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Thrills of a Bell Boy

Chapter 8: VII.
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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.

VII.

IT’S all off now. She’s gone out West somewhere—
The papers say to South Dakota—there
She’s got things fixed to get divorced, they claim.
It seems that Mrs. Pickleham’s her name
In private life, instead of Miss Le Claire.
Her father runs a dray in Buffalo,
That’s what the papers say: I s’pose they know.
I wonder why it always has to be
That everything you think is great before
You know about it, when you get to see
Just how it is don’t seem so grand no more?
I wish I had the forty cents I blew
To get the bunch of posies what I threw
At her that night. I had to gasp almost
Whenever she’d look up. Gee! What a roast
The boys would give me fer it if they knew.
But still there ain’t no use of feelin’ bad;
I got my money’s worth, fer I was glad,
And every minute that you’re feelin’ gay
About a thing that never can come true
Is something that’ll not get took away;
It’s in your system and belongs to you.