Lonesome Traveler (12 page)

“Well come on, show me what's what! I gotta get goin—”

“Take it easy, hold your water—only the captain's up and he aint been down to breakfast.— I'll show you—now look—that's if you wanta—now I'm getting off and I don't have to” and he forgot what he was gonna say and returned to his white socks.— There was something of the hospital in him.— I rushed to find Georgie.— The ship was one vast new iron nightmare—no sweet salt sea.

AND THERE I AM staggering around the tragic darkness of the slavish alleyway with brooms, mops, handles, sticks, rags sticking out of me like a sad porcupine—my face downcast, worried, intent—aloft in the aerial world from that sweet previous Skid Row bed of underground comfort.— I have a huge carton (empty) for the dumpings of officers' ashtrays and wastebaskets—I have two mops, one for toilet floors, one for decks—a wet rag and dry rag—emergency shifts and ideas of my own.— I go frantically searching for my work—incomprehensible people are trying to get around me in the alleyways to get the work of the ship done.— After a few desultory hair drooping lugubrious licks at the Chief Mate's floor he comes in from breakfast, chats affably with me, he's going off to be captain on a ship, feels good.— I comment on the interesting notes in the discarded notebooks in his wastebasket, concerning stars.— “Go up in the chartroom,” he says, “and you'll find a lot of interesting notebooks in the basket up there.”—Later I do and it's locked.—The captain appears—I stare at him befuddled, sweaty, waiting.— He sees at once the idiot with the pail, his crafty brain begins working at once.—

He was a short distinguished looking grayhaired man with hornrim glasses, good sporty clothes, sea green eyes, quiet unassuming look.— Beneath this lurked an
insane mischievous perverted spirit that even at that first moment began to manifest itself when he said “Yes Jack all you have to do is learn to do your job right and everything will be alright—now as for instance in cleaning—now look come in here”—he insisted I go in deep in his quarters, where he could speak low—“When you—now look—you dont—” (I began to see his mad way in the stutterings, changings of mind, hiccupings of meaning)—“you dont use the same mop for deck
and
toilet” he said nastily, in a nasty tone, almost snarling and where a minute ago I'd marveled at the dignity of his calling, the great charts on his workdesk, now I wrinkled my nose to realize this idiotic man was all hung up on mops.—“There's such things as germs, you know,” he said, as if I didn't know although little he knew how little I cared about his germs.— There we were in the California harbor morning consulting on these matters in his immaculate cabin, that thing was like a Kingdom to my skidrow closet and would it make any difference to him anyway not on your life —

“Yes I'll do it that way, dont worry—er—man—captain—sir—” (no idea yet how to sound natural in new sea militarisms).— His eyes twinkled, he leaned forward, there was something unwholesome and something, some hole card not shown.— I covered all the officers' rooms doing desultory work not really knowing how and waiting for when Georgie or somebody would show me.— No time for naps, hungover in the afternoon I had to do the 3rd Cook's scullion work in the galley sink with huge pots and pans till the man came from the union hall.— He was a big Armenian with close set eyes, fat, weight about 260: he took bites day in day out at his work—sweet potatoes, pieces of cheese, fruit, he tasted it all and had big meals in between.

His room (and mine) was the first in the port alleyway facing forward.— Next door was the deck engineer, Ted Joyner, alone; oft and many a night at sea he invited me in there for a snort and always with confidential deepsouth florid faced friendly and—“Now I'm goan tell you the truth,
I
dont really like so-and-so and that's the way I feel, but I'm goan tell you the truth, now, lissen, this is no shit and I'm gonna tell you the truth, it's just a matter of—well I really dont like it and I'm goan tell you the truth, ah dont mince words—now do I Jack?”—nevertheless the prime gentleman of the ship, he was from deep in Florida and weighed also 250 question being who ate most he or Gavril my big 3rd cook roommate, I would say Ted did.

Now I'm going to tell you the truth.

NEXT DOOR were the two Greek wipers, George one, the other never spoke and hardly told his name.—George from Greece, this being in fact a Greek owned Liberty operating under the American flag which many a time thereafter fluttered over my sleep in afternoon cots on the poop deck.— When I looked at George I thought of the brown leaves of the Mediterranean, old tawny ports, ouzos and figs of the Isle of Crete or Cyprus, he was that color and had a little mustache and olive green eyes and a sunny disposition.— Amazing how he took all the kidding from the rest of the crew concerning that Greek predilection to love it up the rear—“Yey, yey!” he'd laugh scatteringly—“Up de ass, yey yey.”—His non-committal roommate was a young man before our very eyes in the process of growing old—still youthful of face and with little lover mustache and still youthful of figure in arms and legs he was growing a pot that looked all
out of proportion and seemed bigger every time I watched him after supper. Some lost love affair had just made him give up attempts to look young and lover-like I presumed.—

The mess hall was next to their foc'sle—then Georgie's room, the pantryman's and saloon messman who didnt arrive till the second day—then at the forward end facing the bow, the Chief Cook and the 2nd Cook and Baker. Chief Cook was Chauncey Preston a Negro also from Florida but way down in the Keys and in fact he had a West Indian look besides regular American Southern Negro of hot fields especially when in there sweating at the range or hammering at beef sections with a cleaver, an excellent cook and sweet person, said to me as I passed with dishes “What you got there love?” and hard and wiry as a boxer, his black figure perfect, you wondered he never got fat on those amazing yams and yam sauces and pigs knuckle stews and Southern Fried Chicken he made.—But the first wonderful meal he made you heard the deep quiet menacing voice of the blond curlylocks Swedish bosun: “If we dont want our food salted on this ship, we dont want it salted” and Prez answered from the galley in just as deep and quiet a menacing voice “If you dont like it dont eat it.” You could see it coming, the trip …

The 2nd Cook and Baker was a hipster, a union man, that is a unionist—a jazz devotee—a sharp dresser—a soft, mustached, elegant, pale gold colored cook of the blue seas who said to me “Man, pay no attention to the beefs and the performances on this or any other ship you might hang up on in the future, just do your work the best way you know, and” (wink) “you'll make it—dad, I'm hep, you understand, right?”

“You got it.”

“So just be cool and we'll all be one happy family,
you'll see. What I mean, man, it's people—that's all—it's people.— Chief Cook Prez, is people—real people—the captain, the Chief Steward, okay, no.— We know that—we stand together—”

“I'm hip—”

He was over 6 feet, wore snazzy white and blue canvas shoes, a fantastic rich Japanese silk sports shirtbought coolly in Sasebo—Beside his bunk a great longdistance Shortwave Zenith portable radio to pick up the bops and shmops of the world from here to hottest Madras—but let nobody play it unless he was there —

My big room mate Gavril the 3rd Cook was also hip, also unionist, but a lonely big fat furtive unloving and unloved slob of the sea—“Man, I have every record Frank Sinatra ever made including
I Cant Get Started
made in New Jersey in 1938” —

“Dont tell me things are going to look up?” I thought. And there was Georgie, wonderful Georgie and the promise of a thousand drunken nights in the mysterious odorous real ocean-girdled Orient World.—I was ready.—

After washing galley pots and pans all afternoon, a chore I'd tasted before in 1942 in the gray cold seas of Greenland and now found less demeaning, more like one's proper dive in hell and guih–earned labor of the steams, punishment in hot water and scald for all the bluesky puffs I'd leaned on lately—(and a nap at four just before supper dishes)—I took off for my first night ashore in the company of Georgie and Gavril. We put on clean shirts, combed, went down the gangplank in the cool of evening: this is sea men.

BUT OH SO TYPICAL OF SEAMEN, that they never do anything—just go ashore with money in their pockets and amble around dully and even with
a kind of uninterested sorrow, visitors from another world, a floating prison, in civilian clothes most uninteresting looking anyway.— We walked across the Navy's vast supply dumps—huge graypainted warehouses, sprinklers watering lost lawns that no one wanted or ever used and which ran between tracks of the Navy Yard railroad.— Immense distances at dusk with no one in sight in the redness.— Sad groups of sailors swimming their way out of the Giant Macrocosmos to find a Microcosmic bug and go to pleasures of downtown Oakland which are really nil, just streets, bars, jukeboxes with Hawaiian hula girls painted on—barbershops, desultory liquor stores, the characters of life hanging around.— I knew the only place to get kicks, to get women, way in the Mexican or Negro streets which were on the outskirts but I followed Georgie and “Heavy” as we later called the 3rd Cook to a bar in Oakland downtown where we just sat in the brown gloom, Georgie not drinking, Heavy fidgeting.—
1
drank wine, I didnt know where to go, what do.—

I found a few good Gerry Mulligan records on the box and played them.

BUT THE NEXT DAY we sailed out the Golden Gate in a gray foggy suppertime dusk, before you knew it we had turned the headlands of San Francisco and lost them beneath the gray waves.—

The trip down the West Coast of America and Mexico, again, only this time at sea within full sight of the vague brown coastline where sometimes on clear days I could definitely see the arroyos and canyons of the Southern Pacific rail where it lined along the surf—like looking at an old dream.

Some nights I slept on deck in a cot and Georgie Varewski said “You senevabitch one morning I wake
up you wont be here—goddam Pacific, you teenk goddam Pacific is quiet ocean? big tidal wave come some night when you dreaming of girls and pof, no more you—you be washed away.”

Holy sunrises and holy sunsets in the Pacific with everybody on board quietly working or reading in their bunks, the booze all gone.— Calm days, which I'd open at dawn with a grapefruit cut in halves at the rail of the ship, and below me there they were, the smiling porpoise leaping and curlicueing in the wet gray air, sometimes in the powerful driving rains that made sea and rain the same. I wrote a haiku about it:

Useless, useless!

—
Heavy rain driving

Into the sea!

Calm days that I went and fouled up, because I foolishly traded my bedroom job for the dishwasher job, which is the best job on the ship because of sudsy privacy, but then I foolishly transferred to the officers' waiter (saloon messman) and that was the worst shot on the ship. “Why dont you smile nice and say good morning?” said the captain as I laid down his eggs before him.

“I'm not the smiling type.”

“Is that the way to present breakfast to an officer? Lay it down gently with both hands.”

“Okay.”

Meanwhile the Chief Engineer is yelling: “Where's the goddam pineapple juice, I dont want no goddam orange juice!” and I have to run below to the bottom stores so when I get back the Chief Mate is burning because his breakfast's late. The Chief Mate has a full mustache and thinks he's a hero in a Hemingway novel who has to be served punctiliously.

And when we sail through the Panama Canal I
cant keep my eyes off the exotic green trees and leaves, palms, huts, guys in straw hats, the deep brown warm tropical mud out there along the banks of the canal (with South America just over the swamp in Colombia) but the officers are yelling: “Come on, goddamit, didnt you ever see the Panama Canal before, where the hell is lunch?”

We sailed up the Caribbean (blue sparkler) to Mobile Bay and into Mobile where I went ashore, got drunk with the boys and later went to a hotel room with the pretty young Rose of Dauphine Street and missed a morning's work.— When Rosy and I were walking hand in hand down Main Street at 10 A M (a terrible sight both of us without underwear or socks, just my pants, her dress, T-shirts, shoes, walking along drunk, and she's a cutie too) it was the captain, lurking around with his tourist camera, who saw it all.— Back on the ship they give me hell and I say I'm going to quit in New Orleans.

So the ship sails from Mobile Alabama westward to the mouths of the Mississippi in a lightning storm at midnight which lights up the salt marshes and vastnesses of that great hole where all America pours out her heart, her mud and hopes in one grand falling slam of water into the doom of the Gulf, the rebirth of the Void, into the Night.— There I am drunk on the cot on deck looking at it all with hungover eyes.

And the ship goes chugging right up the Mississippi River right back into the heart of the American land where I'd just been hitch hiking, damnit, there wasnt about to be no Exotic Sasebo for me. Georgie Varewski looked at me and grinned:—“Senevabitch Jackcrack, vugup huh?” The ships goes and docks at some calm green shore like the shores of Tom Sawyer, somewhere upriver from La Place, to load on barrels of oil for Japan.

I collect my pay of about $300, wad it up together with my $300 left from the railroad, heave the duffle-bag on back again, and there I go again.

I look into the mess hall where all the boys are sitting around and not one of them is looking at me.—I feel eerie—I say “Well when'd they say you're sailing?”

They looked at me blankly, with eyes that didnt see me, as though I was a ghost.— When Georgie looked at me it was also there in his eyes, a thing that said: “Now that you are no longer a member of the crew, on this ghostly vehicle, you are dead to us.” “We cant possibly get any more out of you,” I could have added, remembering all the times they insisted on my company for dull smoky bull sessions in bunks with great fat bellies spilling out like blob in the horrible tropical heat, not even one porthole open.— Or the greasy confidences about malefactions that had no charm.