6

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.