And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks (12 page)

First somebody turned on the radio, and some dancing started. Janie and I went into a bedroom and started to neck on a bed, and then she said we might as well copulate. But I didn’t want to, because everybody was walking through the room on their way to and from another room. Then a lot of beer showed up in carton containers, and Janie and I went out into the studio room proper and took two quart containers apiece.

We went back to the bedroom and started to drink the beer. I began acting silly and climbing out the window, and the first thing I knew there was Al climbing in from outside, through the window. He had been out to find Phillip and couldn’t get back in, because the door was locked downstairs.

“Where is Phillip?” I asked.

“That’s what I’d like to know,” he said.

I stuck my head out the window to see how Al had managed it: the studio was just over the Swing Rendezvous nightclub, and Al had hauled himself up over the marquee.

Meanwhile, Barbara was in the other room necking with the artist while Joe Gould sat on a bed with a dark-haired girl in slacks. He was talking to her with his chin resting on the handle of his cane. Finally Barbara came out of the room looking all disheveled and went to a mirror. “He just asked for it,” she said to Janie, “and he got it.”

The artist was glaring at Barbara, then he came over to me and said, “There stands a young lady who came very close to being laid.”

I registered appropriate awe, and then went out to the studio room to look at this guy’s work. Al was opening doors all over the place, looking for Phillip. He even opened closet doors and poked his head inside.

All along the wall of the studio were hung paintings that the artist had done. They were done in vivid colors set in rigid forms, like cubes and squares and circles.

“How do you like them?” I asked Janie, and she said the colors were nice.

Then Phillip somehow reappeared and we all
decided to go back to Minetta’s. The artist, meanwhile, was getting very nasty with everybody, and finally he went and opened the door for everybody to get out.

We all started to file out, and as we passed, the artist made insult after insult. He referred to Barbara’s close shave, called Al a queer, and finally turned around to pick up a cat that was passing in the hallway. He took it by the tail and flung it down the stairs, but the cat landed on its feet and scampered away. I went up to the artist and said, “I’m going to k-norck you one for that,” but he didn’t hear my remark, so I let it go at that.

We went back to Minetta’s, which was so crowded you couldn’t elbow your way around, and stood in the middle of the crowd hollering for drinks. I finally appropriated four beers from the bartender. Cathcart and a few other NYU students had by this time showed up, and I began to get sick and tired of all the noise and pushing, so I decided to go home.

On my way to Apartment 32, I reeled to one side and fell on top of some ash barrels that were empty. I rolled on top of one of them and got deposited into the gutter. Then I got up and walked on home, feeling dizzy and limping from the bump on my shin.

When I got to Apartment 32 Phil and Barbara were on the bed in Janie’s bedroom, so I undressed and fell down on the couch. I lay there for a while, riding an
imaginary bicycle in an attempt to catch up with the room. A minute later the doorbell rang, and I heard Phil yell from the bedroom, “What a hell of a time!”

First thing I knew he was up and running around Apartment 32 naked and cursing and pacing the carpet, while the doorbell kept ringing. So I had to get up and open the door.

It was Janie and Cathcart, and both of them were pie-eyed. They stumbled in and actually fell at my feet, while Phil, mad as hell, rushed into my den and slammed the door after him.

I grabbed Janie and threw her on the couch. Then out from the bedroom came Barbara draped in a bed-sheet and went over to Cathcart, who was sitting drunkenly on the other couch, and dropped on his lap with a simple grin on her face. She started kissing him violently and he looked a little bewildered.

Meanwhile Janie kept hitting me over the head with her shoe, and just as Phil came rushing out again from the den to run back into the bedroom and slam the door after him, I leapt up and put out the light so Janie wouldn’t aim so well.

After that there were all kinds of door slammings and noises and mutterings and floor creakings, as if Apartment 32 were the very Whore House of Hell itself.

P
HILLIP AND
I
WOKE UP AT NOON THE NEXT DAY
. We were already four hours late reporting to our ship, so we each took a cold shower, drank a whole can of tomato juice from the icebox, picked up our sea bags, and ran out of the apartment, leaving Barbara and Janie asleep. It was a very hot noon outside.

We took the subway up to 42nd Street and hurried around the corner to a bus terminal, where we just made the Hoboken bus.

When we got to Hoboken, the city was all covered over with a pall of hot gray smoke from a fire on the waterfront. Every now and then a piece of soot dropped down, like black snow in an ash-colored oven-hot sky.

We had to take another bus to get to our pier. When we got there the smoke was even thicker and our eyes were smarting. We crossed the street to the guardhouse
at the gate of the pier and dropped our bags with a bang. A uniformed guard sauntered up.

“The
Harvey West
,” I said, showing my job slip and Coast Guard pass.

“
Harvey West
?” the guard said. “Wait a minute.” He went inside the guardhouse and made a phone call. Then he came back and said, “The
Harvey West
shifted docks this morning at seven. She’s now at the foot of Montague Street, Pier 4, Brooklyn.”

I turned to Phil and showed him the palm of my hand.

“Well,” he said, “if she’s in Brooklyn, let’s go to Brooklyn.”

So we picked up our bags and shuffled away.

“Goddamn it,” I was saying. “They tell us it’s in Hoboken and she shifts to Brooklyn. When we get to Brooklyn, she’ll be in Manhattan. Nothing but chaos everywhere. Let’s have a glass of beer.”

“We haven’t got enough money,” Phil said, “and there’s no time to lose.”

We asked directions for getting back to New York the fastest way and were told to take the ferry.

We dropped our bags at our feet and leaned on the rail of the ferry. It moved away from the slip and headed for Manhattan, shimmering across the river. Over to our left we saw what was causing all the smoke
in Hoboken: a big warehouse and a merchant ship flying the Norwegian flag were on fire. Heavy clouds of pale gray smoke were spewing out of the warehouse, and black smoke was coming out of the freighter. The firemen were all over the place with their little toy hoses and squirts of water. I was wondering how the fire had started.

Gradually we approached Manhattan. There was a cool breeze that smelled of the sea, blowing from the southern end of the river. The ferry eased into the slip, rubbed sides with the timbers until they groaned, and churned water to nose up to the gangway.

We picked up our bags and walked east toward mid-town, stopping at a garage on Tenth Avenue for a drink of water. There was nobody around the garage and we couldn’t find a men’s room, so I undid a hose used to wash cars with from a large faucet and we let the water spill into our mouths and over our faces. There was still nobody around and I said to Phil, “Some garage. We ought to take a couple of wrenches.”

Then we walked to Eighth Avenue and spent our last dime on the subway down to Brooklyn. We got off at Borough Hall, only on the wrong side, so that we had to walk through a lot of clanging traffic with our sea bags on our shoulders while the sun pressed down like
a hot flatiron. We finally found Montague Street and started toward the waterfront.

At the foot of Montague Street there is a stone arch that overspans the street at the point where it dips down to the piers. We passed under this like a couple of Foreign Legionnaires just in sight of the fort after a long march.

In front of Pier 4, I said to the guard, “Is the
Harvey West
here?”

“She sure is, son.”

We showed him our identification papers.

“She’s all yours, son.”

We stomped across the floor of the cool, damp warehouse that smelled of coffee beans. There were hundreds of longshoremen loading on ships on both sides of the wharf. Winches screeched, foremen yelled, and a little truck trailing a string of wagons darted in front of Phil and me from around a corner and almost ran into us.

“Is that her?” Phil said, pointing to the right.

There was the great hull of a Liberty ship showing, at intervals where the shed doors were open, all streaked with oil and rust and with water pissing out of her scuppers.

“That’s her,” I said.

“Is she big!” he exclaimed, feasting his eyes on the ship as we walked nearer to the gangplank.

Then I heard some yelling behind us and turned and saw some seamen coming toward us, waving their hands. Some of them were carrying their sea bags. I recognized a few of them from the Union Hall.

“You guys goin’ on this
Harvey West
?” one of them asked, dropping his bag.

“Yeah,” I said.

He said, “I’m supposed to be goin’ on as bosun. What about you?”

“AB and ordinary,” I told him.

“Well listen,” the bosun said, looking over my shoulder at Phil, “we’re almost the whole deck crew right here.” He turned and gestured to the five other guys with him. “Now, none of us here are goin’ to sign on until we get the lay of the land.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I shipped out with the mate on this one before, and he is a bastard, let me tell you. The work’s never good enough for him. Now, look. This ship’s goin’ upriver to Albany to load on, and then it’s comin’ back to New York and out. None of us has to sign on till it gets back, but they’ve already set out the articles up there. None of us guys intend to sign on till we get
back from Albany, because the mate is a prick and we gotta see he acts right with us.”

“Well,” I said, “what will the mate say?”

“We’re playin’ it safe, all of us. All you do, you two guys, is lay low and say nothin’. The mate is a prick and none of us are gonna take any shit from him.”

“I guess that’s all right with us,” I said.

“Okay,” said the bosun, “that’s what we wanted to talk to you about. So just lay low for a while and don’t say anything.”

“Okay,” I said, “and after you.” I moved aside from the gangplank and let the bosun go up first. The five guys followed and Phil and I took up the rear.

When we were aboard, I stepped quickly into an alleyway and led Phil to an empty fo’c’sle. “We might as well appropriate two lower bunks,” I said. “Throw your gear in that locker.”

I could see this was going to be some trip, all right. Trouble already.

“Now,” I said to Phil, “I’ll show you around.”

I took him up to the bow and had him lean over and look at the anchor and then at the anchor chain. I showed him the jumbo block. “This thing weighs over a hundred pounds,” I said, “and it’s just one of the little gadgets you work with on deck.”

Phil slapped the jumbo block and it didn’t budge.

Then I took him topside to the bridge and showed him the wheelhouse, then belowdecks to the refrigerator storage. There was no padlock on the door, so we went in. There were whole cold roasts of beef and gallons of milk in cans.

Phil ripped off a piece of beef with his fingers. I ran topside for some glasses and came back a minute later and poured out some cold foaming milk from the cans.

“This is the balls,” Phil said.

We were very thirsty and hungry from running all over in the hot sun, looking for the
Harvey West
.

After we had had our fill, I led Phil back up to our fo’c’sle and we undressed to take a shower. After that, we dried up with some clean towels I got from the Negro steward belowdecks in the linen locker. Then we fished some clean work clothes out of our sea bags and put them on.

“When do we work?” Phil wanted to know, and I told him probably not before tomorrow morning.

I stretched out on the bunk and turned on the bulkhead light over my pillow. I picked up a book and started to read, and said, “See? This is the way you do at sea, just lie down in your bunk and read.”

Phillip reached up and took down a gas mask and a steel helmet from the top of his locker. “We’re going to see action,” he said, and put on the steel helmet.

Then I decided it was about time to find the chief mate and give him our job slips, so I told Phil to wait for me and went first to the mess. Some navy gunners were sitting there drinking coffee and playing cards.

“Where’d this ship go last trip?” I asked.

One of them, a husky blond sailor in shorts, said, “Italy. This time France, I think.”

I went topside to the mate’s stateroom. No one was there, so I went back to my fo’c’sle and stretched out on my bunk again. Then it occurred to me for the first time that Phil had laid Barbara last night.

“Say,” I said, “you finally did it last night, didn’t you?” I started to applaud, clapping my hands. Phil had dug out some books from behind a locker and was throwing them away as he glanced at the titles.

“Tonight,” I went on, “we’ll go ashore and see our goils again.”

At this point, a six-foot-four red-haired man wearing a dirty officer’s cap and some old khaki stepped into our fo’c’sle.

“What’s your names?” he yelled.

I told him.

“Did you sign on yet?”

“Are they signing on yet?” I asked innocently.

“Yeah, we’re signing on.”

“Well,” I said, “the bosun ... and the other guys ... told us to wait until later ... or—”

“Yeah?” said the red-haired giant. I began to realize that he was probably the bastard chief mate.

“Get off the ship,” he said.

“Why?”

“Ask me once more,” he said, “and I’ll throw you off myself.”

“Well—”

“Never mind!” he shouted. “Who do you guys think you are, anyway? You come on a ship, you sign on. If you don’t want to sign, get off.”