Fo'castle Waltz

AN EMPTY TROLLEY IN THE EARLY MORNING is a good place to think and repent. There are few faces to see, and those usually belong to night workers going home to sleep or someone like yourself with a bleary-eyed, half-awake, empty pan. They stare back at you or through you, and you soon lose interest in one another.

So I thought back over the events that had brought me this far and vaguely repented my own impetuosity. It had been so much trouble to get to this point with my seaman's passport and my physical examination card, which smugly guaranteed me from venereal infection for forty-eight hours only—(Who are they to control my love life?) I'd passed that fool lifeboat test. . . .

I had been doing a portrait head of a Mrs. Grub, whose husband had had a stirring in him—he, top, had studied the fine arts, he had drawn in evening class -when he was very young and had grown up to be a short, overstuffed, and oversuccessful silk salesman. Whenever he spoke of those few evening classes in which he'd sketched from the nude, a faraway look came into his eyes and a sad, bitter smile creased his rather thick lips. He had a sympathy for me because he felt that he, too, had been a starving, young artist for a few weeks. He encouraged me to talk of my ambitions, my hopes, my yearnings.

Now and again I'd ventured a thought that had just begun to brew—I'd like to get a job aboard a small freight ship. I'd even made some half-hearted attempts to get one. Once or twice I'd gone down to the Shipping Board agencies and stood at the outskirts of a motley gang of men—deckhands, firemen, mess-men, sea cooks, and so on—as they scanned the bulletins of the help wanted aboard the thousands of ships down at the docks.

None of the listings seemed to want my kind of guy. Since I could draw, do sculpture, and paint water colors, I should make excellent material for a deck boy who, I understood, did nothing but get in the way of the real sailors, or I thought I might be an ordinary who does just a little more. I never aspired to be an able-bodied seaman; as a Boy Scout I was a perennial tenderfoot. I could never box the compass: I'd forget what followed East Northeast.

But the want ads for the toilers of the sea were mainly concerned with ship technicians—and so many dishwashers, waiters, and galley hands, mainly for passenger boats. I understood why years later, when I'd crossed the ocean a few times as a passenger. We ate, sat, and slept, slept, sat, and ate all over again, one monotonous day after another—there must have been an awful lot of dishes used. I hate dishdashing lukewarm water or cold, greasy stuff on my hands nauseates me so I hunted a freighter to ship out as a deckhand, which I eventually did, and instead of merely immersing niv dainty- hands in smelly dish water up to my elbows on the S.S. Hermanita, my dream ship, I had them dunked up to the shoulders and down my lily-white body in the stinking mess of a thick black, green and brown bilge soup for almost four long weeks. But to twist a cliche, I'm slopping about six thousand miles ahead of my story.

As Mrs. Grub's head neared completion, she had whimpered to her husband and he had relayed it sadly to me over a drink —she had hoped I'd do a sort of Epstein head. I was not hurt by this affront—no, I gathered my frayed artistic dignity about me as best I could and said that Epstein was Epstein and Slo-bodkin . . . well . . . Slobodkin, was Slobodkin, and I might have added that if they had wanted an Epstein they'd have had to pay a thousand pounds, while for the skimpy twenty they were paying me they would only get a Slobodkin—a bargain at any price and a pretty good investment, if I do say so.

But I said all that to myself, for I liked Mr. Grub and did not want to hurt him. Instead, I switched the talk back to my gnawing ambition to get a ship. Whereupon Mr. Grub revealed that he was a lot cannier than I'd given him credit for. He asked when I'd finish the Madame's head. I replied that I was waiting for the plaster cast to dry and I expected to work it for a few days ... in about a week I'd patine the plaster, and it would be done.

Yes, in those days I did a beautiful patined portrait head of your favorite wife for a hundred bucks. Of course, there's been a market crash, depression, oppression, and a war since then, and I'm a good bit older and I can finagle a lot better price than that now—so. Art Lovers, don't write for similar terms.

The head would be done in a week, repeated Mr. Grub. Then he turned the trick I hadn't expected, and I felt he'd called my bluff.

He knew a man who owed him a favor. This man could get me a ship. I could only gulp weakly—yeah?

Yeah, he said, this man had helped organize the Havana Shipping Board, and he knew every Port Captain in New York and was especially friendly with the United Banana Line, the Limited Lime Line, Universal Tropical, and many other steamship outfits that supply our pushcarts with squashy tropical fruit.