I was sitting in Johnnie’s apartment one day when the door opened and in walks this spindly Jewish kid with horn-rimmed glasses and tremendous ears sticking out, seventeen years old, burning black eyes, a strangely deep mature voice, looks at me, says ‘Discretion is the better part of valor.’
‘Aw where’s my food!’ I yelled at Johnnie, because that’s precisely all I had on my mind at the moment he walked in. Turns out it took years for Irwin to get over a certain fear of the ‘brooding football artist yelling for his supper in big daddy chair’ or some such. I didnt like him anyway. One look at him, a few days of knowing him to avouch my private claim, and I came to the conclusion he was a lecher who wanted everybody in the world to take a bath in the same huge bathtub which would give him a chance to feel legs under the dirty water. This is precisely the image I had of him on first meeting. Johnnie also felt he was repugnant in this sense. Claude liked him, always has, and was amused, entertained, they wrote poems together, manifestoes of the ‘New Vision’, rushed around with books, had bull sessions in Claude’s Dalton Hall room where he hardly ever slept, took Johnnie and Cecily out to ballets and stuff downtown when I was out in Long Island visiting my folks. They tell me that Claude started a commotion in the ballet balcony, the ushers were coming with flashing lights, he led ‘the gang’ out thru some strange door and they found themselves in the labyrinths underneath the Metropolitan Opera House running into dressing rooms some of them occupied, out again, around, back and forth and triumphantly emerged somewhere on Seventh Avenue and got away. That on the way home, in the crowded subway all four of them laughing and gay, Claude suddenly yelled out over everybody’s heads: ‘WHEN THEY PUT CATTLE IN CARS THEY COPULATE!’ All such Joe College stuff. Not bad style. In that same light Claude sorta looked at me as some kind of lout which was true.
Franz Mueller was jealous of Irwin, of me, of anybody Claude had anything to do with, especially of the blonde college girl Cecily (‘a bourgeois kitten’ Claude called her) and one lilac dusk when we were all exhausted and asleep in the mad pad on the sixth floor, Will Hubbard and Franz came in quietly, saw Claude on the couch in Cecily’s arms, and Mueller said: ‘Doesnt he look pale, as tho he were being sucked dry by a vampire?’
One night the same two came in, but found an empty apartment, so to amuse himself that no-good pederast Mueller took my little cat, wrapped Hubbard’s tie around its neck, and tried to hang it from the lamp: a little kitty. Will Hubbard immediately took it down, undamaged and just slightly hurt I guess in the neck, I dont know, I wasnt there, I would have thrown that man out the window. It was only told to me much later on.
II
Then sometimes Mueller would catch me alone and talk to me long and earnestly over beers but always the same intention: to find out what Claude did or said behind his back, that is, behind his knowing, and who he saw, what, where, all the anguished questioning of a lover. He even patted me on the back. And he gave me detailed instructions to say this, that, to arrange meetings one way or the other. Claude was avoiding him more than ever.
Their past was unbelievable. It was exactly like Rimbaud and Verlaine. In Tulane U Claude became depressed, blocked up all his apartment windows, put a pillow in the oven, his head on the pillow, and turned on the gas. But the amazing thing is that Mueller happened at that moment to be riding by on horseback, of all things, with a socialite girl, of all things (he was always after making women so he could get closer to Claude, this was one of Claude’s casual dolls). Mueller quite accidentally got off the horse, smelled the gas at the door, broke it down and dragged the kid out in the hall.
On another occasion, after that and before Bowling Green or Andover or someplace, they actually got Coast Guard passes and seaman’s papers and shipped out of Baltimore or someplace but were thrown off the ship in New York on some beef I never got clear. Wherever Claude went, Mueller followed. Claude’s mother even tried to have the man arrested. At the time, Hubbard, Franz’ closest friend, remonstrated again and again with him to go off someplace and find another boy more amenable, go to sea, go to South America, live in the jungle, go marry Cindy Lou in Virginia (Mueller came from aristocrats somewhere). No. It was the romantic and fatal attachment: I could understand it myself because for the first time in my life I found myself stopping in the street and thinking: ‘Wonder where Claude is now? What’s he doing right now?’ and going off to find him. I mean, like that feeling you get during a love affair. It was a very nostalgic Season in Hell. There was the nostalgia of Johnnie and me in love, Claude and Cecily in love, Franz in love with Claude, Hubbard hovering like a shadow, Garden in love with Claude and Hubbard and me and Cecily and Johnnie and Franz, the war, the second front (which occurred just before this time), the poetry, the soft city evenings, the cries of Rimbaud!, ‘New Vision!’, the great Götterdämmerung, the love song ‘You Always Hurt the One You Love’, the smell of beers and smoke in the West End Bar, the evenings we spent on the grass by the Hudson River on Riverside Drive at 116th Street watching the rose west, watching the freighters slide by. Claude saying to me (whispering): ‘Gotta get away from Mueller. Let’s you and me ship out. Dont tell a soul about this. Let’s try to get a ship to France. That one there’s probably going to France. We’ll land at the second front. We’ll walk to Paris: I’ll be a deaf mute and you speak country French and we’ll pretend we’re peasants. When we get to Paris it will probably be on the verge of being liberated. We’ll find symbols saturated in the gutters of Montmartre. We’ll write poetry, paint, drink red wine, wear berets. I feel like I’m in a pond that’s drying out and I’m about to suffocate. I s’pose you understand. If you dont, let’s just do it anyway. Franz he’s desperate enough to kill me anyway.’
III
So during the days we now started to hang around the NMU Hall waiting for our turn to come up for a ship. Evenings, we rejoined Hubbard at his apartment around the corner down Seventh Avenue to Greenwich Village because he was working, had his monthly trust fund check and always bought us fine dinners, in Romley Marie’s, in Sam Remo’s, in Minetta’s, and inevitably Franz would always find us and join in. Claude was a great one for what André Gide called the acte gratuite (‘the gratuitous act’) the doing of an act just for the hell of it. Seeing his veal Parmesan didnt taste too hot in one of the restaurants he simply picked up the plate, said ‘This is crap,’ and threw it back over his shoulder with just a flick of the wrist, no expression, suavely picking up his glass of wine to sip, and nobody saw him do it except us. The waiter even rushed up apologetically to pick up the pieces. Or in a diner at dawn he’d hold up dripping egg white from his fork and say to waitress dryly ‘You call this minute-and-a-half-eggs?’ Or, when we had a big steak in Will’s room, he’d pick it up before Will could start to cut it into four sections and start ronching on it with greasy fingers and seeing that we were all just amused, would start growling like a tiger, and then Franz would jump into the act and try to wrestle the steak from his fingers and they’d rip it apart with their claws. ‘Hey,’ I’d yell, ‘my steak!’
‘Ah The Louse, all you think about is food, you beefy clout!’
One time he leaped up on Jane Street to grab at overhanging branches, in the evening, and Franz sighed to Will: ‘Isnt he wonderful?’ Or another time vaulted over a fence and Franz tried it too, missed, ‘You could hear,’ as Hubbard says, ‘his joints creak.’ (In the effort to keep up with a young man like that, nineteen.)
It was really sad. I didnt know about the cat then, anyway, luckily.
Another evening, Claude saw a hole in the sleeve of Will’s seersucker suit, stuck his finger in it, and ripped half the coat off. His bones creaking, Franz jumped in and grabbed the other sleeve and yanked it off, wrapped it around Hubbard’s head, ripped up the back of the coat over his head, then they stood round making strips of it, tied them together, and made a festoon over chandeliers and bookcases all over the room. It was done in perfect good humor, Hubbard just sa
t there with his lips compressed, going ‘thfunk’ down his nose, like a bunch of Luftwaffe blades on a night off they all had all the right in the world to do anything they felt like. And of course to a ‘Lowell boy’ like me, destroying a coat was strange but to them . . . they all came from well-to-do families.
IV
Mueller finally got wind of what we were doing, would trail us down 14th Street and around the corner to the union hall, hiding in doorways, finally we found him in the union hall with a pleading look saying: ‘Look, I knew what you were up to, so I did something about it: I arranged a lunch for the three of us with the girl upstairs who’s in charge of shipping calls and such. I talked to her yesterday before you got here and this afternoon, look at this, I swiped a dozen sailing cards off her desk and here they are, Claude, put em in your pocket. Now listen: I can do this and a whole lot of other things, with my help we can all ship out the three of us in no time at all, there wont be any of this waiting around . . .’
Naturally, when Franz is out of earshot, Claude says to me: ‘But the whole point of shipping out is to get away from him. Now what do I do?’
That night we all wind up, with the girls, and Will too, at Minetta Lane, where old Joe Gould, leaning his bearded chin on his cane, looks at Cecily and says: ‘I’m a Lesbian, I love women.’ So we all go to a harmless little party on MacDougal Street eluding Franz somehow as he’s going around the corner to find something, we’re sitting there in that typical New York style latenight party jabber and we hear the marquee of the bar downstairs groaning and cracking, and then we see that someone is climbing it, coming into the window, boom, it’s Franz Mueller.
In fact, as things got worse and Franz grew more desperate, one night (according to what he told Will) he climbed the fire escape in back of Dalton Hall and went up to Claude’s third-floor window, the window was wide-open, he went in and found Claude asleep in the dark of the moon in the window. He stood there, he said, for about a half hour, just looking down at him silently, reverently, hardly breathing. Then he went out. As he was jumping the fence he was caught by the apartment hotel guard and hauled into the front foyer at gunpoint and harangued by the night clerk, the cops were called, he had to wave papers and explain, they had to call Claude and wake him up and come down and confirm that he had been drinking with Mueller in his room all night. ‘My Gawd,’ said Hubbard laughing with compressed lips, ‘s’posing you’d-a found the wrong room and hovered over a perfect stranger.’
V
In a burst of angry inspiration I went straight to the bigshot desk in the union and said I was waiting an awful long time for a ship, ‘So what? Let’s see your old discharges.’ Suddenly he whooped when he saw the old Dorchester discharge: ‘The Dorchester? You were on the Dorchester? Fer krissakes why dint you tell me, any ex-crewman of that Dorchester gets special treatment around here, I can tell you that, brother! Here! Here’s your cards. Go down and give them to Blacky, you’ll get a ship in a day or two. Glad times, brother.’ I was amazed. Claude and I had opportunity to rejoice. We decided to go out to Long Island and see my folks.
In the bar across the street my father, in white August shirtsleeves of beery night, looked at Claude crossways and said ‘All right then, I’m going to buy a rich man’s son a drink.’ A shadow crossed Claude’s face. He told me later he never liked that. ‘If that isnt typical of the Duluozes I’ll never know what is. Why did he have to bring that up just then? You clods of romantic gas land.’
‘I dont like that Claude,’ says me Pa to me privately that night, ‘he looks like a mischievous young punk. He’s going to get you in trouble. So will that little Johnnie Podlie of yours, and that Hubbard I keep hearing about. What are you doing hanging around with such a lowdown bunch as that? Cant you find good young friends anymore?’ Imagine telling me that in the midst of my ‘Symbolist Poet’ period, with Claude and me yelling at the dark bridge waters: ‘Plonger au fond du gouffre, ciel ou enfer, qu’importe? [to plunge to the bottom of the abyss, Heaven or Hell, what matter?]’ and all those other Rimbaud sayings, and Nietzschean, and here we are guaranteed to sail in no time at all and we’re going to be Symbolist Isidore Ducasses and Apollinaires and Baudelaires and ‘Lautréamonts’ altogether in very Paris itself.
Years later I met an infantryman who was in the second front at exactly this time, who said ‘When I heard you and that de Maubris guy were going to jump ship in France and walk to Paris to become poets, behind the lines, pretending to be peasants, I wanted to find you and bump your heads together.’ But he forgets that we really intended to do it and almost did, and this was done before the St-Lô breakthrough, too.
VI
The call did come in one afternoon. I’d written a paper for Claude (who was more intelligent but lazier than I was), he’d handed it in, in hopes of getting some kind of appeasing from the professors of Columbia, and off we went to the union hall and grabbed our call. The call was ‘a Liberty bound for the second front’. We rushed off to Hoboken via the subway, a cross-town walk to North River, and the ferry. But when we got to the pier they told us she had shifted to a pier on Brooklyn at the foot of Joralemon Street (again!). So we had to wangle our way all the way back, across the river on the ferry, in heavy smoke now as there was a waterfront fire on the Jersey side (a smoke I felt was surprisingly thick, inauspicious, commenting on something that was going to go wrong), then down to Brooklyn and down to the ship. There she was.
But as we were crossing the long pier with our passes and papers all clear, and our gear on our back, singing ‘Hi hee ho Davey Jones’ and ‘Whattaya Do with a Drunken Sailor Ear-Lie in the Mawning?’ and all the seaman songs, a bunch of guys from our ship came marching up the other direction and said ‘You guys going on the SS Robert Hayes? Well, dont sign on. I’m the bosun. I’m also the delegate on the ship. There’s something wrong with the chief mate, he’s a Fascist, we’re going to see about having him replaced. Go on board, occupy your foc’sle, stow your gear, eat, but DONT sign on.’
I should have known better because when we came up the gangplank we were met in the alleyway by the port official who said: ‘Allright, stash your gear, boys, and go into the captain’s office to sign on for this voyage.’ That sounded more like it. But Claude and I wondered what to do really. We wondered if we’d be thrown off the ship by the union if we did sign. We hung around the foc’sle discussing it. We put away our clothes and went down to the stores below, found a huge can of ice-cold milk (dairy can five gallons) and drank most of it, chawing on cold roast beef meanwhile. We walked around the ship trying to figure out the complicated lines and ropes and winches. ‘We’ll learn!’
On the poop deck we looked toward the towers of Manhattan, right across the river, and Claude said, ‘Well, by God, at last I’ll be free of F.M.’
But just then a great big redheaded mate who looked exactly like Franz Mueller without a beard came storming at us and said ‘Are you the two boys who just walked on board?’
‘Yen.’
‘Well werent you told to go sign up in the captain’s mess?’
‘Yen . . . but the bosun told us to wait.’
‘Oh did he now?’
‘Yeh, he said there was some kind of beef . . .’
‘Lissen wise guy, beef is right. I saw you two bums go down in the stores and eat beef and drink milk, that’s your beef. Leave some money on this ship to pay for that beef, pick up your gear, and get off. You’re fired along with the bosun and all the rest of you no-good bastards. We’re going to get a crew on this ship if it’s the last thing I do you cocksucking no-good little pearly-assed punks.’
‘But we didnt know.’
‘Never mind the we didnt know, you knew well enough you sign on a ship or you dont, now get in that foc’sle, get that gear, and beat it and beat it good!’ He was such a big guy I was afraid to get into explanations, he just didnt want explanations, also he scared me, as for Claude he wa
s as pale as a sheet.
Here we went, five minutes later, straggling back down the long cool pier with our gear on our backs, headed for the hot sun of the hot murderous streets of New York at four o’clock in the afternoon.
So sunny hot, in fact, we had to stop for Cokes with our last few dimes at a little store. Claude looked at me. I looked down. I should have known better. On the other hand, what was that silly bosun up to? Trying to get his own friends on the ship? And it was bound for the second front, too . . . war bonus pay and no more danger from German artillery, either. I’ll never know.
VII
I’m neglecting Johnnie of course, who in those days looked about what Mamie Van Doren looks like today, same build, height, with the same almost buck-toothed grin, that eagering grin and laugh and eagerness entire that makes the eyes slit but at the same time makes the cheeks fuller and endows the lady with the promise that she will look good all her life: no lines of drawnness.
As Claude and I return from that long foolish day, throw our gear on the floor, the apartment is all darkened, sun going down, Union Theological Seminary bell tolling, nobody in there but Cecily sleeping on the sofa in a litter of books, bottles, empties, butts, manuscripts. Without turning on the light Claude immediately lies down beside her on the couch and holds her tight. I go into Johnnie’s (and my) bedroom and lie down and take a nap. Grinning Johnnie comes in about an hour later with some food she bought after borrowing a few bucks from a funeral director she knows and we have a gay supper in our bare feet. ‘Ha ha ha,’ chides Johnnie, ‘so you two bastards aint goin to France after all! I shouldna wasted my good film on those pictures I took of you yesterday afternoon thinkin I’d never see either one of you again.’