Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46

II

  Big Slim wasnt discharged till a week later. He too went back to the Merchant Marine. He said he’d look me up in New York.

  New York, that is, Ozone Park, Long Island, Queens, was where Ma and Pa had now moved, from Lowell, bringing the old piano only worth five dollars even, and all the old Lowell furniture, to begin a gay new life in the big city. Because they figured if Nin was in the WACS now (which she was), and I either in the Navy or in the Merchant Marine, we’d be more or less routing and rerouting in and through New York City. I came home in civvies to their new apartment over a drugstore in Ozone Park on a hot June morning.

  But we had a gay party of it. Pa had a job on Canal Street in New York City as a linotypist and Ma had a job in Brooklyn as a skiver in a shoe factory making Army shoes, between the two of them they were socking money away in the bank, wartime wages, and living cheap, and splurging only on Saturday nights when they went out to Manhattan via the Jamaica El, the BMT subway and the rest and wound up roaming arm in arm around New York visiting interesting-looking restaurants and going to big Roxy and Paramount and Radio City movies and later, French movies, and coming home with shopping bags full of junk and toys that hit their fancy such as Chinese cigarette holders from Chinatown, or toy cameras from Times Square, or doodad figurines for shelves. This was, by the way, the happiest time of their entire married life. Their children were on their own and they began to realize they liked each other as persons. Ma even let Pa go down to the corner on Cross Bay Boulevard and make his bets with the big fat woman bookie who ran the candy store.

  III

  I remember the morning my father got up and found some baby mice in the closet at Ozone Park apartment and there was nothing else to do but throw them down the toilet. Red sun in June, the cars shizzing by on the boulevard, the smell of exhaust but a nice wind all the time from the nearby sea immediately blowing it away, and also nice trees around.

  ‘Poor little beasts,’ he said, ‘but you gotta do it.’ But as soon as he’d done it he almost cried. ‘The poor little dolls, it’s a pity.’

  ‘They were so cute,’ said Ma in a little baby voice that would have sounded silly in English but in French Canadian only made you see what kind of little girl she’d been in her New Hampshire days, the emphasis on the word ‘cute’, the English word itself used, but in French context and pronunciation, carrying in it infinite and genuine child regret that such little creatures with their tittery noses and mustaches carried such a heavy weight of diseasing filth . . . yea the little helpless white bellies, the hairs streaming back from scrawny necks in the water . . .

  The other night, now (1967), when my cat died, I saw his face in Heaven just like old Harry Carey saw the face of his loyal Negro porter in Heaven at the end of the picture Trader Horn. I dont care who the person is you love: you love the loyal, the helpless, the trusting.

  In night, my bed by the boulevard window, I thrashed in a thousand twenty-one-year-old agonies at the horror of all this world.

  When I went out and signed on the SS George Weems via the union hall, and saw the paintings of three airplanes on its stack at the docks in Brooklyn, meaning they had shot down three planes in the Atlantic, I felt the same way . . .

  When you’re twenty-one you run to your girl. I ran up to Columbia campus to look up Johnnie, caught up with her at Asbury Park where she was living in the summer with her grandmother, she put earrings on my ears and when we went to the sands all afternoon in the crowd a bunch of girls said ‘What is it, a gypsy?’ But this is a gypsy who doesnt eat up others as he goes along.

  ‘I’ll get a ship and come back around October and we’ll live together in an apartment in New York City, right on the campus, with your friend June.’

  ‘You’re a rat but I love you.’

  ‘Who cares?’

  IV

  Getting my gear ready to ship out in about a week, at my parents’ apartment in Ozone Park, all of a sudden the door knocks at 8 A.M. and it’s Big Slim in the door. ‘Come on boy let’s get out and git drunk and play the horses.’

  ‘There’s a bar right across the street to start with. As for the horses, Slim, let’s wait till my Pa gets home from work at noon, he loves to go to Jamaica.’ Which we did. Me, Big Slim and Pa went to Jamaica and in the first race Slim secretly laid twenty to win on the favorite while Pa put five to place on some dog he’d figured all night before in the Morning Telegraph form charts. Both lost. Slim had a pint of whiskey in his backpocket, me too. It was wartime, there were a million things to do. My Pa just loved Slim. B’God we went out to New York City after the races, on the train that runs back to Penn Station, and went out to hit the Bowery. Sawdust saloons and raucous big fat dames in Sammy’s Bowery Follies singing ‘My Gal Sal’ and one old Tugboat Annie even sat on Pa’s big fat lap and said he was a cute kid and buy me a beer. Pa went home exhausted and I went on with Slim into the night . . . He ended up, the last time I ever saw him, with his head in his hands howling loud and sad ‘O I’m sick, I’m sick!’ and bumping into lamp poles on the waterfront near the Seamen’s Union. Everybody hiding in the alleys to see him carry on like that, big 6 foot 5 and 200-pound muscle and bones. They were building a Seaman’s Chapel out of the Seamen’s Union at the time, under the direction of Reverend Nordgren whom I met many years later in retirement in Florida, but it wasnt for Slim to go to a chapel. Where he ever went I’ll never know. Last I heard he was punching cows in East Texas, probably not true. Where is he tonight? Where am I? Where are you?

  Because when I saw the face of my beloved dead cat Timmy in the Heavens, and heard him mew like he used to do in a little voice, it surprised me to realize he wasnt even born when World War II was on, and therefore at this moment, how can he even be dead? If he wasnt born, how can he be dead? So just an apparition in molecular form for awhile, to haunt our souls with similarities to God’s perfection, in Timmy’s case the perfection was when he’d sit like a lion on the kitchen table, paws straight out, head erect and full-jowled, and God’s imperfection when he was dying and his back was a skeletal run of ribs and spinal joints and his fur falling off and his eyes looking at me: ‘I may have loved you, I may love you now, but it’s too late . . .’ Pascal says it better than I do when he says: ‘WHAT SHALL WE GATHER FROM ALL OUR DARKNESS, IF NOT A CONVICTION OF OUR UNWORTHINESS?’ And he adds, to show you right path:

  ‘There are perfections in Nature which demonstrate that She is the image of God’ — Timmy sittin like a lion, Big Slim in his prime, Pop in his prime, me in my careless 1943 youth, you, all — ‘and imperfections’ — our decay and going-down, all of us — ‘to assure us that She is no more than His image.’ I believe that.

  ‘God is Dead’ made everybody sick to their stomachs because they all know what I just said, and Pascal said, and Paschal means Resurrection.

  V

  An amazing seven hours, that hot day in late June 1943, when I was sweating water through my shirt pushed up against hundreds of people in the subway, en route downtown to get my boarding papers at the National Maritime Union, cursing (because I cant stand the heat at all my blood is thick and hot as molasses), and then, seven hours later, I’m standing bow watch in the windy dark sea under stars in a big jacket as we round Nantucket and head for England, wow.

  This was the aforementioned SS George Weems, I was signed on as an ordinary seaman on the four-to-eight watch, my first job on deck. I had to learn from the other fellows about picking up those fist-thick ropes and winding them about giant bits while the guy at the steam-driven winch ground up those rope cables on a big spool as big as your bedroom, or bed thereof, and all the jazz about learning to lower away lifeboats, with drills and everything at any moment’s notice. All Greek to me. The bosun said I was the stupidest deckhand of all time.

  ‘Especially,’ says he, ‘at nine o’clock in the evening an hour before we sail, he’s complaining it’s too hot in New York Harbor, he goes up on
the poop deck and dives off, how many feet is that? Right into the harbor waters in the dark? How does he know there aint a big plank or something floating there preferably with nails in it to make more holes in his head? Then he comes climbing up the Jacob’s ladder all drippin wet and expects the guard watch to think he’s an ordinary Joe who jumped off for a coolin swim . . . how did they know you werent a German spy you dughead?’

  ‘It was hot.’

  ‘I’ll show you some hot. And on top of that,’ he later complains, guy never says anything to anybody and just lays in his bunk reading, mind ya, READING . . . But kid you coulda hit somethin in that water in the dark and that’s a very high deck up there.’

  ‘We did it in Nova Scotia off the Dorchester in the afternoons.’

  ‘Sure, when you could see the water was clear below . . .’

  On top of that, the ship is carrying 500-pound bombs in all its holds and is flying the dynamite flag, red, going to Liverpool.

  VI

  Flying the red dynamite flag is a warning to everybody including tugboats not to bump us too hard. If we get hit by a torpedo we all go up in a gigantic mass of shrapnel, men, pots, pans, bosuns, books, bunks, the works. Today I cant imagine how the hell I slept so well.

  But here it is, seven hours after I’d cursed and sweated in the human subway in the June heat of Manhattan, ah, boy, cold winds, Atlantic again, night, stars, I turn around and look back at the bridge: little blue dim light indicates where the able-bodied seaman’s got the wheel with eye on compass, where the first mate or captain stands thinking, or looking thru binoculars into the dark, off our both sides you see other ships puffing up smoke, it’s a big A-Number-One convoy.

  Boys in the gallery stalk about and talk about a legendary German battleship that, if it finds us, can stand out there a million yards and just hammer us with longdistance shells and we cant even touch them with our protective cruisers’ guns (you see the cruisers out there pitching and biting right into the wave). Morning and new seas.

  Four-to-eight watch is best watch on any ship. Day’s deck work ends at four thirty. Usually at seven thirty in the morning I’m on the bow watch, just standing at the front tip of the ship (bow) and looking at the water and the horizons for signs of mines or wakes of periscopes or anything suspicious. What a horizon! The sea is my brother . . . People who’ve never been to sea dont know that when you’re out over the real deeps the water is pure blue, not a speck of green, deep blue, on choppy days with white foam, the colors of the Virgin Mary. Maybe it’s not surprising the Portuguese and Mediterranean fishermen pray to Mary and by night call her the Star of the Sea, or Stella Maris. Could Roger Maris hit a homerun over the sea? Wasnt Jude a duck when he said the waves of the sea foam ‘out their own shame’? (Jude 13.) Not really, considering Nature and her borning and dying. What connection is there between human shame and all that splendid PHOOEY of an ever cackling old man like that brother my sea, even tho the worms eat away and the worry warts’ll win? Who put the plug in the bottom-room floor of THAT tub? What a round goiter of disjointed flecks, such a Slavic plain nevertheless with uprisings of white foam, some of them veritable Genghis Khans of curling trouble off the port bow . . . Who but a bow watchman standing there staring for hours at his job, at nothing but the sea, can tell you this, and better yet (as sometimes) as crow’s nest watch who can spot stuff on the water miles away? The wind sometimes making a choppy wave giving off a mountain of floss sprays and letting them dissolve back in the farmless huff of waters. Little uprisings, big uprisings, phooey, the sea is like a log fire ever fascinating to watch, ever intrinsically a bore, as I must be now, ever a lesson of some dumb universal kind, wisdom and all that, ‘the burning away’ and ‘the ever shifting’ horse manure of it all, the sea and all, it makes you wanta go down to the mess hall and drink three cups of coffee, or three policemen, one, and say goodbye to aimless universe which is after all the only brother we’ve got, placid or otherwise his face will frown or soothe. What can I do with those meandering lines of foam? Being a descendant of Cornish sea-mongers and Breton after that means nothing in the face of all that crop of salt and shite outcroppings all over like flowers, Lord, Wolfdog Sea.

  Off the coast of the Firth of Clyde the dotty pomerancy pack of it. Surprising, tho, the Irish Sea IS green.

  Thank God the sea isnt my mother and never pecks at me, nor my wife and never hens at me, the sea is my brother and can either eat me plain (without apologies or tricks) or leave me alone to sway and dip and sleep and dream, on the crow’s nest, like Pip, up on the masthead, boy. The dangling legs of Buddy Bill from the yardarm of the British Navvy . . .

  Phiddlephuck with the See, holy or otherwise, the SEA, what’s below it we’ll never see except with Coral Gable eyes, Israel Hands, Phineas Feet and fine tentricles in our vestibules, vestigitabbibles at least.

  What a crocka horsewater.

  VII

  Rooming in my foc’sle with me are two seventy-year-old seadogs from the old World War I days and even before, my God, one of them, a Swede, is even still sewing canvas with a big needle. They hate me because I lie in bed and just read and refuse to learn how to sew canvas in lieu of reading and also going out at midnight to use the purser’s typewriter in his little cubicle office where I’m trying to finish ‘The Sea Is My Brother’. By now I’ve changed the names and my feeling is different. In my bunk I read, of all things, the entire Galsworthy Forsyte Saga, which not only gives me a view of British life before I get there (we’re headed for Liverpool as I say) but gives me an idea about sagas, or legends, novels connecting into one grand tale.

  Every night at five or six I’m like that barefooted Indian on the Dorch now, I have to cover the entire ship, all the foc’sles and staterooms, and make sure the portholes are closed and secured. It’s wartime blackout regulations. So I not only have to go into the thirty-one-year-old captain’s room and check his porthole as he’s taking a five-minute captain’s nap (poor kid never slept, I promise you), but have to brave the foc’sle of the eight-to-ten deck watch which is three nutty kids with muscles and tattoos who spend all their time practicing knife throwing against the door. When you’re about to open the door (bulkhead) you hear ‘Slowm’, a knife’s just missed sticking in it, then you hear ‘Struck!’ and a knife has. Then you have to knock. Mostly rainy weather this run over, I had to wear sou’wester all the time, you know the outfit, the Gloucester fishermen wear with rubber big hat and shroudy rubber coat, in all pictures you’ve seen of storms at sea of the nineteenth century, so in this outfit I have to knock and they say ‘Come in, Spencer Tracy!’ I’m not sure they’re not going to throw another knife but it’s my duty to come in and check their portholes. They hold their knives up. I never even said a word to one of them. That whole trip I didnt say more than a dozen words on board.

  Then around six I was on bow watch, in the gathering sea dusk and groomus gray Atlantic spray, and that was, of course, best of all. And one night at about this time I saw an oil barrel floating on the waves at 33 degrees and picked up the telephone there in the bulkhead and called the bridge. They went carefully to the portside, a good ways from it, called our US Navy convoying ships, and later we heard the explosion of that mine. Right in the middle of the ocean, too.

  VIII

  But nothing, and not even this, could satisfy the chief mate who hated my guts I’ll never know why except perhaps I didnt talk to him enough, I dont know. He was a German with a big scar down his cheek and very mean. At the switch of watch duties when I was supposed to leave the bow and go down and make coffee, he was never satisfied with it, altho I made coffee better’n anybody on the ship except the chef and that’s why they kept having me make the coffee. I knew how to clean out the silver urn, the cloth bucket, even how to change it, etc., had learned all this on the Dorchester with Glory and the other cooks, but no, this chief mate had it in for me. One morning there was a fantastic squall with waves v
ery high, rain, thunder, even a rainbow, black cloud there, something else there, the ship pitching like mad but nevertheless the idiot first mate sends me up the iron ladder to the crow’s nest. To do this I had to hang on with my hands just as hard as I ever had to hang on years later on the iron rungs of the railroad just when a jolt ran along the cars (a slack). I’m hanging upside down, I’m hanging on leaning over on the mast, that’s the way the mast was waving side to side. But I made the crow’s nest, closed the little door, went ‘Oh aaah sigh’, but suddenly a rainbow rushed up inside of a black cloud and hit the ship head on, with it a gigantic smashing of rains, and the mast went over to starboard so far I thought my nest would touch the waves, at worst go right in with the ship foundered. But the big keel underneath creaked her around, oops, way way over now to the port, me up there getting this big carnival ride for free and I’m yelling ‘O my God!’

  Thereupon, the members of the deck crew, all NMU, held a meeting and denounced the first mate for sending an ordinary seaman up to the crow’s nest during a serious squall. It was decided he could never do this again. ‘He’s trying to kill you,’ the union delegate told me briefly.

  Sure enough, during another rough morning, the chief mate with his scar and his unwanted coffee spits at me in Germanic accent to go out and bail the outswung life boats. To do this I have to jump over 4 feet of water or less, that is, from the ship itself and into the life boat suspended over the rushing waters, rushing from the forward momentum of the ship and also crashing from the storm. Using my hands again, I made it, bucket in hand, wearing sou’wester (but yelling ‘Whooeee!’ as I’d done when I threw that empty gin bottle across the moony trees of Virginia with Annie), and I bailed and bailed. Nothing much to bail out, it was just another trick by the chief mate to get rid of me and overboard. Why, I’ll never know. ‘You oughta grab that guy on the dock when we get back to Brooklyn,’ said a guy to me. In those days I never entertained any such thoughts. My secret thought was: ‘I can do anything he wants and I wont fall off nothin.’ All I wanted to do was to get to my bunk and get on with my reading of the Saga.