Part 35

The excitement of the day was that the Big Boss for the first time took note of the fact I was alive. He said good evening and thought he'd look in my ice chest. My heart did flutter, but I knew I was safe. I had scrubbed and polished that ice chest till it creaked and groaned the Saturday night before. The brass parts were blinding. But there was too much food in it for that hour of the night. He called Schmitz--Schmitz was abject reverence and acquiescence. It was, of course, Kelly's fault for leaving so much stuff there when he went at 3. And Kelly was gruff as a bear next day. Evidently the Big Boss spoke to him about sending stuff upstairs after the lunch rush was over. He almost broke the plates hurling things out of the ice box at 2.30. And the names he called Schmitz I dare not repeat. He swore and he swore and he swore! And he stripped the ice box all but bare.

How down on prohibition were Kelly and many of those waiters! Perhaps all the waiters, but I did not hear all express opinions. A waiter was talking to Kelly about it in front of my counter one day. "How can we keep this up?" the waiter moaned. "There was a time when if you got desperate you could take a nip and it carried you over. But I ask you, how can a man live when he works like this and works and then goes home and sits around and goes to bed, and then gets up and goes back and works and works, and then goes home and sits around? You put a dollar down on the table and look at it, and then pick it up and put it in your pocket again. Hell of a life, I say, and I don't see how we can keep it up with never a drink to make a man forget his troubles!"

Kelly put forth that favorite claim that there was far more evil-doing of every sort and description since prohibition than before--and then added that everyone had his home-brew anyhow. He told of how the chefs and he got to the hotel early one morning and started to make up six gallons of home-brew down in our kitchen. Only, o' course, "some dirty guy had to go an' squeal" on 'em and Kelly 'most lost his job, did Kelly.

I had a very nice Italian friend--second cook, he called himself--who used to come over to the compartment of Monsieur Le Bon Chef and talk over the partition to me every afternoon from four to half past. He also was not in the least fresh, but just talked and talked about many things. His first name in Italian was "Eusebio," but he found it more convenient in our land to go under the name of "Vwictor." He came from a village of fifty inhabitants not far from Turin, almost on the Swiss border, where they had snow nine months in the year. Why had he journeyed to America? "Oh, I donno. Italians in my home town have too little money and too many children."

Victor was an intelligent talker. I asked him many questions about the labor problem generally. When he first came to this country seven years ago he started work in the kitchen of the Waldorf-Astoria. In those days pay for the sort of general unskilled work he did was fifteen to eighteen dollars a month. Every other day hours were from 6 A.M. to 8.30 P.M.; in between days they got off from 2 to 5 in the afternoon. Now, in the very same job, a man works eight hours a day and gets eighteen dollars a week. Victor at present drew twenty-two dollars a week, plus every chef's allotment of two dollars and forty cents a week "beer money." (It used to be four bottles of beer a day at ten cents a bottle. Now that beer was a doubtful bestowal, the hotels issued weekly "beer money." You could still buy beer at ten cents a bottle, only practically everyone preferred the cash.)

But Victor thought he was as well off seven years ago on eighteen dollars a month as he would be to-day on eighteen dollars a week. Then, it seems, he had a nice room with one other man for four dollars a month, including laundry. Now he rooms alone, it is true, but he pays five dollars a week for a room he claims is little, if any, better than the old one, and a dollar a week extra for laundry. Then he paid two to three dollars for a pair of shoes, now ten or twelve, and they wear out as fast as the two-dollar shoes of seven years before. Now fifty dollars for a suit no better than the one he used to get for fifteen dollars. Thus spoke Victor.

Besides, Victor could save nothing now, for he had a girl, and you know how it is with women. It's got to be a present all the time. You can't get 'em by a store window without you go in and buy a waist or a hat or goodness knows what all a girl doesn't manage to want. He went into detail over his recent gifts. Why was he so generous as all that to his fair one? Because if he didn't get the things for her he was afraid some other man would.

Nor could Victor understand how people lived in this country without playing more. Every night, every single night, he must find some countryman and play around a little bit before going to bed. "These fellas who work and work all day, and then eat some dinner, and then go home and sit around and go to bed." No, Victor preferred death to such stagnation. If it was only a game of cards and a glass of wine (prohibition did not seem to exist for Victor and his countrymen) or just walking around the streets, talking. Anything, so long as it was something.

Victor was a union man. Oh, sure. He was glowing with pride and admiration in the union movement in Italy--there indeed they accomplished things! But in this country, no, the union movement would never amount to much here. For two reasons. One was that working people on the whole were treated too well here to make good unionists. Pay a man good wages and give him the eight-hour day--what kind of a union man will he make? The chances are he won't join at all.

But the main reason why unions would never amount to much here was centered in the race question. Victor told of several cooks' strikes he had been in. What happens? A man stands up and says something, then everybody else says, "Don't listen to him; he's only an Irishman." Some one else says something, and everyone says, "Don't pay any attention to him; he's only an Italian." The next man--he's only a Russian, and so on.

Then pretty soon what happens next? Pretty soon a Greek decides he'll go back to work, and then all the Greeks go back; next an Austrian goes back--all his countrymen follow. And, anyhow, says my Italian friend Eusebio, you can't understand nothin' all them foreigners say, anyhow.

I asked him if Monsieur Le Bon Chef after his start as a strike breaker had finally joined a union. "Oh, I guess he's civilized now," grinned Victor.

Numerous times one person or another about our hotel spoke of the suddenness with which the workers there would be fired. "Bing, you go!" just like that. Kelly, who had been working there over two years, told me that the only way to think of a job was to expect to be fired every day. He claimed he spent his hour's ride in to work every morning preparing himself not to see his time card in the rack, which would mean no more job for him.

I asked Victor one day about the girl who had held my job a year and a half and why she was fired. There was a story for you! Kelly a few days before had told me that he was usually able to "get" anybody. "Take that girl now what had your job. I got her. She was snippy to me two or three times and I won't stand that. It's all right if anybody wants to get good and mad, but I detest snippy folks. So I said to myself, 'I'll get you, young lady,' and within three days I had her!"

Kelly was called away and never finished the story, but Victor did. The girl, it seems, got several slices of ham one day from one of the chefs. She wrapped them carefully in a newspaper and later started up the stairs with the paper folded under her arm, evidently bound for the locker room. Kelly was standing at the foot of the stairs--"Somebody had tipped him off, see?"

"What's the news to-day?" asked Kelly.

"'Ain't had time to read the paper yet," the girl replied.

"Suppose we read it now together," said Kelly, whereupon he slipped the paper out from under her arm and exposed the ham to view.

"You're fired!" said Kelly.

He sent her up to the Big Boss, and he did everything he could think of to get the girl to tell which chef had given her the ham. The girl refused absolutely to divulge that.

The Big Boss came down to our kitchen. He asked each chef in turn if he had given the girl the ham, and each chef in turn said No.

The Big Boss came back again in a few minutes. "We can put the detective force of the hotel on this job and find out within a few days who did give that ham away and the man will be fired. But I don't want to do it that way. If the man who did it will confess right now that he did I promise absolutely he will not be fired."

A chef spoke up, "I did it."

Within fifteen minutes he was fired.

* * * * *

As ever, the day for leaving arrived. This time I gave notice to Kelly three days in advance, so that a girl could be found to take my place. "The Big Chief and I both said when we seen you, she won't stay long at this job."

"Why not?" I indignantly asked Kelly.

"Ah, shucks!" sighed Kelly. Later: "Well, you're a good kid. You were making good at your job, too. Only I'll tell y' this. You're too conscientious. Don't pay."