And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks (9 page)

When we got to Al’s place, over a jazz club on 52nd Street, he wasn’t home yet. I stretched out on the couch and Phil sat in the easy chair to read
Europa
.

From the couch I could see the backyard where there was an old vine-covered plaster wall with a crack in it that looked beautiful in the clear late-afternoon light. I said to Phil, “Look at that wall outside, and the exotic vine leaves. I’ll bet that’s what Montmartre looks like.”

Phillip went to the French window and stood looking out at the wall. Pretty soon I fell asleep on the couch.

When I woke up, Al and Phillip were standing over the couch telling me to get up. I turned over and started to think about a dream I’d just had. It was about some hills I’d seen in Tennessee. Then I reflected how odd it was that I wasn’t dreaming about ships at all these days, because whenever I go to sea I dream about it beforehand.

A while later the door opened just a few inches and Will Dennison slipped in his six-foot-three shadow. I was startled because he had come in without a sound. He was wearing a seersucker coat, and a cigarette hung half-smoked from his mouth. He sat down in the easy chair and Al and Phillip began telling him about our luncheon with the union girl and how it had all worked
out. I sat up on the couch and watched Dennison’s reaction.

There wasn’t ever much reaction to note in Dennison. I had known him for several months and still couldn’t make him out. He hailed from Reno, Nevada, and he had a look about him that suggested racetracks and gambling tables. But that was the external impression only. He spoke in a slow surly drawl that had an incongruous tint of refinement to it. And I knew that he was involved in all kinds of shady activities. He was always getting mysterious phone calls from Chicago, and some of the guys that visited him in his apartment seemed pleasant enough except that they had a tight, secret look about them.

It seemed that Will had an old lady who still lived in Reno and kept sending him packages of food, and that every Christmas, according to Phillip and Al, he always packed up and took a trip west. There was something distinctively western about Dennison, and I often wondered why he stayed in the East. Of course there was some talk about the unhealthy atmosphere out West for him, where it was rumored he had put something over on a number of people who would be glad to see him sometime. Evidently, his annual Christmas journey was on the q.t.

Dennison reminded me of a cowboy, somehow. But
not the cowboy you see in the movies on a white horse with a pearl-gray Stetson and a heavily ornamented double holster. Will is the cowboy who wears a plain vest and half-Stetson, who is always sitting at a card table in the saloon and withdrawing silently with his money when the hero and the villain start shooting it out.

W
EDNESDAY NIGHT WAS THE SAME STORY
. W
HEN
I got to Al’s on my way home from work, there sat Ryko and Phillip. It seems they had slept late so couldn’t get a ship, but tomorrow for sure and so forth. I was getting disgusted and could see this thing running on for weeks. We started off for dinner.

In the hall I ran into Agnes. She had spent the day interviewing people down at the House of Detention and found out for sure that Hugh was really there. Next day she planned to get a lawyer for him so he could get out on bail. She had quit her job so as to give all her time to the matter. I gave her the name of a lawyer I knew who got a friend of mine off with two months after he had been caught inside an office building at four a.m. with $1,500 in his pocket that didn’t belong to him.

I asked Agnes if she would join us for dinner but she said no, she was broke. I said, “On me,” and she still said no. She was always like that. So I said good night and walked out.

The others were standing in the street in front of the house.

I said, “Agnes wouldn’t come for dinner because she is broke. Some people have some pride.”

Phillip said, “People get silly ideas.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but you’re an artist. You don’t believe in decency and honesty and gratitude. Where shall we eat?”

Phillip said he wanted to go to the Fifth Avenue Playhouse and see
Pépé le Moko
after dinner, so we decided to eat in the Village. We took the Seventh Avenue subway down to Sheridan Square and went in Chumley’s to eat. Phillip started right off ordering Pernod and daiquiris.

After dinner we walked to the Fifth Avenue Playhouse. Phillip and Ryko got in for half price when they showed merchant marine papers. When we were in the theater Phillip went in the row first and sat down, Ryko went next, then me, then Al last.

During the movie Al kept craning his neck to look across at Phillip, and finally moved to the other side
of the front row next, where he had an unobstructed view of Phillip’s profile.

After the movie we went to MacDonald’s Tavern, which is a queer place, and it was packed with fags all screaming and swishing around. Every now and then one of them would utter a shrill cry.

We pushed our way to the bar and ordered some drinks. The older fags were looking frankly at Phillip, but the younger ones pretended not to notice him and stood around in groups, talking and looking at him out of the corner of their eyes.

There were several sailors standing around and I heard one of them say, “Where are the women in this fucking town?”

A well-dressed middle-aged man started talking to Phillip about James Joyce and told Phillip he didn’t know anything about literature, trying to establish himself in a position of dominance. Then he bought Phillip a drink.

A little thin black-haired man with a slightly insane grin on his face came up to Al and asked him for a cigarette. Al produced the package and there was only one cigarette in it. The man said, “The last cigarette. Well, I’ll take it,” which he did.

Al looked at him coldly and turned his head away.

The man began to explain that in the Village you had to act like a character. He was from Hartford, Connecticut, and looking for a woman. Then he caught sight of two lesbians who were standing by the piano, and his eyes glistened.

“Women!” he said.

He went over and stood behind them, looking at them with his insane grin.

We left MacDonald’s and went around the corner to Minetta’s.

Phillip said, “I wonder what Babs and Janie are doing tonight?” and Ryko said, “Well, we’ll see them later.”

The usual assortment of stupid characters was assembled in Minetta’s. Joe Gould was sitting at a table. A man bumped into Al and said he was sorry.

Al said, “That’s quite all right.”

The man said, “I apologized because I’m a gentleman, but you wouldn’t know about that.”

Al looked at him, and the man said, “It so happens that I was intercollegiate boxing champion at the University of Michigan.”

Nobody said anything and after a while the champion wandered away to bother somebody else. People in bars are always claiming to be boxers, hoping thereby to ward off attack, like a black snake will vibrate its tail in leaves and try to impersonate a rattlesnake.

Everyone had a few drinks. Al sat down with a fairly good-looking girl and began to talk to her. Phillip was standing at the bar, and I saw him showing his seaman’s papers to someone who was trying to show him a document proving something about what he did in the last war.

I sat down with Al and the girl. It was hard work talking to her. Al was telling her about the movie, and I mentioned that I had been to Algiers.

At this the girl looked at me with great hostility and demanded, “When were you in Algiers?”

I said, “In 1934.”

She continued to look at me with an expression of stupid suspicion and anger.

I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nut-house. It doesn’t make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact. Right then I decided to go home.

I said, “Well Al, I have to get up early tomorrow. I think I’ll go along.” So I got up and left and started to walk home.

As I was walking past Tony Pastor’s I saw Pat, the lesbian bouncer, throw a drunken young sailor out into the street. The sailor said, “That place is full of fucking queers.” He swung at the air and nearly fell on his face, then he staggered away, muttering to himself.

I walked over to Seventh Avenue, then up to Christopher Street to buy the morning papers. On my way back I saw there was an argument in front of George’s, so I crossed over to see what was going on.

The proprietor was standing in the doorway arguing with three people he had just thrown out of the joint. One of the men kept saying, “I write stories for the
Saturday Evening Post
.”

The proprietor said, “I don’t care what you do, Jack, I don’t want you in my place. Now beat it,” and he advanced on the group. They shrank away, but when the proprietor turned to go back in, the man who wrote for the
Saturday Evening Post
came forward again and the whole process was repeated.

As I walked away the proprietor was saying, “Why don’t you go somewhere else? There are plenty of other places in New York.”

I had the feeling that all over America such stupid arguments were taking place on street corners and in bars and restaurants. All over America, people were pulling credentials out of their pockets and sticking them under someone else’s nose to prove they had been somewhere or done something. And I thought someday everyone in America will suddenly jump up and say “I don’t take any shit!” and start pushing and cursing and clawing at the man next to him.

A
T TEN O’CLOCK
T
HURSDAY MORNING
P
HILLIP
threw a glassful of water in my face and said, “Come on, get up.”

I was sleeping on the couch with all my clothes on, and Janie was sleeping in the bedroom. Phillip was all washed and combed and ready to go.

I was still half asleep when we got to the Union Hall, fortified by a cup of coffee and a sandwich from a Greek lunch cart.

There was a call for a whole deck crew just as we walked into the hall. We ran up to the window and I threw in my card with six other ABs. There were only seven cards for nine jobs so I was certain to get a job at last. But the dispatcher threw back two cards, one of which was mine.

“What the hell’s wrong with my card?” I yelled through the cage.

“Yeah!” another AB wanted to know.

“There was a meeting last night,” said the dispatcher, “and you didn’t attend. Next time you’ll know there was a meeting, brothers.”

I grabbed another AB’s card from the window and looked at the back of it. It was stamped “Attended Meeting June 26, 1944.”

I went back to sit on a bench and swear.

Phillip was standing over me. “Well, what’s next?” he asked.

I looked up at him a little helplessly, and then I said, “We’ll have to figure something out.”

We sat around and thought for a while, then I decided to pull something I knew would work. “Come on,” I said to Phillip, and led him into one of the offices in back.

There was a union official sitting and talking over a phone. I leaned my hands on his desk and waited for his full attention. He kept on talking for ten minutes and then hung up.

I said, “Look, brother, I was just now getting a job when the dispatcher threw my card back and said it wasn’t stamped for last night’s meeting. Does that mean I can’t get a ship?”

“It means you’ll have to go to the open job window, brother.”

“Well neither one of us”—I turned and gestured at Phillip—“could attend last night’s meeting because we were in Washington. We’d been down there a couple of days to sit in on the Senate and House debates over the Pillsbury postwar bill. You see, we got drunk and decided to go down there—”

“What’d you think of the debates?” the official interrupted.

“Why,” I said, turning to Phillip, “Phil and I’ve never seen anything like it. It was outrageous to sit and listen to those southern Democrat poll-tax reactionary bastards like John of Georgia and Banken of Mississippi make speeches against a bill like Pillsbury’s.”

The union official had a faint smile on his face. I was going to say something else when the phone rang. The official was busy for a minute, then he hung up and I started again. “So like I say—”

“Let’s see the cards,” he interrupted me and held out his hand. We gave him the cards and he stamped them.

“Thanks,” I said gravely, like a brother just bailed out of jail by the union after a strike.

We walked out. I looked at the cards. They were stamped “Attended Meeting June 26, 1944.”

“That was pretty good,” Phil said.

“The psychology,” I said, “is that they want as many intelligent liberals on the ships as possible, to spread around the dogma and to convert simple dopes into mouthpieces for the working class. What he’s practically saying to us is ‘spread it around, boys.’”

We found Ramsay Allen looking for us in the hall and told him about the union official. Al nodded appreciatively. Then, while Phillip was in the foyer buying cigarettes, I asked Al what he was going to do about the blank cards.

“I won’t do anything,” he said. “Phillip said he wouldn’t let me on the same ship with him. It’s no use.”

I shrugged my shoulders and felt better.

Phillip came back and we stood around looking at the shipping board.

“I feel it in my bones,” I said to Phillip. “We get our ship today or tomorrow.”

Al was looking at Phillip all the time, and Phillip wouldn’t pay any attention to him. Finally he said to Al, “Why don’t you spend the afternoon getting money instead of hanging around here.”

Al said, “Well yes, that’s an idea. I could do a little calcimining for old Mrs. Burdett.”

“Well go ahead, then,” Phillip said, and Al immediately left.

Phil and I had a little lunch and some beer at the Anchor Bar, waited around for jobs in the hall, read, dozed on the benches, and finally it was almost closing time again. We had passed up several jobs on tankers because we wanted to go on a freighter. Now that our cards were good, we were getting fussy. Tankers that went to France stayed offshore and we wouldn’t be able to jump ship.