Algernon, Charlie, and I: A Writer's Journey

  There was no longer a Meyer at Meyer's Goody Shoppe. The luncheonette and ice-cream parlor was owned by Mr. Goldstein and Mr. Sohn, both of whom nearly drove all us waiters crazy.

  Sweet and gentle Mr. Goldstein always spoke of his desire to help poor boys who were working their way through college. Near the entrance, on the wall behind the cash register, he'd hung photographs from former waiters who had, as he said, "made good." Some were in Army, Navy or Marine uniforms. Others were wearing graduation robes. Goldstein spoke of "his boys" with affection. When I had first applied for the job, and told him my parents wanted me to go to medical school, he patted my head, and said I was a good boy to listen to my parents.

  During the nights he was on duty, if business was slow, he was calm and would sit at the counter and discuss issues of the day with the idle short-order cooks. But when things got busy, he became transformed. Reflective Mr. Goldstein became a screamer, shouting orders at us over the customers' heads.

  Mr. Sohn was a different sort of character. "When business was good, he stuck to the cash register. We were free to handle our tables in quiet dignity. But during slow periods, before the crowds came in, or between the dinner rush and the after-movie rush, Mr. Sohn would slip into the dining room and, under the pretext of inspecting our stations, he would take possession of most sugar dispensers, ketchup bottles, and saltshakers and hide them on the shelves below the cash register.

  One of the veteran waiters explained that it was Sohn's reaction to one traumatic day when vandals had emptied all the saltshakers into the sugar dispensers. Sohn was also convinced that someone was stealing knives, forks, and spoons, and he intended to find the culprit. He made frequent sorties from behind the cash register to the dishwasher's station and removed much of the flatware. This led to a shortage of every kind of cutlery whenever Sohn was on duty.

  At first, it created intense rivalry among the waiters. None of us wanted to tell our customers there were no spoons for their ice cream and coffee, no forks for their chocolate cake. Irate customers would storm out without tipping and without paying, and it was no use trying to explain to Sohn that it was his fault.

  I learned from the veterans how to survive. During Sohn nights we prepared ourselves by slipping flatware into our pockets, under our belts, and beneath our shirts. We occasionally joined forces to divert Sohn's attention, and penetrated his fortress to liberate sugar, ketchup, and salt.

  Quiet Sohn and Screaming Goldstein kept us waiters on our toes—sometimes on each other's toes.

  In the two years I'd worked there, I accumulated enough tips for my first year's tuition at NYU. Then one evening my life turned a corner.

  The after-movie crowd started arriving at ten o'clock. The place filled up quickly, and soon there was a crowd waiting outside. When four couples arrived and broke through the line, Goldstein did something I'd never seen before. He greeted them, smiling and Owning, led them past the other protesting customers, and directed them to my station.

  As I went to get water and menus, Goldstein suddenly showed up with glasses of water on a tray. "How come there are no napkins on the tables?" he shouted at me. "Where's the silverware? Why don't they have menus?"

  "Mr. Goldstein, they just sat down."

  Explaining was useless, so I tried to ignore him as I took their orders. He bustled around, smiling at them. A few minutes later, when he passed me near the kitchen, he said, "What's taking you so long?"

  "I just put my orders in, Mr. Goldstein."

  "They're ready. On the counter."

  I turned to look, and sure enough, the normally lethargic countermen had gone into action and given my new customers' orders of sandwiches and waffles priority.

  "What's going on?" I asked one of the older waiters.

  "Give 'em good service," he whispered. "Those guys hang out at Midnight Rose's."

  I carried two cups of coffee with glass creamers balanced on the edges of the saucers in my left hand, and three sandwiches and waffles spread across my right arm.

  Goldstein again reappeared from between two aisles. "What's taking you so long?"

  "I'm delivering their orders."

  "These are special customers."

  "I've figured that out already. Mr. Goldstein, please give me a chance..."

  He blocked my path. "Watch those creamers!"

  I looked, and saw that my trembling hands were making the glass creamers alongside the coffee cups jiggle on the edges of the saucers. He walked backward, facing me, shouting at me. The more he shouted, the more they jiggled. I had learned that a glass creamer, if dropped, would break on the third bounce. If you could kick it to one side before that, you could prevent it from shattering.

  Jiggle. Jiggle. One dropped, and bounced twice. I tried to kick it aside before the third hit, but failed. It shattered. I attempted to block-kick the second creamer: Bounce ... bounce... break! By now I was off balance and the sandwich plates nestled along my right arm wobbled. I tried to grab them but it was too late. Everything else I was carrying crashed to the floor.

  "Mazel tov!" someone shouted, amid laughter. Then a couple of others took up the cry, laughing and applauding as if I were a bridegroom stomping the wineglass at a wedding. Someone called out, "The kid ain't stupid! That's better than washing them!"

  Goldstein's face turned red and menacing. "What's the matter with you?" He addressed the mocking customers. "A college boy, and he can't even wait on tables." And then to me, "Clean it up, moron!"

  His expression of disgust said it all. He'd given me a chance to work because I needed money for college, and I had betrayed him by breaking his dishes in front of his special customers. He walked away and didn't speak to me for the rest of the evening. But my Murder, Inc. customers left me big tips.

  At closing time, I finished cleaning up, refilling sugar bowls and ketchup bottles and mopping the floors around my tables. Then I went up to him and said, "Good-bye, Mr. Goldstein. I'll send you a photograph for your mailing wall as a token of my appreciation."

  His brow furrowed. "What do you mean?"

  "You've helped me make a decision. I can't put up with this crap anymore. I'm enlisting in the Merchant Marine."

  "What about college?"

  "That'll have to wait until after the war is over."

  He looked at me long and hard. His voice was cold as he said, "Good luck." And as I headed for the door, he shouted so that everyone would hear, "Hey, moron!"

  I didn't turn.

  "Hey, smart college boy!"

  I looked back at him.

  "Try not to break everything on the ship!"

  That's how, years later, I could imagine what Charlie Gordon felt during the scene in a restaurant when he sees a mentally handicapped busboy drop and break a tray of dishes, and the owner shouts: "All right, you dope, don't just stand there! Get a broom and sweep that mess up. A broom ... a broom, you idiot!"

  Suddenly, I was furious at myself and all those who were smirking at him. I wanted to pick up the dishes and throw them. I wanted to smash their laughing faces. I jumped up and shouted: "Shut up! Leave him alone! He can't understand. He can't help what he is ... but for God's sake, have some respect! He's a human being!"

  I was able to see it through Charlie's eyes and feel his emotions. I was able to write it, because it happened to me.

  5. I Become Ship's Doctor

  I KNEW THAT JOINING the U.S. Maritime Service would be a turning point. I would be away from my parents, living my own life, pursuing my own dreams. But because I was three months short of my eighteenth birthday, to enlist I needed one of my parents' signatures.

  My mother insisted that I was too young, too thin, too short, and too nearsighted.

  "They don't care," I said. "I can pass the physical."

  My father asked, "What about college?"

  "A lot of other guys are in the same boat, Dad. They enacted a new law last year—the G.I. Bill—to pay college tuition for servicemen. After my discharge, I'll be able to conti
nue my education free of charge."

  I didn't know at the time that Maritime Service duty would not make me eligible for G.I. benefits.

  "You'll still become a doctor?" she asked. "Doctors save lives."

  "Of course, I'll become a doctor."

  My father frowned. "What about that writer stuff?"

  I told them about Somerset Maugham and Chekhov and Conan Doyle having been physicians who later became famous authors, and that I wasn't foolish enough to believe I'd be able to support myself by writing. I didn't mention that as doctors, my three heroes had failed.

  "Practicing medicine will be my profession," I said. "Writing will be my hobby."

  "You're only seventeen," my mother sobbed. "You're still my baby."

  I thought, but didn't tell them that, at seventeen, Jack London had shipped out for a year on a seal hunting schooner and later used his adventures to write The Sea Wolf. I believed that, like London, writing of my own seafaring experiences would launch my career as an author, but what I said was, "I promise I'll be a doctor."

  My father signed the enlistment papers, and set me free.

  After six weeks of basic training at Sheepshead Bay, I was transferred to Radio Officers' Training School on Hoffman Island, in New York Harbor. I liked the thought of sending messages in Morse code and being called Sparks. Perhaps that would be my pen name.

  My only memory of Hoffman Island is meeting Morton Klass, who was to become my lifelong friend. Our last names began with K, and so we marched, ate, and sat in classes side by side. Since Mort's bunk was across from mine, we argued politics, philosophy, and literature, often long after lights-out, until some of the men threw their boots across the barracks to shut us up.

  After Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945, the U.S. Maritime Service discovered they had a surplus of radio operators and closed the Hoffman Island Radio Officers' School. Mort sailed as an engine room wiper, and I was shipped out a week later to Le Havre, as Army utility aboard a luxury liner that had been converted into a troopship.

  My ship traveled back and forth to France carrying fresh troops to the replacement depot—the men called it repo depo— and bringing back G.I.'s who had completed their European tours of duty. They slept in bunks stacked five high in the hold that reeked of sweat, booze, and vomit. The poker games went on twenty-four hours a day.

  Shore leave in Le Havre was short, and all I remember is the mud and destruction and poverty—images I stored away.

  After my second voyage on the troopship, I learned that, although the War Shipping Administration had a surplus of radio officers, there was a shortage of pursers. They put out a call for seamen with clerical experience.

  As it turned out, one of the most useful courses I had taken in junior high school was touch-typing. Long before it helped me as a writer, I had been able to get clerical jobs during summer breaks. With recommendations from former employers, and a successful series of tests, I was granted a purser's license from the War Shipping Administration.

  Now, with a U.S. Maritime Service rank of ensign, I no longer wore bell-bottoms. A staff officers uniform with crossed quills above one gold stripe on each sleeve designated my rating. Instead of being called Sparks, I would be called purser.

  Planning to write of my experiences, I changed the name of the ship and the shipping company in the records I kept, and I avoided using the real names of officers and crew. Except for those changes, what follows really happened.

  My first duties as ship's purser took place at the New York office of International Tankers, Inc., where I drew up the ship's manifest and crew lists for the'S.S. Polestar and supervised the men's signing of ship's articles in the presence of the shipping commissioner.

  The Navy told us only that it was to be a short coastwise voyage. When I questioned one company official, he pointed to a sign on the office wall showing a flaming ship disappearing into the ocean. Beneath it were the words: A SLIP OF THE LIP CAN SINK A SHIP.

  The men and I were told only that the Polestar would depart some time within the next two days from Bayonne, New Jersey, and that I would meet the captain—now on leave to visit his family in Philadelphia—just before sailing. As a matter of security, I learned, we would not be informed of the port of call or the duration of the voyage until after the tugs had escorted us out of New York Harbor and the harbor pilot had left the ship. Only after we were out to sea would the captain open his sailing orders and inform us of our destination.

  It was a freezing January morning in 1946 when I finally got to the Bayonne docks. The taxi pulled up as close to the pier as possible, and I made my way along the ice-caked earth, stepping over networks of pipes, and ducking under suspended hoses that creaked and swayed in their slings. Finally, I made out the name of my T-2 tanker at the end of the dock—S.S. Polestar.

  Empty of cargo, the ship rode high, looming over the dock, and the gangway tilted up at a forty-five-degree angle. Slipping one of my bags under my arm, I grabbed the railing and climbed up to the well deck. It was littered with papers and empty beer cans. The smell of oil was overpowering, and I had to stop at the windward side for swallows of air before climbing the ladder to the main deck. I could hear the ship creaking as she rose and fell with the wash. Other than that no sounds. It felt like a ghost ship.

  I found my way to the purser's cabin, unpacked and stowed my books: Homer, Plato, and Shakespeare, as well as War and Peace and Moby Dick in the rack above the desk. Hearing a rustling, I turned to see a baby-faced officer leaning against the open door, watching me. He had four gold stripes on his sleeves.

  "Welcome aboard, Purser. I see you're a reader."

  "Yes, Captain."

  "We have a pretty good ship's library. You'll be in charge of lending out books. Mostly donations, of course, but if there are any special books you want let me know. We have a petty cash fund."

  "Glad to hear that."

  "But I think you should check out the dispensary and ship's hospital in case you need to order any additional medication or supplies. The last purser was pretty lackadaisical, and he was always running out of stuff."

  "Ship's hospital? I don't understand. What's that got to do with me?"

  He glanced at my jacket hanging over the back of the chair and frowned, pointing to my sleeve embroidered with gold braid crossed quills. "Where's the caduceus?"

  Then I realized he was referring to the winged staff entwined with a snake which, along with crossed quills, would have denoted the usual dual rating of purser/pharmacist mate.

  "I'm a purser, Captain, but not a pharmacist mate."

  His face reddened. "I told the shipping commissioner I needed a replacement purser who was also a medic!"

  "They told me there's a shortage of pursers, especially purser/ pharmacist mates. That's why they hired me."

  "This won't do, Keyes. I've got forty men aboard ship whose medical needs must be attended to."

  Without thinking of the consequences, I blurted out, "I've got First Aid Expert merit badges in both the Boy Scouts and Sea Scouts. I served as ship's doctor on a few of our sailing trips. I was premed at college, and I'm planning to become a surgeon."

  He studied me for a long time. "Okay, Keyes. You'll have to do. As soon as we're at sea—beyond coastal limits—I'll use my authority to designate you our pharmacist mate. In addition to your regular purser's duties, you'll run the dispensary and hospital, handle sick call, and do short-arm inspections after every shore leave."

  "But, Captain—"

  "No buts about it! You're ship's doctor." On his way out, he asked, "Play chess?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "How good?"

  "Average."

  "Fine. We'll have a game tonight after dinner."

  When he was gone, I slumped on my settee. Me and my big mouth. Wrapping and taping down bandages and dispensing aspirin on a Sea Scout weekend voyage up the East River was a far cry from being a physician to forty men at sea.

  I beat the captain at chess that evening,
but when I saw the annoyance in his blue eyes, I decided not to let that happen too often.

  Next morning, the throbbing engines woke me, and I rushed out on deck to watch us weigh anchor and leave port. But I was too late. I climbed one of the ladders to an empty guntub, where antiaircraft cannon had once been mounted, and from that position I could scan the horizon all around me. Unlike sailing along the East River on the Dutchman III, now there was no land in sight anywhere.

  Suddenly, I had cast off all earthbound duties, plans, responsibilities. Worries and conflicts sloughed off like dead skin, giving way to deep relaxation. Without land in sight, there was no reality—no life, no death—nothing of importance but the here and now of the sea.

  For the first time in my life, surrounded by sty and water I experienced "the oceanic feeling," and I understood why men, like an old seaman I'd visited in Sailors' Snug Harbor, followed the sea.

  At sixteen, shortly after I had joined the Sea Scouts, I'd made a pilgrimage to the old sailors' home in Staten Island that provided a haven for retired seamen. There I visited one weather-beaten old salt. We sat in the visiting room silently for a while smoking our pipes, I in my pressed Sea Scout uniform and crisp peacoat, he with his black watch cap and threadbare peacoat pulled tight against the drafts.

  Then, gripping my wrist, and fixing me with his rheumy-eyed stare, he reminisced about his seafaring days. Images from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" flooded my mind: He holds him with his skinny hand ... He holds him with his glittering eye—

  Like the Ancient Mariner, my old sailor held me captive as he described how his ship had been blown off course, and was then becalmed among the gulfweed drifting in currents into the great whirl in the North Atlantic to which all the sargasso weed in the world flowed. It was known as the Sargasso Sea.