America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (30 page)

The various hustlers who lived by their wits and some work in the canneries when they had time were an amazing crew. Ed never got over his admiration for them.

“They have worked out my personality and my resistances to a fine mathematical point,” he would say. “They know me better than I know myself, and I am not uncomplicated. Over and over, their analysis of my possible reaction is accurate.”

He was usually delighted when one of these minor triumphs took place. It never cost him much. He always tried to figure out in advance what the attack on his pocket would be. At least he always knew the end. Every now and then the audacity and freedom of thought and invention of his loving enemy would leave him with a sense of wonder.

Now and then he hired some of the boys to collect animals for him and paid them a fixed price, so much for frogs, so much for snakes or cats.

One of his collectors we will call Al. That was not his name. An early experience with Al gave Ed a liking for his inventiveness. Ed needed cats and needed them quickly. And Al got them and got them quickly—all fine mature cats and, only at the end of the operation did Ed discover, all tomcats. For a long time Al held out his method but finally he divulged it in secret. Since Al has long since gone to his maker and will need no more cats, his secret can be told.

“I made a double trap,” he said, “a little cage inside a big cage. Then in the little cage I put a nice lady cat in a loving condition. And, Eddie, sometimes I'd catch as many as ten tomcats in one night. Why, hell, Ed, that exact same kind of trap catches me every Saturday night. That's where I got the idea.”

Al was such a good collector that after a while he began to do odd jobs around the lab. Ed taught him to inject dogfish and to work the ball mill for mixing color mass and to preserve some of the less delicate animals. Al became inordinately proud of his work and began to use a mispronounced scientific vocabulary and put on a professorial air that delighted Ed. He got to trusting Al although he knew Al's persistent alcoholic history.

Once when a large number of dogfish came in Ed left them for Al to inject while he went to a party. It was a late party. Ed returned to find all the lights on in the basement. The place was a wreck. Broken glass littered the floor, a barrel of formaldehyde was tipped over and spilled, museum jars were stripped from the shelves and broken. A whirlwind had gone through. Al was not there but Al's pants were, and also an automobile seat which was never explained.

In a white fury Ed began to sweep up the broken glass. He was well along when Al entered, wearing a long overcoat and a pair of high rubber boots. Ed's rage was terrible. He advanced on Al.

“You son of a bitch!” he cried. “I should think you could stay sober until you finished work!”

Al held up his hand with senatorial dignity. “You go right ahead, Eddie,” he said. “You call me anything you want, and I forgive you.”

“Forgive me?” Ed screamed. He was near to murder.

Al silenced him with a sad and superior gesture. “I deserve it, Eddie,” he said. “Go ahead—call me lots of names. I only regret that they will not hurt my feelings.”

“What in hell are you talking about?” Ed demanded uneasily.

Al turned and parted the tails of his overcoat. He was completely naked except for the rubber boots.

“Eddie boy,” he said, “I have been out calling socially in this condition. Now, Eddie, if I could do that, I must be pretty insensitive. Nothing you can call me is likely to get under my thick skin. And I forgive you.”

Ed's anger disappeared in pure wonder. And afterward he said, “If that Al had turned the pure genius of his unique mind to fields other than cadging drinks, there is no limit to what he might have done.” And then he continued, “But no. He has chosen a difficult and crowded field and he is a success in it. Any other career, international banking for instance, might have been too easy for Al.”

Al was married, but his wife and family did not exercise a restraining influence on him. His wife finally used the expedient of putting Al in jail when he was on one of his beauties.

Al said one time, “When they hire a new cop in Monterey they give him a test. They send him down Cannery Row, and if he can't pick me up he don't get the job.”

Al detested the old red stone Salinas jail. It was gloomy and unsanitary, he said. But then the county built a beautiful new jail, and the first time Al made sixty days he was gone seventy-five. He came back to Monterey enthusiastic.

“Eddie,” he said, “they got radios in the cells. And that new sheriff's a pushover at euchre. When my time was up the sheriff owed me eighty-six bucks. I couldn't run out on the game. A sheriff can make it tough on a man. It took me fifteen days to lose it back so it wouldn't look too obvious. But you can't win from a sheriff, Eddie—not if you expect to go back.”

Al went back often until his wife finally tumbled to the fact that Al preferred jail to home life. She visited Ed for advice. She was a red-eyed, unkempt little woman with a runny nose.

“I work hard and try to make ends meet,” she said bitterly. “And all the time Al's over in Salinas taking his ease in the new jail. I can't let him go to jail anymore. He likes it.” She was all frayed from having Al's children and supporting them.

For once Ed had no answer. “I don't know what you can do,” he said. “I'm stumped. You could kill him—but then you wouldn't have any fun anymore.”

This account of Ed Ricketts goes seesawing back and forth chronologically and in every other way. I did not intend when I started to departmentalize him, but now that seems to be a good method. He was so complex and many-faceted that perhaps the best method will be to go from one facet of him to another so that from all the bits a whole picture may build itself for me as well as for others.

Ed had more fun than nearly anyone I have ever known, and he had deep sorrows also, which will be treated later. As long as we are on the subject of drinking I will complete that department.

Ed loved to drink, and he loved to drink just about anything. I don't think I ever saw him in the state called drunkenness, but twice he told me he had no memory of getting home to the laboratory at all. And even on those nights one would have had to know him well to be aware that he was affected at all. Evidences of drinking were subtle. He smiled a little more broadly. His voice became a little higher in pitch, and he would dance a few steps on tiptoe, a curious pigeon-footed mouse step. He liked every drink that contained alcohol and, except for coffee, which he often laced with whisky, he disliked every drink that did not contain alcohol. He once estimated that it had been twelve years since he had tasted water without some benign addition.

At one time when bad teeth and a troublesome love affair were running concurrently, he got a series of stomachaches which were diagnosed as a developing ulcer. The doctor put him on a milk diet and ordered him off all alcohol. A sullen sadness fell on the laboratory. It was a horrid time. For a few days Ed was in a state of dismayed shock. Then his anger rose at the cruelty of a fate that could do this to him. He merely disliked and distrusted water, but he had an active and fierce hatred for milk. He found the color unpleasant and the taste ugly. He detested its connotations.

For a few days he forced a little milk into his stomach, complaining bitterly the while, and then he went back to see the doctor. He explained his dislike for the taste of milk, giving as its basis some pre-memory shock amounting to a trauma. He thought this dislike for milk might have driven him into the field of marine biology since no marine animals but whales and their family of sea cows give milk and he had never had the least interest in any of the Cetaceans. He said that he was afraid the cure for his stomachaches was worse than the disease and finally he asked if it would be all right to add a few drops of aged rum to the milk just to kill its ugly taste. The doctor perhaps knew he was fighting a losing battle. He gave in on the few drops of rum.

We watched the cure with fascination as day by day the ratio changed until at the end of a month Ed was adding a few drops of milk to the rum. But his stomachaches had disappeared. He never liked milk, but after this he always spoke of it with admiration as a specific for ulcers.

There were great parties at the laboratory, some of which went on for days. There would come a time in our poverty when we needed a party. Then we would gather together the spare pennies. It didn't take very many of them. There was a wine sold in Monterey for thirty-nine cents a gallon. It was not a delicate-tasting wine and sometimes curious things were found in the sludge on the bottom of the jug, but it was adequate. It added a gaiety to a party and it never killed anyone. If four couples got together and each brought a gallon, the party could go on for some time and toward the end of it Ed would be smiling and doing his tippy-toe mouse dance.

Later, when we were not so poor, we drank beer or, as Ed preferred it, a sip of whisky and a gulp of beer. The flavors, he said, complemented each other.

Once on my birthday there was a party at the laboratory that lasted four days. We really needed a party. It was fairly large, and no one went to bed except for romantic purposes. Early in the morning at the end of the fourth day a benign exhaustion had settled on the happy group. We spoke in whispers because our vocal cords had long since been burned out in song.

Ed carefully placed half a quart of beer on the floor beside his bed and sank back for a nap. In a moment he was asleep. He had consumed perhaps five gallons since the beginning of the party. He slept for about twenty minutes, then stirred, and without opening his eyes groped with his hand for the beer bottle. He found it, sat up, and took a deep drink of it. He smiled sweetly and waved two fingers in the air in a kind of benediction.

“There's nothing like that first taste of beer,” he said.

Not only did Ed love liquor. He went further. He had a deep suspicion of anyone who did not. If a nondrinker shut up and minded his own business and did not make an issue of his failing, Ed could be kind to him. But alas, a laissez-faire attitude is very uncommon in teetotalers. The moment one began to spread his poison Ed experienced a searing flame of scorn and rage. He believed that anyone who did not like to drink was either sick and/or crazy or had in him some obscure viciousness. He believed that the soul of a nondrinker was dried-up and shrunken, that the virtuous pose of the nondrinker was a cover for some nameless and disgusting practice.

He had somewhat the same feeling for those who did not or pretended they did not love sex, but this field will be explored later.

If pressed, Ed would name you the great men, great minds, great hearts and imaginations in the history of the world, and he could not discover one of them who was a teetotaler. He would even try to recall one single man or woman of much ability who did not drink and like liquor, and he could never light on a single name. In all such discussions the name of Shaw was offered, and in answer Ed would simply laugh, but in his laughter there would be no admiration for that abstemious old gentleman.

 

Ed's interest in music was passionate and profound. He thought of it as deeply akin to creative mathematics. His taste in music was not strange but very logical. He loved the chants of the Gregorian mode and the whole library of the plainsong with their angelic intricacies. He loved the masses of William Byrd and Palestrina. He listened raptly to Buxtehude, and he once told me that he thought the Art of the Fugue of Bach might be the greatest of all music up to our time. Always “up to our time.” He never considered anything finished or completed but always continuing, one thing growing on and out of another. It is probable that his critical method was the outgrowth of his biologic training and observation.

He loved the secular passion of Monteverde, and the sharpness of Scarlatti. His was a very broad appreciation and a curiosity that dug for music as he dug for his delicious worms in a mud flat. He listened to music with his mouth open as though he wanted to receive the tones even in his throat. His forefinger moved secretly at his side in rhythm.

He could not sing, could not carry a tune or reproduce a true note with his voice, but he could hear true notes. It was a matter of sorrow to him that he could not sing.

Once we bought sets of tuning forks and set them in rubber to try to reteach ourselves the forgotten mathematical scale. And Ed's ear was very aware in recognition although he could not make his voice come even near to imitating the pitch. I never heard him whistle. I wonder whether he could. He would try to hum melodies, stumbling over the notes, and then he would smile helplessly when his ear told him how badly he was doing it.

He thought of music as something incomparably concrete and dear. Once, when I had suffered an overwhelming emotional upset, I went to the laboratory to stay with him. I was dull and speechless with shock and pain. He used music on me like medicine. Late in the night when he should have been asleep, he played music for me on his great phonograph—even when I was asleep he played it, knowing that its soothing would get into my dark confusion. He played the curing and reassuring plainsongs, remote and cool and separate, and then gradually he played the sure patterns of Bach, until I was ready for more personal thought and feeling again, until I could bear to come back to myself. And when that time came, he gave me Mozart. I think it was as careful and loving medication as has ever been administered.

Ed's reading was very broad. Of course he read greatly in his own field of marine invertebratology. But he read hugely otherwise. I do not know where he found the time. I can judge his liking only by the things he went back to—translations of Li Po and Tu Fu, that greatest of all love poetry, the Black Marigolds—and Faust, most of all Faust. Just as he thought the Art of the Fugue might be the greatest music up to our time, he considered Faust the greatest writing that had been done. He enlarged his scientific German so that he could read Faust and hear the sounds of the words as they were written and taste their meanings. Ed's mind seems to me to have been a timeless mind, not modern and not ancient. He loved to read Layamon aloud and Beowulf, making the words sound as fresh as though they had been written yesterday.