Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46

  ‘O sure, suppose I woulda socked him . . . would I be getting back there?’

  ‘Who said you’re getting back there? YOU’ll never see the inside of Columbia again, I dont think.’

  ‘Dammit I will, even if you dont want me to! Just dare me! If I’da listened to your encouraging words of wisdom all my life I’da rotted in Lowell a long time ago!’

  ‘You dont know it, but you’re rotting in Lowell right now.’

  ‘O you like that thought dont you? You’d like me to join you in rotting away in Lowell.’

  ‘AAAh you’re nothing but a little punk, you were once the finest, sweetest, most innocent kid a few years ago, now look at him.’

  ‘Yes look at me, tell me, Pa, is the world innocent?’

  Ma broke in: ‘Why dont you two stop fighting all the time? I never in all my life saw such a commotion in a house, eh maudit why dont you leave him alone Emil, he knows what he wants to do, he’s old enough to know what he wants.’

  Pa rose quickly from the table and began to leave the room: ‘Sure, sure’ — supper unfinished — ‘stick up for him, he’s the only thing you got, go ahead and believe in him, but you believe me, you’ll starve plenty if you do, let him have his way, but dont come crying to me when you starve. Dammit!’ Pa yelled on.

  ‘Dammit!’ I yelled. ‘She wont starve, maybe I’m not paying her back now but I’ll pay her back some day, a million times over . . .’

  ‘Sure,’ said Pa, leaving the room to make his point dramatic, ‘pay her back when she’s in her grave.’ And he was gone into the freezing parlor fuming, stomping, Duluoz enraged. Ma looks at me and shakes her head gravely:

  ‘I never saw such a man. I dont know how I ever lived twenty-five years with him, if you dont know listen to me, dont listen to him, if you do, you’ll be the same thing he is, he never did anything himself . . . he’s jealous that you’ll go out and make something of yourself, dont listen to him, dont talk to him, he’ll only make you mad . . .

  ‘He’s always been that way,’ adds Ma, ‘his whole family is crazy, his brothers are worse than he is, they’re a bunch of crazy nuts, everybody in Canada knew that . . .’

  Okay, me too.

  Krrooooaaaooo! I could hear the railroad calling outside, okay, I’m packing tomorrow and going South and on the road.

  IV

  I wrote my resignation to the newspaper, packed my bag, bought a bus ticket, and rode straight down to Washington DC where G.J. my Greek boyhood buddy of Lowell had a bed for me, to share with him, while in the other double bed in the room slept an old Southern construction worker called Bone who got up in the morning and scratched his back with a Chinese backscratcher and moaned and said ‘Ah shit, gotta to go work again.’ To me, the scrollworks few as they are up around New Hampshire Avenue, Washington DC, represented a kind of New Orleans romance I was getting into, and G.J. and I went out the first night and hit the bars, and here’s this big brunette sitting in a booth with her girlfriend and says to me: ‘You goin walking?’

  ‘Sure,’ I sez, ‘and buy newspapers, two of em.’

  With the two newspapers laid out in the grass under an oak tree in the US Soldiers’ Home Park we made the newspapers pay their way.

  Then the backscratcher construction worker, a Southerner, driving me the first morning down to the Pentagon construction project, eyes bleary, sees a poor Negro riding a bike on Ninth Street and says ‘Hey boy, wanta Nigger?’ I’d never heard such talk in my life. I said:

  ‘What you mean, dont hit him.’ He swerved real close and almost hit the workingman’s bike. I didnt like old Bone too much. At the Pentagon I had to pay ten dollars to join the union and then, few days later, got a job as apprentice sheetmetal worker. Huh! First day on the job I’m with this drunken sheetmetal worker who cant even find where the sheet metal’s goin, goes out to lunch or someplace, dont come back, so I find a hole in the wood and dirt and take a big nap till 5 P.M. Next day, seeing my ‘master’ metalworker aint here I go back to crawl into my hole to sleep and there’s three big blue-gum Nigras in there snoring and I manage to crawl in with them and sleep too, till five o’clock.

  So that makes me a tin-eared Canuck?

  Next afternoon a Negro with a shovel over his back is singing ‘St James’ Infirmary’ so beautiful I follow him across the entire 5-mile construction field so I can hear every note and word. (Forgot to mention that on my way down to Washington that spring, 1942, I stopped off in New York just so I could hear Frank Sinatra, and see, Frank Sinatra, sing in the Paramount Theater, waiting there in line with two thousand screaming Brooklyn Jewish and Italian girls, I’m just about, in fact, AM the only guy in the line, and when we get in the theater and skinny old Frank comes out and grabs the mike, with glamorous rings on his fingers and wearing gray sports coat, black tie, gray shirt, sings ‘Mighty Like a Rose’ and ‘Without a song . . . the road would never end’, oww.) Here I am following old St James across a field, and the next day I go all the way and leave the construction site and walk into the woods of Virginia and sit there all day, in what I take to be the northern part of the Wilderness of Civil War fame, and sing ‘Carr-y Me Back to Old Virginny’.

  Worse than that, one day I have a pint of gin in my backpocket and I hitchhike back from the Pentagon construction project over the Potomac Bridge, the guy lets me out on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the Nation’s Capitol, during the day some work’s torn off the front part of my pants, I have to hold them together or my thing’ll wave. As I see the Nation’s Capitol, the American flag, Pennsy Avenue, I whip back for my pint in backpocket to take a nip and the thing comes out and waves at the American flag and the Capitol. Now if Jefferson, Jackson or Washington’d seen that, whoo!

  I mean, the weirdest nip of gin a man ever took in old Washington DC.

  V

  On top of which, I then quit the construction job on the Pentagon and get me a job as a short-order cook and soda jerk in a Northwest Washington lunchcart and one night me and my West Virginia buddy are sent down to the cellar to fetch a bag of potatoes and fall over each other and tumble down and dont break our necks. ‘You all right?’ I ask him.

  ‘Yes. I’m all right. It’s just,’ he says looking away dreamily west, ‘it’s just I mess cant go down stairs no mo without fallin, that love bug’s done bit me.’

  ‘Who?’

  The love bug’s done bit me, boy, I’m in love.’ I go back upstairs with the potatoes and here I am wearing this big white cook hat and two girls are at the counter and one of them, the pretty brunette, hands me a pack of pornographic playing cards:

  ‘Bet you cant tell where that hand is? You like tham pictures?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Well lissen, you quit this job as a soda jerk and come live with me, I’ll support you, all I ask is you dont go foolin around with no Negra gals or I’ll stick a nife in yore back.’ So I moved in with Annie of Columbus Georgia. One night as she’s moaning up to my face ‘Jack you jess doin me to dayeth’ we hear a great knock on the door and a great mournful voice croons out:

  ‘Annie, it’s Bing. It’s only old Bing.’

  ‘Dont answer the door,’ she whispers, ‘it’s only old Bing.’

  ‘Bing Crosby?’

  ‘No it aint Bing Crosby.’

  ‘Sounds like him.’

  ‘Shhh. He’ll go away.’

  ‘And one of these days you’ll turn me back at the door too, hey Annie of Georgia?’

  Meanwhile me and G. J. hung around parks looking for even more quiff, we talked about the birds at dusk on the branches over our heads, about Lowell, but later that night he got drunk and mad and pulled out his scissors and said he was going to cut a whore’s breasts off. Me and Bone restrained him.

  Annie found a new boyfriend, took us in her car to a drive-in, we saw Henry Fonda get drunk in the hammock during the bi
g football game of The Human Animal and I got so delirious and glad I threw an empty bottle of gin clear across the trees of Virginia and yelled ‘Wa-hooooo’ to the moonlight, which was there too. So I’d had my Virginia.

  I took a bus back to Lowell thinking with slavering thoughts of Moe Cole.

  VI

  That’s what it’s like when you’re twenty and it’s spring, war or no war. But the war was on . . .

  So, Moe Cole and all that, and others. Marleine, etc., but now I hitchhiked to Boston with Timothy Clancy to join the United States Marines. We were examined, did a teleprogram of examinations, were passed and sworn in. That’s why today people still think I’m a US Marine. Officially, yes, but unofficially meanwhile I’d forgotten my Coast Guard pass out of Boston, was fingerprinted, photographed and passed, hung round the National Maritime Union hall waiting for a ship and after me and Clancy were designated as Marines he hitchhiked back 24 miles to Lowell to rest and read John Adams but I went down to Scollay Square to get drunk and met some seamen, in the morning I woke up and we tottered to the seaman hall, to my surprise the union man called over the mike: ‘Job for a scullion on the SS Dorchester.’

  ‘What’s scullion?’

  ‘That’s where you wash the pots and pans.’

  ‘Where’s the ship going?’

  ‘Murmansk, boy.’

  ‘Here we go . . . I’ll be scullion.’ I threw my card in and they hired me and some of those other boys and by that afternoon I was going on board the SS Dorchester with my seabag, we got drunk that night and sang in South Boston and Charleston nightclubs and goofed around chased by cops, and at dawn troops came on board, then a lot of men, and before I knew it this big tub the SS Dorchester was steaming out of Boston Harbour for the North Pole, with destroyer escorts of the US Navy on the starboard and cutters of the US Coast Guard on the port, goodbye Boston, goodbye America, goodbye US Marines.

  It wasnt intentional. The Marines never chased me about that. Because the Dorchester later became an international monument ship of Merchant Marine courage, tho we could hardly guess that at the time, with all those stewpots and regular stewpots moaning in their bunks and stewpots general.

  VII

  The fact of the matter is, while Timmy Clancy waited in Lowell for the US Marines to call him, I was sailing for the North Pole on the SS Dorchester with a bunch of drunks, Indians, Polocks, Guineas, Kikes, Micks, Puddlejumpers (Frogs, me), Svedes, Norvegians, Krauts and all the knuckleheads including Mongolian idiots and Moro sabermen and Filipinos and anything you want in a most fantastic crew. But on the ship also was the Navy gun crew in orange life belts and handling the Oerlikon antivessel guns. To get into this will get my best respects from Heaven, spelled with a capital Aitch.

  Ouch. Wanta harken back just a little, Sabby Savakis’d also hitchhiked a couple of times to Boston with me, and also with Clancy, wanted to join anything I joined. Said ‘I wanta sail with you on this ship.’

  ‘Get your papers.’ Went down to the Coast Guard but didnt get his papers’s fast as I did. The trouble was, he didnt look like a sailor but like a curly-haired goatsherd from Sparta. Sailors come from Cornwall I tell you.

  So it was too late and he cried to see me go but I said ‘I see the flowers of death in the eyes of me shipmates, it’s just as well you dont come on this trip.’

  ‘But dont you see the flowers of death in MY eyes?’

  ‘Yes, but from where from I dont know . . . Sabby,’ I added, ‘I just wanta be away from you and Lowell and New York and Columbia for a long while and be alone and think about the sea . . . Please let me sail by myself for awhile.’ (You Dear Man, I should have added, of course.) Before we sailed, that last morning, as I said in On the Road book I actually got so drunk I wrapped myself around the toilet bowl of the Scollay Square Café and got pissed and puked on all night long by a thousand sailors and seamen and when I woke up in the morning and found myself all covered and caked and unspeakably dirty I just like a good old Boston man walked down to the Atlantic Avenue docks and jumped into the sea, washed myself, grabbed a raft, came up, and walked to my ship fairly clean.

  You buy sailors in wartime? Up against a monument, dearie.

  Book Seven

  I

  Now that I look back on it, if Sabby could have got his Coast Guard papers on time and sailed on that ship with me he might have lived thru the war. It was now June 1942, with a little black bag containing rags and a collection of classical literature weighing several ounces in small print, I’d walked by a white fence near my mother’s house on my way to the North Pole, to hitchhike to Boston with Timmy Clancy (later District Attorney of Essex County Massachusetts). It was, really, like Melville packing his little black bag and setting off to New Bedford to go a-whaling. If Sabby had come on board with me he might have signed off the Dorchester after this, her next-to-last trip, and come with me thence to Liverpool etc. But as I saw the flowers of death in the eyes of most of my shipmates I had seen the flowers of death in his eyes too. He got into the Army a few months later. Flowers of death, as Baudelaire well knew from his leaning balcony in sighin Paree, are everywhere and for all time for everybody.

  We have destroyers too watching far out as we leave Boston Harbor and move north out of those waters toward the Maine waters and out to the Banks of Newfoundland where we’re swallowed in fog, and the water in the scuppers, supped up from the sea to wash our buckets with, gets a-colder and a-colder. We’re not in a convoy, it’s only 1942, no Allied and British arrangement, just the SS Dorchester and her sister ship the SS Chatham going up north, with a freighter called the US Alcoa Pilot, and surrounded by corvettes and cutters and destroyers and destroyer escorts and led by, my you better mind me now, the old wooden ice-cuttin ship of Admiral Byrd (the North Star). Five hundred civilian construction workers, carpenters, electricians, bulldoze cat men, laborers, all in Alaska boomtown wool shirts, and tho all life is but a skullbone and a rack of ribs through which we keep passing food and fuel just so’s we can burn so furious (tho not so beautiful), here we went on a voyage to Greenland, ‘life’s delicate children’ on one sea, Saturday, July 18, oil-burning transport, out Merchant Miners dock, Boston, some of the crew going about with sheathed knives and daggers more of a semiromantic fancy than a necessity, poop decks, reading the funnies on poop decks, powder and ammunition in the afterdeck storeroom not 10 feet from the foc’sle where we’uns slept, up ahead foaming main and clouds . . .

  Let’s get seamenlike. A bonus for sleeping on top of a powder magazine, does that sound like Captain Blah? AGWI Lines people, own this ship, ah bright and winedark sea. Anchor tied we pull out between those two lighthouses in Boston Harbor, only the Chatham follows us, an hour later we perceive a destroyer off our port and a light cruiser (that’s right) off our starboard. A plane. Calm sea. July. Morning, a brisk sea. Off the coast of Maine. Heavy fog in the morning, misty in the afternoon. Log. All eyes peeled for the periscope. Wonderful evening spent before with the (not Navy, excuse me) Army gun crew near the big gun, playing popular records on the phonograph, the Army fellas seem much more sincere than the hardened cynical dockrats. Here’s a few notes from my own personal log: ‘There are a few acceptable men here and there, like Don Gary, the new scullion, a sensible and friendly fellow. He has a wife in Scotland, joined the Merchant Marine to get back to Scotland, in fact. I met one of the passengers, or construction workers, an Arnold Gershon, an earnest youth from Brooklyn. And another fellow who works in the butcher shop. Outside of these, my acquaintances have so far been fruitless, almost foolish. I am trying hard to be sincere but the crew prefers, I suppose, embittered cursing and bawdry foolishness. Well, at least, being misunderstood is being like the hero in the movies.’ (Can you imagine such crap written in a scullion’s diary?) ‘Sunday July 26: A beautiful day! Clear and windy, with a choppy sea that looks like a marine painting . . . long flecked billows of blue water, with the wake of ou
r ship like a bright green road . . . Nova Scotia to larboard. We have now passed through the Cabot Straits.’ (Who’s Cabot? A Breton?) (Pronounced Ca-boh.) ‘Up we go, to northern seas. Ah there you’ll find that shrouded Arctic’. (That wash of pronounced sea-talk, that parturient snowmad ice mountain plain, that bloody Genghis Khan plain of seaweed talk broken only by uprisings of foam.)

  Yessir, boy, the earth is an Indian thing but the waves are Chinese. Know what that means? Ask the guys who drew those old scrolls, or ask the old Fishermen of Cathay, and what Indian ever dared to sail to Europe or Hawaii from the salmon-tumbling streams of North America? When I say Indian, I mean Ogallag.

  ‘As I write, tonight, we are passing thru the most dangerous phase of our journey to that mysterious northern land . . . we are steaming ahead in a choppy sea past the mouth of the St Lawrence River in a crystal clear Moonglow.’ (Good enough for a Duluoz, descendant of the Gaspé and the Cape Breton.) ‘This is the region where many sinkings have occurred of late.’ (Keeping up with the news in New York’s P.M. newspaper, I had been.) ‘Death hovers over my pencil. How do I feel? I feel nothing but dim acceptance.’ (O Eugene O’Neill!) ‘A sort of patience that is more dreamlike than real. The great card games, the tremendous card games and crap games go on in the diningroom, Pop is there with his cigarette holder, chef’s cap, mad rich rakish laugh, some of the base workers mixed in the games, the scene seasoned with impossible characters, shit language, rich warm light, all kinds of men gambling their shore pay away in a dare at Neptune . . . Sums of money changing hands with death nearby. What an immense gambling ship this is . . . and our sister ship, the Chatham, off our stern, same thing of course. The stake is money and the stake is life. At dusk, with long lavender sashes hovering over distant Nova Scotia, a Negro baker conducted a religious sermon on the afterdeck. He had us kneel while he prayed. He spoke of God (“We howled”), and he prayed to God for a safe journey. Then I went to the bow and spent my usual hour staring the face of the mounting northern gales. We should be off the coast of Labrador tomorrow. As I was writing just now, I heard a hissing outside my porthole, the sea is heavy, the ship just rocks and rocks real deep, and I thought: “Torpedo!” I waited for one long second. Death! Death!’ (Think of your death scenes and death trips, LSD users!) ‘I tell you,’ sez confident young Jack London in his bunk, ‘I tell you, it is NOT hard to face death’ — no, sirree — ‘I am patient, I shall now turn over to sleep. And the sea washes on, immense, endless, everlasting, my sweet brother [?] and sentencer [!]. In the moonlight tonight in these dangerous waters, one can see the two Navy ships that are convoying us, two tawny seacats, alert and lowslung’ (O gee) . . .