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.
8
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.
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