Thrills of a Bell Boy

Chapter 13: XII.

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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.

XII.

IF I would get to be a millionaire
And didn’t have to work or anything,
I’d go and buy a dimun’ stud and ring
And open up a swell hotel somewhere
And be head clerk myself, and have my hair
All curled and fixed like Morton’s is, and fling
On agony as though I’d be a king
And had a throne behind the counter there.

The guy that owns this joint ain’t got no style:
He wears his whiskers down around his neck:
I’ll bet that I’d have shiners by the peck
If I was in his place and had his pile.
When guests come in he don’t put on a smile
And get to lookin’ chesty and say “Front”
As though he owned the earth: he leaves that stunt
Fer Morton, who can beat him out a mile.