Algren at Sea

by Nelson Algren

  The Wickedest of any was the Wicked Producer. I knew he was wicked because he toted this huge bottle about, tucked resolutely under his arm as if firmly determined to get everybody drunk. I saw immediately I would have to be careful.

  I knew he was a producer because he wore sunglasses tinted chartreuse and open-toed sandals whose protruding toes were tinted a matching shade.

  His name was Schlepker. Otto Schlepker.

  It wouldn’t be fair to call Otto grasping as he often let me hold his bottle for minutes at a time.

  “Read that label,” he would say, and, after a moment—“Read it out loudt.”

  “The Best Scotch Procurable,” I would read aloud, looking at him appealingly.

  “Let me be open with you,” he offered, taking the bottle back and looking hooded, “you have noticed I am not a happy man?”

  “Well, I didn’t think of you as being downright happy so much as just gruesomely smug,” I had had to confess.

  “I force myself to look contented,” Otto confessed, “actually, I am a tragic person. All my life I have thoughtlessly devoted my life to selfish interests and now I am paying the price—I have pangs of guilt so secret only my analyst knows where to find them. But unless I begin doing things for other people right away the secret pangs will destroy me. As I have already spent over three thousand dollars on my analyst I cannot afford doubt. That would be throwing money away. I’m going to start living for others if it kills me. I will make a movie that will show the terrible suffering of drug addicts that will make a million dollars.”

  A human soul stood before me naked and imperiled. I would give him succor in his spiritual struggle. Nothing short of that was going to get him to open that bottle.

  I ought to explain that I was in California on a Hollywood Fulbright. That is the kind whereby a studio will allot five hundred dollars to an independent producer toward the entertainment of an out-of-town writer upon the assumption that a week’s free feeding will so fill the recipient with gratitude that he will sign anything just to show he is a good old sport.

  When the word got around that a studio was picking up my tabs at Romanoff ’s, a marvelous change came over the occupants of the Chateau. Where they had heretofore appeared indifferent to my career, they now began competing good-naturedly with one another to give me friendly advice. When my allotment ran out we were blocking traffic.

  With the allotment run out and still no signature, there was a danger that the Wicked Independent Producer would find himself merely Independently Wicked. He did not wish to threaten me, he threatened me, but unless I signed he would blacken my name with everyone in Schwartz’s drugstore.

  “‘Whatever am I to do in this crisis?”—I turned to my agent who was dealing himself a solitaire hand with mutuel tickets. “I am depending on your wisdom, acquired by long years of toiling in the vineyards of Art.”

  “Jump ship and pan for gold,” the agent advised me, and won the hand. .

  At that moment the large producer materialized, accompanied by a small gimp.

  “I want you to meet a Dedicated Fan,” the producer introduced him.

  “To whom, sir,” I inquired courteously, “are you dedicated?”

  “Why,” he told me, “to you. May I see some identification?”

  “You want me to identify myself?” I asked.

  “I can’t risk dedicating myself to an impostor,” the friendly fellow explained.

  I showed him my library card and my army serial number. These distinctions satisfied him. For he handed me a packet of attractively colored papers and left looking even more dedicated.

  As any process server ought when leaving a client properly subpoenaed. So this was Hollywood.

  Otto handed me the bottle of the best procurable as if to apologize for threatening me with the law. It was the first time I’d been invited to a party and ordered to jail by the same man with a single gesture. I didn’t know how to react to Otto. This may have been because Otto didn’t know how to react to himself.

  He turned on his heel in a lurching safari with myself lurching solemnly after him, my benefactor; clutching my subpoenas and my Scotch to my breast with equal ardor.

  He did a hard right and braked. I almost ran the man down. He drew himself up and, literally striking his own breast, declaimed, “I’m a nice fellow! I do good for everybody! Why do you make me act so damned cheap?”

  Transfixed by the realization of what I was doing to a fellow human being, my guilt was self-proclaiming.

  “Open the Scotch!” he roared at me. “Or isn’t the best procurable good enough for you? ” And handed me the contract he’d been begging me to sign.

  “It is surely the very best procurable,” I confessed meekly, hurrying to put my signature down while he still permitted me to make such a small atonement, “so it will have to do until we can get a bottle of the best that is unprocurable,” I added hopefully.

  Martha came out of the bedroom dressed to go out.

  Anna picked up Commander on Trial, determined to resume the story of Nanavati’s trial. But a low growl from the corner where the ayah hid, protested. Every time Anna began to read, the ayah growled.

  “She is stealing the brandy,” Anna warned Martha, “I smelled it on her when I came in.”

  How a person so soaked in The Best Procurable could tell what anyone else had been drinking was something I couldn’t figure.

  “I want you to leave,” Martha told Anna.

  Even the ayah was glad to see her go.

  Martha seemed contented, most of the day, to lounge about in Indian robes, idling the hours between her record player and her son.

  She had been married, at sixteen, to a man of Shillong; who had deserted her shortly after their son had been born. She’d had one letter from him, postmarked London; that had contained neither money nor a promise of it. It had sounded as though he had remarried.

  The photograph on her bookshelf was of a middle-aged American wearing a maritime officer’s cap. It was signed: With all my love to Martha—Jeff.

  When she’d put on her Western clothes we’d wheel about Calcutta for an hour.

  We both looked forward to that late afternoon hour when the sun softened the city’s ancestral walls to amber. Then we rode into the first flares of the night past trees like clouds at rest. We’d have dinner at a restaurant as far from Ezekiel’s as I could take her; and buy her roses—one rupee per bunch—before we had to go back.

  Her father had been a physician of Shillong. Anna had spent a great deal of money entertaining men younger than herself. The physician had at last divorced her and remarried, severing all connection with his first family.

  Anna had then pressed Martha to leave Shillong and come to Calcutta until Martha had given in.

  Anna had brought an American home with her.

  He was a seaman of twenty and had been displeased with the older woman. Anna had taken money that belonged to him while they had been drinking.

  “A man who wants to make love to me, must pay,” Anna had justified herself in taking the boy’s money.

  “I don’t want to make love to you, old dog,” the seaman had answered.

  “Now you insult me, you cannot have your money back,” Anna had decided.

  “Give the man his money, Anna,” Martha had instructed her mother.

  “He gets nothing,” Anna had been stubborn.

  “I ought to whip you,” the seaman had threatened her.

  “You want to beat somebody?” Anna had picked up the threat—“beat her—she’s the one you want to make love to, isn’t she?”

  The sailor had not denied it. It was Martha or his money back. Anna wouldn’t give up the money.

  Martha had taken him into the bedroom.

  “I gave you life,” Anna reproached her after the seaman had left, “now you take away my sweethearts.”

  “I do not like to sell my bud-dee,” Martha would say at the same hour every night. As if, just by saying it, she could de
lay the night at Ezekiel’s.

  She was disliked by Ezekiel’s other B-girls: they mistook her contempt for this trade as contempt for themselves, and her beauty sharpened their resentment.

  Yet she was not truly a beauty. The bridge of her nose was a bit too broad, and she lacked perhaps half an inch of being of average height. Yet her face was abundant with warmth and light.

  “They are all like Anna,” she told me of the other women of Ezekiel’s—“they think I take their sweethearts.”

  I knew she didn’t need to take their sweethearts. Seaman and tourist alike were drawn toward her, and not merely for her looks. This woman had such inner calm that her presence lent others a sense of repose.

  One night, after she had come in late and had fallen asleep immediately, I wakened, later, to feel her arms come around me. Yet it wasn’t love-making on her mind. She needed to talk.

  “I do not like to sell my bud-dee,” she wanted me to understand, “because if I do this, how am I to belong to the child?”

  “Don’t you feel you belong to him now?”

  “I belonged to him in Shillong. I belonged, also, to my father. I belonged, then, to Shillong. Now I belong to nothing. And I cannot go back to Shillong. I thought I belonged to Jeff, but then Jeff go. I think maybe I belong to you; but soon you go. How can I belong to the child when I do not belong to myself? I belong to Ezekiel’s, nothing more.” She began to cry softly.

  I did not try to console her.

  I hadn’t been aboard the Malaysia Mail, nor seen any of the crew, for over a week. I’d avoided going into Ezekiel’s, when I dropped Martha off there, and waited for her at home.

  I got along well with the Ayah-Who-Lived-On-The-Floor by means of such small gifts as the butts of cigars or a nip of brandy. It was like spending the evening with a small, intelligent, domesticated monkey. Sometimes, without a word, she would bring me tea.

  I would feel a touch on my knee and she would be crouched, holding the cup and saucer out to me and grinning from ear to ear. The old woman had beautiful teeth.

  When Martha and I took a cab in the evening, I would have the driver stop by the quai, just to make sure that the ship was still in port. There would always be a great crane unloading cargo off the deck, and a line of porters carrying fresh cargo into the hold. I had no idea either of what was being unloaded or of what was being taken on. Sometimes I caught glimpses of Sparks or Chips or Danielsen or Bridelove or Muncie. I didn’t see Manning. Sufficient unto the day, I thought.

  “What kind place is Shy-Ann?” Martha asked me on one of these evening spins. “What kind place in America?”

  “Shy-Ann?”

  “Shy-Ann in Why-O-Ming.”

  “Oh. Wyoming is in the West of America.”

  “Why people of Why-O-Ming call me monkey?”

  “Why should people call you monkey?”

  Martha touched a finger to her cheek: “Dark.”

  She was brooding about her American engineer. Whoever he was, he was a kuke; he had bewildered this girl.

  His letters, that she’d asked me to read, were dense with endearments and plans for bringing her to Cheyenne.

  “I wait many day,” she remembered now. “Jeff come at last. Him very good to me and boy. I not have to sell my bud-dee. Then, middle of night, big knock on door. I turn on light. Jeff not in bed. Jeff outside door making big noise. ‘Whore!’ he speak at me—‘Whore! Open door!’ What I gonna do? I not open, police come. I open. He hit. Keep hitting. I fall. He kick. Jeff dronk.”

  Now the letters of endearment had begun again; filled with the same old plans. The desperation of her situation was tempting Martha to believe that, if she gave Jeff a second chance, he might mean it after all and take her to America. Whatever might happen to her in Cheyenne could hardly be worse, she felt, than what was happening to her in Calcutta.

  “You think this man love?” she asked me.

  “He love alright,” I assured her, “for sure.”

  “Then why he hit?”

  “Because to be in love makes a man no longer free, and not to be free makes him angry. He would rather give you money and go away.”

  “In Why-O-Ming, will I have to sell my bud-dee?”

  “As the wife of an American engineer making eight hundred dollars a month I shouldn’t think so,” I told her; but the way things are changing I couldn’t be sure.

  Jeff, I felt, had problems.

  One was the hard time he was going to have convincing his neighbors in Cheyenne that his wife wasn’t a squaw.

  The other was tougher, being within himself. My hunch was that Jeff was a churchgoing, college-educated middle-class man who believed in being sorry for whores and kind to Indians—but to fall in love with an Indian whore! Wouldn’t that be degrading himself? The man was in the switches without a doubt. If he weren’t he’d come and get her and take her home and be damned to the neighbors; instead he was turning destructive.

  The cab wheeled us to Ezekiel’s. I never hung around Ezekiel’s long after I’d taken Martha there, and she didn’t want me standing by. If I saw anyone there from the ship I’d have a drink with him, then get out. Danielsen, sitting by himself as he always sat, looked like he was waiting for somebody.

  “Your girl friend have a friend?” he asked me.

  “She lives by herself,” I explained, “what’s the matter with the stuff walking around?”

  “I don’t go for the short-term deal,” he explained. “I’m not like Sparks, a new thing every night. I want the same thing. We may be here another week.”

  “Don’t look now,” I changed the subject, “but did you notice what just came in with a jug in his hand?”

  It had to be Crooked-Neck, his head slowly revolving; and carrying a gin-fifth simply by a finger thrust into it for a stopper. By that continuous slow rotation both Danielsen and myself had the apprehension that Smith was getting in shape to surpass himself in fouling himself up as well as everybody within fouling-up distance.

  “Hi-ee,” he greeted us with one hand on Danielsen’s shoulder and his bottle-hand on my own, “shall we bound a bit on the waves, my boys? Shall we zig? Shall we zag? What course shall we steer?”

  “I’m thinking seriously of getting laid,” Danielsen announced like a Papal Edict.

  I wanted to shake off Smith.

  “Kanani Mansions is swarming,” I suggested.

  “Let’s go,” Danielsen said quickly. He wanted to shake Smith too.

  “See you on the ship, sailor,” I told Smith, to make our departure final.

  Danielsen wouldn’t ride an Indian taxi unless it were driven by a Sikh. We found one that was satisfactory because the Sikh had a white beard.

  “Smith,” Danielsen advised me in the cab, “is dangerous.”

  “So I’ve been told,” I answered.

  Although Anna must have been a couple of years older than Danielsen, she appeared ten years younger. Fairer than Martha, with an oval face where Martha’s was square-jawed, her hair dyed red and worn in bangs—befitting the green that flecked her eyes whenever she thought about money—she made a strong impression upon him. When she led him to a pink settee and began brushing his colorless hair with her hand, she cinched that impression. A pink blush rose to Danielsen’s cheeks that matched the settee’s strange hue. He was in good hands.

  I was fixing the drinks when the knock came.

  Crooked-Neck stood in the open door, still gently revolving his ominous skull, his bottle still attached to the finger.

  I’d said “Kanani Mansions” too loudly.

  Yet Anna welcomed him warmly. An American was an American regardless of the angle at which his head might be attached was her thinking. When she went into her small kitchen, I followed.

  “Sick,” I whispered in her ear, spinning a finger at my temple and indicating her new guest, “a Crazy.”

  “All Americans are Crazies,” Anna told me. “You are a Crazy too.”

  Smith declined the drink she offered, p
referring to unstop his own bottle, wash gin between his cheeks for a minute, then swallow it down with great boggling jumps of his Adam’s apple.

  Danielsen’s set of the blues began darkening. He never held a fleeting doubt that anyone, who wanted to take the trouble to do so, could take any woman he wished away from Danielsen.

  “I was batting the breeze with this Anglo chick in a bar on Ho-Phang Road,” Smith began relating cheerfully, “and it got toward closing time. She told me if I wanted to spend fifteen dollars I could come up to her place and stay all night. I said I’d like that only all I had was thirteen. She said ‘That’ll do.’

  “‘But I have to get out early,’ I told her, ‘to get back to my ship.’ She said, ‘That’s alright, I’ll set the alarm.’ I said, ‘Well, alright, but I’ll need cab-fare to get back.’ She said, ‘I’ll see you get back alright.’ ‘I feel awfully crummy,’ I said, and she said ‘I’ll draw you a bath.’ ‘This shirt is like a rag,’ I told her. ‘There’s a couple of new shirts at my place you can have,’ she told me. I said, ‘Gee, Honey, that’s swell, but we can’t go up there and just look at one another.’ So she said, ‘We’ll pick up a couple of bottles on the way.’ So we got a cab and picked up a couple of bottles and went to her place and she cooked up ham and eggs. There was a suit of my size hanging in the clothes-closet. She says would I like to see her dance with nothing on but her shoes and stockings, so I said, ‘Gee, Honey, that would be great.’ So she mixed the drinks and turned on the record player and danced naked holding her hand between her legs. Wonderful figure. After a while we went to bed. I could still kick myself when I think about it.”

  “What are you kicking yourself about?” I obliged Smith—“It sounds like you got a pretty fair shake.”

  “I wanted to see if she made good on her promises,” he explained, “but she didn’t.”