And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks (4 page)

“Now if it was
my
joint I’d tell those cops, ‘Now listen, fellows, you made a mistake. There’s plenty alleys around here, you don’t have to beat somebody up in the joint.’ And then, on top of everything else, they walk out of there and don’t even leave a dime on the bar. If they were any sort of characters at all, they’d say ‘Jimmy here’s a dollar for you.’”

M
ONDAY AFTERNOON
I
SPENT LOUNGING AROUND
the apartment. I was more or less waiting for Phillip to get back from downtown, where he was getting his papers in order. I took showers, raided the icebox, sat on the fire escape with the cat on my lap, or just sat in the easy chair thinking that if Phillip made out all right we could go first thing in the morning to the National Maritime Union Hall and register to ship.

Barbara Bennington was spending the afternoon with Janie. She used to come to Janie’s apartment between classes at the New School for Social Research, and sometimes she would sleep there instead of going home all the way to Manhasset in Long Island, when she had early classes the following day.

Apartment 32 was by way of being a meeting place for her and Phillip, as well as a general hangout for our
friends. Janie did her best to keep the place neat, but too many people came in all hours of the day and night to lounge around and talk and sleep, so the place was always a mess. The floors were always cluttered with books, old shoes, clothing, pillows, empty bottles, and glasses, and the cat used to prowl through all this as in a jungle.

Barbara was a sort of society girl with long black hair, very pale complexion, and surly dark eyes. She looked a little like Hedy Lamarr. She was quite aware of it, and sometimes she would turn on a demure, faraway look when you talked directly to her.

There really wasn’t much in common between Barbara and Janie, except that Phillip and I, as friends, were what you might call their men.

Janie, although she, too, originated from a good family, had more of the expansive West about her than Barbara. Janie was a tall and slender blonde who walked like a man, cursed like a man, and drank like a man. You could see that sometimes Barbara’s occasional coyness got on Janie’s nerves.

They were sitting in the front room talking about dresses or something, and I was in the kitchen cleaning out a dirty glass that had a dead cockroach in it so that I could pour some milk, when Phillip got in. I stepped out of the kitchen with the milk and a liver-wurst sandwich and asked him how he’d made out.

“All set,” he said. He was carrying a big blue sea bag full of clothes and books. He put down the sea bag and showed me his newly acquired papers: a Coast Guard pass, a War Shipping Administration waiver, and an NMU book. I asked him where he had gotten the money for the union book and he said his uncle had given it to him with full blessings.

“Good,” I said, “we’ll go to the Union Hall first thing in the morning and register.”

Phillip sat on the couch beside Barbara and showed her his papers.

She said, “I didn’t think you’d really do it.”

“Poor Babsy,” said Phillip. “She won’t have anybody to douse Pernod on her little belly anymore.” He started to kiss her.

“That’s what you think,” Janie put in. “Do you guys think you can walk out on us like this and expect us to wait on our asses? Do you think women are suckers?”

“You’ve got to be faithful to the boys out there,” Phil said.

“Yeah?” said Janie, giving me a significant look.

I turned on the radio and stretched out on the floor with a pillow under my head.

“I’m moving out of Washington Hall,” said Phillip. “Can I live here until I get a ship?”

“I don’t care one way or the other,” said Janie.

Phillip got up and threw his sea bag behind the couch.

At this point, James Cathcart walked in and dropped his books on a chair. A big hulking sixteen-year-old freshman who was always giving out with the Noël Coward dialogue, Cathcart looked like the Hollywood version of the languid drama critic.

He said, “Hello, kids,” and then turned to Phillip and asked him if he was still thinking of going to sea.

“You’re going to help me move my stuff to my uncle’s,” Phil said.

“Then you are!” said Cathcart.

“Remember what I told you about Ramsay Allen. None of you are to tell him about this.”

We talked for a while about the possibility of Al’s finding out and what he would do if he did, and so forth, and then the conversation gradually drifted to general things.

Finally, Phillip and Barbara were discussing his favorite subject, the ultimate society.

“All artists,” he was saying. “The ultimate society has to be the completely artistic society. Each of these artist-citizens must, during the course of his lifetime, complete his own spiritual circle.”

“What do you mean, spiritual circle?” Barbara wanted to know.

The radio was on to an afternoon soap opera, and a kindly old country doctor who had just helped a young couple out of a scrape was giving them advice about life, with an organ-music background. “The thing that you must learn,” he was saying, “is that sometimes you have to do things in this life that you don’t quite like to do, but you’ve got to do them all the same.”

Phillip was explaining about his theory. “I mean the circle of one’s spiritual life. You complete the cycle of experience, in an artistic sense, and by means of art, and that is your individual creative offering to the society.”

“You know,” reflected the country doctor, “I’ve been practicing here in Elmville for almost forty-five years now, and in all that time I’ve learned one thing about human beings.”

“Just how is such a society to be attained?” Cathcart wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” Phillip said. “This is the pre-ultimate society. Don’t ask me about the details.”

“Human beings,” said the country doctor, pausing to puff on his pipe, “are essentially good. Now wait”— and he interrupted the young and bitter hero of the story—“I know what you’re going to say. But, son, I’m an old man. I’ve lived a lot more than you have. You’re only starting out on the road of life, and you might listen
to what I have to say. Maybe I’m just an old codger, but—”

“There are artists in the pre-ultimate society,” Phillip said, “who are contemporary models of the ultimate artist-citizen. I guess that as more and more people become artists, the nearer is realized the ultimate artistic society.”

“Well,” said Barbara, “maybe the Atlantic Charter is the first step toward an ultimate society. And certainly Roosevelt and Churchill aren’t artists.”

“Sometimes,” the country doctor said, “sometimes the going is tough. Life is bitter, you get discouraged, you can’t go on ... and then suddenly—”

“Well I don’t know about Roosevelt and Churchill,” said Phillip, “except that they represent the type that is going to work out the gory details of progress.”

“Then suddenly,” the country doctor said, “something happens! Things suddenly start to break in your favor, problems get solved, the hard bumps along the road of life become beds of roses for a while, and you realize—”

“The artistic man alone will find the New Vision,” Phillip said. Then he added, “For Christ’s sake turn that fucking thing off!”

I jumped up and clicked off the radio. That sort of
put an end to the discussion. Cathcart went into the bathroom and Phillip and Barbara began to neck on the couch.

“Flaming youth,” I said, and went into the small library. Janie followed me and sat on the arm of the chair.

“Mickey,” she said, “don’t go.”

“Oh take it easy. We’ll be back in two months with loads of money.”

“Mickey don’t go.”

“Baloney,” I said.

She was almost ready to cry. I took her hand and bit one of her knuckles.

“When I get back,” I said, “we’ll go to Florida.”

“I love you,” she said.

“So do I.”

“Why don’t we ever get married?”

“We will some day.”

“You bastard, you know you’ll never get around to it.”

“Sure we will. Remember that letter I wrote you from New Orleans?”

“You were just horny then,” she said. “You didn’t mean it.”

“Nuts,” I said.

I’d met her a year ago when I thought I was Doctor Faustus himself, and ever since then we’d been living
together in New York when I wasn’t out at sea. The reason why we’d never actually gotten married was money, and I was always beefing about how I hated to work, so there it hung.

We went back to the front room and Phil and Barbara were still necking. Phil was on top of her and you could see her bare thigh. I wondered what prevented them from ever copulating. Sometimes they would neck all night long on the couch without actually copulating, sometimes even in their underclothing. That sort of technical virginity was a pain in the neck.

Phillip got up and said, “Let’s all move my stuff up to my uncle’s.”

I wasn’t keen on going along until Phillip told me there’d be drinks after. His uncle would give him some more money. So we all got ready to go out, except Janie, who went into the bedroom to sulk.

I went over and kissed her on the hair. “Come with us,” I said, but she didn’t answer, and even the cat gave me a dirty look.

So Cathcart, Phillip, Barbara, and I went around the corner to Phil’s hotel, Washington Hall. We picked up all his junk in his room and took it down the elevator in dribbles.

There was a picture of Phillip’s father on the wall that said
WANTED
underneath. Right alongside it hung
a masochist’s whip which Phil tenderly laid away in a box along with the framed poster of his father. There were also paintings in reproduction, books, record albums, easels, a saber of some sort, pornographic pictures, and whole boxes of assorted junk that Phillip collected all the time.

We finally carted all that out on the sidewalk and Cathcart went down to the corner to hail a cab. He was the type that liked to hail cabs.

On our way uptown Barbara got to talking politics with me, and finally we were on the Negro question. Phillip was talking to Cathcart and only half-listening to us.

“I like the Negroes,” I told her, “but maybe I’m prejudiced because I know so many of them.”

“Well,” said Barbara, “what would you say if your sister married a Negro?”

“What!” yelled Phillip, and he turned to look at Barbara as though he were seeing her for the first time and didn’t like her.

The cab was at this point rolling by Carnegie Hall on 57th Street and a shiny black hearse was cruising alongside of us. Phillip, instead of saying anything further to Barbara, suddenly stuck his head out the window and yelled at the hearse driver, “Is he dead?”

The hearse driver was all decked out in formal dress, black homburg and all, but his face gave him away.

“Dead as a doornail,” he yelled back, and swung the hearse between two cars and slipped just by the curb and went on down Seventh Avenue. His face and his driving were all hack driver.

We all laughed and then we were on Central Park South, which is where Phillip’s uncle lived.

We lugged all the junk into the lobby of the swank apartment house and Phillip had the doorman pay the cab fare. I told Phillip I’d wait downstairs and they all went up. I wasn’t dressed for the occasion, since I hadn’t shaved for two days and all I had on was a pair of chino pants and a blue sweatshirt stained with whiskey.

I waited on the sidewalk. There was a long orange slant in the street and Central Park was all fragrant and cool and green-dark. I began to feel good because it was getting dusk, and because we would be getting a ship in a few days.

After five minutes they came down and we all hustled around the corner to a cocktail bar. Barbara and Cathcart sat side by side and ordered beer, and Phillip and I sat next to them, side by side, and ordered martinis.

We finished the martinis and ordered two more. It was a fashionable place on Seventh Avenue, and the
bartender didn’t seem to like the way Phillip and I were dressed.

Phillip started telling me about Gerald Heard’s
The Third Morality
, about biological mutation, and finally about how the more forward-looking dinosaurs mutated into mammals while the bourgeois dinosaurs became extinct.

He had a third martini. He looked at me intently and took hold of my arm. “Look,” he said. “You’re a fish in a pond. It’s drying up. You have to mutate into an amphibian, but someone keeps hanging on to you and telling you to stay in the pond, everything’s going to be all right.”

I asked him why he didn’t take yoga in that case, and he said the sea was more to the point.

The bartender had the radio going. A news broadcaster was telling about a circus fire, and I heard him say, “And the hippos were boiled to death in their tanks.” He gave these details with the unctuous relish characteristic of radio announcers.

Phillip turned to Barbara and said, “Could you go for some boiled hippo, Babsy?”

Barbara said, “I don’t think that’s funny.”

Phillip said, “Well, let’s eat anyway.”

We left the bar and went over to the Automat on 57th Street and each had a little pot of baked beans
with a strip of bacon on top. While we were eating, Phillip paid no attention to Barbara, and Cathcart had to keep her company.

Then we boarded the subway and went back downtown to Washington Square. Phillip was leaning against the door watching the darkness reel by.

Cathcart and Barbara were sitting down, and I could see her getting impatient with Phillip’s attitude. Cathcart himself looked as though he didn’t think it was good taste on Phillip’s part.

We went back to Apartment 32 and picked up Janie. She wasn’t sore at me anymore. So we all went down to the Minetta Tavern and ordered a round of Pernods.

All during this time Phillip kept making cracks at Barbara until finally Cathcart said, “What’s the matter with you tonight?”

It was the first time I had seen Phillip act that way toward Barbara, and I figured that now he had Ramsay Allen out of the way, he no longer had to rely on her.

By three o’clock we were all loaded on Pernod.