It's an old poem. Still strikes me. If it's relevant, that's scary.
ALLEGHENY REALTY CORP.
A collection man had shown me a door,
right by a dingy fileroom on the 3rd floor
Allegheny Realty Corp. it said, in black stencil.
Behind the door was a broom closet.
It was some slumlord's rent-check mail-drop:
a place he could go without fear of getting shot
by some tenant-in-arrears.
Downstairs, on Two, we worked the tenants who owed our client:
a Su Credito Es Bueno Aqui jewelry store on the street floor
that gave Easy Terms, sold the Norteamericano White Man's Dream
to cleaning girls from Bayamon, Black countermen,
day-laborers without Union books:
the Olympic TV, sapphire ring, Gruen watch, or set of silverplate.
We ogled Laura, the hourglass body Puerto Riquena bookkeeper,
said she was worth a sterling silver diaphragm,
and that we'd fight to install it ourselves.
Divorced guys and a high-school kid: me.
I knew where I had come from: an upstairs neighbor
fixed an off-the-books summer job for a kid
with a future in English Lit'ra'cha.
But I never dreamed what fate had brought these
wrinkled collars and dollar ties to this place.
I wondered only why these middle-aged men looked at me with envy
or anger, snarled "Kid, why the fuck are you here?"
as they hung up from a minimum wage debtor
who'd told them to burn in hell for the hundredth time that week.
They always fell behind, our clients,
so we garnished them because that's what the job was:
called the Brooklyn Civil Court and kept a magistrate hopping:
The buff cards of broken dreams were piled floor to ceiling,
scattered on desktops, wedged under phone books.
We worked the horn to work out terms: but got false addresses,
disconnected phones, crazed accented voices telling us to
make much too good friends with our mothers,
or to put our fates in the hands of the gods
as those we garnished had put theirs.
At noon I'd cross the street, sit in the old Pennsylvania Station,
marked by '61 for the wrecker's ball,
look up at my glass ceiling,
and thank God that my ticket was punched,
that I would go to college in the fall,
forget this place, forget the vengeful phone calls,
forget the cursing manager who struck out last night
and took it out on a widow,
forget my sticky virgin night-fantasies of Laura the bookkeeper,
and inhabit a world of high art, of poetry
that would soar into an Avalon of misty hills and kings.
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