Frank McCourt - 'Tis

Mr. Logan gasped in his armchair and told Peter, That hurt me, Peter, that you’d say my wife clanks and you the finest boarder we ever had even if we were fooled a long time by the false piety of the fella that just left, thank God.

I’m sorry to hurt you, Mr. Logan, but Nora from Kilkenny is not by any means a morsel. No one here would give her a second look on a dance floor.

Mr. Logan looked around the room at us. Is that right, lads? Is that right?

’Tis, Mr. Logan.

Are you sure of that, Peter?

I am, Mr. Logan.

Thank God for that, Peter.

The boarders earn good money on the docks and in the warehouses. Tom works at Port Warehouses loading and unloading trucks and if he works extra hours he goes on time and a half or double time so that his pay is well over a hundred dollars a week.

Peter McNamee works at Merchants Refrigerating Company unloading and storing the meat from the freezer trucks from Chicago. The Logans like him for the slabs of beef or pork he hauls home every Friday night, drunk or sober, and that meat takes the place of the eighteen dollars. We never see this meat and some boarders swear Mr. Logan sells it to a butcher shop on Willis Avenue.

All the boarders drink even though they say they want to save money and go back to Ireland for the peace and quiet that’s in it. Only Tom says he’ll never go back, that Ireland is a miserable bog of a place, and they take that as a personal insult and offer to settle it if he’ll step outside. Tom laughs. He knows what he wants and it’s not a life of fighting and drinking and moaning about Ireland and sharing towels in flophouses like this. The only one who agrees with Tom is Ned Guinan and it doesn’t matter with him because he has the consumption like the Duke and he’s not long for this world. He’s saving enough money so that he can go home to Kildare and die in the house he was born in. He has dreams of Kildare where he’s leaning on a fence at the Curragh watching the horses training in the morning, trotting through the mist that clouds the track till the sun breaks through and turns the whole world green. When he talks like this his eyes glisten and there’s a slight pink flush on his cheeks and he smiles in such a way you’d like to go over and hold him a minute though that’s the kind of thing they might frown on in an Irish boarding house. It’s remarkable that Mr. Logan allows him to stay but Ned is so delicate Mr. Logan treats him like a son and forgets the baby who might be threatened by coughs, spits and flecks of blood. It’s remarkable the way they keep him on the payroll at the Baker and Williams Warehouse where they have him in the office answering the phone because he’s so weak he can’t lift a feather. When he’s not answering the phone he studies French so that he can talk to St. Thérèse, the Little Flower, when he goes to heaven. Mr. Logan tells him very gently he might be on the wrong track in this matter, that Latin is the language you need in heaven and that leads to a long discussion among the boarders as to what language Our Lord spoke, Peter McNamee declaring for a fact it was Hebrew. Mr. Logan says you might be right there, Peter, because he doesn’t want to contradict the man who brings the Sunday meat home on a Friday night. Tom Clifford laughs that we should all brush up on our Irish in case we run into St. Patrick or St. Brigid and everyone glares at him, everyone but Ned Guinan who smiles at everything because it doesn’t matter one way or the other when you’re dreaming of the horses in Kildare.

Peter McNamee says it’s a wonder a single one of us is alive with all the things against us in this world, the weather in Ireland, the TB, the En-glish, the De Valera government, the One Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, and now the way we have to break our arses to make a few dollars on the docks and the warehouses. Mr. Logan begs him to mind his language in the presence of Nora from Kilkenny and Peter says he’s sorry, he gets carried away.

Tom tells me of a job unloading trucks at Port Warehouses. Emer says no, I should work in an office where I can use my brains. Tom says warehouse jobs are better than office jobs that pay less and make you wear a suit and tie and have you sitting so much you get an arse on you the size of a cathedral door. I’d like to work in an office but the warehouse pays seventy-five dollars a week and that’s more than I ever dreamed of after my thirty-five dollars a week at the Biltmore Hotel. Emer says that’s fine as long as I save something and get an education. She talks like that because everyone in her family went to school and she doesn’t want me lifting and hauling till I’m a broken old man at the age of thirty-five. She knows from the way Tom and I talk about the boarders that there’s drinking and all kinds of blaguarding and she wouldn’t like me to be spending my time in bars when I could be making something of myself.

Emer has a clear head because she doesn’t drink or smoke and the only meat she eats is an occasional morsel of chicken for her blood. She goes to a business school at Rockefeller Center so that she can earn a living and make something of herself in America. I know her clear head is good for me but I want that warehouse money and I promise her and myself I’ll go to school someday.

Mr. Campbell Groel who owns Port Warehouses isn’t too sure if he wants to hire me, that I might be too scrawny. Then he looks at Tom Clifford who is smaller and scrawnier and the best worker on the platform and if I’m half as strong and fast I have the job.

The platform boss is Eddie Lynch, a fat man from Brooklyn, and when he talks to me or Tom he laughs and puts on a Barry Fitzgerald accent which I don’t think is a bit funny though I have to smile because he’s the boss and I want the seventy-five dollars every Friday.

At noon we sit on the platform with our lunches from the diner on the corner, long liverwurst and onion sandwiches dripping with mustard and Rheingold beer so cold it gives me a pain in my forehead. The Irish talk about the drinking they did last night and they laugh over their great sufferings in the morning. Italians eat the food they’ve brought from home and don’t know how we can eat that liverwurst shit. The Irish are offended and want to fight except that Eddie Lynch says anyone in a fight on this platform can go looking for a job.

There’s one black man, Horace, and he sits away from the rest of us. He smiles once in a while and says nothing because that’s the way it is.

When we finish at five someone will say, Okay, let’s go for a beer, one beer, just one, and we all laugh at the idea of one beer. We drink at bars with longshoremen from the piers who are always fighting over whether their union, the ILA, should join the AFL or the CIO and when they’re not fighting about that they’re fighting about unfair hiring practices. Hiring bosses and gang foremen go to different bars farther into Manhattan for fear they might have trouble along the waterfront.

There are nights when I stay out so late and I’m so confused with the drink there’s no sense going back to the Bronx at all and it’s just as easy to sleep on the platform where the bums keep fires going in great drums on the street till Eddie Lynch comes along with his Barry Fitzgerald accent and tells us, Off your awrse and on your feet. Even when I’m hungover I want to tell him arse is pronounced with a flat a but he’s from Brooklyn and he’s the boss and he’ll say awrse forever.

Sometimes there’s night work on the piers unloading ships and if there aren’t enough longshoremen with ILA cards they’ll hire warehousemen like myself with Teamster cards. You have to be careful you’re not taking jobs from longshoremen because they think nothing of sinking a baling hook in your skull and pushing you down between ship and dock on the chance you’ll be crushed beyond recognition. They make better money on the docks than we do in the warehouses but the work is unsteady and they have to fight for it every day. I carry my own hook from the warehouse but I’ve never learned to use it for anything but lifting.