ABOUT NINETY YEARS AGO, GIVE OR TAKE . . .
So long, son!” Paddy’s parents shouted as they waved to him from the quay. “We’ll . . .” They paused and looked at each other, each hoping the other would say, “We’ll miss you.”
But in the end neither could quite pull it off. So they just repeated, “So long!”
Paddy shipped out for America aboard HMS DiCaprio, a luxury transatlantic ship. At least it was luxury if you were in first class. But the DiCaprio had seven different classes of accommodation.
In first class you lived like a king. A giant stateroom, a butler, a maid, two bathrooms, crystal chandeliers, gold doorknobs, lovely soft feather beds. The toilet paper was linen, and the linens were silk. In the bathroom there were three knobs: hot, cold, and soup. The food served was so fresh you could actually meet the chickens who laid your eggs and the pigs who would become your bacon.
But none of that mattered because Paddy was not in first class.
In second class you were still doing pretty well, with a nice little stateroom. There was no soup nozzle in the room, and the toilet paper was just paper, but it was soft (two-ply). And second-class passengers were served pleasant and healthy meals in the cheerful second-class dining room. You didn’t get to actually chat with your pig or lamb or chicken or cow, but you could wave to them.
But Paddy was not in second class.
Third class was a little more rough-and-ready. You had to make your own bed, for one thing. And meals were all self-serve at the oat ’n’ swine buffet.
Nope, not third class, either.
Fourth class was where most impoverished emigrants traveled. They cooked their own meals over open fires in massively overcrowded holds down in the sweaty bowels of the ship, where they dreamed of spotting the Statue of Liberty.
Paddy was not in fourth class.
Fifth-class passengers weren’t even given a place to spread out a blanket. Mostly they climbed into laundry bags and hung those bags from hooks. Thus they rocked back and forth all night, banging up against the steel bulkheads with each passing wave. They were kept awake by the mystery of how they could hang up a bag they were actually in. Their meals were served at the same time as the livestock kept for the first-class passengers’ dinners were fed. In fact, it was the same food.
So, maybe I should explain because you may not know very much about golems. First of all, it’s golem, like go and then lem. Not Gollum. I am not Gollum. I don’t wants it, precious. A Gollum is 90 percent hobbit and 10 percent evil. A golem is 90 percent mud, and another 7 percent twigs, pinecones, dead beetles, and lint. The last 3 percent is faithfulness. We are very faithful. I will always faithfully try to take Mack’s place while he’s away. Even though it means I have detention because of the whole dissolved-feet situation and the screaming and all.
Fifth class didn’t dream of spotting the Statue of Liberty because if they ever appeared on the open deck, they’d get a beat-down from beefy ship’s stewards. The only time they were allowed on deck was for gladiatorial games in which they were pitted against each other in pepper mill battles while first-class passengers bet on the outcome.
Fifth class? Tough place. Unpleasant place.
But Paddy was not in fifth class. He’d have loved to be fifth class.
Sixth class meant you slept in the fifth-class bathrooms, or heads as they say on boats. You could sit on one of the toilets until someone needed to use it. This wasn’t a great way to spend ten days, which was how long it took the HMS DiCaprio to get across the ocean to New York.
But Paddy wasn’t in sixth class.
Paddy was in seventh class. And seventh class was a very bad class aboard the DiCaprio. Seventh-class passengers were allowed aboard the ship, but once aboard they were hunted by the packs of wild dogs that lived down in the bilges.
The wild dogs were the offspring of escaped pets. You see, sometimes first-class passengers traveled with poodles or Chihuahuas or Pekingese. Over the years some of these animals had escaped their kennels and had bred and multiplied in the bowels of the great ship.
Imagine, if you will, poodles bred with Chihuahuas and then hardened and made savage by the dog pack life in the dank, dark holds far, far from light.
Nobody would want to go up against that kind of horror.
The bilges of a ship are the lowest level. Down below the engines. Not even the basement of the ship, more like if the ship had a basement but someone dug out a pit below that.
Anyway, the bilges were where all the water that seeped into the ship collected. Rainwater, sea spray, mop water, overflowing toilet water, spilled coffee water, seasickness results, you name it. It was about up to Paddy’s thighs. It smelled like a toilet.
For food, the seventh-class passengers had to trap and kill one of the many alligators that slithered through the dank, cold, oily, poo-smelling water.
So basically it was bad. Very bad. As bad as flying coach out of O’Hare.
But Paddy was a tough kid. On his first night in the bilges he earned the respect of the wild dog pack by biting the pack’s leader on the ear and gnawing away for so long that forever after that dog was known as Rex “One Ear” Plantagenet.
On his second night Paddy killed and ate an alligator.
By the time he left the DiCaprio—seventh-class passengers didn’t walk down the gangplank; they were tossed into the water and left to swim ashore—he not only had a belly full of tasty alligator sushi, he had a nice pair of homemade alligator boots and a matching alligator vest.