Frank McCourt - 'Tis

A few blocks away is Merchants Refrigerating Company and they need a platform man to fill in for men on summer vacation. They tell me, We might be having a heat wave but dress warm.

My job is unloading meat from the freezer trucks that bring sides of beef from Chicago. It’s August on the platform but inside where we hang the meat it’s freezing. The men laugh and say we’re the only workers who travel so fast from the North Pole to the equator and back.

Peter McNamee is platform boss while the regular man is on vacation and when he sees me he says, What in the name of the crucified Jesus are you doing here? I thought you had a brain in your head.

He tells me I should be going to school, that there’s no excuse for me humping sides of beef in and out in and out when I could be using the GI Bill and moving up in the world. He says this is no job for the Irish. They come here and the next thing they’re hacking and coughing up blood discovering they had TB all along, the curse of the Irish race but the last generation to be afflicted. It’s Peter’s job to report if anyone is hacking or coughing all over the sides of beef. Board of Health inspectors would close the place down in a minute and we’d be on the street scratching our arses looking for work.

Peter tells me he’s weary of the whole game himself. He couldn’t get along with the cousin on Long Island and now he’s back in another boarding house in the Bronx and it’s the same old game, bring home the side of beef or any kind of meat on a Friday night and he gets the free lodging. His mother torments him with her letters. Why can’t he find a nice girl and settle down and give her a grandson or is he waiting for her to sink into the grave? She nags him so much about finding a wife he doesn’t want to read her letters anymore.

My second Friday at Merchants Refrigerating Peter wraps the side of beef in newspaper and asks me if I’d like a drink up the street. He rests the side of beef on a bar stool but the meat begins to defrost and there are blood spots and that upsets the bartender. He tells Peter he can’t have that kind of thing in the bar and he’d better put it somewhere. Peter says, All right, all right, and when the bartender isn’t looking he takes the side of beef into the men’s lavatory and leaves it there. He returns to the bar and when he starts talking about the way his mother nags him he shifts from beer to whiskey. The bartender sympathizes with him because they’re both from the County Cavan and they tell me I wouldn’t understand.

There’s a sudden roar from the men’s lavatory and a big man stumbles out yelling that there’s a huge rat sitting on the toilet seat. The bartender barks at Peter, Damn it to hell, McNamee, is that where you put that goddam meat? Get it outa this bar.

Peter retrieves his meat. Come on, McCourt, that’s the end of it. I’m worn out dragging the meat around on Friday nights. I’m going to a dance to get a wife.

We take a taxi to the Jaeger House but they won’t let Peter in with the meat. He offers to leave it at the coat check but they won’t accept it. He creates a disturbance and when the manager says, Come on, come on, get that meat outa here, Peter swings at him with the side of beef. The manager calls for help and Peter and I are pushed down the stairs by two big men from Kerry. Peter yells that he’s only looking for a wife and they should be ashamed of themselves. The Kerrymen laugh and tell him he’s an arsehole and if he doesn’t behave himself they’ll wrap that meat around his head. Peter stands still in the middle of the sidewalk and gives the Kerrymen a peculiar sober look. You’re right, he says, and offers them the meat. They won’t take it. He offers it to people passing by but they shake their heads and hurry past him.

I don’t know what to do with this meat, he says. Half the world is starving but no one wants my meat.

We go to Wright’s Restaurant on Eighty-sixth Street and Peter asks if they’d give us two dinners in exchange for a side of beef. No, they can’t do that. Board of Health regulations. He runs to the middle of the street, lays the meat on the center line, runs back and laughs at the way cars swerve to avoid the meat, laughs even more when there’s the sound of sirens and a police car and an ambulance scream around the corner and stop with flashing lights and men stand around the meat scratching their heads and then laughing till they drive away with the meat in the back of the police car.

He seems to be sober now and we order eggs and bacon at Wright’s. It’s Friday, says Peter, but I don’t give a shit. That’s the last time I’ll drag meat through the streets and subways of New York. I’m tired of being Irish anyway. I’d like to wake up in the morning and be nothing or some kind of American Protestant. So will you pay for my eggs because I have to save my money and go to Vermont and be nothing.

And he walks out the door.

23

On a slow day at Merchants Refrigerating we’re told we can go home. Instead of taking the train back to Queens I walk up Hudson Street and stop at a bar called the White Horse Tavern. I’m nearly twenty-three but I have to prove I’m eighteen before they’ll give me a beer and a knockwurst sandwich. It’s quiet in the bar even though I’ve read in the paper it’s a favorite place of poets, especially the wild man, Dylan Thomas. People sitting at tables by the windows look like poets and artists and they’re probably wondering why I’m sitting at the bar with trousers caked with beef blood. I wish I could sit there by the windows with a long-haired girl and tell her how I’ve read Dostoyevsky and how Herman Melville got me thrown out of the hospital in Munich.

There’s nothing to do but sit at the bar tormenting myself with questions. What am I doing here with this knockwurst and beer? What am I doing in the world at all? Will I spend the rest of my life hauling sides of beef from truck to freezer and vice versa? Will I end my days in a small apartment in Queens while Emer is happy raising a family in a suburb completely protected by insurance? Will I ride the subways all my life envying people carrying books from universities?

I shouldn’t be eating knockwurst at a time like this. I shouldn’t be drinking beer when I don’t have an answer in my head. I shouldn’t be in this bar with poets and artists all sitting there with their serious whispered conversations. I’m weary of knockwurst and liverwurst and the feel of frozen meat on my shoulders every day.

I push the knockwurst away and leave a half stein of beer and walk out the door, across Hudson Street, along Bleecker Street, not knowing where I’m going but knowing I have to keep walking till I know where I’m going, and here I am in Washington Square and there’s New York University and I know that’s where I have to go with my GI Bill, high school or no high school. A student points to the admissions office and the woman gives me an application. She says I didn’t fill it in properly, that they need to know my high school graduation, where and when.

I never went.

You never went to high school?

No, but I have the GI Bill and I’ve been reading books all my life.

Oh, my, but we require high school graduation or the equivalency.

But I read books. I’ve read Dostoyevsky and I’ve read Pierre, or the Ambiguities. It’s not as good as Moby Dick but I read it in a hospital in Munich.

You actually read Moby Dick ?

I did and Pierre, or the Ambiguities got me thrown out of the hospital in Munich.

I can see she doesn’t understand. She goes into another office with my application and brings out the Dean of Admissions, a woman with a kind face. The dean tells me I’m an unusual case and wants to know about my schooling in Ireland. It’s her experience that European students are better prepared for college work and she will allow me to enroll at NYU if I can maintain a B average for a year. She wants to know what kind of work I do and when I tell her about the meat she says, My, my, I learn something every day.