A Monk Swimming by Malachy McCourt

Author:Malachy McCourt [McCourt, Malachy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: McCourt, Malachy, 1931-, Irish Americans, Schrijvers, Engels, Ieren
ISBN: 9780007116836
Google: UDR0ngEACAAJ
Amazon: 0786884142
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 1999-06-02T05:00:00+00:00

154 MALACHY McCOURT

He was a lively lad, this Malachy William. He arrived with a great yell, I was told, and I know he didn't stop yelling for quite a long time again, clearly his father's son. Off I went for another celebration, sentimental and weepy about the new life that had come into mine, and I envisaged great prospects for my children. Drunken dreams of glory rampaged through the mind, as I strode from saloon to saloon, roaring through the walls—Frank has noted that I never seemed to use the doors—frightening bar owners, and delighting bartenders, because of the munificence of the tips.

'Twas about then the partners in Malachy's decided this laborer was not worthy of his hire, and the business could do very well without him. The partners offered me seven thousand dollars for my twenty percent of the biz, and they would pay me at the rate of a hundred dollars a week for seventy weeks, not much for a piece of the flourishing enterprise that bore my name. Even worse, I accepted these payments in post-dated checks and without interest.

I had swaggered around New York City, the bigshot owner of one of the most successful saloons in town, an actor and television personality, and now here I was, with a wife and two small children, despairing and despondent of ever working again, as I approached the ancient age of thirty.

Humiliating as it was, I got a job bartending at the behest of Joe Allen and John Cobb, at their popular spot at Seventy-third and Third. I had by now taken an intense dislike to the job of barman. I felt trapped, and subject to the beck and call of any and all idiots, fools, imbeciles, defectives, deviates, arseholes, and inferiors; the fatuous, the stupid, the moronic; all of whom seemed to seek me out and torment me with the aridness of their talk and the emptiness of their lives.

Day in and day out, I was raging within, and when someone gave me some pills, ostensibly to lose weight, that cloaked the rage with a kind of jittery euphoria. I took to them like a baby to the breast.

I was on the day shift, so I'd start with coffee, cream, honey, a

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