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 from 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.