But after all the ham comes up and the retching stops I know what Horace is thinking. He’s thinking that if this were his son, Timothy, he’d tell him walk away from this and I know that’s what I have to do. I walk to Eddie Lynch and pass him my baling hook, making sure to offer him the handle to avoid the insult of the hook itself. He takes it and shakes hands with me. He says, Okay, kid, good luck, and we’ll send your paycheck. Eddie might be a platform boss with no education who worked his way up but he knows the situation, he knows what I’m thinking. I walk to Horace and shake hands with him. I can’t say anything because I have a strange feeling of love for him that makes it hard to talk and I wish he could be my father. He doesn’t say anything either because he knows there are times like this when words have no meaning. He pats my shoulder and nods and the last sound I hear at Port Warehouses is Eddie Lynch, Get back to work, you bunch of limp pricks.
On a Saturday morning Tom and I ride the train to the bus station in Manhattan. He’s on his way to Detroit and I’m taking my army duffel bag to a boarding house in Washington Heights. Tom gets his ticket, stows his bags in the luggage compartment, steps up on the bus and says, Are you sure? Are you sure you don’t want to come to Detroit? You could have a hell of a life.
I could easily get on that bus. Everything I own is in the duffel bag and I could throw it in there with Tom’s bags, get a ticket and be on my way to a great adventure with money and blondes and secretaries offering me everything, anything, but I think of Horace telling me what a fool I’d be and I know he’s right and I shake my head at Tom before the bus door closes and he makes his way to his seat, smiling and waving.
All the way up to Washington Heights on the A train I’m caught between Tom and Horace, Detroit and New York University. Why couldn’t I just get a job in a factory, eight to five, an hour for lunch, two weeks vacation every year? I could go home in the evening, take a shower, go out with a girl, read a book when I felt like it. I wouldn’t have to worry about professors mocking me one week, praising me the next. I wouldn’t have to worry about papers and reading assignments from fat textbooks and exams. I’d be free.
But if I traveled on trains and buses in Detroit I might see students with their books and I’d wonder what kind of a fool I was to give up New York University for the sake of making money on the assembly line. I know I’d never be content without a college degree and always wondering what I missed.
Every day I’m learning how ignorant I am especially when I go for a coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich in the cafeteria at NYU. There are always crowds of students who drop their books on the floor and seem to have nothing to do but talk about their courses. They complain about professors and curse them for giving low grades. They brag about how they used the same term paper for more than one course or they laugh over the ways you can fool a professor with papers copied directly from encyclopedias or paraphrased from books. Most of the classes are so big the professors can only skim the papers and if they have assistants they don’t know from shit. That’s what the students say and going to college seems to be a great game with them.
Everyone talks and no one listens and I can see why. I’d like to be an ordinary student talking and complaining but I wouldn’t be able to listen to people talking about something called the grade average. They talk about the average because that’s what gets you into good graduate schools and that’s what the parents fret over.
When they’re not talking about their averages the students argue about the meaning of everything, life, the existence of God, the terrible state of the world, and you never know when someone is going to drop in the one word that gives everyone the deep serious look, existentialism. They might talk about how they want to be doctors and lawyers till one throws up his hands and declares everything is meaningless, that the only person in the world who makes any sense is Albert Camus who says your most important act every day is deciding not to commit suicide.
If ever I’m to sit with a group like this with my books on the floor and turn gloomy over how empty everything is I’ll have to look up existentialism and find out who Albert Camus is. That’s what I intend to do till the students start talking about the different colleges and I discover I’m in the one everyone looks down on, the School of Education. It’s good to be in business school or the Washington Square College of Arts and Sciences but if you’re in the School of Ed you’re at the bottom of the scale. You’re going to be a teacher and who wants to be a teacher. Some of the students’ mothers are teachers and they don’t get paid shit, man, shit. You break your ass for a bunch of kids who don’t appreciate you and what do you get? Bubkes, that’s what you get.
I know from the way they say it that bubkes isn’t good and that’s another word I have to look up along with existentialism. It gives me a dark feeling sitting there in the cafeteria listening to all the bright talk around me knowing I’ll never catch up with the other students. There they are with their high school diplomas and their parents working away to send them to NYU to be doctors and lawyers but do their parents know how much time their sons and daughters spend in the cafeteria going on about existentialism and suicide? Here I am, twenty-three with no high school diploma, bad eyes, bad teeth, bad everything and what am I doing here at all. I feel lucky I didn’t try to sit with the clever suicidal students. If they ever found out I wanted to be a teacher I’d be the laughingstock of the group. I should probably sit in some other part of the cafeteria with future teachers from the School of Education though that would show the world I’m with the losers who couldn’t get into the good colleges.
The only thing to do is finish my coffee and grilled cheese sandwich and go to the library to look up existentialism and find out what makes Camus so sad, just in case.
26
My new landlady is Mrs. Agnes Klein and she shows me a room for twelve dollars a week. It’s a real room, not like the end of a hallway Mrs. Austin rented me on Sixty-eighth Street. There’s a bed, a desk, a chair, a small couch in the corner by the window where my brother Michael can sleep when he comes from Ireland in a few months.
I’m hardly in the door when Mrs. Klein is telling me her history. She tells me I’m not to jump to any conclusions. Her name might be Klein but that was her husband who was Jewish. Her own name is Canty and I should know very well you can’t get more Irish than that and if I have no place to go at Christmas I can spend it with her and her son, Michael, what’s left of him. Her husband, Eddie, was the cause of all her troubles. Just before the war he ran off to Germany with their four-year-old son, Michael, because his mother was dying and he expected to inherit her fortune. Of course they were rounded up, the whole tribe of Kleins, mother and all, and ended up in a camp. No use telling the damn Nazis Michael was an American citizen born in Washington Heights. The husband was never seen again, but Michael survived and, at the end of the war, the poor kid was able to tell the Americans who he was. She tells me what’s left of him is in a little room down the hall. She says I should come to her kitchen Christmas Day about two in the afternoon and have a little drink before dinner. There won’t be turkey. She’d like to cook European, if I don’t mind. She tells me don’t say yes unless I mean it, that I don’t have to come for Christmas dinner if I have some place to go, some Irish girl making mashed potatoes. Don’t worry about her. It wouldn’t be her first Christmas with no one but Michael at the end of the hall, what’s left of him.