Algren at Sea Read online

  “I never lose nothin’, you sonofabitch,” she reassured me; “they just keep saying that so their rotten friends won’t think a publisher turned them down. Get me a drink, you rotten crook; get out of my sightline, Whoever-You-Are; I done everything I could for you, you cheap ape; the least you can do is get a lady a drink, you lickspittle baboon. Who the hell let you in?”

  “I’m the fellow the party’s for, Ginny,” I reminded her. “I invited you to show you there weren’t any hard feelings on my part just because you lost that book and gave away the other one and told me you’d sue if I got another agent.”

  Ginny pulled herself up by holding onto a floor lamp. I stepped on its base to keep it from falling, as Ginny weighs three pounds more than a porpoise.

  “You invite me to a party ’n’ then you bee-rate me in front of your snooty friends,” she told me, looking terribly hurt. “ ‘Come up to my house and see a boob’—is that what you told them?” She broke into tears.

  “Don’t cry, Ginny,” I asked her.

  She reached for her handbag, so I got out of the way. When I brought her a water glass of straight gin she drank it down in one try and lay back.

  “I’m leaving on the SS Meyer Davis,” I told her. “Aren’t you proud of me?”

  “I don’t give a goddamn if you’re climbing into a nose cone,” Ginny told me. “When are you going to get me a drink?”

  I have to give Old Ginny credit. Losing a few lifetime treatises doesn’t dampen her spirits.

  A fellow in horn-rimmed glasses helped me to prop Ginny against the wall with a Manhattan Directory at her feet to keep her from sliding. I thought it would take a Queens Directory as well, but he thought one book was enough. I told him I knew Ginny longer than he: when she started to slide, one Manhattan book wasn’t going to hold her.

  The horn-glassed fellow introduced himself as Kenwood McCowardly, Chief Junior Editor of Doubledeal & Wunshot, a subsidiary of Ethical & Entity. Mr. McCowardly was interested in my transaction with Blueblade & Scalpel, and I had just gotten to the good part, where I swing a first-class passage on a real ocean liner simply by signing over ownership of everything in perpetuity.

  “We wouldn’t have taken advantage of you like that,” Mr. McCowardly informed me; “we would have limited out rights to ninety-nine years. We’re an ethical house.”

  At that moment Rapietta took Mr. McCowardly by his ethical elbow and led him into the bedroom and shut the door. I was flattered to see that one of our leading junior editors was represented by the same courageous counselor as myself.

  Sure enough, Ginny began to slide, so I had to get another directory. While holding her ankles, a young woman, seeing the difficulty of my position, came up with a Bronx and a Yonkers book too. With her help we got Ginny blocked so she couldn’t inadvertently trip anybody.

  The helpful young woman introduced herself as Denise Paperfish, wife of Alfred Paperfish, Leading Footnote King. I inquired whether Alfred was on hand, having long been an admirer of his authenticity; not to mention his footnoteship.

  “I left the old fig home,” Mrs. Paperfish assured me, “I loathe him.”

  “I’m sorry to hear your marriage didn’t turn out well, Demise,” I consoled the poor child.

  “Oh, I loathed him long before I married him,” she explained. I didn’t follow the explanation but assumed it had something to do with Literature.

  “Nobody but a square would marry a man she didn’t loathe,” she cleared matters up; “right now he is doing a paper revealing that Lewis and Clark were forced to make their expedition because nasty talk in Washington had made it impossible for them to be alone together anywhere except in the Northwest Territory.”

  “I begin to see what you mean,” I assured her.

  “I treat him like so much dirt,” she added proudly.

  “Don’t worry,” I comforted the woman; “on Alfred Paperfish dirt isn’t noticeable.”

  Then we stood merely looking at each other.

  “Well, Mister Man,” she broke the silence, “it’s your move.”

  “Mine?”

  “I have just time for a quickie,” she explained.

  “I think we should come to terms with the Technocrats,” was the only move I could think to make for the moment.

  “Furthermore, Mister Man, my name is not ‘Demise.’ “ She concluded our little discussion and turned away to seek elsewhere for a quickie.

  “Lean white cat vs. lean black cat!” I heard Giovanni make a curious challenge. Sure enough, it was Norman Manlifellow he was challenging.

  “Lean white boy meets lean black boy!” Norman replied.

  I looked around to see if I was hearing right, as the better word for Giovanni would be “puny,” and Norman’s physique is closer to Buddy Hackett’s than to that of a jaguar.

  But Giovanni, tossing his fez to one side, balanced himself like a ballet dancer, strangely upon one leg; and Norman executed a similar posture with equivalent grace.

  I was about to witness the first arabesque Indian-wrestling contest in the history of American letters!

  “Is this for the black or the white supremacist title?” I inquired eagerly, hoping to get a bet down.

  Ginny sat up and boggled about. “Liberace can whip you both!” she announced, and sank back upon the divan.

  Norman, apparently discouraged by this comment, broke the contest off. “I’m a writer, not a performer,” he explained with disdain of attention-getting devices, and thereupon stood on his head; revealing, as his trousers slipped to his knees, that one of his socks bore the legend “Look at me!” and the other the plea “Keep Looking!”

  Actually, I believe his withdrawal from the contest was provoked by an unwritten ethical law among New York writers never to run for public office against one another. Except, of course, for the Presidency of American Writers.

  At this point he resumed an upright position and began jumping up and down with drinks in both hands, shouting, “I’m getting mine! Getting mine!” As he was already wet from previous drinks I didn’t see the need of spilling more on himself.

  Giovanni, left in the ballet dancer’s attitude, got tired of holding it. He got back on tippytoe and tippytoed right up to me.

  “You look like you’re from nowhere,” he informed me. “Are you really from somewhere?”

  “Chicago.” I had to admit it.

  “Do you realize you are responsible for the race riots of 1917?” he informed me, placing his forefinger on the tip of my nose.

  “I was eight years old at the time.” I tried wriggling out of the accusation.

  “You are an honorable, well-meaning white square,” he informed me; emphasizing his point by tapping my nose lightly.

  “Yes, sir.”

  What else could I say with my eyes crossed? I didn’t ask him to take the finger off as I knew this would be to deprive him of personal dignity.

  “In short,” he summed the situation up crisply, “you flatly deny that Negroes are lynched, jailed, cheated, corrupted, flogged, degraded, debauched, deprived, dehumanized, alienated, isolated, disaffected, locked in, locked out, smoked in, smoked out, outcast, outlawed, knocked down, strung up, run over, banjaxed, castrated, jillflirted, stomped, harassed, jeered at, vilified, despised, warped”—he paused to change fingers, as he tires easily—“pulled apart, soldered, molded, transfixed, invaded, pursued, abandoned, orphaned, aborted, disemboweled, and are last to be hired and first to be fired?”

  “I know you pay higher rents.” I gave an inch.

  “And you call yourself a Christian?”

  “I can’t call myself a Christian. I’m not ready for the responsibility.”

  “Ah! You take no responsibility. I could tell that by looking at you.”

  I broke.

  “I was the kid who put the ten thousand dollars under Eddie Cicotte’s pillow,” I made a clean breast of everything, “later I burned down the Reichstag. What can I do, just short of killing myself, to atone to the hum
an race?”

  Giovanni relented. He removed his fingertip from my nose tip. I was grateful. A new resolve filled me. My eyes were wet as I grasped his hand.

  “Let me join you and Norman in your struggle against the established order,” I begged him for a chance to strike a blow against oppression. “Let me hail squad cars and pretend I thought they were taxis! Let me help snarl the system by defying local traffic ordinances! Let me lead a wade-in into Buckingham Fountain!”

  Norman came over to us.

  “Have you ever written anything that would disturb an eight-year-old?” he demanded.

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Then don’t bug me,” he instructed me, and walked off.

  “Don’t bug me either,” Giovanni added. “I’m going south.”

  I held him by his sleeve. “Take me with you to Atlanta,” I pleaded.

  He removed my hand. “The south of Corsica, Baby,” he corrected me, and turned to leave. I followed.

  “But aren’t we going to fight for the downtrodden everywhere?” I wanted to know. “Isn’t that our responsibility?”

  Giovanni turned so swiftly on me I almost lost my balance.

  “Ours?” he asked, as though he had not heard aright, “ours? Why can’t you understand that, as you represent white power, you have deprived me of the right to take any responsibility? Oh, no, Baby, you aren’t putting that on me now. I am a victim of society! You have to make everything up to me.”

  “I will! I will!” I leaped at the opportunity. “I’ll immolate myself in the Negro race! I’ll pull a Jim Crow in reverse! I’ll be a white James Baldwin and you be a black Eisenhower!”

  Giovanni looked disgusted.

  “Go tell your troubles to the Reverend King,” he advised me. “Now ta-ta and huggy-vous. See you in the Seizième Arrondissement, Daddydoo”—he gave me a small delighted shriek and whirled about. “Normy, you dreadful boy! You goosed me!”

  “Boss Johnson can’t cut the mustard!” Normy challenged him, and fled out the door.

  A merry chase! Down the steps went Normy with Giovanni right on his heels, trying to catch him, and I was right on Giovanni’s heels, trying to catch him. At the Fiftieth Street entrance to Central Park, Giovanni almost caught Normy when Normy ducked around a hansom cab and Giovanni did a U-turn on him. I guess he would have caught him at that if I hadn’t gotten between them. That was all that saved Normy.

  The last I saw of him he was heading toward the carrousel in the park with Giovanni gaining on him. I couldn’t follow because I had lost my Ked Gavilan. It was under the cabman’s horse, and when I went to pick it up the horse reared, waking up the cabman. He leaned over and gave me such a crack with the butt end of his whip that for a minute I forgot all about my sneaker.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he wanted to know, and I couldn’t blame him.

  “I was just trying to be some kind of supremacist, sir,” I explained as best I could.

  “Can’t you do that without getting under a horse?”

  “I just got carried away, sir.”

  “If I give you another crack as good as the first, you’ll be carried away alright,” he told me, fingering the butt of his whip.

  “That first one was pretty good, sir,” I complimented him. “I want to thank you for it. It cleared my head.”

  A policeman came up at that moment, and I was pleased that he did. He was the same one who had scolded me for looking for a drugstore in Central Park without my shoes. I was relieved that I had one on now.

  “I see you’re back,” he congratulated me. “Where’s your other shoe?”

  “It’s there under the horse, sir,” I pointed out.

  “Then get it and put it on.”

  I looked at the cabman. He still had a good grip on his whip.

  “Are you waiting for me to pick it up and put it on for you?” the officer wanted to know.

  “No, sir.”

  “Would you rather go to the station with one shoe than two?”

  “No, sir, I’d rather wear both. If you give me my rathers.”

  “Then get it.”

  “The horse don’t want me to,” I explained. I didn’t want to get the cabman in trouble.

  But the cabman was a regular fellow. He came down off the cab and got the shoe for me. They both watched me putting it on. I tied a neat bow so they would see I was sincere.

  “Are you deformed, son?” the officer asked.

  “No, sir. It’s just that one shoe is a British walker and the other is a Ked Gavilan.”

  My friends exchanged glances.

  “Don’t take him in, he’s harmless,” the cabman suggested.

  “I wasn’t seriously thinking of taking him in,” the officer decided in my favor. “I was just curious about his plans,” and he looked at me inquiringly. The cabman looked curious too.

  “Why, come to think of it, my plans are to sail from Pier 86 in an hour and a half,” I recalled, checking the hour and hopping into the cab.

  “To Pier 86!” I instructed the helpful cabbie, and we were off at a rollicking gallop.

  “Are you going aboard without baggage?” he asked me over his shoulder.

  “Stop at the first hockshop. I’m glad you reminded me,” I thanked him.

  On Eighth Avenue I purchased two traveling bags and a secondhand electrified typewriter the salesman assured me was a real bargain. “And I’ll throw in an electrified tie,” he offered.

  “I’m traveling first class,” I demurred. “I don’t want to be conspicuous.”

  “Nothing conspicuous,” he reassured me. “Something in a dark blue with a gray pencil stripe.”

  He snapped a vermilion tie around my neck, one with two Chinese-red polka dots which lit up gloriously at the touch of the battery in my pocket.

  “And I’ll throw in an extra set of batteries in case the salt-air damages the set attached,” he told me.

  And he was as good as his word.

  DOWN WITH ALL HANDS

  THE CRUISE OF THE SS MEYER DAVIS

  At Pier 86 a blue-uniformed baggage-hustler took both bags and the typer off my hands, and I took the elevator. “How much does a baggage-hustler get per bag?” I asked the elevator guy.

  “He gets what you want to give in your heart,” the guy instructed me.

  “I don’t want the man to work without shoes,” I explained. “How much does he get per bag?”

  The elevator guy stopped the lift between floors. “Let me tell you something,” he reproved me; “the intelligence you breathe, that you were born with, let that be your guide.”

  Then we continued going up.

  I gave the bag-hustler a two-dollar bill and stood waiting for change. “That was a deuce I just gave you,” I reminded him.

  “It’s mouse eat mouse,” he informed me.

  “Easy come, easy go,” I warned him, glad to get my bags back. But were I going to keep count of people who were out of their minds and those who were in them on this trip, the kooks would already be lapping the field.

  However, I wasn’t dismayed to learn it was mouse eat mouse and every man for himself now, more than it used to be; because whatever we have lost in brotherly feeling I am confident we have made up in spitefulness. Things work out best for everybody in the end if you just look at things right. Prospects for mice are particularly bright.

  I had never crossed the Atlantic first class before. It was my first time.

  My ticket assigned me to Stateroom S-1, meaning sundeck and first to chow, but a fellow in a seafaring cap told me to go to U-68. United States Lines had put me on a submarine was what I assumed. But the gangplank led up to some sort of seagoing department store that had three decks below water level, so I went down. What traveling first class means, I gathered, is that you may be sent to the galleys but you still don’t have to row.

  I kept going down until I hit the engine room. As long as I was there I figured I might as well inspect the turbines and the rest o
f that crazy stuff. It looked in better shape for crossing an ocean than myself. The pin that kept my topcoat from flapping made me self-conscious among such well-groomed engines. I went upstairs to see if the captain would take time to sew a button on for me.

  In U-68 my bags were waiting but there was nobody home. The vice president of U.S. Lines had left a personal message for me on the dresser, however:“There is little need to describe the charm and attractiveness of this gay lady of the seas,” the V.P. informed me. “There is an atmosphere of ease and relaxation about her that seems to rub off on all who stroll about her wide promenades and enjoy themselves in her roomy salons.”

  I fell asleep on the gay lady of the seas and dreamed that so much ease had rubbed off on me that I was strolling around trying to rub some off on a roomy saloon. Until someone wakened me by hollering All Ashore That’s Going Ashore outside my door. I got up and looked out of the porthole, and what did I see but the whole New York literary scene moving past me as if I were being towed.

  I’d never see that scene again nearer than now. The people I had known there were being towed away too.

  I had come to know two New York crowds: one that took its cut off the traffic in horses and fighters around St. Nick’s Arena, and the other that took its cut off the traffic in books. Plungers and chiselers alike, I’d found, were less corrupt than Definitive Authorities on D. H. Lawrence. The corruption of the sporting crowd was that of trying to get two tens for a five off you, but the corruption of the throngs of cocktail Kazins went deeper. They were in need of something more than two tens for a five. The fight mob possessed that spirit and humor that comes of being oneself. But lack of any inner satisfaction in being alive had left the paperfishmen feeling deprived. They owned the formulas for morality, but couldn’t make them good personally. All they carried within them was the seeds of their own disaster.

  Each had had his own seed. Ambitiousness had made them inventive in making footnotes. And so, like paperfish, they became transparent.