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Thrills of a Bell Boy

Chapter 11: X.
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About This Book

The collection presents a series of comic, first-person monologues by a hotel bellboy who idolizes actresses and imagines alternate lives as a wealthy lover or stage star. Through colloquial, humorous verses he recounts bouquet-throwing mishaps, backstage glimpses, romantic fantasies, and the deflating discovery of performers’ ordinary realities, while reflecting on appearances, social aspiration, and gossip. Light irony and working-class vernacular punctuate moments of yearning and self-deprecating wit, shifting between dreamy ambition and pragmatic resignation across short, episodic poems.

X.

SOME people make me sick. They act as though
They’d leased this hemisphere. See that boy there,
The way he tilts his head up in the air
And struts around so everybody’ll know
He’s cut his second teeth. Now watch him go
And ask about the telegrams. I’ll bet
Nobody ever telegraphed him yet,
Or if they did it’s comin’ mighty slow.
When she was operatin’ yesterday
He leaned against the railin’, lookin’ wise
And spoilin’ blanks and makin’ goo-goo eyes.
I wish he’d pay his bill and go away,
Or that she’d slap his face for gettin’ gay.
When fellows hang around a girl to buzz
Her hours at a time the way he does
I wonder how they think of things to say?
Mike says he never seen a woman yet
That hated men fer showin’ them they’d like
To take them in their lovin’ arms and hike
Away to where nobody else could get.
Mike says it doesn’t seem to make them fret
When men get gone on them—I guess I’ll strike
Out bold, because it must be so, fer Mike
He’s had two wives, and knows a lot, you bet.
There goes that dude again, confound the luck!
I wish he’d get a telegram that said
Some chap was comin’ here to punch his head,
And he’d fergit how sweet she was, and duck:
Mike says that when a fellow shows he’s struck
A woman hardly ever raises Ned
Or seems to get to wishin’ she was dead—
Gee whiz! he’s went and give her chin a chuck.