Fo'castle Waltz

THE NIGHT BEFORE WE SHIPPED SOUTH FROM RIO SANTIAGO everybody was almost broke. We had exhausted our credit with Captain Brandt, and no one dared ask him for any further advance. We pooled our resources. Joe slid his cap along the supper table and we all dug up our last crumpled pesos and centavos and dropped them in. It made a small pile on the table when we counted up the money. It didn't amount to much. He pocketed it and went ashore. After a while he came back to the fo'castle where we waited for him, loaded down with twenty-two bottles of vino, a number of long loaves of bread, and a package of sliced, smoked ham. Joe had done well with the money and we were all proud of him.

It was quite a shindig—that fo'castle party. All the deck crew were in it and only Scotty and Birdneck from the black gang and Philip from the mess crew. Toward the end of the evening old Pat, the oiler, came in and sat in a corner, drunk and glowing. He'd been ashore drinking alone as usual The Bos'n stuck his head into the door later, too, and told us to quiet down and took a drink with us.

We had good wine. After the second coffee-cup full of that staining red-purple aniline, it tasted good—though its goodness lasted only while we were going up the hill of hilarity. When we'd rounded the bend of saturation the wine was like any other I've ever known—a dread, sour obligation. And we had good food, though we didn't want to eat. We had just finished supper, but we all felt duty bound to scramble about filling big hunks of bread with ham after a drink or two It was good ham. I never heard anyone ever say any ham was bad (a bit on the salty side, perhaps, or a mite briny or just a little stringy—but never bad). I'm not a ham addict. To me— and this sort of thing, I know, brings on pogroms-ham is al-ways a dull, dry, and distinctly flat-flavored meat.

There are many sections of the pig I prefer—hocks, ribs, snout, tail, and an occasional chop that has not been fried to a burnt sienna cinder or a greasy undercooked slab of trichinosis. I know—I know. There's Westphalian, Polish, Smithfield, Virginia—and I've recently met up with a Smithsonian ham.

A few summers ago a good friend of mine drove me down to Philadelphia to a big sculpture exhibition we'd both been invited to. I'd have preferred to have taken the train down because even more than long train trips I hate long auto rides. I piled in with him and his family and we rattled along through the hot afternoon and pulled up to the museum that housed the exhibit, tired, thirsty and bladderful, about sunset.

A local artist, an old friend of my friend, was leaving the show as we came along. He insisted we come over to his house for a drink and a spot of dinner and then we'd all return to the show for the reception in the evening. We drove off with him— some twenty odd miles out of the city back toward New York to his place. And needless to say, we never returned to see that show so I never saw my sculpture in place and have no adequate excuse why that piece was not sold during that exhibit—or since.

His place was one of those modem arty houses so fussed over and so original I felt, as I always do in such surroundings, that I was one of the lesser motifs in a picture hung in a non-objective show. Outside of some crudely painted atrocious deep-sea fish that goggled at you, the bathroom functioned normally. Though there was a disturbing and perfectly killing musical accompaniment that came with the toilet paper—a gentle tinkle of a Swiss music box and the toilet seat jingled Ravel's Bolero in a rising crescendo.

The artist, our host, after giving us a few niggardly drinks of lukewarm watered Scotch, worked up a castor-oily looking dressing which he poured over a tremendous salad of chickory, cucumbers and radishes, none of which I can digest. It looked tremendous because of the springy rising curl to the chicory, and we sat down to a five-sided table to dinner. Perhaps I should mention that our host had made this table himself. He was wonderful—he carved, worked terra cotta, designed furniture, painted, wove, embroidered—and there were many examples of his craft around. In fact, the whole house was full of it, but I didn't like any of it. Seems to me it was ausgekvecht —tasteless, senseless, and unpleasant—but different.

That table we sat down to on three-legged, five-legged, two-legged benches and chairs, had five sides, all different. It was roughly the shape of a lopsided coffin.

The piece de resistance of our dinner was to be a ham. All the way out to the house he had talked of this wonderful ham— how they got it, when they did, and the taste— tiens, tiens!