Saint Jack (12 page)

Behind me, Big Hing was screwing the lid back on to the can of cigarettes, and that was the only sound; the tin lid caught and clicked and rasped in the metal grooves, and was finally silent.

Big Hing was grave, reflectively biting his upper lip with his lower teeth. He banged the cigarette tin onto the trestle table, making the beads on the abacus spin and tick. He became brisk. He led me to my cubicle, two beaverboard partitions, without a ceiling, narrow as a urinal, and he shot the curtain along its rod, jangling the chrome hoops. I climbed onto the stool and put my head down. I did not turn around. I knew the
Allegro
had sailed without me.

T
HE SECOND TIME
I met Hing, when I was still buying for the
Allegro
and thought of him as a friend, he took me to an opium parlor, a tiny smoke-smeared attic room off North Bridge Road. It was one of the stories I told later in hotel bars to loosen up nervous fellers whom I had spotted as possible clients. I had expected the opium parlor to be something like a wang house filled with sleepy hookers relaxing on cushions; I was not prepared for the ghostly sight of five elderly addicts, dozing hollow-eyed in droopy wrinkled pajamas, and two equally decrepit “cooks” scraping dottle out of black pipes. The room was dark; a single shutter, half-open, gave the only light; the ceiling panels seemed kept in place by the cobwebs that were woven over the cracks between the panels and the beams they dangled from. The walls were marked with the cats' paws of Chinese characters. There were some scarred wooden furniture, broken crates and stools, and low cots and string beds with soiled pillows where the derelict men slept with their mouths open. A very old woman in wide silk trousers and red clogs drank coffee out of a condensed milk tin and watched me. It was an atmosphere only an opium trance could improve. I anxiously sucked one pipeful; none of the skinny dreamers acknowledged me, and we left. In front of the opium parlor, where Hing's Riley sat, a parking attendant, a round-faced girl in a straw hat and gray jacket, was writing out a ticket. Hing saw the joke immediately, and we both laughed: the parking ticket at the opium den. I embellished it as a story by increasing the overtime parking fine and glamorizing the dingy room, giving it silk pillows and the addicts youth.

The opium parlor was Hing's idea. He had convinced me that I could ask anything of him; he said, “Singapore have everything,” and he wanted a chance to prove it. Faced by variety, my imagination was confounded; I chose simple pleasures, outings, walks, the Police Band concerts at the Botanical Gardens, fishing from the pier. Hing made suggestions. He introduced me to Madam Lum and her chief attraction, Mona, a girl with the oddest tastes, whom I used to describe truthfully to fellers, saying, “She's not fooling—she really likes her work, and everyone comes back singing her praises!” Hing took me to the “Screw Inn,” a little bungalow of teen-age girls off Mountbatten Road, and he taught me that yellow-roofed taxis were the tip-off: more than two parked together in a residential area indicated a brothel close by. At Hing's urging I had my first taste of the good life: a morning shave, flat on my back at the Indian barbershop on Orchard Road (Chinese barbers used dull razors—the sparse Chinese beard was easy to scrape off); a heavy lunch at the Great Shanghai, followed by a nap and a massage by a naked Chinese girl who sat astride me and kneaded my back and who afterward invited another girl into the room so that the three of us could fool for the whole afternoon. After tea, both girls gave me a bath and we went for a stroll; I walked them to a bar, had a last drink, then early to bed with a novel—the sequence of a lovely exhausting day, which gave me a stomach full of honey and the feeling that the skin I wore was brand new. Hing paid the bills. He had few pleasures himself, and he wasn't a drinker. What he liked were big Australian girls in nightclubs who stripped to the buff and then got down on all fours and shook and howled like cats. He understood food; he taught me the fine points of ordering Szechwan meals, the fried eels in sauce, the hot-sour soup, poached sea slugs, steamed pomfret, and crisp duck skin that was eaten in a soft bun. He gave me bottles of ginseng wine, which he claimed was an aphrodisiac tonic, and on the appropriate festival, a whole moon cake wrapped in red paper. He said he was glad I wasn't British, and why wasn't I married, and how did I like Singapore?

All this time I was his customer; the ritual friendship ended when I became his employee, and at 600 Straits dollars a month I was treated as a difficult burden, crowding his shop with my bulk, wasting his time, eating his money. He stopped speaking to me directly, and if the two of us were in the shop alone he assumed a preoccupied busy air, rattling scraps of paper, pretending to look for things, banging doors, groaning, saying his commercial rosary on his abacus. He spoke to me through his dog; my mistakes and lapses got the dog a kick in the ribs. I thought I might be promoted, but I learned very early that no promotion would come my way. The job interested me enough so that I could do it without any encouragement from Hing. For Hing to thank me, something he never did, would have been an admission on his part of dependency, a loss of face: civility was a form of weakness for him. I understood this and took his rudeness to be the gratitude it was. We had no contract; after our verbal agreement Hing arranged a visa for me which allowed me to stay in Singapore as long as I worked for him. This was convenient (the bribe came out of his pocket), but limiting: if he fired me the visa would be canceled and I would be deported. He needed me too much to fire me, but I knew that to remind him of this would be to ask for a sacking, for that was the only way he could demonstrate I wasn't needed.

But I was. A year on the
Allegro
and all the calls we had made at Singapore had acquainted me with most of the other vessels and skippers who called regularly, and I knew many of the fellers in the Maritime Building who managed the shipping lines. The advantage I had, which Hing had hinted at, only dawned on me later: I was white. The rest of the ship chandlers in Singapore were either Indian or Chinese. As a paleface in the late fifties in Singapore I drank in clubs and bars where “Asians,” as they were called, were not allowed. Largely, I drank in these places because I was not welcome in the Chinese clubs, and I didn't like the toddy in the Indian ones. It offended me that I was forced to drink with my own race—later, I would not do otherwise: I couldn't relax with fellers of other races—but in the end, this simple fact of racial exclusiveness landed Hing with many contracts for supplying European ships. I was learning the ropes: Chinese and Indians transacted all their business in offices, Europeans did it in clubs and used their offices as phone booths.

A club, even a so-called exclusive one, was easy to enter but hard to join. The doormen were Malays or Sikhs, and I had learned how to say “How's every little thing, brother?” in Malay and Punjabi. In any case, they would not have dared to turn an
ang moh
away; and as for signing the drink chits, I had a number of match tricks and brain twisters that I'd spring on anyone drinking alone. The loser had to sign for the drink. I never lost.

“Just in from Bangkok,” I'd say. “Feller up there showed me a cute gimmick. You've probably seen it. No? Well, you put six matches down like this, make a little sort of circle with them. There. Now—I wonder if I've got that right? I'm a real jerk when it comes to these tricky things. What you're supposed to do is rearrange five matches without disturbing—”

After I explained, I'd say, “Loser signs, okay?” and the drink would be as good as mine. That was a British con. Americans were easier. “Bet you can't name the twelve apostles,” or “Whose picture's on the hundred?” or “What's the capital of Maine?” secured my drinks with Americans, and with a drink in my hand I could stay in a club bar for hours, making up stories, chatting, or telling jokes that appealed to the listener's prejudices by confirming them. There were not many Chinese jokes, apart from the funny names, of which I had a long list, culled from the Singapore telephone directory (“Pass me the phone book, Ali; my friend here doesn't believe Fook Yew and Wun Fatt Joo really live in Singapore”). There were many good Indian jokes, and these always went down well. I told Englishmen the joke about the Texan who's accused of sodomizing animals. “Cows, pigs, mules,” says his accuser, a girl he wants to take home. She goes on, “Sheep, dogs, cats, chickens—” The Texan interrupts in annoyance: “What do you mean,
chickens?
”

Americans were always bowled over by the story of the Englishman whose pecker is accidentally cut off. After a painful month he finally decides to see a doctor, who says he knows how to sew the thing back on. “Just hand it over and I'll see to it straightway.” The Englishman slaps his pockets, says, “I've got the damned thing here somewhere,” and gives the doctor a huge cigar. “This is a cigar,” says the perplexed doctor, and “My word,” says the Englishman, “I must have smoked my cock!”

Sometimes I clowned around, like making a great show of ordering cherries in brandy, simply to say, “To tell the truth, I hate these cherries, but I like the spirit in which they're given!” So, even without the match tricks and brain twisters, someone was always buying me a drink and saying, “You're a card.” And in clubs where I was not a member, fellers said, “We haven't seen you lately—missed you at the film show,” and “Don't forget the A.G.M. next week, about time we tackled that gatecrashers' clause”; eventually, a feller would ask, “Say, Jack, what's your line of work?”

“Me? I'm in ship chandling.” I never said I was a water clerk.

“Odd, that,” would be the reply.

“I know exactly what you mean,” I'd say. “But the way I figure it, this business could use a little streamlining. Methods haven't changed since Raffles's time, and by God neither have some of the groceries they're flogging, from the taste of them! Shops haven't been swept in years, bread's as hard as old Harry, weevils in the rice—mind you, I've got nothing against our Asiatic brothers. It's just as you say, they work like dogs. On the other hand, your Indian is never really happy handling meat—but you can't hold their religion against them, can you?”

“One can't, I suppose. But still—”

“And your Chinese ship chandler—he'll give you a turd and tell you it's an orchid. Shall I tell you what I saw one day in a Chinese shop? This'll kill you—”

The feller would be agreeing with me and putting his oar in from time to time. I'd tell my valve story and he'd cap it with a better and terrifying one about defective life jackets or wormy provisions, all the while working up the indignation to change ship chandlers.

My most effective selling ploy, which I used just before mealtimes, when conversations always got around to food, was my English breakfast. This never failed. The English, I had discovered, had a weakness for large breakfasts; it might have had a literary source—a Dickens character having a beefsteak with his tea—or a tradition begun on those cold mornings when the Thames used to freeze over, or war rationing. Whatever the reason, it was an inspired way of getting a contract.

I hit on this a few months after I began ship chandling in Singapore, with a feller from the Victoria Shipping Lines. It was on the verandah of the Singapore Cricket Club, on a Saturday just before tiffin. The feller was sitting beside me in a wicker chair and we were watching some ladies bowling on the grass. This form of bowling was exactly like the Italian game
bocce
, which my father played in an alley in the North End every Sunday afternoon. It was the only game I knew well, and I was commenting on the ladies' match to the feller on my right. “Gotta have more left-hand side . . . Not enough legs on that one . . . Kissed it . . . Never make it . . . She's out for blood—it's going like a demon—” The ladies took a rest. I turned to the feller and said, “Seems there was this Texan—”

“Very amusing,” he said, when I finished, his understatement contradicting the honking laughter he couldn't suppress. “Have a drink?”

“
Thank
you.”

“Actually, I'm hungry,” he said. “No time for breakfast this morning. Ruins the day, don't you find?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “That's what I try to tell these skippers I deal with. Give a seaman a slap-up breakfast and he'll do a fair day's work. Cut down on his lunch, but don't ever tamper with that breakfast of his!”

“My idea of a really topnotch breakfast is kippers, porridge oats, eggs, and a pot of tea—hot and strong.” He smacked his lips.

“You're forgetting your fruit juice—juices are
very
important. And choice of cereals, some bubble and squeak, huge rashers of bacon, or maybe a beefsteak and chips, stack of toast, hot crumpets, marmalade. Boy!” The feller was nodding in agreement and swallowing. “It's a funny thing, you know,” I went on. “These ship chandlers don't supply fresh juice—oh, no! Course the fresh is cheaper and the fruit grows locally. They give you this tinned stuff.”

“You can taste the metal.”

“Sure you can!”

“Potatoes make a nice breakfast,” he said, still swallowing.

“Hashbrowns—fry 'em up crisp and hot and serve them with gouts of H. P. Sauce.”

“I'm famished,” he said, and looked at his watch.

“Me too,” I said. “I wouldn't mind a big English breakfast right this minute. I envy the seamen on some of the ships I supply.”

“All the same,” he said, “it sounds an expensive meal.”

“Not on your nelly,” I said, and quoted some prices, adding, “I buy in bulk, see, so I can pass the savings on to the customer. I still make a profit—everyone gains.”

“It sounds frightfully reasonable.”

“And that's not all—”