t touch. He wants to know why anyone would drink piss like Four Roses when they can have the best thing that ever came out of Ireland, the whiskey. Mr. Carey strokes his belly along the double-breasted suit and says it’s all the same to him, he can’t drink anything. It would kill him. But drink anyway, here’s to a Merry Christmas and who knows what the next year will bring.

Joe Gilligan is already smiling from whatever he’s been swigging all day from the flask in his back pocket and between that and the arthritis there’s the odd stumble. Mr. Carey tells him, Here, Joe, sit in my chair, and when Joe tries to sit he lets out a great groan and there are tears on his cheeks. Mrs. Hynes, the head of all the chambermaids, goes over to him and holds his head against her chest and pats him and rocks him. She says, Ah, poor Joe, poor Joe, I don’t know how the good Lord could twist your bones after what you did for America in the war. Digger Moon says that’s where Joe got the arthritis, in the goddam Pacific, where they have every goddam disease known to man. Remember this, Joe, it was the goddam Japs gave you that arthritis the way they gave me malaria. We haven’t been the same since, Joe, you an’ me.

Mr. Carey tells him take it easy, take it easy with the language, there are ladies present, and Digger says, Okay, Mr. Carey, I respect you for that and it’s Christmas so what the hell. Mrs. Hynes says, That’s right, it’s Christmas and we must love each other and forgive our enemies. Digger says, Forgive my ass. I don’t forgive the white man and I don’t forgive the Japs. But I forgive you, Joe. You suffered more than ten Indian tribes with that goddam arthritis. When he grabs Joe’s hand to shake it Joe howls with pain and Mr. Carey says, Digger, Digger. Mrs. Hynes says, Will you, for the love o’ Jesus, have respect for Joe’s arthritis. Digger says, Sorry, ma’am, I have the greatest respect for Joe’s arthritis, and to prove it he holds a large glass of Paddy’s to Joe’s lips.

Eddie Gilligan stands over in a corner with his glass and I wonder why he looks and says nothing when the world is worried about his brother. I know he has his own troubles with his wife’s blood infection but I can’t understand why he won’t at least stand closer to his brother.

Jerry Kerrisk whispers we should get away from this crazy crowd and have a beer. I don’t like spending money in bars with the trouble my mother is in but it’s Christmas and the whiskey I had already makes me feel better about myself and the world in general and why shouldn’t I be good to myself. It’s the first time in my life I ever drank whiskey like a man and now that I’m in a bar with Jerry I can talk and not worry about my eyes or anything. Now I can ask Jerry why Eddie Gilligan is so cold to his brother.

Women, says Jerry. Eddie was engaged to this girl when he was drafted but when he went away she and Joe fell in love and when she sent Eddie back the engagement ring he went crazy and said he’d kill Joe the minute he saw him. But Eddie was sent to Europe and Joe to the Pacific and they were busy killing other people and while they were away Joe’s wife, the one Eddie was supposed to marry, started drinking and now makes Joe’s life hell. Eddie said that was punishment for the son-of-a-bitch for stealing his girl. He met a nice Italian girl himself in the army, a WAC, but she has the blood infection and you’d think there’s a curse on the whole Gilligan family.

Jerry says he thinks the Irish mothers are right after all. You should marry your own kind, Irish Catholics, and make sure they’re not drinkers or Italians with blood infections.

He laughs when he says that but there’s something serious in his eyes and I don’t say anything because I know I don’t want to marry an Irish Catholic myself and spend the rest of my life dragging the kids to confession and Communion and saying, Yes, Father, oh, indeed, Father, every time I see a priest.

Jerry wants to stay in the bar and drink more beer and he turns peevish when I tell him I have to visit Mrs. Austin and her sister, Hannah. Why would I want to spend Christmas Eve with two old Swedish women, forty years old at least, when I could be having a grand time for myself with girls from Mayo and Kerry up at Ireland’s Thirty-Two? Why?

I can’t answer him because I don’t know where I want to be or what I’m supposed to do. That’s what you’re faced with when you come to America, one decision after another. I knew what to do in Limerick and I had answers for questions but this is my first Christmas Eve in New York and here I am pulled one way by Jerry Kerrisk, Ireland’s Thirty-Two, the promise of girls from Mayo and Kerry, and the other way by two old Swedish women, one always gawking out the window in case I might smuggle in food or drink, the other unhappy with her Irish husband and who knows what way she’ll jump. I’m afraid if I don’t go to Mrs. Austin she might turn savage on me and tell me leave and there I’ll be out on the street on Christmas Eve with my brown suitcase and only a few dollars left after sending money home, paying my rent and now buying beer right and left in this bar. After all this I can’t afford to spend the night doling out beer money for the women of Ireland and that’s the part Jerry understands, the part that takes away his peevishness. He knows money has to be sent home. He says, Happy Christmas, and laughs, I know you’ll have a wild night with the old Swedish girls. The barman has his ear cocked and he says, Mind yourself at them Swedish parties. They’ll be giving you their native drink, the glug, and if you drink that stuff you won’t know Christmas Eve from the feast of the Immaculate Conception. It’s black and thick and you’d need a strong constitution for it, and then they make you eat all kinds of fish with it, raw fish, salty fish, smoked fish, all kinds of fish you wouldn’t give a cat. The Swedes drink that glug and it makes them so crazy they think they’re Vikings all over again.

Jerry says he didn’t know the Swedes were Vikings. He thought you had to be a Dane.

Nodatall, says the barman. All them people in northern places were Vikings. Whenever you saw ice you were sure to see a Viking.

Jerry says it’s remarkable the things people know and the barman says, I could tell you a story or two.

Jerry orders one more beer for the road and I drink it though I don’t know what’s going to become of me after my two large whiskeys in Mr. Carey’s office and four beers here with Jerry. I don’t know how I’m going to face a night of glug and all kinds of fish if the barman is right in his prophecy.

We walk up Third Avenue singing “Don’t Fence Me In” with people rushing past us frantic over Christmas, giving us nothing but hard stares. There are dancing Christmas lights everywhere, but up around Bloomingdale’s the lights dance too much and I have to hold on to a Third Avenue El pillar and throw up. Jerry pushes in my stomach with his fist. Get it all up, he says, and you’ll have plenty of room for the glug and you’ll be a new man tomorrow. Then he says glug glug glug and laughs so hard over the sound of the word he’s nearly hit by a car and a cop tells us move on, that we should be ashamed of ourselves, Irish kids that should respect the birthday of the Savior, goddammit.

There’s a diner at Sixty-seventh Street and Jerry says I should have coffee to straighten me out before I see the Swedes, he’ll pay for it. We sit at the counter and he tells me he’s not going to spend the rest of his life working like a slave at the Biltmore Hotel. He’s not going to wind up like the Gilligans who fought for the U.S.A. and what the hell did they get for it? Arthritis and wives with blood infections and drinking problems, that’s what they got. Oh, no, Jerry is heading for the Catskill Mountains on Memorial Day, the end of May, the Irish Alps. Plenty of work up there waiting on tables, cleaning up, anything, and the tips are good. There are Jewish places up there, too, but they’re not too active in the tipping department because they pay for everything in advance and don’t have to carry cash. The Irish drink and leave money on tables or the floor and when you clean up it’s all yours. Sometimes they come back squawking but you didn’t see a thing. You don’t know nothing. You just sweep up the way you’re paid to. Of course they don’t believe you and they call you a liar and say things about your mother but there’s nothing they can do except take their business elsewhere. There are plenty of girls up in the Catskills. Some places have outdoor dances and all you have to do is waltz your Mary into the woods and before you know it you’re in a state of mortal sin. The Irish girls are mad for it once they get to the Catskills. They’re hopeless in the city the way they all work in fancy places like Schrafft’s with their little black dresses and little white aprons, Ah, yes, ma’am, ah, indeed, ma’am, are the mashed potatoes a little too lumpy, ma’am? but get them up in the mountains and they’re like cats, up the pole, getting pregnant, and before they know what hit them, dozens of Seans and Kevins are dragging their arses up the aisle with the priests glaring at them and the girls’ big brothers threatening them.

I want to sit in the diner all night listening to Jerry talking about Irish girls in the Catskills but the man says it’s Christmas Eve and he’s closing out of respect to his Christian customers even though he’s Greek and it’s not really his Christmas. Jerry wants to know how it could not be his Christmas since all you have to do is look out the window for proof but the Greek says, We’re different.

That’s enough for Jerry who doesn’t argue about such things and that’s what I like about him, the way he goes through life having another beer and dreaming of grand times in the Catskills and not arguing with Greeks about Christmas. I wish I could be like him but there’s always some dark cloud at the back of my head, Swedish women waiting for me with glug, or a letter from my mother saying thanks for the few dollars, Michael and Alphie will have shoes and we’ll have a nice goose for Christmas with the help of God and His Blessed Mother. She never mentions she needs shoes for herself and once I think of that I know I’ll have another dark cloud at the back of my head. I wish there was a little panel I could slide back to release the clouds but there isn’t and I’ll have to find another way or stop collecting dark clouds.

The Greek says, Good night, gen’men, and would we like to take some day-old doughnuts. Take ’em, he says, or I trow out. Jerry says he’ll have one to keep him going to Ireland’s Thirty-Two where he’ll have a feed of corned beef and cabbage and floury white potatoes. The Greek fills a bag with doughnuts and confectionery and tells me I look like I could use a decent meal, so take the bag.

Jerry says good night at Sixty-eighth Street and I wish I could go with him. The whole day has me dizzy and it’s still not over with the Swedes there waiting, stirring the glug, slicing the raw fish. The thought of it makes me puke all over again there on the street and people passing by, frantic with Christmas, make sounds of disgust and step away from me, telling their little children, Don’t look at that disgusting man. He’s drunk. I want to tell them, please don’t turn the little children against me. I want to tell them this is not a habit I have. There are clouds at the back of my head, my mother has a goose, at least, but she needs shoes.

But there’s no use trying to talk to people with parcels and children by the hand and their heads ringing with Christmas carols because they’re going home to bright apartments and they know God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world, as the poet said.

Mrs. Austin opens the door. Oh, look, Hannah, Mr. McCourt brought us a whole bag of doughnuts and pastries. Hannah gives a little wave from the couch and says, That’s nice, you never know when you might need a bag of doughnuts. I always thought the Irish brought a bottle but you’re different. Give the boy a drink, Stephanie.

Hannah is drinking red wine but Mrs. Austin goes to a bowl on the table and ladles out the black stuff into a glass, the glug. My stomach turns again and I have to control it.

Siddown, says Hannah. Lemme tell you something, Irish boy. I don’t give a shit about your people. You may be nice, my sister says you’re nice, you bring nice doughnuts, but right under your skin you’re nothing but shit.

Please, Hannah, says Mrs. Austin.

Please, Hannah, my ass. What did you people ever do for the world besides drink? Stephanie, give him some fish, decent Swedish food. Moon-faced mick. You make me sick, you little mick. Ah, ha, didja hear the poetry in that?

She cackles away over her poetry and I don’t know what to do with my glug in one hand and Mrs. Austin pushing fish at me with the other. Mrs. Austin is drinking the glug, too, and she staggers from me to the bowl to the couch where Hannah is holding out her glass for more wine. She slurps her wine and glares at me. She says, A kid I was when I married that mick. Nineteen. How many years ago? Jesus, twenty-one. Whadda you, Stephanie? Forty-something? Wasted my life on that mick. And what are you doin’ here? Who sent you?

Mrs. Austin.

Mrs. Austin. Mrs. Austin. Speak up, you little spud-shitter. Drink your glug and speak up.

Mrs. Austin sways before me with her glug glass. Come on, Eugene, less go to bed.

Oh, I’m not Eugene, Mrs. Austin.

Oh.

She turns and wobbles away into another room and Hannah cackles again, See that. She still doesn’t know she’s a widow. Wish I was a goddam widow.

The glug I drank is making my stomach turn and I try to rush to the street but the door has three locks and I’m throwing up in the basement vestibule before I can get out. Hannah lurches from the couch and tells me get into the kitchen, get a mop and soap and clean up this goddam mess, don’t you know it’s Christmas Eve for Chrissakes and is this how you treat your gracious host.

From kitchen to door I go with dripping mop, swabbing, squeezing, rinsing in the kitchen sink and back again. Hannah pats my shoulder and kisses my ear and tells me I’m not such a bad mick after all, that I must have been well brought up the way I clean my mess. She tells me help myself to anything, glug, fish, even one of my own doughnuts, but I place the mop back where I found it and walk past Hannah, with the idea in my head that once I cleaned up I don’t have to listen to her anymore or anyone like her. She calls to me, Where you going? Where the hell do you think you’re going? but I’m up the stairs to my room, my bed, so that I can lie there listening to Christmas carols on the radio with the world spinning around me and a great wonder in my head about the rest of my life in America. If I wrote to anyone in Limerick and told them about my Christmas Eve in New York they’d say I was making it up. They’d say New York must be a lunatic asylum.

In the morning there’s a knock at my door and it’s Mrs. Austin in dark glasses. Hannah is farther down the stairs and she’s in dark glasses, too. Mrs. Austin says she heard I had an accident in her apartment but no one can blame her or her sister since they were prepared to offer the finest of Swedish hospitality and if I chose to arrive at their little party in a certain state they couldn’t be blamed and it’s too bad because they wanted nothing but a truly Christian Christmas Eve and I just wanted to tell you, Mr. McCourt, we don’t appreciate your behavior one bit, isn’t that right, Hannah?

There’s a croak from Hannah as she coughs and puffs on a cigarette.

They go back down the stairs and I want to call after Mrs. Austin to see if there’s any chance she could spare me a doughnut from the Greek’s bag since I’m so empty from all the throwing up last night but they’re out the door and from my window I can see them loading Christmas parcels into a car and driving off.

I can stand at the window all day looking at the happy people with children by the hand going off to church, as they say in America, or I can sit up in the bed with Crime and Punishment and see what Raskolnikov is up to but that will stir up all kinds of guilt and I don’t have the strength for it and it’s not the right kind of reading for a Christmas Day anyway. I’d like to go up the street for Communion at St. Vincent Ferrer’s but it’s years since I went to confession and my soul is as black as Mrs. Austin’s glug. The happy Catholic people with children by the hand are surely going to St. Vincent’s and if I follow them I’m bound to have a Christmas feeling.

It’s lovely to go into a church like St. Vincent’s where you know the Mass will be just like the Mass in Limerick or anywhere in the world. You could go to Samoa or Kabul and they’d have the same Mass and even if they wouldn’t let me be an altar boy in Limerick I still have the Latin my father taught me and no matter where I go I can respond to the priest. No one can scoop out the contents of my head, all the saints’ feast days I know by heart, the Mass Latin, the chief towns and products of the thirty-two counties of Ireland, songs galore of Ireland’s sufferings and Oliver Goldsmith’s lovely poem “The Deserted Village.” They could put me in jail and throw away the key but they could never stop me from dreaming my way around Limerick and out along the banks of the Shannon or thinking about Raskolnikov and his troubles.

The people who go to St. Vincent’s are like the ones who go to the Sixty-eighth Street Playhouse for Hamlet and they know the Latin responses the way they know the play. They share prayer books and sing hymns together and smile at each other because they know Brigid the maid is back there in the Park Avenue kitchen keeping an eye on the turkey. Their sons and daughters have the look of coming home from school and college and they smile at other people in the pews also home from school and college. They can afford to smile because they all have teeth so dazzling if they dropped them in snow they’d be lost forever.

The church is so crowded there are people standing in the back but I’m so weak with the hunger and the long Christmas Eve of whiskey, glug and throwing up I want to find a seat. There’s an empty spot at the end of a pew far up the center aisle but as soon as I slip into it a man comes running at me. He’s all dressed up in striped trousers, a coat with tails, and a frown over his face and he whispers to me, You must leave this pew at once. This is for regular pew holders, come on, come on. I feel my face turning red and that means my eyes are worse and when I go down the aisle I know the whole world is looking at me, the one who sneaked into the pew of a happy family with children home from school and college.

There’s no use even standing at the back of the church. They all know and they’ll be giving me looks, so I might as well leave and add another sin to the hundreds already on my soul, the mortal sin of not going to Mass on Christmas Day. At least God will know I tried and it’s not my fault if I wandered into a happy family from Park Avenue pew.

I’m so empty now and hungry I want to go mad with myself and have a feast at the Horn & Hardart Automat but I don’t want to be seen there for fear people might think I’m like the ones who sit there half the day with a cup of coffee, an old newspaper and nowhere to go. There’s a Chock Full o’ Nuts a few blocks away and that’s where I have a bowl of pea soup, a nutted cheese on raisin bread, a cup of coffee, a doughnut with white sugar and a read of the Journal-American that someone left behind.

It’s only two in the afternoon and I don’t know what to do with myself when all the libraries are closed. People walking by with children by the hand might think I have nowhere to go so I keep my head up and walk up one street and down the other as if I were rushing for a turkey dinner. I wish I could open a door somewhere and have people say, Oh, hi, Frank, you’re just in time. The people walking here and there on the streets of New York take it all for granted. They bring presents and get presents and have their big Christmas dinners and they never know there are people walking up one street and down the other on the holiest day of the year. I wish I could be an ordinary New Yorker stuffed after my dinner, talking to my family with Christmas carols on the radio in the background. Or I wouldn’t mind being back in Limerick with my mother and brothers and the nice goose but here I am in the place I always dreamed about, New York, and I’m worn out with all these streets where there isn’t even a bird to be seen.

There’s nothing to do but go back to my room, listen to the radio, read Crime and Punishment and fall asleep wondering why Russians have to drag things out. You’d never find a New York detective wandering around with the likes of Raskolnikov talking about everything but the murder of the old woman. The New York detective would nab him, book him and the next thing is the electric chair in Sing Sing, and that’s because Americans are busy people with no time for detectives to be chatting with people they already know committed the murder.

There’s a knock on the door and it’s Mrs. Austin. Mr. McCourt, she says, would you come downstairs a minute?

I don’t know what to say. I’d like to tell her kiss my arse after the way her sister talked to me and the way she talked to me herself this morning but I follow her down and there she has all kinds of food laid out on the table. She says she brought it from her sister’s, that they were worried I might have no place to go or nothing to eat on this beautiful day. She’s sorry about the way she talked to me this morning and hopes I’m in a forgiving mood.

There’s turkey and stuffing and all kinds of potatoes, white and yellow, with cranberry sauce to make everything sweet and all this puts me in a forgiving mood. She’d give me some glug but her sister threw it out and it’s just as well. It made everyone sick.

When I’m finished she invites me to sit and watch her new television set where there’s a program about Jesus that’s so holy I fall asleep in the armchair. When I awake the clock on her mantelpiece says twenty past four in the morning and Mrs. Austin is in the other room letting out little cries, Eugene, Eugene, and that proves you can have a sister and go to her house for Christmas dinner but if you don’t have your Eugene you’re as lonely as anyone sitting in the Automat and it’s a great comfort to know my mother and brothers in Limerick have a goose and next year when I’m promoted to busboy at the Biltmore I’ll send them the money that will let them stroll around Limerick dazzling the world with their new shoes.

Eddie Gilligan tells me go to the lockers and get into my street clothes because there’s a priest in Mr. Carey’s office who met me coming over on the ship and now wants to take me to lunch. Then he says, What are you blushing for? It’s only a priest and you’re getting the free lunch.

I wish I could say I don’t want to meet the priest for lunch but Eddie and Mr. Carey might ask questions. If a priest says come to lunch you have to go and it doesn’t matter what happened in the hotel room even if it wasn’t my fault. I could never tell Eddie or Mr. Carey how the priest came at me. They’d never believe me. People sometimes say things about priests, that they’re fat or pompous or mean, but no one would ever believe a priest would interfere with you in a hotel room especially people like Eddie or Mr. Carey with sick wives always running to confession in case they die in their sleep. People like that wouldn’t be surprised if priests walked on water.

Why can’t this priest go back to Los Angeles and leave me alone? Why is he taking me to lunch when he should be out there visiting the sick and the dying? That’s what priests are for. It’s four months since he went off to that retreat house in Virginia to beg forgiveness and here he is still on this side of the continent with nothing on his mind but lunch.

Now Eddie comes to me in the locker room and tells me the priest had another idea, meet him across the street in McAnn’s.

It’s hard to walk into a restaurant and sit down opposite a priest who came at you in a hotel room four months ago. It’s hard to know what to do when he looks at you directly, shakes your hand, holds your elbow, eases you into your seat. He tells me I’m looking good, that I filled out a bit in the face and I must be eating right. He says America is a great country if you give it a chance but I could tell him how they won’t let the Puerto Ricans give me leftovers anymore and how I’m weary of bananas but I don’t want to say much in case he might think I’ve forgotten the Hotel New Yorker. I don’t have any grudge against him. He didn’t hit anyone or starve anyone and what he did came from the drink. What he did was not as bad as running off to England and leaving your wife and children to starve the way my father did but what he did was bad because he’s a priest and they’re not supposed to murder people or interfere with them in any way.

And what he did makes me wonder if there are any other priests wandering the world going at people in hotel rooms.

There he is gazing at me with his big gray eyes, his face all scrubbed and shiny, with his black suit and his gleaming white collar, telling me he wanted to make this one stop before returning to Los Angeles forever. It’s easy to see how pleased he is to be in a state of grace after his four months in the retreat house and I know now it’s hard for me to eat a hamburger with someone in such a state of grace. It’s hard to know what to do with my own eyes when he gazes at me as if I were the one who went at someone in a hotel room. I’d like to be able to look right back at him but all I know of priests is what I’ve seen of them on altars, pulpits and in the darkness of confessionals. He’s probably thinking I’ve been up to all kinds of sin and he’s right but at least I’m not a priest and I never bothered anyone else.

He tells the waiter, Yes, a hamburger is fine and no, no, Lord no, he won’t have a beer, water is fine, nothing alcoholic will ever cross his lips again, and he smiles at me as if I should understand what he’s talking about and the waiter smiles, too, as if to say isn’t this a saintly priest.

He tells me he went to confession to a bishop in Virginia and even though he received absolution and spent four months in work and prayer he feels it wasn’t enough. He has given up his parish and he’ll spend the rest of his days with the poor Mexicans and Negroes in Los Angeles. He calls for the bill, tells me he never wants to see me again, it’s too painful, but he’ll remember me in his Masses. He says I should be careful of the Irish curse, the drink, and whenever I’m tempted to sin I should meditate like him on the purity of the Virgin Mary, good luck, God bless, go to night school, and he’s into a taxi to Idlewild Airport.

There are days the rain is so heavy I have to spend a dime on the subway and I see people my own age with books and bags that say Columbia, Fordham, NYU, City College, and I know I want to be one of them, a student.

I know I don’t want to spend years in the Biltmore Hotel setting up banquets and meetings and I don’t want to be the houseman cleaning up in the Palm Court. I don’t even want to be a busboy getting a share of the waiters’ tips which they get from the rich students who drink their gin and tonic, talk about Hemingway and where should they have dinner and should they go to Vanessa’s party on Sutton Place, it was such a bore last year.

I don’t want to be houseman where people look at me as if I were part of a wall.

I see the college students in the subway and I dream that some day I’ll be like them, carrying my books, listening to professors, graduating with a cap and gown, going on to a job where I’ll wear a suit and tie and carry a briefcase, go home on the train every night, kiss the wife, eat my dinner, play with the kids, read a book, have the excitement with the wife, go to sleep so that I’ll be rested and fresh the next day.

I’d like to be a college student in the subway because you can see from the books they’re carrying their heads must be stuffed with all kinds of knowledge, that they could sit down with you and chat forever about Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson and Dostoyevsky. If I could go to college I’d make sure to ride the subways and let people see my books so that they could admire me and wish they could go to college, too. I’d hold up the books to let people see I was reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It must be grand to be a student with nothing to do but listen to professors, read in libraries, sit under campus trees and discuss what you’re learning. It must be grand to know you’ll be getting a degree that puts you ahead of the rest of the world, that you’ll marry a girl with a degree and you’ll be sitting up in bed the rest of your life having great chats about the important matters.

But I don’t know how I’ll ever get a college degree and rise in the world with no high school diploma and two eyes like piss holes in the snow, as everyone tells me. Some old Irishmen tell me there’s nothing wrong with hard work. Many a man made his way in America by the sweat of his brow and his strong back and it’s a good thing to learn your station in life and not be getting above yourself. They tell me that’s why God put the pride at the top of the Seven Deadly Sins so that young fellas like me won’t be getting off the boat with big notions. There’s plenty of work in this country for anyone who wants to earn an honest dollar with his two hands and the sweat of his brow and no getting above himself.

The Greek in the diner on Third Avenue tells me his cleaning-up Puerto Rican quit on him and would I like to work an hour every morning, come in at six, sweep out the place, mop it, clean out the toilets. I could have an egg, a roll, a cup of coffe and two dollars and, who knows, it might lead to something permanent. He says he likes the Irish, they’re like the Greeks, and that’s because they came from Greece a long time ago. That’s what a professor at Hunter College told him though when I said this to Eddie Gilligan at the hotel he said the Greek and the professor were full of shit, that the Irish were always there on their little island since the beginning of time and what the hell do Greeks know anyway? If they knew anything they wouldn’t be slinging hash in restaurants and babbling in their own language that no one understands.

I don’t care where the Irish came from with the Greek feeding me every morning and paying me two dollars adding up to ten for the week, five for my mother and her shoes and five for me so that I can get proper clothes for myself and not look like Paddy-off-the-boat.

I’m lucky to have an extra few dollars a week especially after Tom Clifford knocked on my door at Mrs. Austin’s and said, Let’s get the hell outa here. He says there’s a huge room the size of an apartment for rent up on Third Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street over a shop called Harry’s Hats and if we shared the rent we’d still be paying six dollars a week and we wouldn’t have Mrs. Austin watching every move. We could bring in anything we liked, food, drink, girls.

Yeah, says Tom, girls.

The new room has a front and a back and looks out on Third Avenue where we can watch the El pass right before us. We wave at the passengers and discover they don’t mind waving back in the evening on the way home from work though very few wave in the morning because of the bad mood they’re in going to work.

Tom works on the night shift at an apartment building and that leaves me on my own in the room. It’s the first time in my life I ever had the feeling of freedom, no bosses, no Mrs. Austin telling me put out the light. I can walk around the neighborhood and look at the German shops, bars, cafés and all the Irish bars on Third Avenue. There are Irish dances at the Caravan, the Tuxedo, the Leitrim House, the Sligo House. Tom won’t go to the Irish dances. He wants to meet German girls because of his three happy years in Germany and because he’s able to speak German. He says the Irish can kiss his ass and I don’t understand that because every time I hear Irish music I feel tears coming and I want to be standing on the banks of the Shannon looking at swans. It’s easy for Tom to talk to German girls or Irish girls when he’s in the mood but it’s never easy for me to talk to anyone because I know they’re looking at my eyes.

Tom had a better education in Ireland than I did and he could go to college if he liked. He says he’d rather make money, that’s what America is there for. He tells me I’m a fool for breaking my ass working at the Biltmore Hotel when I could look around and find a job with a decent wage.

He’s right. I hate working at the Biltmore Hotel and cleaning up for the Greek every morning. When I clean the toilet bowls I feel angry with myself because it reminds me of the time I had to empty the chamber pot of my mother’s cousin Laman Griffin for a few pennies and the loan of his bike. And I wonder why I’m so particular about the toilet bowls, why I want them to be spotless when I could give them a swish of the mop and let them be. No, I have to use plenty of detergent and make them sparkle as if people were going to have their dinners out of them. The Greek is pleased though he gives me strange looks that say, Very nice but why? I could tell him this extra ten dollars a week and the morning food is a gift and I don’t want to lose it. Then he wants to know what I’m doing here in the first place. I’m a nice Irish boy, I know English, I’m intelligent, and why am I cleaning toilet bowls and working in hotels when I could be getting an education. If he knew English he’d be in a university studying the wonderful history of Greece and Plato and Socrates and all the great Greek writers. He wouldn’t be cleaning toilet bowls. Anyone who knows English should not be cleaning toilet bowls.

Tom dances with Emer, a girl at the Tuxedo Ballroom, who is there with her brother, Liam, and when Tom and Liam go for a drink she dances with me even though I don’t know how. I like her because she’s kind even when I step on her feet and when she presses my arm or my back to go in the right direction for fear of colliding with the men and women of Kerry, Cork, Mayo and other counties. I like her because she laughs easily even though I feel sometimes she’s laughing at my awkward ways. I’m twenty years of age and I never in my life took a girl to a dance or a film or even a cup of tea and now I have to learn how to do it. I don’t even know how to talk to girls because we never had one in the house except my mother. I don’t know anything after growing up in Limerick and listening to priests on Sundays thundering against dancing and walking out the road with girls.

The music ends and Tom and Liam are over there at the bar laughing over something and I don’t know what to say or do with Emer. Should I stand in the middle of the ballroom and wait for the next dance or should I lead her over to Liam and Tom? If I stand here I’ll have to talk to her and I don’t know what to talk about and if I start walking her toward Tom and Liam she’ll think I don’t want to be with her and that would be the worst thing in the world because I do want to be with her and I’m so nervous over the state I’m in my heart is going like a machine gun and I can barely breathe and I wish Tom would come and cut in so that I could laugh with Liam though I don’t want Tom to cut in since I want to be with Emer but he doesn’t anyway and there I am with the music starting again, a jitterbug or something, where men throw girls around the room and up in the air, the kind of dancing I could never dream of doing when I’m so ignorant I can barely put one foot before the other and now I have to put my hands somewhere on Emer for the jitterbug and I don’t know where till she takes my hand and leads me to where Tom and Liam are laughing with Liam telling me a few more nights in the Tuxedo and I’ll be a regular Fred Astaire and they all laugh because they know that could never be true and when they laugh I blush because Emer is looking at me in a way that shows she knows more than what Liam is talking about or that she even knows about my heart beating and making me short of breath.

I don’t know what to do without the high school diploma. I drag on from day to day not knowing how to escape till a small war breaks out in Korea and I’m told if it gets any bigger I’ll be drafted into the U.S. Army. Eddie Gilligan says, Not a chance. Army’s gonna take a look at your scabby eyes and send you home to your momma.

But the Chinese jump into the war and there’s a letter from the government that says, Greetings. I’m to report to Whitehall Street to see if I’m fit to fight the Chinese and the Koreans. Tom Clifford says if I don’t want to go I should rub salt on my eyes to make them raw and I should moan when the doctor examines them. Eddie Gilligan says I should complain of headaches and pain and if they have me read from a chart to give them all the wrong letters. He says I shouldn’t be a fool. Why should I get my ass shot off by a bunch of gooks when I could stay here at the Biltmore and rise in the ranks. I could go to night school, get my eyes and teeth fixed, put on a little weight and in a few years I’d be like Mr. Carey, all togged out in double-breasted suits.

I can’t tell Eddie or Tom or anyone else how I’d like to get down on my two knees and thank Mao Tse-tung for sending his troops into Korea and liberating me from the Biltmore Hotel.

The army doctors at Whitehall Street don’t look at my eyes at all. They tell me read that chart on the wall. They say Okay. They look in my ears. Beep. Can you hear that? Fine. They look in my mouth. Jesus, they say. First thing you do is see the dentist. No one was ever rejected from this man’s army for teeth and a good thing because most of the men who come in here have teeth like garbage dumps.

We’re told to line up in a room and a sergeant comes in with a doctor and tells us, Awright, you guys, drop your socks and grab your cocks. Now milk ’em. And the doctor looks at us one by one to see if there’s any discharge from our dongs. The sergeant barks at one man, You, what’s your name?

Maldonado, Sergeant.

Is that a hard-on I see there, Maldonado?

Ah, no, Sergeant. I . . . a . . . I . . . a . . .

You gettin’ excited, Maldonado?

I want to look at Maldonado but if you look anywhere but straight ahead the sergeant barks at you and wants to know what the hell you’re looking at, who told you to look, buncha goddam fairies. Then he tells us turn around, bend over, spread ’em, I mean spread your cheeks. And the doctor sits on a chair and we have to back up with our arses open for inspection.

We’re lined up outside the cubicle of a psychiatrist. He asks me if I like girls and I blush because that’s a silly question and I say, I do, sir.

Then why are you blushing?

I don’t know, sir.

But you prefer girls to boys?

Yes, sir.

Okay, move on.

We’re sent to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, for orientation and indoctrination, uniforms and equipment, and haircuts that leave us bald. We’re told we’re no-good sorry pieces of shit, the worst set of recruits and draftees ever to come into this camp, a disgrace to Uncle Sam, lumps of meat for Chinese bayonets, nothing but cannon fodder and don’t you forget it for one minute you lazy ass-dragging gang of dropouts. We’re told straighten up and fly right, chin in, chest out, shoulders back, suck in that belly, goddam it, boy, this is the army not a goddam beauty parlor, oh girls, you step so pretty, whaddya doin’ Sattaday night?

I’m sent to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for sixteen weeks of basic infantry training and we’re told once again and every day we’re no good hup ho hup ho hup hup hup ho, get in line there, soldier, goddam it, kills me to call you soldier, goddam pimple on the ass of the army, get in line or you’ll get a corporal’s boot up your fat ass, hup ho, hup ho, come on come on sing it sound off

I got a gal in Jersey City

She got gumboils on her titty.

Sound off, cadence count,

One two three four

One two three four.

This is your rifle, ya listenin’ to me, your rifle, not your goddam gun, call this a gun and I’ll ram it up your ass, your rifle, soldier, your piece, got that? This is your rifle, your M1, your piece, your girlfriend the rest of your army life. This is what you sleep with. This is what comes between you and the goddam gooks and goddam Chinks. Got that? You hold this goddam piece the way you hold a woman, no, tighter’n a woman. Drop this and your ass is in a sling. Drop this piece and you’re in the goddam stockade. A dropped rifle is a rifle that can go off, blow off somebody’s ass. That happens, girls, and you’re dead, you’re fuckin’ dead.

The men who drill and train us are draftees and recruits themselves, a few months ahead of us. They’re known as training cadre and we have to call them corporals even if they’re privates like us. They yell at us as if they hate us and if you ever talk back you’re in trouble. They tell us, Your ass is in a sling, soldier. We got your balls and we’re ready to squeeze.

There are men in my platoon who had fathers and brothers in World War II and know everything about the army. They say you can’t be a good soldier till the army breaks you down and builds you up again. You come into this man’s army with all kinds of smartass ideas, think you’re big shit, but the army’s been around a long time, all the way back to Julius fuckin’ Caesar, and knows how to deal with shitass recruits with attitude. Even if you come in all gung-ho the army will knock that outa you. Gung-ho or negative all means shit to the army because the army will tell you what to think, army will tell you what to feel, army will tell you what to do, army will tell you when to shit, piss, fart, squeeze your fuckin’ pimples and if you don’t like it write to your congressman, go ahead, and when we hear about that we will kick your little white ass from one end of Fort Dix to the fuckin’ other so that you’ll be cryin’ for your momma, your sister, your girlfriend and the whore on the next street.

Before lights-out I lie on my bunk and listen to the talk about girls, families, Mom’s home cooking, what Dad did in the war, high school proms where everyone got laid, what we’re gonna do when we get out of the goddam army, how we can’t wait till we get to Debbie or Sue or Cathy and how we’re gonna screw ourselves blue, shit, man, I won’t wear my goddam clothes for a month, get into that goddam bed with my girl, my brother’s girl, any girl, and I won’t come up for air, and when I get discharged get me a job, start a business, live out on Long Island, come home every night an’ tell the wife, drop them panties, babe, I’m ready for action, have kids, yeah.

Awright, you guys, shut your miserable asses, lights-out, not a goddam sound or I’ll have you on KP quicker’n a whore’s fart.

And when the corporal leaves it starts again, the talk, oh, that first weekend pass after five weeks of basic training, into the city, into Debbie, Sue, Cathy, anyone.

I wish I could say something like I’m going into New York on my first weekend pass to get laid. I wish I could say something that would make everyone smile, even nod their heads to show I’m one of them. But I know if I open my mouth they’ll say, Yeah, get a load of the Irishman talking about girls, or one of them, Thompson, will start singing, “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” and they’ll all laugh because they know my eyes.

In a way I don’t mind because I can lie here on the bunk all clean and comfortable after the evening shower, tired from the day of marching and running with my sixty-pound backpack the corporals say is heavier than the packs carried in the French Foreign Legion, a day of training in weapons, taking them apart, reassembling, firing on ranges, crawling under barbed wire with machine guns clattering over my head, climbing ropes, trees, walls, charging at bags with fixed bayonets and screaming, fuckin’ gook, the way the corporals tell me, wrestling in woods with men from other companies wearing blue helmets to show they’re the enemy, running up hills with fifty-caliber machine gun barrels over my shoulder, scrambling through mud, swimming with my sixty-pound backpack, sleeping all night in the woods with backpack for pillow and mosquitoes feasting on my face.

When we’re not out in the field we’re in large rooms listening to lectures on how dangerous and sneaky the Koreans are, the North Koreans, and the Chinese who are even worse. The whole world knows what sneaky bastards the Chinks are and if there’s anyone in this outfit who’s Chinese tough shit but that’s the way it is, my father was German, men, and he had to put up with a lotta shit during World War II when sauerkraut was liberty cabbage, that’s the way it was. This is war, men, and when I look at you specimens my heart sinks thinking of the future of America.

There are films about what a glorious army this is, the U.S. Army, that fought the English, the French, the Indians, the Mexicans, the Spanish, the Germans, the Japs, and now the goddam gooks and Chinks, and never lost a war, never. Remember that men, never lost a goddam war.

There are films about weapons and tactics and syphilis. The one about syphilis is called The Silver Bullet and shows men losing their voices and dying and telling the world how sorry they are, how foolish they were to go with diseased women in foreign places and now their penises are falling off and there’s nothing they can do about it but ask God’s forgiveness and the forgiveness of their families back home, Mom and Dad sipping lemonade on the porch, Sis laughing on a backyard swing pushed by Chuck the quarterback home from college.

The men in my platoon lie on their bunks and talk about The Silver Bullet. Thompson says that was a stupid fuckin’ movie, you’d have to be a real horse’s ass to get syphed up like that and what the hell do we have rubbers for, right, Di Angelo, you went to college?

Di Angelo says you have to be careful.

Thompson says, What the hell do you know, goddam spaghetti-eating guinea?

Di Angelo says, Say that again, Thompson, and I’ll have to ask you to step outside.

Thompson laughs, Yeah, yeah.

Go ahead, Thompson, say it again.

Nah, you probably got a knife there. All you guineas got knives.

No knife, Thompson, just me.

Don’t trust you, Di Angelo.

No knife, Thompson.

Yeah.

The whole platoon is quiet and I wonder why people like Thompson have to talk to other people like that. It shows you’re always something else in this country. You can’t just be an American.

There’s an old regular army corporal, Dunphy, who works in weapons, issuing and repairing, and smelling always of whiskey. Everyone knows he should have been kicked out of the army long ago but Master Sergeant Tole takes care of him. Tole is a huge black man with a belly so great it takes two cartridge belts to go around him. He’s so fat he can’t go anywhere without a jeep and he roars at us all the time that he can’t stand the sight of us, we’re the laziest lumps it has ever been his misfortune to see. He tells us and the whole regiment that if anyone bothers Corporal Dunphy he’ll break their backs with his bare hands, that the corporal was killing Krauts at Monte Cassino when we were just starting to beat our meat.

The corporal sees me one night pushing a cleaning rod up and down in my rifle barrel. He snatches the rifle from me and tells me follow him to the latrine. He breaks down the rifle and plunges the barrel into hot soapy water and I want to tell him how we were warned by all the cadre corporals never never use water on your piece, use linseed oil, because water causes rust and the next thing is your piece is rotting and jamming in your hands and how the hell are you gonna defend yourself against a million Chinks swarming over a mountain.

The corporal says, Bullshit, dries the barrel with a rag on the end of the cleaning rod and peers down the barrel to the reflection of his thumbnail. He hands the barrel to me and I’m dazzled by the shine inside and I don’t know what to say to him. I don’t know why he’s helping me and all I can say is, Thanks, Corporal. He tells me I’m a nice kid and not only that he’s going to let me read his favorite book.

It’s The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan by James T. Farrell, a paperback, falling apart. The corporal tells me I’m to guard this book with my life, that he reads it all the time, that James T. Farrell is the greatest writer that ever lived in the U.S.A., a writer that understands you an’ me, kid, not like those blue-ass bullshit artists they have in New England. He says I can have this book till I finish basic training and then I have to get my own copy.

Next day is colonel’s inspection and we’re confined to barracks after chow time to clean and scrub and shine. Before lights-out we have to stand by our bunks for closer inspection by Master Sergeant Tole and two regular army sergeants who stick their noses into everything. If they find anything wrong we have to do fifty push-ups with Tole resting his foot on our backs and humming “Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home.”

The colonel doesn’t check every rifle but when he looks down my barrel he steps back, stares at me and says to Sergeant Tole, This is a hell of a clean rifle, Sergeant, and asks me, Who’s the Vice President of the United States, soldier?

Alben Barkley, sir.

Good. Name the city where the second atomic bomb was dropped.

Nagasaki, sir.

Okay, Sergeant, this is our man. And that’s a hell of a clean rifle, soldier.

After formation a corporal tells me I’m to be colonel’s orderly next day, all day, riding in his car with the driver, opening his door, saluting, closing the door, waiting, saluting, opening the door again, saluting, closing the door.

And if I’m a good colonel’s orderly and don’t fuck up I’ll get a three-day pass next week, Friday night to Monday night, and I can go to New York and get laid. The corporal says there isn’t a man in Fort Dix who wouldn’t pay fifty dollars to be colonel’s orderly and they don’t know why the hell I got it just for having a clean rifle barrel. Where the hell did I learn to clean a rifle like that?

In the morning the colonel has two long meetings and I have nothing to do but sit with and listen to his driver, Corporal Wade Hansen, complaining about the way the Vatican is taking over the world and if there’s ever a Catholic President in this country he’ll emigrate to Finland where they keep Catholics in their place. He’s from Maine and he’s a Congregationalist and proud of it and doesn’t hold with foreign religions. His second cousin married a Catholic and she had to move out of the state to Boston which is crawling with Catholics all leaving their money to the Pope and those cardinals who like little boys.

It’s a short day with the colonel because he gets drunk at lunch and dismisses us. Hansen drives him to his quarters and then tells me get out of the car, he wants no fish heads in his car. He’s a corporal and I don’t know what to say to him but even if he were a private I wouldn’t know what to say because it’s hard to understand people when they talk like that.

It’s only two o’clock and I’m free till chow time at five so I can go to the PX and read magazines, listen to Tony Bennett on the jukebox singing “Because of you there’s a song in my heart,” and I can dream about my three-day pass and seeing Emer, the girl in New York, and how we’ll go out to dinner and a movie and maybe an Irish dance where she’ll have to teach me the steps and it’s a lovely dream because the weekend of my three-day pass is my birthday and I’ll be twenty-one.

The Friday of my three-day pass I have to stand on line outside the orderly room with men waiting for ordinary weekend passes. A cadre corporal, Sneed, whose real name is a Polish name no one can pronounce, tells me, Hey, soldier, pick up that butt.

Oh, I don’t smoke, Corporal.

I didn’t ask you if you fuckin’ smoked. Pick up that butt.

Howie Abramowitz nudges me and whispers, Don’t be an asshole. Pick up the fuckin’ butt.

Sneed has his hands on his hips. Well?

I didn’t drop the butt, Corporal. I don’t smoke.

Okay, soldier, come with me.

I follow him into the orderly room and he picks up my pass. Now, he says, we’re going to your barracks and you’re changing into fatigues.

But, Corporal, I have a three-day pass. I was colonel’s orderly.

I don’t give a shit if you wiped the colonel’s ass. Get into your fatigues and on the double and get your entrenching tool.

It’s my birthday, Corporal.

On the double, soldier, or I’ll have you in the fuckin’ stockade.

He marches me past the men waiting on line. He waves my pass at them and tells them say bye bye to my pass and they laugh and wave because there’s nothing else to do and they don’t want to get into trouble. Only Howie Abramowitz shakes his head as if to say he’s sorry over what’s happening.

Sneed marches me across the parade ground and into a clearing in the woods beyond. Okay, asshole, dig.

Dig?

Yeah, dig me a nice hole three feet deep, two feet wide, and the faster you do it the better for you.

That must mean the sooner I finish this the sooner I can take my pass and go. Or is it something else? Everyone in the company knows Sneed is bitter because he was a big football star at Bucknell University and wanted to play for the Philadelphia Eagles only the Eagles wouldn’t have him and now he goes around making people dig holes. It’s unfair. I know men have been forced to dig holes and bury their passes and dig them up again and I don’t know why I should have to do that. I keep telling myself I wouldn’t mind if this were an ordinary weekend pass but this is a three-day pass and it’s my birthday and why do I have to do this? But there’s nothing I can do about it. I might as well dig as fast as I can and bury the pass and dig it up again.

And while I’m digging I’m dreaming that what I’d really like to do is wrap my little shovel around Sneed’s head and smash him till his head is raw and bloody and I wouldn’t mind one bit digging a hole for his big fat football body. That’s what I’d like to do.

He hands me the pass to bury and when I finish shoveling in the earth he tells me pat it with my entrenching tool. Make it nice, he says.

I don’t know why he wants me to make it nice when I’ll be digging it up in a minute but now he tells me, ’Bout face, forrard harch, and he marches me back the way we came, past the orderly room where the line of men waiting for passes is gone, and I’m wondering if he’s had enough satisfaction for the day so that he might march inside for a replacement pass but, no, he keeps me going right to the mess hall and tells the sergeant there I’m a candidate for KP, that I need a little lesson in obeying orders. They have a good laugh over that and the sergeant says they must have a drink together sometime and talk about the Philadelphia Eagles, isn’t that some goddam team. The sergeant calls over another man, Henderson, to show me my job, the worst job you can get in any mess hall, pots and pans.

Henderson tells me scrub those mothers till they shine because there’s constant inspection and one spot of grease on any utensil will get me another hour of KP and at that rate I could be here till the gooks and Chinese are long gone home to their families.

It’s dinnertime and the pots and pans are piled high around the sinks. Garbage cans lined up against the wall behind me are alive with the feasting flies of New Jersey. Mosquitoes buzz in through open windows and feast on me. Everywhere there is steam and smoke from gas burners and ovens and running hot water and I’m sodden with sweat and grease in no time. Corporals and sergeants pass through and run their fingers around the pots and pans and tell me do them over and I know that’s because Sneed is out in the mess hall telling football stories and telling them how they can have a little fun with the draftee on pots and pans.

When it grows quieter in the mess hall and the work slows the sergeant tells me I’m free for the night but I’m to report back here tomorrow morning, Saturday, 0600 hours and he means 0600. I want to tell him I’m supposed to have a three-day pass for being colonel’s orderly, that tomorrow is my birthday, that there’s a girl waiting for me in New York, but I know now it’s better to say nothing because every time I open my mouth things get worse. I know what the army means: Tell ’em nothing but your name, rank and serial number.

Emer cries on the phone, Oh, Frank, where are you now?

I’m in the PX.

What is the PX?

Post Exchange. It’s where we buy things and make phone calls.

And why aren’t you here? We have a little cake and everything.

I’m on KP, pots, pans, tonight, tomorrow, maybe Sunday.

What is that? What are you talking about? Are you all right?

I’m worn out from digging holes and washing pots and pans.

Why?

I didn’t pick up a butt.

Why didn’t you pick up a butt?

Because I don’t smoke. You know I don’t smoke.

But why would you have to pick up a butt?

Because a fucking corporal, excuse me, a cadre corporal who was rejected by the Philadelphia Eagles told me pick up the butt and I told him I didn’t smoke and that’s why I’m here when I should be with you on my fucking, excuse me, birthday.

Frank, I know it’s your birthday. Are you drinking?

No, I’m not drinking. How could I be drinking and digging holes and doing KP all at the same time?

But why were you digging holes?

Because they made me bury my damn pass.

Oh, Frank. When will I see you?

I don’t know. You may never see me. They say every grease spot I leave on a pot gets me another hour of KP and I could be here till I’m discharged washing pots and pans.

My mother is saying couldn’t you see a priest or something, a chaplain?

I don’t want to see a priest. They’re worse than corporals the way they . . .

The way they what?

Oh, nothing.

Oh, Frank.

Oh, Emer.

Saturday dinner is cold cuts and potato salad and the cooks are easy on the pots and pans. At six the sergeant tells me I’m finished and I don’t have to report on Sunday morning. He shouldn’t be saying this, he says, but that Sneed is a goddam Polack prick that no one likes and you can see why the Philadelphia Eagles didn’t want him. The sergeant says he’s sorry but there was nothing he could do about putting me on KP when I disobeyed a direct order. Yeah, he knew I was colonel’s orderly and all but this is the army and the best policy for a draftee like me is a shut mouth. Tell them nothing but your name, rank and serial number. Do what you’re told, keep your mouth shut especially when you have a brogue that stands out, and if you do that you’ll see your girlfriend again with your balls intact.

Thank you, Sergeant.

Okay, kid.

The company area is deserted except for men in the orderly room and men confined to barracks.

Di Angelo is lying on his bunk confined to barracks because of the way he spoke up after they showed a film on how poor everyone is in China. He said Mao Tse-tung and the Communists would save China and the lieutenant showing the film said communism is evil, godless, un-American, and Di Angelo said capitalism was evil, godless and un-American and he wouldn’t give two cents for isms anyway because people with isms cause all the troubles in the world and you may have noticed there is no ism in democracy. The lieutenant told him he was out of order and Di Angelo said this is a free country and that got him confined to barracks and no weekend pass for three weeks.

He’s on his bunk reading the copy of The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan Corporal Dunphy loaned me and when he sees me he says he borrowed it from the top of my locker and who, for God’s sakes, dipped me in a grease pit. He says he did KP like that one weekend and Dunphy told him how to get the grease off the fatigues. What I should do now is stand in a hot shower in my fatigues, hot as I can bear it, and scrub off the grease with a scrubbing brush and a bar of the carbolic soap they use for cleaning lavatories.

While I’m in the shower scrubbing Dunphy sticks his head in and wants to know what I’m doing and when I tell him he says he used to do that, too, only he’d bring in his rifle and do everything at one time. When he was a kid first time in the army he had the cleanest fatigues and rifle in his outfit and if it wasn’t for the goddam booze he’d be top sergeant by now and ready to retire. Speaking of booze, he’s heading to the PX for a beer and would I like to come along after getting out of my soapy fatigues, of course.

I’d like to ask Di Angelo along but he’s confined to barracks for praising the Chinese Communists. While I’m changing into khakis I tell him how much I owe Mao Tse-tung for attacking Korea and liberating me from the Palm Court at the Biltmore Hotel and he says I’d better be careful what I say or I’ll wind up like him, confined to barracks.

Dunphy calls from the end of the barracks, Come on, kid, come on, I’m gasping for a beer. In a way I’d rather stay and talk to Di Angelo, he has such a gentle way about him, but Dunphy helped me become colonel’s orderly, for all the good it did me, and he might need the company. If I were a regular army corporal I wouldn’t be hanging around the base on a Saturday night but I know there are people like Dunphy who drink and have no one, no home to go to. Now he drinks beer so fast I could never keep up with him. I’d be sick if I tried. He drinks and smokes and points at the sky all the time with the middle finger of his right hand. He tells me the army is a great life especially in peacetime. You’re never lonely unless you’re some kind of asshole like Sneed, the goddam football player, and if you get married and have kids the army will take care of everything. All you have to do is keep yourself fit to fight. Yeah, yeah, he knows he’s not keeping himself fit but he carries so much Kraut shrapnel in his body he could be sold for scrap metal and the drink is the only pleasure he has. He had a wife, two kids, all gone. Indiana, that’s where they went, back to his wife’s daddy and mom, and who the hell wants to go to Indiana. He takes pictures from his wallet, the wife, the two girls, and holds them up for me to see. I’m ready to tell him how lovely they are but he starts to cry so hard it brings on a cough and I have to clap him on the back to save him from choking. Okay, he says, okay. Goddam, it gets to me every time I look at them. Look what I lost, kid. I could have them waiting for me in a little house near Fort Dix. I could be home with Monica making dinner, me with my feet up, taking a little nap in my top sergeant’s uniform. Okay, kid, let’s go. Let’s get outa here and see if I can straighten out my shit and go to Indiana.

Halfway to the barracks he changes his mind and goes back for more beer and I know from this he’ll never get to Indiana. He’s like my father and when I’m in my bunk I wonder if my father remembered the twenty-first birthday of his oldest son, if he raised his glass to me in a pub in Coventry.

I doubt it. My father is like Dunphy who will never see Indiana.

It’s a surprise on Sunday morning when Di Angelo asks me if I’d like to go to Mass with him, a surprise because you’d think that people who sing the praises of Chinese Communists would never step into church, chapel, or synagogue. On the way to the base chapel he explains the way he feels, that the Church belongs to him, he doesn’t belong to the Church, and he doesn’t agree with the way the Church acts like a big corporation declaring they own God and it’s their right to dole Him out in little bits and pieces as long as people do what they’re told by Rome. He sins every week himself by receiving Communion without first confessing his sins to a priest. He says his sins are nobody’s business but his and God’s and that’s who he confesses to every Saturday night before he falls asleep.

He talks about God as if He were in the next room having a pint and smoking a cigarette. I know if I went back to Limerick and talked like that I’d be hit on the head and thrown on the next train to Dublin.

We might be on an army base with barracks all around us but inside the chapel it’s pure America. There are officers with their wives and children and they have the clean scrubbed look that comes from shower and shampoo and a constant state of grace. They have the look of people from Maine or California, small towns, church on Sundays, leg of lamb afterward, peas, mashed potatoes, apple pie, iced tea, Dad snoozing with the big Sunday paper dropped to the floor, kids reading comics, Mom in the kitchen washing dishes and humming “Oh, what a beautiful mornin’.” They have the look of people who brush their teeth after every meal and fly the flag on the Fourth. They might be Catholics but I don’t think they’d feel comfortable in Irish or Italian churches where there might be old men and women mumbling and snuffling, a suspicion of whiskey or wine in the air, a whiff of bodies untouched for weeks by soap and water.

I’d like to be part of an American family, to sidle up to a blonde blue-eyed teenage daughter of an officer and whisper I’m not what I seem. I might have pimples and bad teeth and fire alarm eyes but, underneath, I’m just like them, a well-scrubbed soul dreaming of a house in a suburb with a tidy lawn where our child, little Frank, pushes his tricycle and all I want is a read of the Sunday paper like a real American dad and maybe I’d wash and clean our spanking new Buick before we drive over to visit Mom’s grandpa and grandma and rock on their porch with glasses of iced tea.

The priest is mumbling away on the altar and when I whisper the Latin responses Di Angelo nudges me and wants to know if I’m all right, if I’m hung over from my beer night with Dunphy. I wish I could be like Di Angelo, making up my own mind about everything, not giving a fiddler’s fart like my Uncle Pa Keating back in Limerick. I know Di Angelo would laugh if I told him I’m so steeped in sin I’m afraid to go to confession for fear of being told I’m so far gone that only a bishop or a cardinal could give me absolution. He’d laugh if I told him that some nights I’m afraid to fall asleep in case I die and go to hell. How could hell be invented by a God who’s in the next room with a beer and a cigarette?

This is when the dark clouds flutter like bats in my head and I wish I could open a window and release them.

Now the priest is asking for volunteers to pick up baskets from the back of the chapel and make the collection. Di Angelo gives me a little push and we’re out in the aisle genuflecting and sending the baskets along the pews. Officers and noncoms with families always hand their contributions to their children to drop in the basket and that makes everyone smile, the little one is so proud and the parents are so proud of the little one. Officers’ wives and noncoms’ wives smile at each other as if to say, We’re all one under the roof of the Catholic Church, though you know once they’re outside they know they’re different.

The basket goes from pew to pew till it’s taken by a sergeant who will count the money and pass it on to the chaplain. Di Angelo whispers he knows this sergeant and when the money is counted it’s two for you and one for me.

I tell Di Angelo I’m not going to Mass anymore. What’s the use when I’m in such a state of sin for impurity and everything else? I can’t be in the chapel with all those clean American families and their state of grace. I’ll wait till I get the courage to go to confession and Communion and if I keep committing mortal sins by not going to Mass it won’t matter since I’m doomed anyway. One mortal sin will get you into hell just as easily as ten mortal sins.

Di Angelo tells me I’m full of shit. He says I should go to Mass if I want to, that the priests don’t own the Church.

I can’t think like Di Angelo, not yet. I’m afraid of the priests and the nuns and the bishops and the cardinals and the Pope. I’m afraid of God.

Monday morning I’m told report to Master Sergeant Tole in his room at Company B. He’s sitting in an armchair and sweating so much his khaki uniform is dark. I want to ask him about the book on the table next to him, Notes from the Underground by Dostoyevsky, and I’d like to tell him about Raskolnikov but you have to be careful what you say to master sergeants and the army in general. Say the wrong thing and you’re back with the pots and pans.

He tells me stand easy and wants to know why I disobeyed a direct order and who the hell do I think I am defying a superior noncom even if he is training cadre, eh?

I don’t know what to say because he knows everything and I’m afraid if I open my mouth I might be shipped to Korea tomorrow. He says Corporal Sneed or whatever the hell his Polish name is had every right to discipline me but he went too far especially when it was a three-day pass for the colonel’s orderly. I’m entitled to that pass and if I still want it he’ll arrange it for the coming weekend.

Thanks, Sergeant.

Okay. Dismissed.

Sergeant?

Yeah?

I read Crime and Punishment.

Oh, yeah? Well, I could have guessed you’re not as dumb as you look. Dismissed.

In our fourteenth week of basic training there are rumors we’re being shipped to Europe. In the fifteenth week the rumors say we’re going to Korea. In the sixteenth week we’re told we’re definitely going to Europe.

We’re shipped to Hamburg and from there to Sonthofen, a replacement depot in Bavaria. My outfit from Fort Dix is broken up and sent all over the European Command. I’m hoping they’ll send me to England so that I can travel easily to Ireland. Instead they send me to a caserne in Lenggries, a small Bavarian village, where I’m assigned to dog training, the canine corps. I tell the captain I don’t like dogs, they chewed my ankles to bits when I delivered telegrams in Limerick, but the captain says, Who asked you? He turns me over to a corporal chopping up great slabs of bloody red meat who tells me, Stop whining, fill that goddam tin plate with meat, get in that cage and feed your animal. Put the plate down and get your hand outa the way case your animal thinks it’s his dinner.

I have to stay in the cage and watch my dog eating. The corporal calls this familiarization. He says, This animal will be your wife while you’re on this base, well, not your wife exactly, because it’s not a bitch, you know what I mean. Your M1 rifle and your animal will be all you’ll have for a family.

My dog is a black German shepherd and I don’t like him. His name is Ivan and he’s not like the other dogs, the shepherds and Dobermans, who howl at anything that moves. When he’s finished eating he looks at me, licks his lips and backs away, baring his teeth. The corporal is outside the cage telling me that’s a hell of a goddam dog I have there, doesn’t howl and make a lotta bullshit noise, the kinda dog you want in combat when one bark will get you killed. He tells me bend slowly, pick up the plate, tell my dog he’s a good dog, good Ivan, nice Ivan, see you in the morning, honey, back out nice and easy, close the gate, drop that lock, get your hand outa the way. He tells me I did okay. He can see Ivan and I are already asshole buddies.

Every morning at eight I turn out with a platoon of dog handlers from all over Europe. We march in a circle with the corporal in the middle calling hup ho hup ho hup hup hup ho heel, and when we yank on the dogs’ leashes we’re glad they’re growling behind muzzles.

For six weeks we march and run with the dogs. We climb the mountains behind Lenggries and race along the banks of rivers. We feed and groom them till we’re ready to remove their muzzles. We’re told this is the big day, like graduation or marriage.

And then the company commander sends for me. His company clerk, Corporal George Shemanski, is going stateside on furlough in three months and they’re sending me to company clerk school for six weeks so that I can replace him. Dismissed.

I don’t want to go to company clerk school. I want to stay with Ivan. Six weeks together and we’re pals. I know when he growls at me he’s just telling me he loves me though he still has a head of teeth in case I displease him. I love Ivan and I’m ready to remove his muzzle. No one else can remove his muzzle without losing a hand. I want to take him on maneuvers with the Seventh Army in Stuttgart where I’ll dig a hole in the snow and we’ll be warm and comfortable. I want to see what it would be like to turn him loose on a soldier pretending to be Russian and watch Ivan tear his protective clothing to bits before I bring him to heel. Or watch him lunge for the crotch and not the throat when I swing a dummy Russian at him. They can’t send me to company clerk school for six weeks and let someone else handle Ivan. Everyone knows it’s one man, one dog, and it takes months to break in another handler.

I don’t know why they have to pick me for company clerk school when I never even went to high school and the base is filled with high school graduates. It makes me wonder if company clerk school is punishment for never going to high school.

My head is filled with dark clouds and I wish I could bang it against the wall. The only word in my head is fuck and that’s a word I hate because it means hate. I’d like to kill the company commander, and now here’s this second lieutenant barking at me because I passed him without saluting.

Soldier, get over here. What do you do when you see an officer?

Salute him, sir.

And?

I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t see you.

Didn’t see me? Didn’t see me? You’d go to Korea and claim you didn’t see the gooks coming over the hill? Right, soldier?

I don’t know what to say to this lieutenant who’s my age and trying to grow a mustache with sad ginger hair. I want to tell him they’re sending me to company clerk school and isn’t that enough punishment for not saluting a thousand second lieutenants? I want to tell him about my six weeks with Ivan and my troubles back in Fort Dix when I had to bury my pass but there are dark clouds and I know I should be quiet, tell ’em nothing but your name, rank, serial number. I know I should be quiet but I’d like to tell this second lieutenant fuck off, kiss my ass with your miserable ginger mustache.

He tells me report to him in fatigues at twenty-one hundred hours sharp and he makes me pull weeds on the parade ground while other dog handlers pass by on their way to a beer in Lenggries.

When I’m finished I go to Ivan’s cage and remove his muzzle. I sit on the ground and talk to him and if he chews me to pieces I won’t have to go to company clerk school. But he growls a bit and licks my face and I’m glad there’s no one here to see how I feel.

Company clerk school is in the Lenggries caserne. We sit at desks while instructors come and go. We’re told the company clerk is the single most important soldier in an outfit. Officers get killed or move on, noncoms too, but an outfit without a clerk is doomed. The company clerk is the one in combat who knows when the outfit is under strength, who’s dead, who’s wounded, who’s missing, the one who takes over when the supply clerk gets his fuckin’ head blown off. The company clerk, men, is the one who delivers your mail when the mail clerk gets a bullet up his ass, the one who keeps you in touch with the folks back home.

After we’ve learned how important we are we learn to type. We have to type up a model of a daily attendance report with five carbon copies and if one mistake is made, one little stroke too much, an error in addition, a strikeover, the whole thing is to be retyped.

No erasures, goddammit. This is the United States Army and we don’t allow erasures. Allow erasures on a report and you invite sloppiness all along the front. We’re holding the line against the goddam Reds here, men. Can’t have sloppiness. Perfection, men, perfection. Now type, goddammit.

The clatter and rattle of thirty typewriters make the room sound like a combat zone with howls from soldier/typists hitting wrong keys and having to tear reports from machines and start all over. We punch our heads and shake our fists at heaven and tell the instructors we were almost finished, couldn’t we please, please erase this one little goddam mark.

No erasures, soldier, and watch your language. I have my mother’s picture in my pocket.

At the end of the course they give me a certificate with a rating of Excellent. The captain handing out the certificates says he’s proud of us and they’re proud of us all the way up to the Supreme Commander in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower himself. The captain is proud to say that only nine men washed out in the course and the twenty-one of us who passed are a credit to the folks back home. He hands us our certificates and chocolate chip cookies baked by his wife and two small daughters and we have permission to eat our cookies right here and now this being a special occasion. Behind me men are cursing and mumbling these cookies taste like cat shit and the captain smiles and gets ready to make another speech till a major whispers to him and what I hear later is that the major told him, Shaddap, you been drinking, and that’s true because the captain has the kind of face that never turned away from a whiskey bottle.

If Shemanski hadn’t been granted a furlough I’d still be up in the kennels with Ivan or down in a bierstube in Lenggries with the other dog handlers. Now I have to spend a week watching him by his desk in the orderly room typing reports and letters and telling me I should be thanking him for getting me away from dogs and into a good job that might be useful in civilian life. He says I should be happy I learned to type, I might write another Gone With the Wind some day, ha ha ha.

The night before his furlough there’s a party in a Lenggries beer hall. It’s Friday night and I have a weekend pass. Shemanski has to return to the caserne because his furlough doesn’t start till tomorrow and when he leaves his girlfriend, Ruth, asks me where I’m staying on my weekend pass. She tells me come to her place for a beer, Shemanski won’t be there, but the minute we’re in the door we’re in the bed going wild with ourselves. Oh, Mac, she says, oh, Mac, you’re so young. She’s old herself, thirty-one, but you’d never know it the way she carries on depriving me of any sleep and if this is the way she is with Shemanski all the time it’s no wonder he needs a long furlough in the U.S.A. Then it’s dawn and there’s a knock on the door downstairs and when she peeks out the window she lets out a little squeal, Oh, mein Gott, it’s Shemanski, go, go, go. I jump up and dress as fast as I can but there’s a problem when I put on my boots and then try to pull my pants over them and the legs are stuck and entangled and Ruth is hissing and squealing, Out ze window, oh, pliss, oh, pliss. I can’t leave by the front door with Shemanski standing there banging away, he’d surely kill me, so it’s out the window into three feet of snow which saves my life and I know Ruth is up there shutting the window and pulling the curtain so that Shemanski won’t see me trying to get my boots off so that I can slip on my pants, then boots again, so cold my dong is the size of a button, with snow everywhere, halfway up my belly, in my pants, filling my boots.

Now I have to sneak away from Ruth’s house and into Lenggries looking for hot coffee in a café where I can dry out but nothing is open yet and I wander back up to the caserne wondering, Did God put Shemanski on this earth to destroy me entirely?

Now that I’m company clerk I sit at Shemanski’s desk and the worst part of the day is typing up the attendance report every morning. Master Sergeant Burdick sits at the other desk drinking coffee and telling me how important this report is, that they’re waiting for it over at HQ so that they can add it to the other company reports that go to Stuttgart to Frankfurt to Eisenhower to Washington so that President Truman himself will know the strength of the United States Army in Europe in case of sudden attack by those goddam Russians who wouldn’t hesitate if we were short a man, one man, McCourt. They’re waiting, McCourt, so get that report done.

The thought of the world waiting for my report makes me so nervous I hit wrong keys and have to start all over. Every time I say, Shit, and pull the report from the typewriter. Sergeant Burdick’s eyebrows shoot to his hairline. He drinks his coffee, looks at his watch, loses control of his eyebrows, and I feel so desperate I’m afraid I’ll break down and weep. Burdick takes phone calls from HQ to say the colonel is waiting, the general, the chief of staff, the President. A messenger is sent to pick up the report. He waits by my desk and that makes it even worse and I wish I could be back in the Biltmore Hotel scouring toilets. When the report is finished without error he takes it away and Sergeant Burdick wipes his forehead with a green handkerchief. He tells me forget the other work, that I’m to stay at this desk all day and practice practice practice till I get these goddam reports down right. They’re gonna be talking up at HQ and wondering what kind of asshole he is for taking on a clerk that can’t even type a report. All the other clerks knock off that report in ten minutes and he doesn’t want Company C to be the laughingstock of the caserne.

So, McCourt, you go nowheres till you type perfect reports. Start typing.

All day and night he drills me, handing me different numbers, telling me, You’ll thank me for this.

And I do. In a few days I can type the reports so fast they send a lieutenant from HQ to see if these are made-up numbers done the night before. Sergeant Burdick says, No, no, I’m right on his case, and the lieutenant looks at me and tells him, We got corporal material here, Sergeant.

The sergeant says, Yes, sir, and when he smiles his eyebrows are lively.

When Shemanski returns I expect to be reassigned to Ivan but the captain tells me I’m staying on as clerk in charge of supplies. I’ll be responsible for sheets, blankets, pillows and condoms which I’ll distribute to dog handler trainees from all over the European Command making sure everything is returned when they’re leaving, everything but the condoms, ha ha ha.

How can I tell the captain I don’t want to be a clerk down in the basement where I have to requisition everything in language that is backward, cases, pillow, white, or balls, Pong Ping, counting things and making lists when all I want to do is get back to Ivan and the dog handlers and drink beer and look for girls in Lenggries, Bad Tolz, Munich?

Sir, is there any chance I could be reassigned to the dogs?

No, McCourt. You’re a damn fine clerk. Dismissed.

But, sir . . .

Dismissed, soldier.

There are so many dark clouds fluttering in my head I can barely make my way out of his office and when Shemanski laughs and says, He gave you the shaft, eh? Won’t let you back to your bow wow? I tell him fuck off and I’m hauled back into the captain’s office for a reprimand and told if this ever happens again I’ll face a court-martial that will make my army record look like Al Capone’s arrest record. The captain barks that I’m a private first class now and if I behave myself and keep accurate accounts and control the condoms I could rise to corporal within six months and now get outa here, soldier.

In a week I’m in trouble again and it’s because of my mother. When I came to Lenggries I went to the HQ offices to fill out an application for an allotment for my mother. The army would retain half my pay, match it, and send her a check every month.

Now I’m having a beer in Bad Tolz and Davis, the allotment clerk, is in the same room drunk on schnapps and when he calls to me, Hey, McCourt, too bad your mother is up shit creek, the dark clouds in my head are so blinding I throw my beer stein and lunge at him with every wish to strangle him till I’m pulled away by two sergeants and held for the MPs.

I’m locked up for the night in Bad Tolz and taken before a captain in the morning. He wants to know why I’m assaulting corporals who are drinking a beer and minding their own business and when I tell him about the insult to my mother he asks, Who’s the allotment clerk?

Corporal Davis, sir.

And you, McCourt, where you from?

New York, sir.

No, no. I mean, where you really from?

Ireland, sir.

Goddam it. I know that. You’ve got the map on your face. What part?

Limerick, sir.

Oh, yeah? My parents are from Kerry and Sligo. It’s a pretty country but it’s poor, right?

Yes, sir.

Okay, send in Davis.

Davis comes in and the captain turns to the man beside him who is taking notes. Jackson, this is off the record. Now, Davis, you said something about this man’s mother in public?

I . . . only . . .

You said something of a confidential nature about the lady’s financial problems?

Well . . . sir . . .

Davis, you’re a prick and I could send you for a company court-martial but I’ll just say you had a few beers and your jaw flapped.

Thank you, sir.

And if I ever hear of you making comments like that again I’ll ram a cactus up your ass. Dismissed.

When Davis leaves the captain says, The Irish, McCourt. We gotta stick together. Right?

Yes, sir.

In the hallway Davis puts out his hand. Sorry about that, McCourt. I should know better. My mother gets the allotment, too, and she’s Irish. I mean, her parents were Irish so that makes me half Irish.

This is the first time in my life anyone ever apologized to me and all I can do is mumble and turn red and shake Davis’ hand because I don’t know what to say. And I don’t know what to say to people who smile and tell me their mothers and fathers and grandparents are Irish. One day they’re insulting your mother, the next day they’re bragging their own mothers are Irish. Why is it the minute I open my mouth the whole world is telling me they’re Irish and we should all have a drink? It’s not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you’d wonder how they’d get along if someone hadn’t invented the hyphen.

When they made me supply clerk the captain didn’t tell me that twice a month on Tuesdays I’d have to bundle company bedding and take it by truck to the military laundry outside Munich. I don’t mind because it’s a day away from the caserne and I can lie on the bundles with two other supply clerks, Rappaport and Weber, and talk about civilian life. Before we leave the caserne we stop at the PX to get our monthly ration of a pound of coffee and a carton of cigarettes to sell to the Germans. Rappaport has to pick up a supply of Kotex to save his bony shoulders from the weight of the rifle when he’s on sentry duty. Weber thinks that’s funny and tells us he has three sisters but he’d be goddamned if he’d ever step up to a sales clerk and ask for Kotex. Rappaport gives a little smile and says, If you have sisters, Weber, they’re still in the rag stage.

No one knows why we’re allowed a pound of coffee but the other supply clerks tell me I’m a lucky bastard I don’t smoke. They wish they didn’t smoke so they could sell the cigarettes to German girls for sex. Weber from Company B says a carton will get you a whole load of poontang and that makes him so excited he burns a hole with his cigarette in a bundle of Company A sheets and Rappaport, the Company A clerk on his first trip like me, tells him watch it or he’ll beat the shit out of him. Weber says, Oh, yeah? but the truck stops and Buck the driver says, Everybody out, because we’re at a secret little beer place and if we’re lucky there might be a few girls in the back room ready to do anything for a few packs from our cartons. The other men are offering me low prices for my cigarettes but Buck tells me, Don’t be a goddam fool, Mac, you’re a kid, you need to get laid too or you’ll get strange in the head.

Buck has gray hair and medals from World War II. Everyone knows he had a battlefield commission but time and time again he drank and went wild and was busted all the way down to buck private. That’s what they say about Buck though I’m learning that no matter what anyone in the army says about anything you have to take it with a grain of salt thrown over your left shoulder. Buck reminds me of Corporal Dunphy back in Fort Dix. They were wild men, they did their bit in the war, they don’t know what to do with themselves in peacetime, they can’t be sent to Korea with their drinking, and the army is the only home they’ll have till they die.

Buck speaks German and seems to know everyone and all kinds of secret little beer places on the road from Lenggries to Munich. There are no girls in the back room anyway and when Weber complains Buck tells him, Aw, fuck off, Weber. Why don’t you go out behind that tree and jerk off. Weber says he doesn’t have to go behind a tree. It’s a free country and he can jerk off anywhere he likes. Buck tells him, All right, Weber, all right, I don’t give a shit. Take out your pecker and wave it in the middle of the road for all I care.

Buck tells us get back in the truck and we continue to Munich with no more stops at secret little beer places.

Sergeants shouldn’t tell you take the laundry to a place like this without telling you what the place is. They shouldn’t tell Rappaport, especially, because he’s Jewish, and they shouldn’t wait till he looks up from the truck and screams, Oh, Christ, when he sees the name of this place on the gate, Dachau.

What can he do but jump off the truck when Buck slows for the MP at the gate, jump from the truck and run down the Munich road screaming like a madman? Now Buck has to move the truck over and we watch while two MPs chase Rappaport, grab him, push him into the jeep and bring him back. I feel sorry for him the way he’s turned white, the way he’s shivering like one left out in the cold a long time. He keeps saying, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I can’t, I can’t, and the MPs are soft with him. One makes a phone call from the sentry box and when he returns he tells Rappaport, Okay, soldier, you don’t have to go in. You can stay with a lieutenant near here and wait till your laundry is done. Your buddies can take care of your bundles.

While we unload the trucks I wonder about the Germans who are helping us. Were they in this place in the bad days and what do they know? Soldiers unloading other trucks joke and laugh and hit each other with bundles but the Germans work and don’t smile and I know there are dark memories in their heads. If they lived in Dachau or Munich they must have known about this place and I’d like to know what they think about when they come here every day.

Then Buck tells me he can’t talk to them because they’re not Germans at all. They’re refugees, displaced persons, Hungarians, Yugoslavians, Czechs, Romanians. They live in camps all over Germany till someone decides what to do with them.

When the unloading is finished Buck says it’s lunchtime and he’s heading for the mess hall. Weber, too. I can’t go to lunch until I walk around and look at this place I’ve been seeing in newspapers and newsreels since I grew up in Limerick. There are tablets with inscriptions in Hebrew and German and I’m wondering if they’re over mass graves.

There are ovens with the doors open and I know what went in there. I saw the pictures in magazines and books and pictures are pictures but these are the ovens and I could touch them if I wanted to. I don’t know if I want to touch them but if I went away and never came back to this place with the laundry I’d say to myself, You could have touched the ovens at Dachau and you didn’t and what will you say to your children and grandchildren? I could say nothing but what good would that do me when I’m alone and saying to myself, Why didn’t you touch the ovens at Dachau?

So I step past the tablets and touch the ovens and wonder if it’s proper to say a Catholic prayer in the presence of the Jewish dead. If I were killed by the English would I mind if the likes of Rappaport touched my tombstone and prayed in Hebrew? No, I wouldn’t mind after priests telling us that all prayers that are unselfish and not for ourselves reach God’s ears.

Still, I can’t say the usual three Hail Marys since Jesus is mentioned and He wasn’t any way helpful to the Jews in recent times. I don’t know if it’s proper to say the Our Father touching the door of an oven but it seems harmless enough and it’s what I say hoping the Jewish dead will understand my ignorance.

Weber is calling to me from the door of the mess hall, McCourt, McCourt, they’re closing down here. You want lunch you get your ass in here.

I take my tray with the bowl of Hungarian goulash and bread to the table by the window where Buck and Weber are sitting but when I look out there are the ovens and I’m not much in the mood for Hungarian goulash anymore and this is the first time in my life I ever pushed food away. If they could see me in Limerick now pushing away the food they’d say I was gone mad entirely but how can you sit there eating Hungarian goulash with open ovens staring at you and thoughts of the people burned there especially the babies. Whenever newspapers show pictures of mothers and babies dying together they show how the baby is laid on the mother’s bosom in the coffin and they’re together for eternity and there’s comfort in that. But they never showed that in the pictures of Dachau or the other camps. The pictures would show babies thrown over to the side like dogs and you could see if they were buried at all it was far from their mothers’ bosoms and into eternity alone and I know sitting here that if anyone ever offers me Hungarian goulash in civilian life I’ll think of the ovens in Dachau and say, No, thanks.

I ask Buck if there are mass graves under the tablets and he says there’s no need for mass graves when you burn everyone and that’s what they did at Dachau, the sons-of-bitches.

Weber says, Hey, Buck, I didn’t know you were Jewish.

No, asshole. Do you have to be Jewish to be human?

Buck says Rappaport must be hungry and we should bring him a sandwich but Weber says that’s the most ridiculous thing he ever heard of. The lunch was goulash and how you gonna make a sandwich outa that? Buck says you can make a sandwich out of anything and if Weber wasn’t so stupid he could see that. Weber gives him the finger and says, Your mother, and Buck has to be stopped from attacking him by the duty sergeant who tells us all get out, the place is closed unless we’d like to stick around and do a little mopping.

Buck gets into the cab of the truck and Weber and I take a nap in the back till the laundry is ready and we load up. Rappaport is sitting by the gate reading the Stars and Stripes. I want to talk to him about the ovens and the bad things in this place but he’s still white and cold-looking.

We’re halfway to Lenggries when Buck pulls off the main road and follows a narrow path to some kind of encampment, a place of shacks, lean-tos, old tents where small children are running barefoot in cold spring weather and grown people are sitting on the ground around fires. Buck jumps from the cab and tells us bring our coffee and cigarettes and Rappaport wants to know what for.

To get laid, kid, to get laid. They’re not giving it away.

Weber says, Come on, come on, they’re only DPs.

The refugees come running, men and women, but all I can look at is the girls. They smile and pull at the coffee cans and cigarette cartons and Buck yells, Hold on, don’t let them take your stuff. Weber disappears into a shack with an old woman about thirty-five and I look around for Rappaport. He’s still in the truck, looking over the side, pale. Buck signals to one of the girls and tells me, Okay, this is your honey, Mac. Give her the cigarettes and keep the coffee and watch your wallet.

The girl has on a ragged dress with pink flowers and there’s so little flesh on her it’s hard to tell how old she is. She takes me by the hand into a hut and it’s easy for her to be naked because there’s nothing under the dress. She lies on a pile of rags on the floor and I’m so desperate to be at her I pull my pants down around my legs where they can’t go any farther because of the boots. Her body is cold but she’s hot inside and I’m so excited I’m finished in a minute. She rolls away and goes to a corner to squat on a bucket and that makes me think of the days in Limerick when we had a bucket in the corner. She gets off the bucket, pulls her dress on, and holds out her hand.

Cigarettes?

I don’t know what I’m supposed to give her. Should I give her the whole carton for that one minute of excitement or should I give her a pack of twenty?

She says it again, Cigarettes, and when I look at the bucket in the corner I give her the whole carton.

But she’s not satisfied. Coffee?

I tell her, No, no. No coffee, but she comes at me, opening my fly and I’m so excited we’re down on the rags again and she smiles for the first time over the riches of cigarettes and coffee and when I see her teeth I know why she doesn’t smile much.

Buck gets back into the truck cab without a word to Rappaport and I say nothing because I think I’m ashamed of what I did. I try to tell myself I’m not ashamed, that I paid for what I got, even gave the girl my coffee. I don’t know why I should be ashamed in the presence of Rappaport. I think it’s because he had respect for the refugees and refused to take advantage of them but if that’s so why wouldn’t he show his respect and sorrow by giving them his cigarettes and coffee?

Weber doesn’t care about Rappaport. He goes on about what a great piece of ass that was and how little he paid for it. He gave the woman only five packs and has the rest of his coffee and he can get laid in Lenggries for a week.

Rappaport tells him he’s a moron and they trade insults till Rappaport jumps on him and they’re all over the laundry with bloody noses till Buck stops the truck and tells them cut it out and all I worry about is the blood that might be on the laundry of Company C.