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Thrills of a Bell Boy

Chapter 19: XVIII.
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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.

XVIII.

IT’S up to me to kick myself some more:
The daisy that is operatin’ here
Has been another fellow’s wife a year,
And he’s a clerk in some department store.
The happy thoughts I used to think before
Are busted up forever. I appear
To always land somewhere back in the rear—
The sound of telegraphin’ makes me sore.
I hope I’ll have a million bucks some day
And be the landlord here, and she will set
There, in the corner, telegraphin’ yet;
And when I pass she’ll look at me and say
All to herself she wished she knew some way
To not be married, and I’d stop and get
A blank sometimes, just so’s to make her fret
When she would count the dimun’s I’d display.
And mebby when I stood there near her, then,
And had broad shoulders, and was six feet high,
Her lips would tremble and she’d give a sigh
And nibble at her pencil or her pen,
And we would both be feelin’ sad, and when
She seen I loved her she’d begin to cry
Because she hadn’t waited, and then I—
Oh, rats! There’s Morton yellin’ “Front” agen.