Bill would never think he was something. No matter what he did throughout his life, he would never think he was something. Quite to the contrary, he would always think he was less than. He would think he was less than everyone else. Other people he would meet at different times in his life would have done, by any objective standards, so much less than him, but they were infinitely proud of what they’d done and thought of themselves as eminently successful, as something.
Not Bill. He survived jail and would become a top-notch saucier in one of the finest hotels in New York City, that is he would become one of the top three sauciers in the city, and still he would not think he’d accomplished anything. He would not think much of himself. He would not think himself something. He would never think himself something.
So when Jim said to him “You really think you’re something, don’t you,” it couldn’t have been further from the truth. Even though he was the boss, even though he ran things, even though it had come to the point that he made all the line decisions despite Bea still thinking she did, he didn’t think himself anything special. He’d graduated from the university despite their trying to stop him. To do so, he’d survived the most conservative judge and the most conservative English professor and only later did he understand that this was all purposefully designed to get at him, to cause him to quit, to skin the cat a different way.
Judge Shul would bang down the gavel saying “Policemen don’t lie.” Professor Bailey would only offer Bill one deal. Since he had already cut more than half of the final seminar, the seminar all English majors had to take in order to graduate, Bailey offered Bill a “C” but Bill had to ace all the remaining work and make up everything he’d missed. And he couldn’t miss another class, not even, as the professor had said it, with a doctor’s note saying he was dying.
Some deal! Bailey was the sole conservative on the faculty of the Honors College, the college where Bill was enrolled in the university, the college whose Dean, Dean Grey, would come to pick Bill up upon his release from the workhouse. That was a funny story unto itself, the roll-it-up story. So Bill came to think that maybe the professor was a setup as much as his work details in the workhouse were. He was assigned to make bullets for the police, this of course antithetical to why he was in there which was ostensibly for protesting for peace.
The reality was they didn’t know anything about him or about why he was at that protest. But they did know that they’d set him up and framed him then forced him into copping a guilty plea, a heavily coerced guilty plea.
So when Jim picked on Paulie, the ADHD and otherwise challenged kid, Bill knew it was meaner than that guy Ronnie in the workhouse who’d asked to him that first night if he wondered what his wife was doing while he was in there, the implication being who she was with while he was locked up. Meaner than mean.
Truth was at the tender age of twenty Bill already knew the world was filled with meaner than mean. Drenovis was heading that way, or maybe he was just a nasty pig. Jim was surely that way with Paulie, and Ronnie was surely that way.
Bill felt for Paulie and took care of him as much as he could. He felt for all the dishwashers, even Jim, Jim because Bill thought maybe he couldn’t do any better than he was since he wasn’t right anymore.
