The Log from the Sea of Cortez (42 page)

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Authors: John Steinbeck,Richard Astro

BOOK: The Log from the Sea of Cortez
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“Not offhand,” said Ed, “but I’ll be glad to look it up for you if you want to call back in half an hour.” He went to work, saying, “Lovely voice—fine throaty voice.”
Twenty minutes later the phone rang again and the fine throaty voice said, “Dr. Ricketts, never mind. I worked it out from the horizontals.”
He never did meet the puzzle-worker with the throaty voice.
 
In appearance and temperament Ed was a remarkably unmilitary man, but in spite of this he was drafted for service in both World Wars. One would have thought that his complete individuality and his uniqueness of approach to all problems would have caused him to go crazy in the organized mediocrity of the Army. Actually the exact opposite was true. He was a successful soldier. In spite of itself, the Army—at least that part of it which sheltered him—was gradually warped in his favor and for his comfort. He was quite happy in the Army in both wars.
He described his military experience in the first World War to me with satisfaction. “I was young then,” he said, “and I am amazed that I showed such good sense. I have often thought,” he went on, “that if any big company like General Motors or Standard Oil should start a private army, no public army would stand a chance against it. A private company is organized to do something or to produce something, profit or gold or steel. It has a direction. But a public army is made up of millions of individuals all working for themselves. Some want promotions, some want to steal, some want personal power or glory, and some want simply to get out. Very few have any interest in winning a war.”
He told me about his first war experience. “I gave it a good deal of thought before I decided what to be,” he said. “As I said, I was young then, but I have always admired my choice. Literacy was not terribly high in 1917, and it was comparatively easy for me to become company clerk without any danger of being driven into officer’s training school. I definitely did not want to be an officer. No one wanted the job of company clerk.
“People are singularly blind,” he continued. “It escaped the greed and self-interest of the other men that the company clerk makes out the passes and that if the captain and lieutenants happen to have hobbies like golf or women, this duty and even the selections are left in the hands of an efficient company clerk.” He sighed with pleasure. He had enjoyed the Army. “In almost no time,” he said, “the rumor got about that I liked whisky. It became quite common knowledge. And do you know, when I was demobilized I had over three hundred pints left, and that in a time of prohibition, if you will remember.”
A little venom crept into his voice. “You know,” he said in an outraged tone, “there was one christing son-of-a-bitch who complained to the captain about me. Can you imagine that? He put it on a moral basis. He didn’t drink. I wonder why nondrinkers are so often vicious.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“He was a silly man,” Ed said. “He didn’t get a single pass for eighteen months. He wrote complaint after complaint. He was a very silly man.”
“But how about the complaints?”
“If he had given it any thought he would have realized that complaints go through the hands of the company clerk.” He chuck-led. “I guess I should not bear a grudge,” he said, “but I still don’t like that man. Word got about—you know how rumors move in the Army. Anyway, the word got out that the good, kind company clerk was being persecuted. I guess the poor fellow had a rough time of it—from latrines to kitchen police to the brig. I think it ruined his whole military career. I’m pretty sure it ruined his stomach. A very silly man.”
I have always felt that drafting Ed in the Second World War was spiteful on the part of the draft board. He was one week under forty-six when his call came, and his birthday had passed when he was examined. I think there were people in Monterey who were jealous of him. He was really not good soldier material from any point of view. He wore a beard, which is frowned on by Army psychiatrists. The doctor who examined him came from the interview puzzled and worried, but he passed Ed, and the Army made him shave off his beard.
He did not resent being drafted because he remembered the first war with such pleasure.
“I thought that with my subsequent experience and maturity I might be all right,” he said.
Because of his long laboratory experience they put him in charge of the venereal disease section of the induction center at Monterey. This job had its compensations. He could go home every night and he had complete charge of an inexhaustible medicine chest. He was still in no danger of being hustled off to officer’s training school. Ed didn’t want to command men. He wanted to associate with them. His commanding officer had a hobby—whether golf or women I do not know, but it was strong enough so that he let Ed do all the work.
Ed liked that and did a very good job with his section. Possibly because of the medicine chest a little group of passionate admirers clung to him and protected him and defended him against any possible charge that Ed didn’t get to work before ten in the morning and sometimes went away for long weekends.
Quite early in his second hitch in the Army Ed got tired of the sameness of laboratory alcohol and grapefruit juice. With his unlimited medicine chest, he began to experiment. Now another rumor crept about the Presidio of Monterey that a fabulous drink had been invented. It had a strange effect. No one had tasted or felt anything quite like it. It was called “Ricketts’ Folly.” It was said that the commanding officer of the unit, and he a major at that, after two drinks of it had marched smartly and with no hint of stagger right into a wall, and that he had made a short heroic speech as he slid to the ground.
After Ed was safely and honorably discharged I asked him about the drink that had achieved a notoriety as far east as Chicago and that was discussed with hushed respect on the beachheads of the Pacific.
“Well, actually it was very simple,” he said. “It’s components were not complicated and it
was
delicious. I never could figure why it had such a curious and sometimes humorous effect. It was nothing but alcohol, codeine, and grenadine. It was a pretty drink too. You know,” he said, “it made every other kind of liquor seem kind of weak and flabby.”
 
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 stomach-aches 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 stomach-aches 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 stomach-aches 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 chords 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 non-drinker 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 non-drinker was dried up and shrunken, that the virtuous pose of the non-drinker 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 plain song 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.

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