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Thrills of a Bell Boy

Chapter 15: XIV.
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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.

XIV.

I WISH some day there’d be a lawyer come
And say I’d got a fortune left by some
Rich relative I didn’t know I had;
The ones that’s kiddin’ now would soon be sad,
You’d see old Morton lookin’ pretty glum.
I’d buy this place and fire him so quick
The tumble that he got would make him sick;
And then I’d get the bridal-chamber key,
And take the little operator there,
And ask her how she’d like to marry me
And let some other girl hold down her chair.
I wish my hair would get to turnin’ gray,
And ma would suddenly find out some day
That I was ten years older than she thunk,
And I would grow six inches while you wunk.
But what’s the use of wishin’, anyway?
Mike says nobody ever caught a fish
By simply settin’ down somewhere to wish;
He claims if all our wishes would come true
We’d none of us be happy any more,
Fer every day we’d all be feelin’ blue
Because we wished fool things the day before.