"Oh, you do, do you? Well, you wait and see who else comes to get it."
"Nobody else is going to come."
"How do you know they ain't?"
Carl drew the sign from beneath his coat and carefully laid it on the bar. "That's why."
"Well, you got nerve. You got the nerve of a Republican on Fourteenth Street, like the fellow says. You must want it. Well, all right, I guess you can have it if the boss don't kick."
Carl was accepted by the "boss," who gave him a quarter and told him to go out and get a "regular feed." He hummed over breakfast. He had been accepted again by all men when he had been accepted by the proprietor of a Bowery saloon. He was going to hold this job, no matter what happened. The rolling stone was going to gather moss.
For three months Carl took seriously the dirtiest things in the world. He worked sixteen hours a day for eight dollars a week, cleaning cuspidors, scrubbing the floor, scattering clean sawdust, cutting the more rotten portions off the free-lunch meat. As he slopped about with half-frozen, brittle rags, hoboes pushed him aside and spat on the floor he had just cleaned.
Of his eight dollars a week he saved four. He rented an airshaft bedroom in the flat of a Jewish sweatshop worker for one dollar and seventy-five cents a week. It was occupied daytimes by a cook in an all-night restaurant, who had taken a bath in 1900 when at Coney Island on an excursion of the Pip O'Gilligan Association. The room was unheated, and every night during January Carl debated whether to go to bed with his shoes on or off.
The sub-landlord's daughter was a dwarfish, blotched-faced, passionate child of fifteen, with moist eyes and very low-cut waists of coarse voile (which she pronounced "voyle"). She would stop Carl in the dark "railroad" hallway and, chewing gum rapidly, chatter about the aisleman at Wanamacy's, and what a swell time there would be at the coming ball of the Thomas J. Monahan Literary and Social Club, tickets twenty-five cents for lady and gent, including hat-check. She let Carl know that she considered him close-fisted for never taking her to the movies on Sunday afternoons, but he patted her head and talked to her like a big brother and kept himself from noticing that she had clinging hands and would be rather pretty, and he bought her a wholesome woman's magazine to read—not an entirely complete solution to the problem of what to do with the girl whom organized society is too busy to nourish, but the best he could contrive just then.
Sundays, when he was free for part of the day, he took his book of recipes for mixed drinks to the reading-room of the Tompkins Square library and gravely studied them, for he was going to be a bartender.