Fo'castle Waltz

That physical-examination card guaranteed me free from venereal infection for forty-eight hours, and here it was already fifty-two hours—fifty-two and a half before I'd reach the passport office!

I'd been very careful—but would they believe me? I did have a haggard look, all this running around and worrying...

I gently put all my papers down on the passport man's desk. As he shuffled through them I hastily explained about that birth-certificate date, name, and so on. He slapped the papers down on the desk and gave me a long, weary spiel about signed affidavits and a lot of other stuff I'd have to do to rid myself of this Slopotzwkyi with which I'd been saddled. But he hadn't lingered on the forty-eight hour purity clause, so I sighed and settled for Slopotzwkyi.

I was fingerprinted, raised my right hand, and, presto!—I had a seaman's passport.

So the following morning found me rattling along on that trolley car until the motorman turned his head and said, "Hey, Jack, here's Vesey Street. . . . It'll take you to your pier 45."

2. The "Hermanita"

IT WAS COOL AND DAMP ALONG THE STREETS that skirted the waterfront, and I finally sighted the big warehouse with a large, stained, white 45 painted high on the front of it.

There was no one around. No men, no ships near it—at least not on the side I'd approached. I'd been told that my ship was a little one, maybe her stacks didn't even reach the dock level, or maybe she'd sunk! I went around the warehouse to look down into the water. An old man was coiling some wet rope as I turned the comer.

I asked if the S.S. Hermanita wasn't supposed to be docked at this pier. He squinted up his eyes in the manner of those who can't hear very well.

"Which?"

I shouted, "The S.S. Hermanita. Is she supposed... or could you tell me..?"

"The Hermanita, huh?"

"Yes."

He slowly straightened up.

"There she is—out in the stream," and he pointed in the general direction of Europe.

Sure enough, there she was, looking cool and a bit rakish, with patches of red lead on her hull, riding high on the limpid waters of the East River. Panic seized me—here I hadn't even stepped aboard my ship, and already I was a deserter! True, I hadn't really signed on yet, but how was I to know that desertion now might not be considered a sort of breach of promise?

I asked the old man what to do—where was she going, where could I catch her? To all my frenzied questions he answered I dunno or just shook his head and went on coiling rope. I stood there.

"Sorry, fella, can't help you. I jes' ties 'em up when they comes in and unties 'em when they go. I jes' work here."

When he walked off with the coil, he turned and said, "Phone yer Port Captain. He oughter know."

I hunted a phone booth. Now was as good a time as any to come to a final decision about this foolhardy venture to take my soft fat life in my hands and risk it aboard some seagoing, leaky old tub. That first impression I had of the S.S. Hermanita out there in the cool East River was not too persuasive. Seemed to me she had a list to her, and her empty hull smeared with large patches of red lead didn't look any too safe. Maybe I'd call the whole thing off. What could they do me? Let them sue for breach of promise. I'd skip town.

I'd already arranged to give up my studio—or rather it had been done for me. The arranger had been my landlady. Old Dogfaced Keegan they called her, and not without reason. She was a sour, bandy-legged old woman with a face as much like the scowling mug of an English bulldog as I'd ever seen. Her bloodshot eyes were set far apart and bulged. A nondescript button of a pug nose (which seemed to have been broken at the bridge) nestled between her ashy gray jowls. They hung below the dewlaps of her chin—all that with a voice to match.

There was about a block of studio buildings west of Sixth Avenue that she rented to artists, writers, and hangers-on. They were cold-water, rickety walk-ups, but you could mess them up with your work, and there was no curfew on noise. For these niggardly quarters Old Dogface charged a stiff rent—which she sometimes got. As she made her early tour of rent collecting, she was fond of repeating:

"You know what they do to artists where I come from? [England, I'd been told.] They get out their shotguns as soon as they sight them and shoot them as they come up the road."

Having placated her as well as I could with more promises of money I hoped to get, I'd crawl shivering back to bed and dream of being chased through a Constable landscape by Yorkshiremen in chin whiskers and gaiters taking potshots at me with their old blunderbusses, while I ran hugging huge portfolios and plaster casts to my bosom.