Tis 2:

There are days the rain is so heavy I have to spend a dime on the subway and I see people my own age with books and bags that say Columbia, Fordham, NYU, City College, and I know I want to be one of them, a student.

            I know I don’t want to spend years in the Biltmore Hotel setting up banquets and meetings and I don’t want to be the houseman cleaning up in the Palm Court. I don’t even want to a busboy getting a share of the waiters’ tip which they get from the rich students who drink their gin and tonic, talk about Hemingway and where should they have dinner and should they go to Vanessa’s party on Sutton Place, it was such a bore last year.

            I don’t want to be houseman where people look at me as if I were part of a wall.

I see the college students in the subway and I dream that some day I’ll be like them, carrying books, listening to professors, graduating with a cap and gown, going on to a job where I’ll wear a suit and tie and carry a briefcase, go home on the train every night, kiss the wife, eat my dinner, sleep so that I’ll be rested and fresh the next day.

            I’d like to be a college student in the subway because you can see from the books they’re carrying their heads must be stuffed with all kinds of knowledge, that they could sit down with you and chat forever about Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson and Dotoyevsky. If I could go to college I’d make sure to ride the subways and let people see my books so that they could admire me and wish they could go to college, too. I’d hold up the books to let people see I was reading Crime and Punishment by Fyoder Dostoyevsky. It must be grand to be a student with nothing to do bout listen to ten professors, read in libraries, sit under campus trees and discuss what you’re learning. It must be grand to know you’ll be getting a degree that puts you ahead of the rest of the world that you’ll marry a girl with a degree and you’ll be sitting up in bed the rest of your life having great chats about the important matters.

            But I don’t know how I’ll ever get a college degree and rise in the world with no high school diploma and two eyes like piss holes in the snow, as everyone tells me. Some old Irishmen tell me there’s nothing wrong with hard work. Many a man made his way in America by the sweat of his brow and his strong back and it’s a good thing to learn your station in life and not be getting above yourself. They tell me that’s why God put the pride at the top of the Seven Deadly Sins so that young fellas like me won’t be getting off the boat with big notions. There’s plenty of work in this country for anyone who wants to earn an honest dollar with his two hands and the sweat of his brow and getting above himself.

            The Greek in the diner on Third Avenue tells me his cleaning-up Puerto Rican quit on him and would I like to work an hour every morning, come in at six, sweep out the place, mop it, clean out the toilets. I could have an egg, a roll, a cup of coffee and two dollars and, who knows, it might lead to some thing permanent. He says he like the Irish, they’re like the Greeks, and that’s because they came from Greece a long time ago. That’s what a professor at Hunger College told him though when I said this to Eddie Gilligan at the hotel he said the Greek and the professor were full of shit, that the Irish were always there on their little island since the beginning of time and what the hell do Greeks know anyway? If they knew anything they wouldn’t be slinging hash in restaurants and babbling in their own language that on one understands.