Fo'castle Waltz

Mush and I had dressed quickly in our cabin up forward— we weren't crowded up like that gang back aft. So we got out on the wet deck (it had begun to rain) and stood in the fo'castle door watching them put the last touches to their preparations for the big night ahead. The smell of the silk shirts mingled with the lotions and toilet waters some of the guys put on their hair, and with the acidy smell of shoe polish some were dabbing on their shoes; and all these, mixed with the reek of a number of pipes going at once, made an aroma that had a weight to it.

I wondered, as I watched the flash of multicolored shirts and knife-edged trousers, whether Perry and Joe mightn't be sorry they'd included me in their plans for going ashore. I only had a white shirt, and my suit I've already described. That beard of mine didn't help. Maybe there was some compensation in my golden spectacles.

Mush was traveling with Al, Scotty, and the Polack from Baltimore. They were going to meet that guy Perry decided was a pimp. Mush was eager to be off—incidentally, he too, had only a white shirt and so did Al—and he kept bellowing to his gang to step it up, he was rarin' to go.

This sudden snorting, rushing ardor had just developed aboard ship during the afternoon. Birdneck's prophecy that the latter half of the trip would be devoted to talk about the women everybody planned to get when the ship reached port hadn't come off. At least, I don't remember any. Maybe the cold and rain accounted for that. But now the ship was full— if you believed the talk—of a herd of fiery stallions, bellowing bulls, and roaring bucks.

I snorted, bellowed, and roared with the best of them, but I didn't mean it. Working the deck of that ship was the hardest physical labor I had done until then. I'd worked nastier jobs with longer hours than that before, but that Bos'n had driven us and the work was not easy. I didn't feel like a frustrated, seething volcano; I'm sorry, I was not one of Whitman's pent-up rivers. And then again, I'd lived through longer periods of celibacy than those past twenty-eight days. And finally, and perhaps this is the main reason for my reticence, I never had had any occasion to buy a woman and I was uncertain of the proper procedure. Was it like the Automat—does one pay before—or like other places where one pays afterwards? Could one choose caresses a la carte, or is it table d'hote or even a plat du jour a la maison? I'm not implying I was an innocent, but it so happens the girls I had known were nice girls to whom one doesn't pay money—counted money.

Of course, no one figures on the cost of how many dinners, flowers, theater or concert tickets before you were granted certain privileges and certain favors—and how many hours and weeks of your time, for which you might have been paid if you were gainfully employed, is spent mooning, writing, telephoning, and waiting around street corners—because of your beloved.

And how many drawings and painted portraits in various poses, how many planned lectures on plastic form and anatomical structure—for all of which, if you had received a just pecuniary remuneration, you would get a pretty penny—you bestow upon the girl of your choice before she finally grants you that which any member of the crew of the S.S. Hermanita that night could buy for two pesos Argentine (eighty cents in our money).

Indeed, I remember spending the whole day before Christmas, Christmas Eve, and the long night and all day Christmas until late afternoon working steadily with no sleep at all to carve a piece of sculpture from a stone for my beloved—a Christmas present. For which, after I'd washed the stone dust out of my reddened eyes, shaved, and put on a clean shirt, and lugged my finished sculpture over to her house and put it on the mantel, she gently patted me on the cheek and said I was nice—that's all!

Outside of a few, rare, beautifully generous girls who asked nothing but your complete attention and concern for the time you were with them, most of my experiences until then had been like that. Maybe this two-peso system was better. It definitely was less wasteful and I wasn't at all certain I preferred the thornier paths of the chase. I was inexperienced and, as I have indicated, worried about the proper procedure.

So I thought, as I waited for Perry to finish fussing and primping in front of the cracked mirror hung in his locker door. Joe stood around with me. Most of the gang were gone when Perry, Joe, and I marched down the gangplank to wallow in the fleshpots of Rio Santiago's saturnalia.

14. The Epicureans

THE THIN COLD DRIZZLE OF RAIN which had begun during the late afternoon made shallow puddles in the hard earth along the river bank. We turned up our coat collars and walked toward the center of town.