Chapter 2

I slept all morning in an abandoned candy store, with a cracked front window and a busted screen door at the rear through which I crawled in and out. Everything was dusty, the odor of stale chocolate lingered in the corners; I was sleeping the last time with my childhood. About noon I woke up and began wandering around the waterfront. The place where I had fallen off the dredge was only a couple of blocks from the ferry landing, and that afternoon I got a job washing coffee cups in the lunchroom of the Oakland—San Francisco ferry. It only paid sixty dollars a month, but I could eat all the doughnuts I wanted, and whenever the counterman left to go to the washroom, I drank the coffee cream straight out of the dispensers. That was my first ship, the ferry with two front ends that couldn’t make up its mind which way it was going. I didn’t know either, and for eight months the ferry and I went back and forth.

The day after my eighteenth birthday I took out my seaman’s papers and shipped out as a wiper on the Lucknow Line. I sailed with this same company for five years, as wiper and oiler and later as third engineer. It was on the old Emil Lucknow, my first deepwater ship, that I met Victor Gamoff. In those days he was sailing as second mate, a small wiry Russian with a red face and narrow shoulders, his ack eyes set in the deepest crow’s-feet I had ever seen. He was probably only in his late fifties then but he always seemed to me like an old man; he had an old man’s dry odor, an old man’s quick birdlike way of moving his head, a habit of sniffing to himself when he was standing watch alone on the bridge. His short iron-gray hair was beginning to get thin, and the scalp underneath was seared and mottled by the sun. He had been sailing in the tropics for twenty years but his skin never tanned; instead, it burned and peeled off and then burned again. He never paid any attention to this or any other physical discomfort. He never wore a hat, and all the years I knew him he always dressed the same way: blue serge pants, a black turtleneck sweater, and a pair of soiled tennis shoes. In the winter he would add a Navy officer’s greatcoat two sizes too large for him, fastened in the front with a single gold button. Sometimes on the beach the police would take him for a vagrant; Victor would say nothing for a while and then he would foxily pull out his seaman’s papers.

Victor was always talking and yet somehow he gave the impression of being reticent. He was devious about his past and told a number of contradictory stories: that he had been a cadet in the Czarist navy and escaped from Kronstadt on a schoolship at the time of the October Revolution, shipped out as a cabin boy on the P & O, fought in the Civil War with Budenny’s cavalry, helped to shell the Winter Palace from the cruiser Aurora. He also had a story about living in Paris with Clemenceau’s old mistress, and another one about sailing around the Hom on the grain barks from Australia. I never knew which of these stories to believe and in those days I more or less believed them all. Perhaps they were all true, because it was obvious he had been around for a long time; he spoke four languages and he seemed to know all the back alleys and cheap hotels in any port where the ship would happen to call. Victor took a liking to me from the first, treated me like a son and told me who to watch out for on the ship and who I could trust, and the first time I went ashore with him he got me drunk and robbed me of sixty-five dollars.

We had just come back from Australia and Mexico and the ship was tied up in Alameda, at the Bethlehem yards. The engine room was shut down and I had nothing to do, but I was supposed to be on watch from eight till midnight. About eleven o’clock he came in the crew’s messroom where I was sitting drinking coffee. I knew who he was by this time, but I had never spoken to him. He sniffed at me once or twice and then he said, ”Come on, kid, we’re going on the beach.”

“I can’t, I’m on watch.”

“Agh, I’ll square it with the engineer. Come on now. What are you watching anyhow, the coffee pot?”

I don’t think he even knew who I was; he just didn’t like to go ashore alone. I was wearing a blue work shirt and a pair of dirty khaki pants, and he wouldn’t let me change clothes. He dragged me after him through the shipyard to the Webster Street bus. As long as I knew him, he would never spend any money on taxis; he would walk or go in buses, or if necessary, he would hire a car, but he refused to ride in taxis because he didn’t like to listen to the meter clicking.

“Na listen, a man you can argue with, but that machine it’s got you by the short hair.” Victor disliked anything involuntary, even sneezing, because he liked to be the one who made things happen and not the one things happened to. For this reason he was a good ship’s officer; he knew everything that was going on in his watch and it was done the way he wanted it, not the way somebody else thought it ought to be done.

That first night it seemed to me that Victor had a funny way of amusing himself on the beach. We took a bus into Oakland and then we started walking. Victor went by all the back alleys and after the first half hour I was helplessly lost. Finally we ended in a kind of tavern on the east side of town near San Leandro Bay. Victor went into the washroom first and stayed a long time, and then he came out and had a mysterious conference with somebody in the back room. While all this was going on I sat out in front with a beer which I bought with my own money. After this business was over, I thought Victor would sit down and have a drink, but instead he came out of the back room looking elaborately inscrutable and beckoned me to follow him. We left the tavern and started walking again. This time we went downtown and took a bus to a Chinese restaurant out on San Pablo Avenue, halfway to Berkeley. He told me to wait in the bar and then he disappeared again. By this time I felt a need to visit the men’s room myself. The urinal was occupied, so I opened a stall and found Victor with his coat unbuttoned and the front of the turtleneck sweater pulled up. I saw a strip of adhesive tape across the lean belly, and above it the ribs outlined in the hard flesh. “Go on, lad, get out,” he told me.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m looking for fleas. Go on now, beat it.”

I’m getting tired of this. I’m going back to the ship.”

“Agh, now wait. You kids are all alike, you’ve got no patience.” He disappeared into the back room again as he had in the other place. I didn’t know what was going on but it seemed that a lot of money was changing hands. I thought perhaps Victor was paying his bills from the last trip, or for some reason these places owed him money. I sat in the bar drinking beer for almost an hour, with nothing to look at but a calendar distributed by a Chinese undertaker in Hongkong. The place was deserted. Finally he came out with his usual foxy look and we went off to catch another bus. When we got back to the waterfront it was two o’clock in the morning, and Victor took me to a house he knew off Middle Harbor Road near the railroad yards. There he went into the washroom again and came out pulling pieces of adhesive tape off a ten-dollar bill. With this he bought a bottle of rye which we drank out of tumblers, sitting on a rump-sprung plush sofa in the parlor. It was a slow night and the girls were sitting around in kimonos, bored. They knew Victor and they knew he wouldn’t spend any money except for the six dollars he had paid for the whiskey. One girl who was evidently new plumped herself down and began patting his cheek, but he told her to go about her business. “An old man like me, it isn’t good for the heart,” he muttered to the other arm of the sofa.

Later, after I had gone ashore with Victor in a lot of different ports, I began to understand the private way he had worked out of making love. He would sit around all night drinking whiskey and looking at the girls with his money taped to his chest, and then he would go back to the ship and take care of the matter in his own way, behind the locked door of his cabin. It wasn’t that he was stingy; it was his emotions he was wary of giving away and not his money. The idea of paying to have this taken care of by somebody else contradicted his whole private philosophy. It was a situation in which the girls remained professional while you got excited. He knew he was highly sexed and basically emotional, and he was afraid of revealing something private about himself in a moment of excitement to these girls who were cynically interested only in his money. Victor preferred to arrange things so that other people lost their heads while he remained calm.

That night, before I understood all this, I thought perhaps that he was impotent or just that he was an old man and afraid of his heart, as he said. I didn’t spend very much time puzzling out other people’s psychologies anyhow and it didn’t make any difference to me. I sat around for an hour or so drinking his whiskey, and then I got bored and decided to go upstairs with a girl named Abby, who was short-legged and strong as a bull and looked ready for anything. Everything about her was hard, mechanical, and business-like; it was like going to bed with a tractor. There was a half a bottle of whiskey standing on her dresser and afterwards I helped myself to a drink. I imagined the bottle was a courtesy she provided for customers, but when she added up the bill she wanted me to pay extra for the whiskey. “Five dollars short time, a dollar for the drink, makes six dollars,” she told me, counting it up stolidly on her square fingers.

We had an argument about it but she was as hard as nails. My voice began to rise as I explained to her how unlikely it was that I would pay this exorbitant price for two ounces of drugstore whiskey. Finally I was making a disturbance. She had the build of a female wrestler and she could have thrown me bodily out of the room if she wanted, but she only sat on the bed with her arms crossed and said nothing. The noise I was making was disturbing the other guests and finally they sent for Victor. As soon as they explained it to him he told me, “Pay the girl, kid.”

“Like hell.”

“You drank the drink, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, what you use you pay for,” agreed Abby in her toneless voice. “Otherwise go to the Midnight Mission.”

“A dollar for a drink? I’ll give you a fat ear before I give you that.”

Victor said it was not yet established who would give who a fat ear. They had a strong boy out in the kitchen who had had a lot of practice. “Pay the bill, kid. How much do you want from this girl? A dollar’s worth? Ten dollars? She’s going to give you exactly what you pay for.” He looked at her as though asking her to confirm what he said.

“Eh?”

Abby shrugged, sitting on the bed in a sleazy wrapper that had fallen open in front.

I told him, “What she gave me wasn’t worth a lead nickel.”

“Make up your mind, kid. It’s the way she says. You can go to the Midnight Mission and sing hymns for soup, or if you want to pay your money you can play with the girls. Give her the money, kid.”

When I took out my billfold he snatched it from me, found a twenty-dollar bill, and gave it to Abby. “Here, go get the kid a bottle of his own if he wants to drink. The bonded rye, not this stuff you’ve got in your room, it’s good for cleaning paint brushes maybe.”

Abby padded away to the kitchen and got a bottle of rye. Victor sent her back for some glasses and ice and she obediently did as he said, coming back carrying the three glasses with her fingers inside them. I didn’t know what to do, break something, get up and hit Victor, or just say nothing and go away. Instead the minutes passed and I sat there with them and drank. The three of us finished the bottle, there in the sour-smelling room with the unmade bed and the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Abby was on the bed with one leg folded under her bare haunch, I sat on a chair, and Victor on a kind of pouffe or footstool with busted springs. The covers were thrown back and in the middle of the bed there was a damp spot the size of a saucer. Victor drank very little; I don’t think he filled his glass up after the first round. Sometime later I had a vague memory of moving to the floor, which was softer than the chair and didn’t share its peculiar tendency to tilt slowly to one side as though the legs were sinking in sand. But after a while the floor began tilting too. Gently, almost imperceptibly, the whole room turned until I felt the carpet rise and touch my ear. I could smell the dust of the floor, and from somewhere inside my head there was a soft and not unpleasant buzzing sound, like the wings of moths.

“Agh, he’s only a kid.”

The walls and the floor went on revolving slowly. Hands fumbled and searched in my pockets; I was lifted from the floor and put onto something soft. There I lay with my eyes closed listening to the soft buzzing, while voices that had nothing to do with me talked a long way off.

When I woke up, it was dark and I was alone in the room. I was lying face down on the bed with one leg dangling onto the floor, while rhythmic waves of nausea formed in my stomach and rose toward my throat. I got up and groped my way to the bathroom with my eyes half shut, feeling my way along the wall. I found the right door, but barely in time. After I had been sick, I felt better. I was still weak and my stomach felt fluttery but my head was clear.

I looked at my watch and saw it was after five o’clock. I felt I needed a smoke and went back in the bedroom to look for my cigarettes, but I couldn’t find them. Downstairs in the parlor the lights were still burning, but the room was empty except for a girl lying asleep on the sofa with her mouth open. She was naked except for a soiled dime-store kimono; it had fallen open and one breast hung out like a spoiled orange. I found a pack of cigarettes in the corner of an overstuffed chair and lit one, wondering if I was going to be sick again. They were women’s cigarettes, weak, with a sweetish taste. I sat down and smoked, trying to swallow my nausea.

The girl on the sofa was lying in an odd posture. Her head had fallen to one side, and with her mouth open she looked like a corpse. I went up closer and looked at her. Where the kimono had fallen open I could see the yellow breast rising and falling; there was a bruise on it, a splotch of blue-black streaked with green. One leg hung over the edge of the sofa, the slipper half off and dangling from the toe. I stood looking at her for a minute and then I turned away.

The room smelled of cheap liquor, fried onions, and perfume. I felt I had to get out or I would be sick again. But I hadn’t paid any attention to the plan of the house when I came in, and now I couldn’t find the door. In a panic, the nausea rising in me again, I felt my way down the hall, found a doorknob, and got outside into the street barely in time.

In the cold air I felt better. It was winter and still dark; the air was chill. A light rain had fallen and the streets were wet. I began walking down the road looking for a taxi. I had no idea what part of town I was in except that it was somewhere near the waterfront. I turned onto another street that went over the railroad tracks on a bridge and came out on the other side in a shabby district of warehouses. There were no streetlights and it was so dark I could hardly see the buildings on either side. It didn’t look like a very good place to find a taxi, but it did look like a good place to get rolled. When I thought of that I reached back mechanically to check for my billfold, but the pocket was empty.

My first impulse was to go back to the house and look for it. But then I realized the door was locked and everybody asleep, and even if anybody came to the door, I would look a little naive explaining to one of the girls or to the strong boy in the kitchen that I wanted my billfold back. Besides, it was not very likely that the billfold was in the house. I began to remember dimly the sensation of hands going through my pockets, unhurriedly and systematically, the way you check the pockets of a suit before you send it to the cleaners, and I knew now whose hands they were. There was still some change in my right-hand pocket: a quarter, a dime, and three pennies. In a sudden anger I threw the coins across the street and heard them jangle on the pavement in the darkness.

I started walking again. I didn’t know which direction I was going but I felt I had to walk, I had somehow to expend my physical energy, or I would break out in an uncontrollable anger with nothing to be angry at. At the same time I wanted to be angry, but I wanted to save the anger for later. I wandered around in the dark streets for perhaps a half an hour, deliberately letting the pressure build up in me because I had an idea that until I passed the cracking point and did something violent, broke something or hit somebody, they, the others, would not accept me and would go on treating me as a child. This was a primitive idea but no one had ever offered me any better ideas. I even felt a kind of exultation now that the solution to everything was so simple. A light rain was beginning to fall again and I felt the chill through my thin shirt. Then in a long street lined with a corrugated-iron fence, I heard a noise behind me, the sound of tires on the wet pavement. I turned, and a car appeared out of the darkness and pulled in beside me with its headlights switched off. A red light came on and glared at me blindingly.

The door opened and somebody got out on the right side. When he came out into the red light I saw it was a young cop in a rubber poncho carrying a flashlight.

“Where’re you going, fella?” he asked easily.

“Back to my ship.”

He was holding the flashlight on me and I couldn’t see him very well. “Got your shipping papers?”

I reached for them mechanically, but they had been in the billfold. “No,” I said flatly, almost belligerently.

“Haven’t you got a landing card or something?”

Finally in my shirt pocket I found the slip of paper the guard had given me at the gangway. I handed it over and he looked at it in the light from the flashlight.

“What ship are you on?”

“Emil Lucknow.”

He turned questioningly toward the car. From inside a scratchy voice said, “She’s over in Alameda, at the Bethlehem.”

The younger cop who was talking to me was impersonal and detached but there was no unfriendliness in his voice. “You’re going the wrong way, fella. It’s kind of late to be walking around. Get in, we’ll give you a lift.”

He handed me back my landing slip and I got in the back seat of the car. There was a wire screen between the front seat and the back, and the door handles were taken off so you couldn’t open the doors from the inside. The other cop put the car in gear and drove off without a word. In the light from the instrument panel I could see that the one who had talked to me was not much older than I was, with a clean pink face and white, almost albino hair. His poncho and the plastic cover on his cap were beaded with raindrops, and there were fine drops like dew in the white hair on the back of his neck. The other one, the driver, was an old waterfront cop with a creased brown neck like a buffalo. He didn’t turn around and I never saw his face. Inside the car, it was warm and comfortable and there was a smell of cigarette smoke. The blond cop had laid a cigarette in the ashtray when they stopped, and now he picked it up and began smoking again. I sat quietly in the darkness, my hands in my pockets with the fingers clenched in a ball. When the car stopped, I had been ready to mix it up with them if they gave me any trouble. I would just as soon get hurt as not and I was ready to be just as tough as they wanted, but they hadn’t wanted to give me any trouble and I saw now they were just earning their living, like the girls back in the house sitting around in kimonos and getting bruised by drunks. I was just a piece of routine to them, one of the fifty or sixty things they had taken care of that night. They drove me down Broadway and through the tunnel under the estuary, neither of them speaking. Once there was a scratching noise on the radio and the dispatcher said something I couldn’t catch, and the cop with the creased neck picked up the mike and said laconically, “Sixty-one goin’ to Alameda.”

We pulled up at the gate of the shipyard. The younger cop got out and opened the rear door. I bumped into the door as I got out, and he took my elbow to help me.

“How do you feel, fella? Okay?”

I nodded. My head was perfectly clear and I felt fine except that my legs were weak.

“Get your hands off me.” I didn’t feel like talking but I didn’t want him to touch me. I felt I was balancing on the keen edge of violence and that if something gave me a little push, I would swing at him. I didn’t want to do this because I didn’t want to spill my anger; instead I carried it very carefully, the way you carry a glass of water when it is full to the brim and even over the brim, until you get it to the place where you want to drink it.

Still holding me by the elbow, he turned me toward the gate where the night watchman was sitting in his booth. “There you go, fella, straight ahead. You see the gate?”

I shook my elbow loose. “I can see it. Leave me alone, for Christ’s sake.”

“Okay, fella, you’re fine. You get some sleep.”

The car turned around with a squeak of tires on the wet pavement and the taillights dwindled away in the darkness. The street was deserted. It had stopped raining now and the sky was beginning to turn a dirty gray in the east. I went to the gate and showed my landing card to the watchman, and then I walked through the shipyard under the blue floodlights that gave everything an unreal translucent quality. My sense of reality was a little distorted anyhow and the machinery and heaps of steel plates seemed to me like a landscape on the moon. They had moved the ship during the night and it took me a little while to find it. I went up the gangway and straight to Victor’s cabin and opened the door. He was asleep; I could hear him breathing. I switched on the cabin light. “Give me my money,” I told him.

He opened his eyes and sat up without surprise under the blankets, squeezing his forehead. Then he coughed and looked at me. “You missing your money? I guess the girls got it.”

“The girls didn’t get it. They know if they started rolling the customers the police would close the place up in a minute.”

He looked at the clock, sighed, and swung his feet over the edge of the berth, blinking against the light. He was in his underwear and his thin shanks were bare. He pulled up a foot and massaged it in his hands, and I saw that the balls of his feet were curiously white, like the hands of a girl. He looked for a handkerchief, couldn’t find one, and sniffed loudly instead.

“Agh, you kids. You think nothing of a man’s sleep.”

I didn’t say anything.

Without looking at me he got up and began fumbling around the cabin, picking things up and setting them down. Once he turned to me and made a helpless gesture as though he couldn’t find what he was looking for, raising his arms and letting them fall with a clap to his sides. I watched him without expression. Finally, when he saw I was going to stay until I got what I wanted, he gave up and took the billfold out from under the mattress where he had hidden it.

There had been almost a hundred dollars in it when I went ashore, the wages from my first voyage; I had spent a dollar or two for beet and Victor had given Abby a twenty, but now there was about sixteen dollars left.

“Where’s the rest of it?”

He moved around the cabin, snuffing and grumbling. Somehow he managed to give the impression that he was the one who had the grievance, because I had come in and turned the light on when he was asleep. “Agh, what do you mean, the rest of it? You’re lucky you have anything left. The girls took it, I took it, what’s the difference? Where were you when it floated off? You were kissing the rug, as cold as a mackerel. I thought it might get lost so I took care of it for you. Your money, eh? You talk about that money like it had your name on it.”

He rubbed his finger violently under his nose and sniffed. “Let me tell you something, kid. Nothing’s yours that anybody can take away from you. Remember that and it’ll save you a lot of trouble. I had a commission in the Russian navy once.” (He had promoted himself from a cadet.) “Where is it now? I was lucky I got out alive. Instead I joined the Reds and went on the Aurora. And you know why? Because I’m a realist.”

“You’re a God damn thief.”

It was impossible to insult him. “You listen to me now, kid,” he went on calmly, groping in the coat hanging beside him for a cigarette. “You haven’t got a right to anything, even the air you breathe.” He lit the cigarette and began telling a long rambling story. “One time in Odessa I saw a fellow strangle on a piece of sausage. I was at the next table, as near as I am to you, and he was with his friends eating sausage and drinking wine. They were a bunch of Greeks and they were having a party. One minute he was sitting there laughing and talking to his friends, and the next minute he was dead with his face the color of liver. That’s what the world can do to you any time it wants. And you talk about your money. Agh, why don’t you go back to the convent? I took your money to teach you a lesson. Next time you’ll know better than to pass out in whorehouses.”

I got up without a word and took a terrific swing at him, and with surprising agility he ducked and caught my wrist in his vise-like fingers, bending it suddenly until I thought my arm would break.

“Agh, what are you now, a hero? Hit an old man.” He must have been close to sixty but as hard as a wrestler; he seemed to be made out of steel wire and vinegar. He struggled for a long time while his small black eyes watched me, the cords in my neck breaking with exertion. I wanted to kill him and I would have if I could; afterward I probably would have said it was because of the money, but actually it was for reasons that were deeper and more obscure and that I only half understood myself, because the things he said were true and I didn’t want to admit it. But I didn’t kill him, because he was the stronger. Finally he twisted me down onto the floor of the cabin, an unbearable pain shot through the bone of my arm, and I gasped. He let go and turned away scornfully. “Agh, before you hit an old man you’d better go learn how. Anyhow it’s not my fault.”

He meant everything, the money, my rage, the agony of the sausage-eater in Odessa. Doubled up with pain on the floor of the cabin I saw he was right, and I had been wrestling with the wrong person. It was a part of myself that was my enemy; I still had a childish illusion that the flesh on my own bones was somehow unique and precious to the universe, in some obscure corner of my mind I wanted the others to love me and make exceptions for me simply because I felt heat and cold, pain and loneliness as they did. Now this was gone once and for all, and I understood there were no exceptions and no one was invulnerable, we all had to share the same conditions and in the end this was simply mortality, the mortality of things as well as ourselves. After that I didn’t expect anybody to love me and I understood why Victor kept his money taped to his chest. I got up off the floor impassively and went away without a word. Victor didn’t give me back my money, and neither of us ever mentioned the subject again.

I started going to sea in the worst years of the Depression; it was a time when a lot of people who had been sailing all their lives went on the beach or ended up on relief, but I always had a berth and I never had to sing hymns for soup at the Midnight Mission. I learned very quickly how to stay out of trouble and get what I wanted, and it was Victor who showed me, my father and enemy who stole from me and gave me good advice. He taught me a lot of valuable things that were not taught in the high school in Spanish Creek: how to detect wood alcohol by the smell, how to say whorehouse, gonorrhea, and go violate your mother in Spanish, how to kill crab lice with kerosene. He spoke four languages well enough to deal with bus drivers, madams, and harbor police, and he knew the geography of the whole world by heart, or at least that part of the world that lay within a half mile of the waterfront. His philosophy was summed up in a few simple beliefs: that the world was out to get you and that it was better to be a live jackal than a dead lion. He knew he didn’t have to love his neighbor because his neighbor would take care of that. The only thing I ever found out for sure about his politics was that he was antisemitic. His explanation of the October Revolution was that the Yids were taking over the world beginning with Russia, but he didn’t waste any love on capitalism either and believed the Wall Street Jews were in league with the Bolsheviks. The whole world was on one side and Victor was on the other, but they couldn’t get him because he was inside his head outthinking the whole bunch of them, and nobody knew what was going on in there. His scalp had a ridge running up through the center of it, and on the back a flat spot the size of a saucer as though it had been pressed with a hot iron. Once he pulled apart the stiff hair over his temple and showed me the scar where Clemenceau’s former mistress had hit him with a cheese-grater when he told her he was going to leave her. She was older than he was, and her emotions were unstable because of the menopause. “After that I learned a lesson, don’t tell them, just leave them.” He was never sick and his senses were abnormally acute; he was as strong and alert as a fox. His ears over-secreted wax and periodically he would clean them with a match. His only other fleshly frailty was a chronic stricture due to gonorrhea; sometimes he would disappear in the toilet for a half an hour and I would go in and find him clutching himself with a clawlike hand and gritting through his teeth: “Come on, you beast, all I want you to do is make some water.”

Victor and I sailed together on the Emil and on the other Lucknow ships, the Julie Lucknow and the Orion, and usually we would go ashore together when one of us wasn’t on watch. After I had been going to sea for a couple of years I almost forgot I had ever done anything else. I didn’t fall off any more dredges and nobody stole my money now; I had learned how to take care of myself. I had found out that everything I was taught up to the age of seventeen was false, so I decided that nothing was true, or at least it wasn’t worth arguing whether anything was true or not. It seemed to me that Victor had found the only way of dealing with a life which was in the end only a dirty game of hide-and-seek with the undertaker. You could spend thirty years wrapping up your throat and taking pills for your liver and then fall through an open hatchway and your neck, or strangle on a piece of sausage. The only thing as to make yourself as invulnerable as possible: for seventy years, but in the end it would be all the same. At least Victor wasn’t going to fall through any hatches if he could help it. At sea he stood his watches, and ashore he sat around chain-smoking and watching the girls without buying anything. He had never read Zeno or Marcus Aurelius but he was an authentic stoic.

I wanted to be a stoic too, and I spent several years watching to see how Victor did it. After a while I began to see that most people who went to sea all their lives were the same. Going to sea was a little like being in prison or in a monastery. You had a place to sleep and work to do and everything was settled for you. There was none of the confusion of the free world where you had to think, choose, negotiate, struggle, relate to other people. In that other world on the beach you were always confronted with questions and decisions. Did you want peas and carrots for dinner, and should you wear a blue necktie or a striped one? “I love you, do you love me?” they were always asking you. “If I give you this, what will you give me? How could you do this to me? Don’t you love your mother? Aren’t you human?” They drove you crazy with their questions, and in the end everybody wanted you to give a part of yourself until there was nothing left. At sea nobody loved anybody and there was no bargaining. You ate what was put in front of you and nobody asked you any questions. You didn’t have to negotiate or apologize, and nobody asked you whether you believed in God and weren’t sorry for what you had done. You stood your two watches a day, ate your three meals, and people left you alone. The watches were all exactly alike, every day you oiled the same machinery and watched the same gauges for exactly the same number of minutes, and when you went ashore the ports were all the same too: Melbourne, Guayaquil, Santiago, Vancouver, Suva, the same joints that smelled of beer and damp wood, the same girls, the same sweaty wrestle in the room with the douche-bag hanging over the basin and the gaudy oleograph of Our Lady who always understands and gives you another chance, the same muddy street leading along a blank fence back to the ship at dawn. Even the prices were the same in Papeete or Tacoma: five dollars short time, ten dollars all night. I began to realize that nothing of very great value could be obtained from a coin-operated vending machine: the so-called act of love had become a purely hygienic function, like sneezing into a handkerchief. But I didn’t really mind because it was part of a compromise I had made with the world of things, a kind of truce by which I was given food and a place to sleep and receptacles to empty my desire into and in return I accepted boredom, a state of mind halfway between happiness and suicide. This was the way everyone around me lived, and I accepted it as natural. In those five years of my life, I sailed all over the world and went ashore in twenty different countries, and I never saw any more of it than the first half-mile back of the waterfront.

In those years toward the end of the Depression there was a lot of bitterness and labor trouble; there were strikes and people got hurt. I had a union card and I had heard Harry Bridges talk in the Oakland labor hall, but I wasn’t very interested in politics. To be interested in politics you had to believe in an idea—if not in a cause or a party at least in the idea of injustice—and this would mean surrendering a part of yourself to something abstract. I didn’t believe in justice or injustice anymore and I wasn’t interested in abstractions. In San Pedro during the maritime strike in 1939 I watched a lanky pink-faced man with white hair being arrested for reading the Declaration of Independence from a soapbox. They led him away holding up the book and smiling to the crowd, as though it was a private joke he was playing on the police. Somebody said he was a writer. After they had taken him away the crowd began to get ugly; somebody began singing the Internationale and rocks sailed through the air. A cop told me to move on, I stood on my rights as a decent left-wing American citizen, and the cop busted my nose with his nightstick. Evidently they hit you whether you were interested in politics or not. After that I still had no politics, but I decided I was a cop-hater. The inside of my nose was fouled up for life: deflected septum with cartilaginous occlusion. Victor pulled out the splinters of bone for me with a pair of tweezers. He didn’t particularly care for cops either but he was just as contemptuous of revolutions. “The little guys get their heads broken for nothing and after it’s over the same ones creep back in. What do you think? Harry Bridges is paid by Wall Street, they own the unions, everything.” Victor had his own political party and it only had one member.

There was always a lot of free time at sea, the watches were eight hours and you couldn’t sleep for more than nine or ten, and various people passed the time in various ways. Some of them would play poker in the messroom, some would loaf around in bunches telling stupid stories, and some would sit out on deck in the sun squeezing each other’s blackheads. I spent my time off watch reading books.

This was about as queer as you could get, but I didn’t care what anybody else thought about me and after a while I began to get a reputation as a bookworm or some kind of a screwy Merlin. When they were in groups they would sneer at me, but then they would come alone one by one to ask me whether it was true that Roosevelt was an epileptic and whether you ought to eat green peppers when you had gonorrhea and whether Chinese women really had genitals that ran the other way. They weren’t interested in what was really in the books, and if they had asked me I wouldn’t have told them. The books were a private part of me that I carried inside and guarded and didn’t talk to anybody about; as long as I had the books I could convince myself I was different from the others and my life wasn’t quite as stupid and pointless. It wasn’t that I thought I was improving myself, it was just that I was doing something they didn’t understand and this was enough to make me feel different from them, which was what I wanted. During those five years I read on the average two or three books a week, but I had never been educated properly or shown how to read books and I would get things all mixed up and twisted in my head. I never could get it straight that there were two Samuel Butlers and what the difference was between Malraux, Maurois, and Mauriac. I didn’t read Conrad anymore because I had decided he was a sentimentalist. In San Francisco or Melbourne I would buy a box of books and when we got out to sea I would take them out one by one and read the first ten pages. If it didn’t interest me I would throw it overboard or give it to Sailors’ Relief. In this way I discovered Malthus, Ricardo, Gibbon, Veblen, Spencer, Bakunin, Kierkegaard, Vico, Mencken, Fourier. I didn’t like Hegel or Kant or any author who got involved in abstractions, and any kind of speculation or general theorizing made me impatient; I wanted the books that had the answers. I read everything, biography and fiction, but it was the same with the novelists; I threw away books by tea-party fairies like Proust and read the naturalists, Zola, Crane, Dreiser, Celine, Steinbeck, Dos Passos. Somewhere on the bottom of the Pacific is a copy of The Forsyte Saga I heaved overboard one afternoon. I very quickly saw what was wrong with it; Galsworthy was a gentleman, and no gentleman would ever write a good book.

Meanwhile I stood my watches. I didn’t particularly care for machinery but I understood it and I had an instinct for how to take care of it. I found out I was as intelligent as other people and I could learn quickly when I made the effort. It wasn’t easy trying to learn something about marine engineering in those Depression years because everybody was afraid for his job and they wouldn’t tell you anything. When you were on watch instead of explaining to you how the machinery worked they would let you go ahead and do something wrong and then gloat over the mistake. Every time you pulled some stupid blunder, stripped a metric bolt trying to screw an English nut on it or pumped salt water into a fuel tank, it was a little less likely you would get your license and this made their own berths a little safer. I only made each mistake once, and some of them I figured out for myself and didn’t make at all. After I had been going to sea for a couple of years I began studying textbooks, but here again there were some books I didn’t have the patience for. I wasn’t interested in thermodynamic principles or theoretical physics; I wanted the books with the answers, the ones they asked you in the examinations for licensed engineers. All this I read to the last dot, and when I was done I knew it better than the people who had written it. I sat for my ticket after I had been going to sea for three years, and I got my first berth as third engineer in 1938, when a lot of people who had chief’s papers were sailing as oilers. In an Army- Navy store on Market Street I bought a cap with a propeller embroidered on the front in gold braid, between two acanthus leaves. I was twenty-one years old.