Algren at Sea

  “I’ve sailed with Manning before,” Concannon filled me in, “I’m ready to drop the subject when you are.”

  The subject dropped of its own dead weight.

  Both Manning and Concannon are heavy boys, and each has naval service in World War II. There the resemblance ceases. No two men could be more American and no two men could be more different.

  Concannon is “Sparks” or “Sparky” to the crew. Manning is “Acting Corporal.” Manning conducts himself toward the men confident that he is both loved and feared by them. Yet their respect for him is perfunctory: as ship’s storekeeper he can inconvenience them.

  “You can run your poker game,” Manning has told Able Seaman Gary (“Crooked-Neck”) Smith, “so long as you run it just for the crew.”

  Smith had played it safe. “Yes, sir,” he’d assured Manning. Then he’d gone to Sparks.

  “You and Danielsen can’t play any more,” he’d reported to Concannon.

  Concannon had gone directly to Manning.

  “Let’s go see the old man about this,” he’d offered.

  Manning, of course, had had to decline. The purser has neither responsibility for the crew nor authority over them; and that had put an end to the matter.

  Sparks, on the other hand, with the most responsible job aboard, appears to have no concern other than, “Where’s the deck? Who’s got the gin?” He conceals a high competence by flaunting his flaws. While Manning pretends he’s a seaborne executive, Concannon makes himself out as the ship’s outstanding sadsack. Neither man, when they pass each other on deck, raps to the other.

  “I tried to touch Manning for ten bucks,” Muncie, a crew pantryman, complains with a speech impediment, “’n he asks me. Why don’t I take advance. On my next draw. ‘Had I a draw comin’ I wouldn’t. Be trying to borrow off you. Personally. Would I?’ I asked him. ’N walk away.”

  “You should have gone to Sparky,” Chief Crew-Pantryman Bridelove advises Muncie, “has Sparky got it, you can have it.”

  “Manning made forty thousand dollars one year,” I filled both men in.

  “How do you know?” Bridelove asked.

  “He told me so.”

  “And he didn’t spend. A dime of it. On me,” Muncie mourned.

  Concannon was brought up, after a manner of speaking, by relatives more or less distant, around Kingfisher, Oklahoma, in the dust-storm years; never had a home until somebody slipped a pair of headphones over his ears in 1941. Since then, while the hair has thinned, his home has been a radio shack.

  And all the brothels, small and great, of the great East China Sea.

  From Bugis Street in Singapore to Cebu of the blue-mist Philippines, Sparks has left enough empty gin-fifths behind him to capsize the Malaysia Mail.

  Forever friendly, cheerful by the hour, dry, jocular, ready for anything, Concannon yet disclaims friendship. “The word ‘friend’ isn’t in my book,” he assured me, “the only things a seaman can depend upon are money and whiskey, because money and whiskey gets you the women—and what else is there besides women?”

  “You don’t want women because you’re a seaman,” I suggested, “you’re a seaman because you want women.”

  “All I want,” he skipped the suggestion, “is all the fun I can handle, and then go out at sea. I don’t want to be buried on land. The last stitch through the nose and over the rail, that’s the burial for me.”

  “You’re putting me on,” I told Concannon.

  “Why? What have I got to lose? Pussy brought me here and pussy’s going to take me away.”

  “I don’t know what brought you here and I’m sure you’re right about what will take you away. Only that wasn’t what I meant. I meant the last stitch being through the nose.”

  Concannon gave me a look so cold I was startled. I’d never seen a man turn unfriendly so fast.

  “Ask someone else,” he instructed me, and clamped on his headphones.

  I was dismissed.

  JUNE 27TH

  LIONS, LIONESSES, DEADBONE CRUNCHERS

  In December of 1955, I bought a bag of unshelled peanuts in Miami and went into a strip-tease house, but I never saw the strip-tease. It was one of those places that show a film between stage shows, and the picture had just started when I came in. It was The African Lion, a Disney production.

  It was the kind of house that always needs airing because it never closes long enough to open the doors. So many homeless men had slept here all night, to wake when the girls danced on, then had returned to sleep: to wake, to sleep, till sleep and waking were one. Now the stale death of their mingled breath hung waiting forever for girls to come dancing.

  A bear-sized creature was hibernating in the seat in front of mine, with some kind of sun-helmet dangling off the back of his head. When his head lolled, the helmet rolled around the seat’s curving back. It must be strapped to The Bear’s neck, I decided, and dropped a handful of peanut shells into it.

  On the screen, two lionesses were stalking some horned grass-chompers.

  “What’s them, honey?” a girl behind me asked her escort.

  “Them is elks, Baby,” I heard him tell her, in a voice so authoritative there was no use contradicting it.

  One lioness cut off the escape-route: now the girls had the herd entrapped. As the other charged, The Bear sat up and hollered “Look out!”—but too late. Just as in Miami, the prey never escapes. The Bear jammed his helmet down over his ears and began to eat a banana. What country did he think he was in? I wondered. I tapped him on the shoulder. He swiveled about.

  “What country you think you’re in?” I asked.

  “What country you think you’re in?” he challenged me brilliantly.

  “Take off the lid, Dummy,” the Elk Authority came to my support.

  The Bear took the lid off and went back to sleep without finishing the banana. Some Bear.

  Now on the screen a new prey appeared: a rhinoceros. Yet it wasn’t a lioness that had gotten him. It was quicksand.

  How Disney had induced that brute to lie down just there, when it had all the rest of Africa to rub its back in, is a trade secret I’m not free to disclose. In no time at all every hyena in Tanganyika was milling around, pleased as possible to be working as an extra again.

  The hyena has two distinctions: he doesn’t want to be first to try anything and he smells worse than everything. “You can’t be too careful” is the essence of Hyena-Think. He feels his smell is a fringe benefit.

  A buzzard is better. Every buzzard projects an image of himself as Top-Buzzard. He doesn’t wait for the next buzzard to make the action. Where the hyena will settle for standing room only, the buzzard entitles himself to front-row center. When they came down, the hyenas didn’t stop to ask to see their stubs. They hightailed for the back rows and began milling around.

  “How come you birds always get seats front-row center?” they wanted to know from a safe distance, “when we’re better looking?”

  “We smell so nice we deserve front-row seats,” the buzzards explained.

  Which goes to show you that no matter how bad you may smell, someone always smells worse.

  All of a sudden the rhino went all out to raise himself out of that bog. It looked, for a moment, as though he might make it; until his very power worked against him and he began sinking slowly onto his side. The Bear came to and saw what was happening. “Dig a hole!” he hollered—whether to the rhino, the buzzards or the hyenas I still don’t know.

  The-Biggest-Buzzard-Of-All hung one moment on the wing spreading air, watching his shadow enshroud the rhino—then plummeted with talons outspread and somebody popped me in the left ear with a piece of popcorn.

  It didn’t hurt.

  The Bear jammed his helmet down over his ears.

  “Take off the lid, Dummy.”

  I didn’t want to go through all that again. I got up and walked out.

  The first thing I noticed, back on the street, was that the lionesses had begun wearing the mane
s. I had a chocolate phosphate under a rye bread tree and took the next ship to Havana.

  Cuba was the first single-crop country I’d seen. I walked around Havana two days eating bananas before I realized bananas weren’t the country’s single crop.

  Girls! That was Cuba’s single crop. Girls waiting in taxis, girls waiting on corners, girls waiting in hotel lobbies; girls waiting in doorways, strolling the tables of the Tropicana or waiting in front of funeral parlors; girls in the shadows of the skyscrapers of Vedado; girls waiting in drugstores and meat markets; girls waiting in bars and girls with no places to wait: these were just walking around. Girls waiting for seamen and soldiers.

  Girls to whom the sweet cane had brought only bitterness.

  In stores that sold nothing they waited for anything.

  One whose hair was platinum blond yet black as the devil at the roots, invited me to step into her Nothing-Anything door. An American was studying the jukebox, preparing to invest; but he wanted an American song for his investment. When he finished reading the Spanish numbers he finally found one on the American side. It was the very one I would have picked had it been my quarter:I wouldn’t trade the silver

  In my mother’s hair

  For all the gold in the world—

  I’ve felt sentimental about that song ever since a so-long ago rainy afternoon when I skipped an algebra class to hear a baritone sing it at the Haymarket Burlesk and Miss June St. Clair came down the runway immediately after and shook all the Algebra out of my head for keeps:God gave us mothers and tried to be fair

  When he gave me mine I got more than my share.

  I asked the young lady if she would care to go steady with me, but she nodded toward the investor: she was promised to another. Any man who could spend a quarter in a jukebox would make her a better provider than I would, I realized, and I left. I hope they found happiness.

  I recalled then that I was supposed to visit the Hemingways.

  Not that anyone had sent for me. But every American visitor to Havana who’d read a book was supposed to storm the Hemingways with the news. If you hadn’t read one you were interviewing for the Chicago Tribune.

  I phoned and told Mary Hemingway I’d seen a good movie in Havana, so she said come out right away—if I weren’t interviewing for the Chicago Tribune.

  Hemingway was sitting up in bed looking like John McGraw atoning from something; he wasn’t atoning but he was abstaining, and invited me to help myself to the Scotch.

  “How’s the work going?” I asked him.

  “I never turned the horse loose and let her run until this book,” he told me—“but we are so far ahead now that it is pitiful. The next time they’re going to give the money back in the mutuels.”

  He nodded toward the bottle beside his bed. Its label read: Best Scotch Procurable. “I can only have one an hour,” he explained, “doctor’s orders. You go ahead.”

  I went ahead.

  A lion commanded one wall. Some sort of moose held an entire shelf of leatherbound Dickens at bay. On a wall all its own, like a sea all its own, a swordfish had room to zoom: or, if it would rather, just to sail around. A buffalo looked as if it had just thrust its head through the wall. Perhaps the rest of him was standing outside.

  Every brute in the room seemed to proclaim its right to command, zoom, hold at bay or just sail around.

  “You’ve got everything around here but a werewolf,” I observed, trying to sound disappointed.

  “Why go after small game?” Hemingway asked.

  “I don’t even run rabbits myself,” I explained, “I go to movies instead. I just saw one where a rhinoceros got trapped in quicksand. Hyenas came around. You know what the worst thing about the hyena is?”

  “I don’t go to movies any more,” he told me, “but I still go to fights.”

  “I’ll tell you—it’s the smell. Actually, of course, I couldn’t smell a hyena in the movie, but you could tell, just by looking at him, how bad he smelled.”

  “The smartest fighter I ever saw was Leonard,” Hemingway decided. “I never wrote a story about him.”

  Hemingway didn’t want to talk about hyenas. He wanted to talk about fighters. I didn’t want to talk about fighters. I wanted to talk about hyenas. It was his Scotch.

  “A fellow named Nate Bolden whipped Zale twice one winter in the White City ring,” I went along, “that was before the war. One night after the war, I caught a cab on the Southside and noticed that the driver was the same Bolden. ‘I saw you beat Zale,’ I told him.

  “‘Which one was he?’ Bolden asked me. He wasn’t punchy. He’d just never bothered learning the names of the men he’d fought. Some had been white; some black. At 160 pounds he’d whipped top-ranking light-heavies. Now he was driving a cab.”

  I’d thought that was a good story but it hadn’t come off. Hemingway regarded me thoughtfully. Hemingway was a thoughtful-looking fellow.

  “Go ahead,” he said, “help yourself.”

  It was pretty good Scotch. In fact, it was the Best Procurable.

  “Everybody thought Leonard would whip Britton,” Hemingway recalled, “because Leonard was smarter than everybody and Britton wasn’t smarter than anybody. But after Britton had whipped him, I asked him what he thought of Leonard. Britton said Leonard was the smartest fighter he’d ever been up against—‘He was thinking all the time in there,’ Britton told me, ‘and all the time he was thinking, I was busting hell out of him.’ I put that in a story,” Hemingway added.

  “A Lithuanian named Radek had Cerdan out on the ropes in Chicago, but the bell saved Cerdan,” I remembered, “and Cerdan got the decision even though he didn’t know who was holding up his hand. Later he said it was an improper way to win. That’s the very word he used—‘improper.’”

  “Carpentier liked to use words, too,” Hemingway told me. “When he whipped Bombardier Billy Wells he said, ‘Vice, as vice, is bad. But viciousness in the ring is essential.’ What he meant was that Wens had had him the first round and let him go. So Carpentier knocked him out in the second.”

  The lion looked at the bison. The bison looked at the elk. All three were agreeing on something.

  “Battling Siki was paid off to lose to Carpentier,” Hemingway wanted me to know, “and the nigger knocked him cold.”

  I didn’t know how to get back to my rhinoceros.

  “Jack Delaney’s real name was Ovila Chapdelaine,” Hemingway went on, “he gave Oom-Paul Berlenbach the business. Do you know what the business is?”

  I didn’t know what the business was. I hadn’t even known Oom-Paul was sick.

  “Delaney was holding a druggist’s pestle in the thumb of his glove,” Hemingway explained. “He stood with his back to the ropes, waiting for the judge’s decision and a second took the piece out of his glove, and he got the decision. That was ‘the business.’”

  “Well, it wouldn’t have looked very good, when the ref was holding up Delaney’s hand, for a hunk of iron to drop out of it, would it?” I inquired. I had to get off this boxing thing before the man confused me with George Plimpton.

  But Hemingway only looked at me as though trying to decide something.

  It was the Best Procurable alright. If it had been any better it wouldn’t have been procurable at all. The distiller would have kept it all for himself.

  Somebody behind me was eyeing me. I turned fast. That damned swordfish.

  “You were saying something about somebody getting caught in quicksand,” Hemingway reminded me. “How’d he get out?”

  “It was a rhinoceros,” I remembered. “Darryl Zanuck had dug this pit in Africa and pushed the brute into it. He must have had help. The hyenas came around. You know what the worst thing about a hyena is?”

  “You told me. Its smell.”

  “No,” I corrected him, “it’s because when he laughs he giggles. I picked that up somewhere.”

  “Are you living in Paris?” he asked.

  “No, I lost my passport.”

&nb
sp; “They’ll issue you another.”

  “That wasn’t how I lost it,” I had to explain. “I meant they won’t renew it.”

  “Why not?”

  “They won’t tell me why.”

  “The Shipley woman,” Hemingway said, “she won’t tell anybody why.”

  “I’d like to talk to her husband,” I said.

  “Help yourself,” he suggested.

  I did.

  “Another big deal is the lioness,” I reported, because I thought Hemingway ought to know. “The old man don’t hunt. He has two old ladies in his stable he’s pimping and just lays under a tree while they go out and run down an elk and drag it home. He won’t even help drag. He just lays under that tree till his old lady comes back from the supermarket dragging the groceries. He don’t even help drag. When dinner is over they move on so the hyenas can come up and crunch the bones.”

  There was a silence. Hemingway had run out of fighters and I’d nearly run out of hyenas.

  “Another thing,” I felt he ought to know, “if he catches you sleeping he’ll bite off your face.”

  “Was that in the movie?” Hemingway asked quickly.

  “No, I picked it up somewhere.”

  Hemingway got out of bed painfully. He was fully dressed. There were guests waiting.

  He sat among them gravely serious. He carried an air of tranquility. He didn’t throw a punch at anybody. He didn’t stagger. He didn’t brag. He listened, perceived, and he liked having company. What he brought to a table of many guests was the feeling that everyone understood one another. I remember hearing Spanish spoken, and French, and of understanding not a word of what was said; and of knowing, when I spoke English, that some of the guests didn’t understand me. But because of Hemingway’s presence everything seemed understood.

  I spent that afternoon and the next day, which was Christmas, with the Hemingways. He was a big man who had had a big life; that had made those who had known him bigger.

  But they weren’t going to give the money back in the mutuels.