Fo'castle Waltz

All seafaring men are incurable romanticists. Captain Brandt was no exception, although his romantic ideas had a rather practical bourgeois twist—this news I had received might have been about my share of a wealthy uncle's gold-lined salt mine. And after sucking his teeth and squinting off into the distance as he thought it over, he told me I could knock off Friday and go up to Buenos Aires for the week end.

Neither he nor anyone else aboard that ship ever learned that the mysterious blue cablegram delivered to the bewhiskered deck boy with the gold-rimmed glasses had read:

DON’T FORGET TO REMEMBER—I'LL BE WAITING.

SIGNED YOURS.

18. Eight Thousand Miles for Stravinski

PROMPTNESS IS ONE OF MY VIRTUES — in fact, I'm usually so prompt for an appointment, applying for a job or a date with a dame, I always show up an hour or two before the time set and wait around so worried and so perspired that I'm completely wilted come the hour, the minute, or the instant I should look my best. And I've smoked so many cigarettes standing around in corridors or on street corners, I usually have a sore throat and a ripping headache and have forgotten completely the sparkling bon mot I'd planned as a lead-off.

My date with a couple of million Buenos Aireans was no exception, though I tried to approach my first encounter with the Paris of America del Sud with a dignified restraint. Neither Mush nor I had a watch, and since it was winter down there and the day dawned late, how was I to know what time it was when I was dressed and ready to be off long before the man on watch struck three bells, which if it was the First Mate's watch should have made it 5:30. I hoped it was not the Third Mate's watch, for that would be 1:30 on that cold morning. Even then, 5:30 was rather early, and as I sat around in the cold darkness of our cabin I contemplated getting back into bed.

I gave the daylight one more chance and smoked a cigarette out the porthole, waiting—no dawn by the end of that smoke and I'd go back to bed. I burned up three or four cigarettes in quick succession.

Slowly, the livid streaks of the new day dragged across the horizon. Homer has it "when rosy-fingered dawn topped the distant hilltops" or something. If he wants it that way he can have it, though it seemed to me every new day in the Odyssey began the same way. Didn't it ever rain down in the Mediterranean? There was no mention of dreary cold mornings such as this. And how come those rosy fingers always found a few round hilltops to tip? What, no plains?

There was no sense getting angry with old man Homer. The old guy was said to have gone blind. Perhaps those rosy-fingered dawns, etc., were the last he saw before the light faded, and die thought always suggested something else to me anyway.

I didn't expect to have anything to do with the girls up in Buenos Aires. Not many of the crew knew that city and those that did said there was no sense going there—the houses down in Rio Santiago were better and cheaper. And the city was full of clip joints anyway.

None of them knew much about the real Buenos Aires. They knew only the outer salty crust of that port and found all they wanted in the area along the waterfront. Somebody remembered the name of the fancy Main Street: "Avenida del Mayo— how ya like that? May Avenue. Dopey, huh?"

But don't worry, kid, you'll get around," Birdneck assured me. "There's lots of Limeys around, and even some of the city Spiks speak American—not good—but they speak it."

Captain Brandt had doled out twenty-five pesos with a heavy-lidded, sidelong glance, his ragged eyebrows raised with the unspoken question how did I spend that last ten dollars' worth of Argentine tissuepaper. I didn't try to explain, but I did say I had bought a new hat and I expected there might be some longdistance telephoning I'd have to pay for in the city, etc., etc.

Twenty-five single pesos made a sizable lump of money in my pocket and I felt rather affluent, figuring the rate of exchange. Two pesos can buy as much as two bucks or even five along the New York waterfront. If everything else were proportionately priced, I ought to go far on twenty-five.

I'd hung my jacket on an improvised wire hanger for the past few days and slept with my trousers spread under my mattress for a number of nights. My suit didn't look too bad, though the legs of the pants had a curious waffle effect from their contact with the springs of my bunk. My good shoes had been rained on a few times and had a curl to them. The polish I'd dabbed on them couldn't hide the bluish water marks that showed through. The clean pressed shirt I'd kept tucked away for just such an occasion had been scorched in that last laundering. Well, I did have a fine new hat and clean underwear. In the dim gray light that had begun to come into the cabin I tried to get a curl to my mustache, but there wasn't enough of it to grab hold of yet.