Algren at Sea (42 page)

So much for Man's inhumanity to Man. Obsequiousness in one critic helps us all; for it puts money in circulation. Theses which establish the respective failures of Mark Twain, Jack London, Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway are relieving unemployment of graduate students from coast to coast. For what would any head-on-a-stick marvel do for a livelihood were it not for having inherited a body of flawed art? Back to managing a Nedick's and telling the cook to hold back on the butter, no doubt.

Well, everybody has something he needs to throw up: instant erudition soundly based on servility will turn the trick every time. Articles like these restore criticism to its democratic purpose of nauseating everyone who can afford ninety-five cents per copy.
¹⁶

I was encouraged to give a boggling world yet another Hemingway paperback, by the realization that it would be a fresh contribution to write the same old things at sea. I would be the inventor of the very first essay on
Hemingway smelling of salt! What the other fellows had been getting into the mixture I couldn't identify; but it certainly was pervasive.

In fact, I'd always had the feeling that, one time or another, they'd planned to write as well as Hemingway but to be better paid. As things worked out, however, they had continued to write badly without growing wealthy; while Hemingway had gone on writing well without going broke. This had embittered everybody.

So I took a book of essays, by one Norman Podhoretz, to sea to remind me, should fire break out above or mutiny flare below, to be steadfastly magnanimous; so long as it didn't cost me anything.

Would my own efforts induce nausea? If retching was what it was going to take to get me to the docks of Singapore, was my thinking, everybody get set for a fast dash to the rail.

The Captain was on my side too.

His crew wanted to go to Japan, but he had a girl friend shelling copra for Proctor & Gamble and they don't grow coconuts in Japan; so they tossed for whether it should be Kyoto or Chittagong Charlie's in lIo-lIo. The Captain won the toss. “Make it two out of three, sir,” the First Mate spoke up boldly in behalf of his men. The Captain proved himself a sport. “Make it three out of five,” he offered—and won the next two tosses. Later I asked him to show me that half dollar and, sure enough, it had heads on both sides. “I didn't want to go out of my way,” he apologized.

That's how it is in the Orient, men. That's how it
really
is.

And that's how it was that the
Malaysia Mail
made all of the small-pleasure docks and none of the sporty-O ports. Bound neither for Kyoto nor Saigon, neither would we see Macao nor Luzon. We would tie in only at places where copra bugs live in caves called
Bamboo Alley
,
Lion of Kowloon
and
472 Cho-Ryang-Dong
.

Happily, my Definitive Essay began with a ring so definitive that, by putting an ear to the page, I distinctly heard something inside
gong!
I'd hit it off! The thing
rang
with profundity! And yet it was so burdened by precepts that its chime rang leadenly and its tolling held no merriment. It was more of an elegy in a deserted delicatessen.

God! Had I but been able to sustain that I-Give-Unto-Thee-the-Keys-of-the-Kingdom-of-Heaven intonation, bookies would have been offering 6-5 and take your pick that it had been written by Podhoretz! “Well, we all have our good days.

That one bad night can ruin. Such as one when, through an ominous tenement on the quais of Calcutta, a schizoid seaman pursued me under the delusion that I was a salami requiring slicing and he had the knife. Though I remained unsliced, my grasp of the concept that the proper study of mankind is man was shaken.

Later, while trying to dispose of a watch engraved
77 Jewelries
(purchased in a free-trade port), my bowlines were severed and the Definitive Essay began drifting to sea. I bartered my Podhoretz essays for a pair of sandals to a boatman afflicted by elephantiasis—where else could I have picked up a pair so cheap?

Any reader assuming that memoirs of some moveable feast are offered here, should be advised that, by the time I got to Paris, nothing remained but empty napkin-rings on the grass.

I met Hemingway only once, and briefly. My only claim to his friendship is that nocturnal message: “it is now 0230 hours.”

Yet, as he had once observed that all his life he had been peddling vitality, he surely would have understood my defection from critics peddling sterility.

 

NELSON ALGREN

Sooner or later, on her first trip out or her hundredth, every ship carries a doomed man.

For the
Malaysia Mail
this was the sixty-first time out of the barn and she labored like a mare too tightly reined; too old to whip, too mean to whinny. I watched her harbor-home going blind in a mist behind her.

There blue fogs kept bending red roses to rest; and girls, coming home from school, kept tossing their ponytails. No wonder the old scow kept grieving.

For doomful seas from the black edge of the world would come rolling through nights without a moon: no ocean had ever darkened so lonesomely. “Don't take things so hard, Pacific,” I consoled the poor brute—“girls come home from school in Malaysia too.” It wasn't my first time out of the barn either.

Lights of the rigging came on high and flickering. Then the big low lamps of the staterooms began burning too steadily. Was there somebody else aboard? I took a turn around the deck to a door marked PURSER, knocked, and got a direct command from the other side:

“Turn the handle!”

So
that
was how these things worked.

He was all officer. Under a cap so bound with braid I saw
it
had made the decision to go to sea and was only accompanied by the man below for his use as an interpreter. Why would a man be wearing such a self-important hat alone in his cabin unless he'd been practicing the hand salute in preparation for World War III?

There won't be time for that this time, sir, I wanted to assure him, as he introduced himself.

“
Mister
Manning,” he let me know—and just by the way he told it I knew I need not fear mutiny on this trip.

“Algren,” I identified myself, for he needed cheering up. The paperback he'd put down was
Japanese Simplified.

Two Japanese lovelies stood framed on his desk. Neither looked simplified.

“How much time ashore will we have in Kyoto?” I inquired casually.

“We aren't going to Kyoto,” he let me know, “but you'll get a good view of the coastline at Hokkadate.”

The coastline at Hokkadate wasn't what I had in mind. “Will I be able to go ashore there?”

“We only stop at Hokkadate to refuel,”
Mister
Manning told me, “but believe me when I tell you-you're better off staying aboard. The less you see of Asia the better off you'll be.”

“Did you take these from the upper deck?” I inquired about the lovelies—one signed
With All My Love—Noriko
and the other
To Bill With All My Heart—Suzi.

“They run a hotel for me in Kyoto,” he assured me stiffly.

And throw the profits to you from the dock tied in a silk kimono, I assumed—but which one did the throwing? I concluded it must be Noriko because she had a chin like Whitey Ford's.

“These people aren't like us,” Manning informed me, “they steal everything they can get their hands on.”

I was pleased to learn Americans had given up stealing manually.

“All I had in mind was to take a few shots to prove to friends I've been out of town,” I explained, “if the Captain is afraid I'll delay the ship I'll use a Polaroid.”

He picked up the paperback that simplified Japanese lovelies.

“I hope you won't be disappointed in not getting ashore in Japan,” Manning hoped; looking tickled pink.

If you went ashore you'd be trapped by enemies, seemed to be Manning's thinking; and if you stayed aboard friends might trap you. He hadn't gotten far enough in his plans to arrange entrapment by himself, yet seemed to be working toward some such arrangement.

“It's alright,” I assured him. “Don't let me interfere with the ship's schedule: Just go ahead and refuel at any port you feel like.”

Manning bestowed his Be-Kind-To-Our-Only-Passenger-He-May-Be-Related-To-The-Front-Office
smile upon me. He had a mug as round as a rhubarb pie and the smile seemed to
drip
through the juice.

I had no way of knowing that anyone with a face so self-satisfied could be doomed.

 

 

JUNE 22ND

 

This is one hell of a big ship. Wandering among freight cars in the fantail, I figured out that the reason they weren't rolling around the deck must be because somebody had had the foresight to button down their wheels. This would require very strong buttons in a monsoon, I realized, and went up to the point of the ship to see what other cargo I was being held responsible for.

The
point
of a ship is its front part. The reason for making a ship pointed is twofold: it makes the distance between ports shorter and prevents bumping when you run over a whale. Whales often sleep on top of the water because everybody goes to bed earlier in the Pacific than in the Atlantic. Unfortunately it wasn't yet my bedtime. I went to find the Captain to see where he needed me most.

I saw a fellow standing at a steering wheel and went into the cabin to see why he didn't sit down. The reason he wasn't sitting down was because he had to stand up to see over the wheel. He said he was a second mate and I told him I'd been married once myself. He asked me whether I'd like to try steering the ship but he didn't mention pay. Nevertheless I took over as he looked like he needed some rest.

I realized my responsibility: forty seamen and twelve officers, most of them with sweethearts or wives, were now depending on me not to hit anything. There was a clock that had lost one hand above the wheel and, whenever the wheel swung a bit, the clock's hand swung a little too. I put all my strength into holding our course steady as she goes.

“You don't have to bear down,” the Second Mate let me know, “it's automatic”—and a fearsome blast just overhead nearly took off my ears, the wheel swung, the clock's hand boggled, the deck tilted.

“We're sinking, sir,” I reported calmly.

“That was just the foghorn,” the Second Mate informed me with the wannest of wan smiles, “it's automatic too.”

I let him take the wheel back. I didn't yet know that Danielsen's smile,
so thin, so faint, happened only in moments of his highest exuberance. The rest of the time he lived in some sunless world bereft of everything but memories out of years long gone. Though not yet forty, loneliness had aged him by twenty years more.

“How long have you been at sea?” I asked him.

“Since I've been born,” he told me-and again that smile, so wan and wandering. If Danielsen wasn't the loneliest Second Mate on the Pacific they must be flying them in from Antarctica.

“Is there anything to drink aboard?” I asked him.

He whispered something (as he whispered almost everything) that sounded like “Communications Officer.”

Communications Officer Concannon sat, earphones clamped to the perpetual
beep-bop-jot-jot—
then rose to six-foot-three to give me a big hand and grin, toss off the phones and begin pouring gin.

“I saw you come aboard,” he told me. “‘There's one in every crowd,' I thought, ‘and two on every ship.'”

“One of
what?
”

“Why, one mark of course,” he smiled, picked up a stained deck, shuffled and gave them to me to cut; then dealt seven hands of draw poker.

“Tell me what you need and I'll match it,” he promised.

“Match my Jack.”

He dealt around the board and a Jack fell on my hand. Not bad.

He placed my forefinger across the top of my cards—“You're signaling me for an Ace,” and moved the finger down, between the top and the middle of the face-down card—“King.” The finger dead-center was for a Queen. Beneath that indicated a Jack, and the finger at the card's bottom asked for a Ten. Moving back up, but using two fingers, defined every card down to a Deuce: for which the signal was a small sweeping motion of the card.

When I'd mastered the signals, Sparks gave me one admonishing word: “It all depends on the crimp I put in the deck. If the man beside me don't cut them at the crimp, it don't work. You sit opposite me so it don't look like cahoots. Now how about a couple hands of blackjack?”