Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46

  Homeless waters in the North, the Aryan-Nordic up against his chappy sea-net hands.

  II

  But my hands werent sea-netted and chapped by rope and wire, as later the next year as deckhand, at present time I was a scullion. I’d vaguely heard of Shakespeare yelling about that, he who washes pots and scours out giant pans, with greasy aprons, hair hanging in face like idiot, face splashed by dishwater, scouring not with a ‘scourer’ as you understand it but with a goddamned Slave chain, grouped in fist as chain, scratch, scroutch, and the whole galley heaving slowly.

  Oh the pots and pans the racket of their fear, the kitchen of the sea, the Neptunes down here, the herds of sea cows wanta milk us, the sea poem I aint finished with, the fear of the Scottish laird rowing out with a nape of another fox’ neck in the leeward shirsh of SHAOW yon Irish Sea! The sea of her lip! The brattle of her Boney! The crack of Noah’s Ark timbers built by Mosaic Schwarts in the unconditional night of Universal death.

  Short chapter.

  III

  None of the adolescent scribblings of that time I kept in journals’ll do us now.

  Here now yon breaker awash the bowsprit, ‘Night aint fit for man nor dog,’ and what dog, O Burns, O Hardy, O Hawkins, would go to sea except for a bone with meat on it?

  In our case it meant five hundred dollars if we got back safe free and that was a lot of money in nineteen forty two-ee.

  The barefooted Indian deckhand toured every foc’sle at dusk to make sure the portholes were closed and secured.

  He had a dagger in his belt.

  Two Negro cooks had a big fight in the galley at midnight over gambling, that I didnt see, where they swung huge butcher knives at each other.

  A little Moro chieftain turned third cook, with small neck, swiveled and shriveled when he turned to see.

  He had the biggest knife of them all in his belt, a first-degree Swamee machete from old Mindanao.

  The pastry cook was advertised as gay and they said he belted off his gun into the mixings for all of us to enjoy.

  In the steward’s linen department a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, member of the Abraham Lincoln leftwing anti-Fascist Brigade, tried to make a Communist out of me.

  The chief steward had no more use for me than a piece of foam of the sea hath use for him or me or anybody.

  The captain, Kendrick, was hardly seen, as he was so high on the bridge and this was a big ship.

  The chief cook of my galley was Old Glory.

  He was 6 foot 6 and 300 pounds of Negro glory.

  He said ‘Everybody’s puttin down a hype.’ He was the one who used to pray on the poop deck at dusk . . . the real prayer.

  He liked me.

  Frankie Fay the Farter slept with me in the foc’sle and kept farting. Another young kid from Charlestown Mass. with curly hair tried to make fun of me ’cause I was reading books all the time. The third guy in our foc’sle said nothing, was a tall lost junky I guess.

  Some ship.

  Pretty soon the liquor ran out and the real drunks went down to the barbershop to get their hair cut but really only wanted a bottle of bay rum aftershave lotion.

  The clever punks in the galley sent me down to the engine room to ask the chief engineer for a ‘left-handed monkey wrench’. The chief yelled at me over the booming pistons that were turning the shaft of the rear screw ‘There’s no such-a-thing as a left-handed monkey wrench you dumbhead!’

  Then they threw me a special honorary dinner and gave me the ass-hole of a duck, with yams and potatoes and asparagrass. I ate it and pronounced it delicious.

  They said maybe I was a fancypants football player, and a college-educated boy, but I didnt know there was no such thing as a left-handed monkey wrench or that the ass of a duck was the ass of a duck. Good enough, I could use either.

  I pleased the pastry cook who gave me a brown leather jacket that hung over my wrists. He was the poop deck preacher.

  I observed icebergs in my diary; the diary is really very good and I should record it here: Like, ‘Incidentally, one of our two new convoy ships, a small-sized freighter converted into a sort of sub chaser and raider, carries a heroic legend. She has sunk every submarine she’s found in these cold waters. She’s a valiant little bitch: hits the waves briskly and carries a torpedo seaplane as well as a load of depth charges and shells.’ And here’s the old Aryan complaining (before we got to those icebergs): ‘Fog, the Chatham looms astern, lowing like a mournful cow . . .’

  IV

  Icebergs are vast mountains of ice that float about in the North Atlantic and show themselves to be one-tenth of their whole bulk, which, hid beneath the waves, can stave a ship’s hull in faster’n a black-eyed Spartan can do you in, in a Spartan provocation, only this here iceberg is white, icy, cold, dont care, and’s bigger than five West St Louis Police and Fire Departments. O Budweiser, pay homage and notice.

  And you see them a mile away, white ice cubes, with waves crashing against their bowsprits like in slowmotion Dinosaur movies. Splowsh, slow, the gigantic sight of great waters against a cliff, of ice in this case (not a Kern), going PLOW. You know what the name of the Cornish Celtic language is? Kernuak.

  So what’s Kerouac? ‘Kern’ being Cairn, and ‘uak’ language of; then, Ker, house, ouac, language of, THIS IS THE LANGUAGE OF THE HOUSE SPEAKING TO YOU IN PURE SEAMAN TONES.

  Nobody on this ship of mine is going to hit an iceberg, not on your life, not with Cap’n Kendrick, and besides, we’ve got pork chops for supper.

  V

  D’jever see the eyes of the captain in the wheelroom? Did anybody bend over charts as much as that first mate? That second mate, did he have blue eyes? And the third, sharp? No ship as big as the Dorchester can hit disaster unless it hits into a genius.

  The genius, Von Dönitz, hid under the waves in Belle Isle Strait, and we looked for his signs of foam or periscopey proppery, aye we did. Altho Hitler counseled his Naval youth to be wise and athletic you never saw better sailors than I saw in the United States Sea. Service. Na, no Dönitz can escape the mark of a Canadian.

  The usual real Canadian has blue eyes and an eye for the sea and the cove too, a real pirate, tell that to the High Command of any Navy. He licks his lips in anticipation of any sight of breakage in the wave, whether it’s a football, a turd, a dead gull, floating happy albatross (if near enough Poles) or wavelet or sea sparrow or, really, the osprey, that do-do bird, that non go-go bird, that bird who floateth on the waves and sayeth to thee and I ‘Go saileth yourselfth, I am bird what floateth on water.’ Okay. Always found near land.

  What land we got here? Irish Sea? Ju sea it?

  VI

  So I’m frying the bacon for one thousand men, that is, two thousand strips of bacon, on a vast black range, while Glory and the other assistant cooks are doing the scrambled eggs. I’m wearing a life jacket, O Baldwin apples. I hear ‘Boom boom’ outside. Glory is wearing a life jacket too. Boom boom. The bacon sizzles. Glory looks at me and says ‘They’re layin down a hipe out there.’

  ‘Yeh.’

  ‘Get that bacon crisp and put it in the pan, boy.’

  ‘Yowsah,’ says I, ‘boss.’ ’Cause he was my boss, and you buy that. ‘What’s goin on out there Glory?’

  ‘There’s a bunch of Canadian corvettes and American destroyer escorts layin down depth charges against a German submarine attack.’

  ‘We’re being attacked?’

  ‘That aint no Memphis lie.’

  ‘S-n-ucc-Q-z,’ as I sneezed, ‘what time is it?’

  ‘What you wearing your life jacket for?’

  ‘You told me to wear it, you and the chief steward.’

  ‘Well you’re makin bacon.’

  ‘Well sure I’m makin bacon,’ I said, ‘but I’m thinking of that kid on that German submarine who’s also maki
n the bacon. And who is now chokin to death in drowning. Buy that, Glory.’

  ‘I aint layin down no hipe, you’re right,’ said Glory, who was real big and blues singer too but I coulda licked him in any fight because he woulda let me.

  That’s your American Negro man, so dont talk to me about it.

  VII

  The sea speaketh. Remember, why’m I a wave? Three silver nails in a blue field, turned gray by sea. Jesus, it is a Polish sea. What, Djasnsk? Every nobleman in Russia wore furs and gelted everybody in sight. Djanks. Skoll. Aryans.

  Slaves they dared to call us.

  VIII

  Slaves indeed, why when you looked at the bodyguards of Khrushchev or any other regular-lookin Russian you saw some guy sellin cows in North Carolina fields at 9 A.M. . . . Aryans . . . The look where you believe that God will forgive you in Heaven . . . ‘T’sa look make the whores of Amsterdam not only quake but give up their knitting . . . Ah High Germanic Nordic Aryans you brutes of my heart! . . . Kill me! . . . Crucify me! . . . Go ahead, I’ve got Persian friends.

  And what will Persian friends do, grow mustaches and ride jets? . . . Do you know what Jesus meant when he cried out on the cross ‘Father, Father, why hast thou forsaken me?’ . . . He was only quoting a Psalm of David like a poet remembering by heart: He did not repudiate His own kingdom, it’s a crock to believe so, throw the Shield of David in the garbage can with the Cross of Jesus if that’s what you think, let me prove it to you: Jesus was only quoting the first line of David’s Psalm 22 with which he was familiar as a child even (not to mention that the sight of the Roman soldiers casting ballots for his garment reminded him of the line in the same Psalm ‘They cast lots upon my vesture,’ and add this too ‘They pierced my hands and my feet’). PSALM 22 OF DAVID (in part): ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Loudly I call, but my prayer cannot reach thee. Thou dost not answer, my God, when I cry out . . . I am a byword to all, the laughing-stock of the rabble. All those who catch sight of me fall to mocking; mouthing out insults, while they toss their heads in scorn “He committed himself to the Lord, why does not the Lord come to his rescue, and set his favorite free?” . . . I am spent as spilt water, all my bones out of joint . . . parched is my throat, like clay in the baking, and my tongue sticks fast in my mouth . . . They have torn holes in my hands and feet . . . and they stand there watching me . . . They divide my spoils among them, cast lots for my garments . . .’

  He was just like a poet remembering lines of the prophecy of David.

  Therefore I believe in Jesus. Tell you why if you dont know already: Jacob wrestled with his angel because he defied his own Guardian Angel. Typical.

  Michael stands in my corner, 7 feet tall.

  Look.

  There go us.

  Book Eight

  I

  Blaise Pascal says not to look to ourselves for the cure to misfortunes, but to God whose Providence is a foreordained thing in Eternity; that the foreordainment was that our lives be but sacrifices leading to purity in the after-existence in Heaven as souls disinvested of that rapish, rotten, carnal body – O the sweet beloved bodies so insulted everywhere for a million years on this strange planet. Lacrimae rerum. I dont get it because I look into myself for the answers. And my body is so thick and carnal! I cant penetrate into the souls of others equally entrap’t in trembling weak flesh, let alone penetrate into an understanding of HOW I can turn to God with effect. The situation is pronounced hopeless in the very veins of our hands, and our hands are useless in Eternity since nothing they do, even clasp, can last.

  So I thought of the little German blond boy making bacon on that underwater ship and as he stands there in his life belt trembling and sweating, nevertheless sweetly preparing breakfast for the men and officers, he hears the joints and bolts of the submarine’s bulkhead hull creaking and cracking, soon water’s trickling in, his bacon like the proverbial pigs who’d been handed Satan’s walking papers by Jesus to go jump in the lake, is about to be wetted. Then a big close blast of depth charge and the whole ocean comes charging into his kitchen and washes round him and his stove and his humble breakfast, and him a child in Mannerheim when the icicles were pure in the morning winter sun and Haydn was heard at the concert hall down the narrow cobblestoned streets, ah, now the water is up to his neck and he is suffocating anyway at the thought of it all: remembering his entire lifetime. The sweet blond German Billy Budd is suffocated chokingly by water in a sunken capsule. His eyes look wildly toward me in my life jacket at the black cooking range of the SS Dorchester. I cant stand it.

  From that moment on I’m the only real Pacifist in the world.

  I dont see it, I dont get it, I dont want it. Why couldnt our two ships just meet in a cove and exchange pleasantries and phony prisoners?

  Who are these smiling Satans making all the money out of this? Whether they’re Russian, American, Japanese, British, French or Chinese? But wasnt Tolstoy dead right when he said in his final book, The Kingdom of God Is Within You (a quotation from Jesus), that the day will come when the hourglass that’s sanding off war will be suddenly full? Or the day, really, when the water pendulum, having received more water on the peace bucket, will suddenly tilt to peace? All in a second it happens.

  Besides, as I will show later, the Germans should not have been our ‘enemies’. I say this and stake my life on it.

  So old Glory says ‘Okay, boy, got the bacon ready, and I’se got the scrammed eggs, and here we go feeding one thousand men on their way to build an airbase in Greenland with muddy roads and wood shacks and mackinaw jackets, yair, ‘taint been since I left St James Infirmary I felt so foolish and blue. O Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?’

  On top of that I have to wash the pots and pans, mop the deck, go to bed, get woke up at noon by the second cook a Negro with a big dagger saying ‘Get up you lazy bum, you’re five minutes late in the galley.’

  ‘You cant talk to me like that.’

  ‘I’ve got this knife.’

  ‘What do I care about that?’

  ‘I’m gonna tell the captain about your back talk in the galley.’

  ‘It’s your first chance to pick on somebody aint it?’ I say. Boy we didnt like each other. I went to the second mate asking to be transferred to deck but they refused. I was trapped on a steel jail floating in the icy oceans of the Arctic Circle and a slave at last.

  II

  Diary says: ‘July 30, 1942: In the evening, a whipping wind drove in from the north and blew the fog off . . . and a cold, icy wind it was. We are really approaching the north now. This is the eighth day out of Boston, and we should be three-quarters of the way between northern Newfoundland and southern Greenland’ – not yet in the Arctic Circle but a few days later – ‘by now. This wind was a strange wind; it came from the far white north and it bore a message of barren desolation that murmured: “Man must not venture to me, for I am ruthless and indifferent, like the sea, and shall not be his friend and warm light. I am the north and I exist only for myself.” But, off our larboard, the signal light of our new convoy ship (the Navy ships have left, and been replaced by two heavily armed trawlers) beamed across the bleak gray waters with another message . . . and this was a message of warmth and love and cheer, the message of Man . . . It was a beautiful little golden light, and it blinked the symbols of Man’s language. And the thought of language, here in the bosom of a tongueless sea . . . that also was a warm golden fact.’

  And: ‘Prison ship! I scream to myself in the morning, heading for my pots and pans. Oh, where the Prince of Crete Sabbas, and his familiar cry: “In the morning, brothers, sympathy!” . . . about 1,800 miles astern . . . but only 2 feet asoul.

  ‘But this morning, I went up on deck sleepily for a breath of air on the bow, and found myself in an enchanted Greenlandic fjord. I was literally stunned for a moment, then lapsed into boyish wonder.’ – Natch – ‘Eskimos in
kyaks were drifting past us, smiling their strange broken-tooth smiles. And, Oh, how that line of Wolfe’s came back to me in glorious triumph and truth: “Morning and new lands . . .” For here was heavily-eyed, stupored morning, fresh and clean and strange . . . and here was a new land . . . lonely, desolated Greenland. We passed an Eskimo settlement which must have been the one on the map near Cape Farewell, Julianehaab. The American seamen were throwing oranges at the Eskimos, trying to hit them, laughing coarsely – but the little Mongolians merely smiled their idiot tender welcomes. My fellow countrymen embarrassed me no end and considerably for I know that these Eskimos are a great and hardy Indian people, that they have their gods and mythology, that they know all the secrets of this weird land, and that they have morals and an honor that far surpasses ours. The fjord is flanked’ – ‘fjord’ means deep cliff water channel – ‘on each bank by enormous brown cliffs, which are covered by some sort of heavy moss, or grass, or heather, I cant tell which. This is probably why the Northmen named the land GREENland. And these cliffs are absolutely enchanted . . . like the dream cliffs of a child, of the place where resides the soul of Wagner’s music . . . massive, fortlike, and steep; crevices considerably worn by the streambeds of melted ice; rising in sheer tremendous beauty from the green fjord waters to a pale blue sky . . .’