Chapter 3

In those days Victor used to smoke skinny yellow cigarettes that for a long time I thought were Russian, but later I found out they were Mexican reefers he would buy wholesale in Mazatlan or La Paz and take ashore with him when we got back to the States. I never did find out how he got them aboard, but I knew he would go ashore in San Francisco or Oakland taped up like a mummy with small flat packages fastened under his sweater. Under his ribs his abdomen was lean and concave like a cat and there was plenty of room to tape the packages, which were flat and curved to fit his body. Anyhow in the winter he wore his Navy overcoat, which was big enough to carry a parrot cage under it if he had wanted.

The whole business was more complicated than it seemed, or at least Victor made it terribly complicated. He never kept the packages in his cabin and instead he had caches of them tucked away all over the world: in rented rooms in Melbourne, cafes in Suva, bank deposit boxes in San Francisco and Long Beach. He had a lot of mysterious connections and was always going off to meet somebody in a chop suey place on Grant Street or taking a walk around Lake Merritt in the fog. The amount of wile and ingenuity he expended was all out of proportion to the results. But he took it all perfectly seriously and his precautions were so intricate that he never got in trouble; he had a keen intuition for whom to trust and whom to steer clear of. Sometimes he would spend half the day taping packages to his ribs, go out to the gangway and take one look at the customs guard, and come back to his cabin and unwrap the packages again: “I know that guy, he’s got a hoodoo eye.” Later that night the second cook would get caught taking heroin ashore in a clumsily- made suitcase with false sides.

What Victor spent his money for I don’t know. All the time I knew him he wore the same clothes; when the blue serge pants wore out he bought another pair on Market Street for seven dollars. He didn’t care about food and never seemed to notice what he was eating. His only luxury was an occasional bottle of bonded rye, and usually I would drink most of that. (“Forget your pocketbook? Sure, go ahead, graft off an old man.”) It was hard to see what he was getting for all his time and trouble. In the end I think he did it simply because he enjoyed surrounding his life with an aura of mystery: the lonely walks around the lake, the appointments in code in a little notebook, the packages left as if by accident among the chow mein dishes. After I had gone around with Victor for a while I began to understand why Russians made such fine revolutionists: they were natural-born conspirators.

Once in a while Victor would make me a present of three or four of the Mexican reefers, and I would put them in my pack along with the Lucky Strikes. At first they made me sick, but later I began to find the sensation interesting, if not exactly pleasant. Now came a new way of going ashore with Victor; and probably this was what he had been cultivating me for all along, to try me out and see if I would do as a kind of sorcerer’s apprentice in his conspiratorial world of appointments, packages, and mysterious meetings. Usually we would go someplace to deliver a package first, and then we would sit the rest of the night smoking in some Chinese cafe or in a Russian place he knew in North Beach while he explained to me over again how the world was out to get me. The Russian place was called the Yasnaya Polyana, and it was a kind of a tea-room-restaurant and gathering place for Czarist emigres. It was inconspicuous from the street and probably a lot of people who thought they knew North Beach well had never noticed it. On the outside it was only one window and a door wide, with lace curtains on the glass and the name gilded on the door in Russian characters. Inside it was long and narrow like a Pullman car; from the bottom of the room it was like looking out at the street through a tunnel. Through the brownish lace curtains you could dimly see taxis passing and the silhouettes of pedestrians on the sidewalk. Whenever the street door was opened a bell jangled, or rather made a dead clunk: a screw had fallen out and nobody bothered to replace it.

In this place Victor and I used to sit by the hour, smoking and talking or just staring at the wall. After a while his mock-angry manner seemed to leave him and he became almost amiable; the smoke coiling around his head and the lines in his face made him seem wizened, placid, and oriental. He would sit with both hands tucked into his armpits, take out one hand to pick up the yellow cigarette and suck at it briefly, and set it down again. Because of the smoke he kept one eye narrowed and a pattern of wrinkles screwed into his forehead, and when he talked he seemed to address his remarks to the wall instead of to me. I would say very little, looking out through the brown lace curtains and drawing the sweet, slightly sickening smoke into my lungs. The space around me would balloon until the room was as big as a basketball court, the walls a hundred yards away; time slowed until each moment seemed to hang in the air indefinitely, lucid and metallic, before it moved precisely on to the next one. I felt a keenness of perception so great it seemed I could hear the grains of dust falling on the floor and see the individual particles of smoke, and yet at the same time an indifference, a serenity. I began to see why Victor drank so little and instead preferred smoking weed. Alcohol was for people who basically wished to be dead but lacked the courage to kill themselves. It was a kind of little suicide; it annihilated you for eight hours during which you had the sweet peace of a corpse and then it gave you another chance, your head thudding and your mouth tasting like a parrot cage to remind you that you had been somewhere. With the reefers it was the opposite: the world around you got drunk while you stayed awake, foxy and alert. The things around you, tables, chairs, voices, other voices, softened and blurred into an even grayness and after a while only the perception was left, sharpened as fine as a razor. You were poised up there beyond emotion and beyond desire; there was nothing to desire, since there was only grayness and things didn’t exist anymore. The awareness was suspended somewhere beyond the frailty of the flesh, beyond pity for itself or any feeling for others: immortal.

Now I saw what had been the matter before: it was the things that had been my enemy, the whole world of matter and dimension. I had found out what I was, a nihilist, and I had achieved the dream of all nihilists, that of annihilating the universe. Victor had got there before me. He had worked it all out inside his small narrow head and he had beaten them all: the customs police, the whores, the Drunken Craftsman who had slapped together the universe and invented the seven sins. It was a botched job and Victor wouldn’t have anything to do with it. Food, sex, all the other biological inevitabilities, were traps the universe had set up for people who weren’t foxy enough to avoid them. He was tolerantly sarcastic about my spending my money on girls. “Sure, I know, you kids are all alike,” he would tell me, sucking at the yellow cigarette. “All you think about is the bearded clam. One sniff of pussy and your head comes unscrewed.”

“I can take it or leave it.”

“I’d like to see you leave it. Your brains are all in your pants.”

It was this thinking below the belt, he maintained, that caused people to get married. But agh, what happened? As soon as she got her hooks into you, your wife stopped fixing herself up, she got fat and didn’t comb her hair, and you ended up with bills, kids, worries, runny noses, and hairpins in bed. “Don’t tell me, I’ve seen these guys on the beach, beaten down with kids all over the place, the wife yelling at them to go out and get some money. And what for? You take away the moonshine and what’s a woman? A receptacle.”

Love, literature, Paolo and Francesca, Romeo and Juliet, it all went down the drain with Victor’s turd-shaped epigrams. When the stub got too short to hold he would stick a pin in it and suck out the last of the smoke, crushing it between his fingers afterwards and putting the crumbs carefully in his pocket. “They talk about habits,” he would say, getting out another yellow stick and lighting it, “listen, you get hooked on a woman and you’re through.”

I didn’t trust Victor and I only believed about half of what he said, but he had found out something I wanted to know, how to get what you wanted without having to give anything to anybody else, and it was all right about not trusting him because he didn’t trust anybody either. I never went ashore with anybody else now, and I sat listening to him in the Yasnaya Polyana in a hundred white nights at all merge together in my memory. I knew that Victor was only using me in the way he used other people, but I let him do it because I thought it didn’t matter as long as I knew what he was doing, and the important thing was that everyone should know exactly what he was getting. Gradually he led me into his hashish-world of Chinese restaurants and walks around the lake, and after a while I found I was running errands for him. Once I remember taking the Key System from Alameda all the way in to San Francisco, carrying a brown paper bag with two cans of sardines and a package of cornflakes, which I delivered to an Italian with a harelip in a deafening Howard Street joint with a jukebox. It was the cornflakes box Victor had tampered with. I didn’t know what the sardines were for; perhaps the Italian just liked sardines, or perhaps cornflakes and sardines were Victor’s idea of what would be found in a typical American shopping bag. In the back room on Howard Street the Italian sucked his teeth suspiciously and finally counted out for me a hundred dollars in tens. When I got back to the ship I turned the money over to Victor and he gave me one of the tens, or rather dropped it absent-mindedly on the berth beside me.

“I take all the risk and I get ten percent?”

“What do you mean all the risk? I take plenty of risk.”

“Sure, you might cut yourself with the razor blade I saw you opening the cornflakes box with.”

“I’ve got wholesale costs, other things,” Victor muttered to the wall.

“How do I know? Show me the figures.”

“Agh, you’re a jolly boy,” he said vaguely. “If you don’t like it, go in business for yourself.”

I remembered the night he had taken my billfold with the sixty-five dollars in it, and I wondered what he would have done if I had kept all the money. In a way it might have given him satisfaction. Anything that tended to prove his theory that the world was out to get you secretly pleased him, even when he was on the short end. If I had stolen his money he would have threatened, blustered, tried to steal it back, pulled every trick he could think of, but in the end he would have concluded philosophically, “What do you expect? From a grifter like you.” It wasn’t that he disliked me; I don’t know whether he ever liked or disliked anybody, and probably this was the kind of a question that didn’t have any meaning when applied to Victor. The point wasn’t to like or dislike people, but to understand them and be able to predict how they were going to act, so you could deal with them with only a minimal chance of getting shot or made a fool of or betrayed to the police. He created his own world and then set up the rules, and the funny thing was that other people obeyed the rules, or acted as if they did. I, for example, acted exactly as Victor expected me to (“You kids think of nothing but yourselves, your brains are all in your pants”). Like all stoics he liked a predictable world, one in which the atoms never swerved in their orbits. It may have been for this that he liked to go ashore with me or at least tolerated me, because he could always see what I was going to do next. Or it may have been just that he liked to talk once in a while and needed an audience for his theories about habits, the bearded clam, and the world being out to get you. In his way he was quite a philosopher. Once I told him he should read Schopenhauer and he said, “I don’t read Yiddish.”

Victor claimed he had connections in the Lucknow office, and for all I know he had. He knew everything that was going on in the Line, which jobs were vacant and who was likely to get them. In the summer of 1940 the company launched a new ship, the Crown Lucknow, and Victor and I both got berths. It was a good ship, the best I ever had. The engineers’ quarters were midships with the deck officers instead of back aft over the propeller shaft, and I had a private cabin with running water and a tiled shower. I fixed up a bookcase and had my Ricardo, Spencer, Veblen, Sade, Dostoyevsky there along with the cram books and engineering manuals I had studied for my ticket. I didn’t go ashore as much now. Once in a while I would go with Victor to the Yasnaya Polyana or to the house in Oakland, but more often when we were in port I would stay on board and read. There was one last time that fall when we went ashore together. The ship was tied up on the Embarcadero, and a little before midnight Victor came in my cabin and found me in bed in my underwear reading Bakunin. “Come on,” he told me, pitching my pants and shirt at me, “we’re going on the beach.”

“I’m reading.”

“I’ll show you something about the vegetable business.” He took the book, looked at it, and threw it back to me. “Agh, that Bolshevik. Get out of bed, now. Are you going with me, or do you want to stay here all night and play your piccolo?”

Reluctantly I got out of bed; I couldn’t find a bookmark and so put the book face down on the desk so I could find the place when I got back. Victor wandered restlessly around the cabin fiddling with things while I got dressed. It was a mild autumn night and I simply pulled on the khaki pants and blue work shirt I had been wearing all day. I dampened a comb and pulled it through my hair, and then I found my cap and stuck it on at the usual angle over my left ear. The cap was the only material possession I took pride in. The braid was tarnished and spotted with oil and I had taken out the stiffener so the top hung limply over the sides, and sometimes on the long night watches I would put in another couple of spots with the oil can. It had got to the point where I was satisfied with it now; it looked as though somebody had been going to sea in it for at least fifty years.

“Agh, that cap,” said Victor. “You want to look like an admiral, eh? You’ve got a lot to learn.”

He pulled it off my head and sent it sailing across the cabin, and we went ashore. He was hatless as usual, his pink skull glinting under the stiff gray hair, and he was carrying a cheap canvas kit-bag, the kind sold in drugstores. At the gangway the customs man looked in the bag and grunted; it contained a razor, an unopened tube of shaving cream, and some underwear. We went up the Embarcadero to Market Street and then turned on Beale toward the East Bay Terminal. In the station he went to the waiting room, took a key out of his pocket, and unlocked one of the pay lockers. Here he rapidly stowed away the underwear and shaving gear and transferred the packages in the locker to the kit-bag.

“Got a quarter?” he asked me without turning around.

I gave him the coin, and he dropped it in the slot and locked the door again. I knew he would never go back to the locker to claim the underwear, but it was typical of him to lock it before he left, and with my quarter. Later he would throw the key in the bay and the underwear would end up in the Department of Unclaimed Packages. Some bureaucrat would puzzle over it and the locker company would have to make a new key. It was a little sand poured in the gears of Capitalism.

We came out of the station and crossed Market again, and Victor began working his way uptown through the cross streets. For ten or fifteen minutes I followed him through a part of the city I didn’t know very well. It was some kind of a commercial and wholesale district and at this hour after midnight everything was dark; occasionally we would cross the yellow circle of a streetlamp. We walked through five or six narrow streets without meeting anybody or even seeing a light in a window. Then unexpectedly we turned a corner and came out in the middle of the vegetable market. Here at this time of night everything was at the height of its activity; the lights were all on and the street was full of movement and noise.

Trucks were pulling up and unloading, crates of lettuce were stacked the pavement, the cafes were full of truckdrivers and produce brokers. There were no sidewalks and we had to work our way down the street through the moving trucks. I followed Victor’s blue overcoat and pink scalp around a pile of tomato crates, and we turned the corner onto a side street. Here we went into a kind of Italian place with a bar in front and tables for eating in the rear. Victor set the kit-bag down on the bar and ordered two beers. I was thirsty and I drank mine in two swallows, but he barely sipped his. When he saw I was finished he ordered me another one. I didn’t really feel like drinking.

“What are we waiting for?”

“Big red-haired fellow with a longshoreman’s badge.”

We were a long way from the Embarcadero and there weren’t any longshoremen in sight. The place was full of truckdrivers and vegetable men drinking coffee with their hats on. In the rear a tableful of Italians, eight or ten of them, were eating spaghetti and drinking wine. The Italians were dressed up in suits and ties, and all the truckdrivers had city cartage badges on their caps. I saw them looking at Victor in his turtleneck sweater and Navy overcoat, and I began to wonder whether he knew as much about being inconspicuous as he thought.

“This beer is terrible,” Victor muttered to himself. “It’s a byproduct of horse urine. These all-night places, I guess they don’t have a hard liquor license.” I knew this was his way of apologizing for not buying me rye; he wanted to buy me something so I wouldn’t run away and he was afraid two twenty-cent beers wouldn’t do it.

I wasn’t much interested in small talk and would just as soon have been back in my cabin reading Bakunin. “What time is this alleged red-haired guy supposed to show up?”

“Agh, you kids are all alike. You’ve got no patience. Go on back to the ship if you’re getting itchy.”

“I’m not getting itchy.”

Finally it was two-thirty. The Italians got up to leave and came out to pay their bill. They were full of wine and slapping each other’s back and they made a lot of noise as they passed through the bar. After they left it was quieter. Most of the truck drivers were leaving now too and the place was almost empty.

There were still vegetable brokers in the booths drinking coffee. Two new customers had come in, wearing double-breasted suits and neckties. They took a booth in the rear and sat smoking. After a while the waiter brought them a bottle of Chianti and opened it; they filled their glasses but neither of them drank.

The barman lifted our glasses and passed a beery rag under them. My glass was empty again but Victor’s was still half full.

“Pair of draughts again?”

Victor shook his head. I knew he didn’t like to drink beer because he had a weak bladder and he still suffered from the stricture. He muttered something to me or perhaps to the barman, and after a while he got up stiffly and wandered off toward the back, leaving the kit-bag sitting on the bar. The barman took the empty glass, plunged it into the soapy water, and began washing it. I slid Victor’s beer over in front of me, not particularly because I wanted to drink it but so the barman wouldn’t take it away.

I was alone now at the bar. In the mirror I saw the two customers in double-breasted suits get up and begin walking slowly to the front. At first I thought they were coming to pay their bill, but when they reached my end of the bar they stopped; I could see them in the mirror standing behind me. One was thin, with a face crepe-like from the scars of adolescent acne, and the other was heavily built with a short pink neck. They were standing directly behind me and I could have touched them with a motion of my shoulder, but neither of them had spoken yet. The heavy man reached for the kitbag and looked briefly into it, and the other one flashed the card in his billfold and took me by the elbow. The barman hardly looked up.

I started to stand up, but the thin one motioned for me to stay where I was. The big man disappeared into the rear of the restaurant. After a moment he came back and shook his head.

“Where’s your friend?” the crepe-faced one asked me.

“I haven’t got any friend.”

“The one you came in with, in the overcoat.”

“I was with nobody, I came by myself.”

“Okay, have it your way.”

Neither of them had anything else to say, and we left. Their car was parked a little way up the street, an anonymous black sedan without a red light and with civilian plates. I got in the back and the crepe-faced man sat beside me, and the other one drove. They didn’t ask me any more questions, and I just sat watching the lights go by. I remembered that other time I had been in a police car, how I had wanted to swing at the two cops but how the young one, the boyish ink-faced cop in the poncho, had called me fella and told me to get some sleep. I had been full of bitterness that night, at nothing, at my own innocence, but I had come a long way, now I was beyond innocence and beyond bitterness and I felt nothing, as though something inside me was anesthetized. I looked out the window at the occasional pedestrians on Market Street, at the empty streetcars going by full of lights, as though they were on another planet that had nothing to do with me. The two plainclothesmen said nothing all the way uptown. The crepe-faced one lit a cigarette but he didn’t offer me one, and he didn’t call me fella and tell me everything was going to be all right. I didn’t expect anything from them and I didn’t ask for anything. I felt no more resentment against them than I felt against Victor for going out the toilet window and leaving me out in front with the kit-bag; it was natural for him to act the way he did, like a jackal when its companion is trapped by hunters, trotting off and looking back furtively once over his shoulder, pretending not to notice. I knew I could relax and watch the lights go by because the two plainclothesmen had nothing against me; they were earning a living and they left morality to the clergymen and the YMCA. There was even a kind of a calm in the car, an understanding as though we all had our roles and all three of us knew how we were supposed to act.

They drove me not to the precinct but to the central station, uptown in the civic center. The car went down a concrete ramp into the basement of a building I didn’t recognize. I got out of the car and stood blinking in the middle of a brightly-lit garage. The crepe-faced man put his fingers in my belt and we walked across the concrete door and into a corridor.

The big man was carrying Victor’s bag. At the end of the corridor we went up in an elevator, got out on the mam floor, and walked down another marble corridor to the night room where the sergeant was on duty. When he saw us coming he put aside the magazine he was reading. The big man opened the bag and tossed out the packages in a fan-shaped row, tearing open the last one to show what it was. “Possession of marijuana,” he said briefly. That was the first time he had spoken.

The other one still held me by the belt. The sergeant got out a form and began filling it in; the big man gave him the address and the details. “You want to tell us who the other one was?” the sergeant asked me.

“I was by myself.”

He hardly paid attention to the answer; the question had been purely mechanical. Stamping the papers with a date stamp, he took out the carbon and handed the copy to the big man. As we left the sergeant went back to his magazine; it was a hunting and fishing magazine and there was a picture on the cover of a man in a red hat, contentedly puffing his pipe and lifting a trout into a landing net. In a hygienically clean room in the records section I was photographed, my fingers were pressed onto an inkpad, and one by one my fingerprints were rolled over the ten printed squares of the form. I felt, not that the ink from my fingers was going into the paper, but that something from the paper was sinking into me, fixing and making permanent the identity I had so far refused to recognize. All my documents were there laid out on the table: the union card, the Coast Guard ID, even the student card from the high school in Utah I had carried around for five years and never thrown away. The police had it all down, my picture was taken and my prints were on the paper, and I thought: I am this person from now on, I am condemned to be myself. I had thought my name, my flesh, the things I had done had nothing to do with me, that whatever happened to the outside of me there was something inside, a core of ego that remained inviolate and guarded its privacy the way the eyelid guards the eye. Now I understood that a man is simply the sum of his acts, that nothing is irretrievable and everything is permanent. The way I had lived and the things I had done had fixed upon me and sunk in the flesh, become me. Photographed and fingerprinted, I was at last identified and knew who I was: loner, vagabond, patron of whorehouses and sometime marine engineer, petty criminal. The resentment I felt inside was not hatred for being imprisoned or for Victor who had betrayed me but something deeper: a rebellion against the very way of things that condemned men to be imprisoned inside their own identities. “We know you,” the judge remarked without looking up from his papers shortly before he sentenced me. “A very common type.” I thought of the book I had left lying face down in my cabin on the ship, open where I had stopped reading in the middle of the page, and I remembered how I had thought I was different from the others because I read books. It didn’t make very much difference now and the judge was right.

I spent twenty-two months in San Quentin. I was not what is called a model prisoner; if I had been I might have got out in a little more than a year, but although I didn’t yell and bang my bars neither did I cooperate, very much, with the people who were trying to reform me. (I assume that was what they were trying to do.) When they found out I was a licensed engineer they offered to let me run the prison steam plant, but I preferred sewing burlap sacks. I made no friends in the twenty-two months and I didn’t take out any books from the prison library, not even Bakunin, assuming he was there. I had probably expected to impress the prison officials with my magnificent indifference, but like the judge they recognized me as a very common type. No one mistreated me, and if you don’t object to being processed, handled, and passed from cage to cage like an animal in a zoo, prison can be almost a pleasant place. You don’t have to make any pretenses or feel emotion, and you know what to count on. There are no surprises and no decisions, and nothing from the outside can touch you. The war began while I was in prison and it was nothing to me, less than a typhoid epidemic in China. If they knew what prisons were like a lot of people would want to get in.