And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks

by William S. Burroughs

  “Well, I can promise you that if it does you’ll certainly go to jail!” Goldstein shook his head again. “Now, since Mr. Cathcart says you’re all right, I guess we’ll let it go. I really should call the police.”

  Al made a move to leave.

  “Just a minute,” said Goldstein. “You don’t seem to realize that Pat, here, my elevator man, risked his life tonight. He ought to have some say in this matter.” Goldstein turned to the elevator man. “Well Patrick, what do you think we ought to do?”

  “Well,” said Pat, “I don’t like to see anybody go to jail.”

  Goldstein turned to Al. “I think you owe Patrick an apology.”

  Al turned to Pat. “I’m sorry about this thing,” he said.

  Goldstein took over: “It’s pretty easy to say you’re sorry. I’m not going to stand here all night talking to you. I’ve lost enough sleep already, though I guess that doesn’t mean anything to you. Last summer wasn’t it, Patrick, that a thief climbed up the fire escape and stole twenty dollars from someone’s room?”

  “Yes sir, Mr. Goldstein, I think it was,” Pat said.

  “We’ll forget about this,” Goldstein went on. “I’m willing to let it go this one time.”

  Al said, “You’re being very lenient and I thank you. Sorry for all the trouble I caused you.”

  “I think a lot of Mr. Cathcart,” Goldstein replied, “and I’m only doing this for him, you understand.”

  “Yes, I understand,” Al said, and he began to edge around the desk.

  “All right, Pat,” said Goldstein. “Let him go.”

  Pat stood aside. Al turned around and said good night. Goldstein stood and stared at him and didn’t deign to answer. So Al turned and slinked out of the door and went back uptown to bed.

  Next morning Al came back to Washington Hall and found out from the daytime elevator man that Phillip had moved out of the place and was planning to get a ship.

  “I’ve got to stop it,” Al said to me at lunch in Hamburger Mary’s. “He was planning to ship out without my knowing anything about it.”

  I said, “Well, you’ve got papers, why don’t you ship out too?”

  “Well, maybe I will.”

  6

  MIKE RYKO

  TUESDAY MORNING WE ALL HAD HANGOVERS FROM the Pernod. Barbara went to her classes at nine o’clock and Janie and I slept until eleven o’clock, when Phil got up off the couch and woke us up. It was a warm muggy dog day.

  Janie went into the kitchen and heated us some soup. Phillip took a new pair of chino pants and a khaki shirt out of his sea bag and put them on. We were both dressed the same, except that my clothes were older and dirtier.

  “Look at this place,” I said. “What the hell happened last night?”

  Phil said, “Where’s the cat?”

  We started looking around for the cat and found it sleeping in an open bureau drawer.

  After we’d finished our soup, I said to Janie, “We’ll be back tonight.”

  She said, “You’d better” and went back to bed.

  Phillip and I left for the Union Hall.

  The NMU hall is on West 17th Street, about a ten-minute walk from Washington Square. I bought a P.M. on the corner of 14th Street and Seventh Avenue and we stopped for a while on the sidewalk to pore over the military map of France.

  “They’ll break out of the Cherbourg pocket and take Paris,” Phil said. “Caen and Saint-Lô are ready to fall.”

  “I hope you’re right,” I said, and we hurried along toward the hall. We were all excited because we were headed for the front.

  When we got to 17th Street there were scores of seamen standing around outside the Union Hall, talking and eating ice cream that a Good Humor man was selling.

  “First,” I said, “let’s go across here and refresh our throats.”

  We went across the street and went into the Anchor Bar and ordered two beers. The beer was good and cold.

  “These are all seamen,” I said to Phil. “They are the wildest characters in the world, at least they were when I first shipped out in 1942, and in those days they were mostly seadogs, boy, especially on the Boston waterfront.”

  There was one seaman who stood out from all the others because he had a big red beard and Christ-like eyes. He looked more like a Village type than a seaman.

  Phillip kept looking at him, fascinated. He said, “That one looks like an artist.” Then, getting impatient, he turned to me: “Hurry up and finish your beer. We’ve got to register.”

  So we went across the street and into the Union Hall. The foyer was all done up with murals, one of them showing a Negro seaman saving the life of a shipmate, and it showed his muscular brown arm cradling the pale white face. There was a bookstand where they sold books such as Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory and Roi Ottley’s New World A-Coming, and varied pamphlets of the left-wing type, and the Daily Worker, P.M., and the union weekly, which is called The Pilot.

  We showed the steward at the door our union books and went into the crowded shipping hall. It is a long, low, wide hall furnished with connecting folding chairs, and with Ping-Pong tables and magazine racks at the back of the hall.

  At the front end of the hall there is a big board taking up the whole wall, upon which numbers and letters are posted giving information on the companies and names and types of ships, where they are docked or at anchor and for how long, how many and what kinds of jobs are needed, and the general lay of the shipping.

  The hall was crowded with seamen, some in uniform, most of them in civilian clothes. The nationalities were a kaleidoscope of racial types ranging all the way from sleek, olive-skinned Puerto Ricans to blond Norwegians from Minnesota.

  At the other end of the hall, near the magazine racks, there was a desk with a sign over it reading CIO POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE. Phillip and I went over and looked at the pamphlets and petitions on the desk.

  The girl behind the desk encouraged us to sign one of the petitions, which was all about a current fight in the House and Senate over a new postwar bill. Phillip and I signed them “Arthur Rimbaud” and “Paul Verlaine,” respectively.

  Then we went and stood in front of the shipping board to look over the prospects. There wasn’t much shipping, because no convoys had arrived recently, but we went over to the registration windows and waited in line to register anyway.

  I had to do a lot of running around the offices in back because I was behind on my dues and had overstayed shore leave by a couple of months. A union official who sat at his desk with his hat on gave me a lecture and pointed out that I was behind in my dues, and who the hell did I think I was? I nodded my head and shook my head and looked down at the floor until finally he allowed me to register as a member in arrears. This was going to make it harder for me to get the same ship as Phillip.

  Meanwhile, Phillip was all set and registered. I told him to wait a minute and went to the open job window, to see if there were any jobs laying over. This is the window you have to go to when you are behind in dues payments, and also when you have overstayed your leave or anything contrary to the war-emergency rules of the union. The jobs available at this window are the leftover jobs that other seamen have rejected. You can always get a coal boat down to Norfolk or an ore boat up to the Great Lakes.

  I asked if there was anything going overseas, and the open job dispatcher said no.

  I went back to Phillip and we sat down and picked up some newspapers. I didn’t want to tell him about my difficulties until I had done a little thinking on the matter.

  The main dispatcher was calling the jobs over the mike and he had a Trinidad accent that was beautiful to hear. He would say, “Barber Line Liberty on line eight. We need two ABs, two ordinaries, a fireman water tender, three wipers, and two messmen. This ship is going far, far away on a long, cold trip ... you gotta bring your long underwear.”

  And later he’d say, “Here’s a job for a second cook on an old-type freighter. Anybody who comes from Chile can go down
home.”

  Or else he’d say, “Out-of-town job, ship’s waitin’ in Norfolk, need three oilers, company pays your railroad fare down to Norfolk, pay starts today ... here’s your chance to ride in a Pullman.”

  Finally the dispatcher called for a whole deck crew. Phillip took out his registration card and said, “Come on.” I had to explain to him that my card wasn’t any good for these jobs.

  “She’s goin’ straight across,” said the dispatcher over the mike.

  “Did you hear that?” Phillip said. “Straight across. France!”

  “I know,” I said, “but I have to wait for an open job. If you want to get on the same ship as me, you’ll have to take your job at the same window.”

  “That complicates matters,” he said.

  “Well,” I said, “maybe I can get this ‘member in arrears’ rubbed off my card. I can do it myself with ink eradicator or perhaps beef with somebody tomorrow and try to get a new card. I’ll figure something out.”

  Phillip began to look glum. “Can’t you pay your dues?” he asked.

  “It’s for five months and I’m broke, you know that. But don’t worry, we’ll get a ship together. Just leave it to me.”

  “Allen’s going to have plenty of time to find out,” he said gloomily. “And maybe we’ll not be able to get a ship together anyway.”

  “Don’t worry for crissakes,” I said, “we’ll get a berth before the week is out. I know the ropes, I’ve shipped out five times.”

  I got up and went into the latrine and there I met a guy I’d shipped out with before. “Hello Chico,” I said. He was a little Puerto Rican scullion. “Remember me on the trip to Liverpool on the George Weems?”

  Chico grinned blankly. Chico had been out so many times he couldn’t remember one trip from another, or maybe he just couldn’t remember what happened from one minute to the other.

  “Well, so long Chico,” I said, buttoning my fly.

  “So long,” said Chico.

  I went back into the hall. It was almost closing time. Phillip was sitting in the same chair.

  A seaman came up to me and said, “Listen feller, give me a dime, will ya?” No questions asked I gave him a dime. This guy was going all over the hall collecting dimes. I figured he was one of the old-type seamen like I had seen on the Boston waterfront in 1942 and that he needed a few drinks. Most of these old seadogs had been torpedoed and drowned before the land war even started to get hot.

  I looked around the hall at the new-type seamen. A lot of them wore uniforms and gold braid that they bought in army-navy stores. These were the characters who didn’t drink much and spent all their time in seaman’s clubs and canteens, playing society boys with the society girls and actresses that worked as hostesses. Then there were a large number of nondescript, rather shady-looking characters who probably had drifted into the merchant marine trailing their records behind them. Finally I noticed a third general group, a batch of youngsters from all over the country, reminiscent of the teenage sailors in the navy who you find sleeping in the subway with their mouths open and their legs spread all the way across the aisle.

  The hall was beginning to empty out and now an old Swede was coming around with a broom. The dispatcher had gone home and the girl in front of the board with the earphones was gone home, and I guess Joe Curran was gone home too. It was thick and gray outside. Phillip and I sat in the empty row and smoked the last cigarette.

  Suddenly Phil said, “If we go to France, let’s jump ship and hike to Paris. I want to live in the Latin Quarter.”

  “What about the war?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’ll probably be over by the time we get there.”

  I gave this a thought for a while.

  “Well,” I said, “I wouldn’t embark on anything like that unless I were drunk.”

  “We’ll get drunk in port and start off in the middle of the night.”

  “What about MPs and French authorities and all that?”

  “We’ll worry about that when the time comes,” he said.

  “I’d do anything if I were drunk,” I said.

  We sat there thinking about this new plan, and the more I thought about it, the more I felt the dare, although somewhere in the back of my mind I knew it couldn’t work and we’d be arrested.

  Phillip lapsed into a sort of meditative silence so I started talking to him. “You’ll like shipping out,” I said. “Boy, when you get to port there’s nothing like it.”

  “One time my ship got into a little port in Nova Scotia called Sydney. We’d been anchored in an Arctic Greenland fjord for two months and every one of us was all wound up for a big drunk. The whole crew went ashore—a hundred and fifty of us, it was a mediumsized transport cargo—and only fifty of us managed to stay out of jail. One of them was arrested for jacking off a horse on Main Street. Another was walking around with his dick dangling out because he’d forgotten to put it back in after taking a leak, so they pulled him in.

  “I was walking along with a bunch of shipmates and we all went down to the waterfront and found a shack and started fooling around. Two of the guys went inside the shack and then one of them poked his head out of a hole in the roof and started singing. Some of the guys were pushing against the shack to see if it would move. It did. While the two seamen were still in the shack, we pushed it over the side right into the water. It’s a wonder they didn’t drown. Maybe they were too drunk to drown.

  “Later, I was walking up an alley with a full quart of whiskey that a guy who had six of them stuck all over his pockets gave me, when I came on a shipmate of mine bending over a man’s body. The man—he looked like a Sydney waterfront bum—was dead drunk and this shipmate was taking his wallet. ‘Keep your fucking mouth shut about this,’ he said to me, standing up with the wallet in his hand. ‘It’s your business, not mine,’ I said. He laughed and asked for a drink, but I left because I didn’t like him much.

  “I was ashore for three days on a twelve-hour pass. On the third day, in the afternoon, I was walking with a guy in back of the Sydney YMCA when here comes two Canadian SPs and two army MPs from our own ship. They had guns and told us to come with them. My buddy started running up the alley and they shot over his head, so he came back, laughing. We were still drunk—we’d been drunk all the three days—and we didn’t care about anything

  “Anyway, the MPs and the SPs took this guy and I to a Canadian corvette base and had us put in the guardhouse until the Liberty boat was to come and pick us up and take us back to our ship. So we slept for a couple of hours. You wouldn’t believe it, but I was so drunk and tired I slept on two sawhorses I put next to each other. I was drunk and I kept saying to myself that I mustn’t sleep on the floor and get my clothes dirty. So here I lay in a little ball on top of two sawhorses and slept.

  “Finally I woke up and it was getting dark. There were some British sailors playing catch with a ball and gloves outside the guardhouse. I jumped out the window at the side and walked around the guardhouse and started playing with them. They were awkward and didn’t know how to throw, so I kept giving them the fancy Bob Feller windup. Then it got dark and the game broke up. There were no guards around, I guess they were eating chow, so I jumped over the fence surrounding the base and went back into town.

  “I started drinking again. That night I went up to the suburbs of Sydney where no SPs would be likely to find me. This neighborhood consisted of miners who worked in the Princess Colliery. I drank in several little honky-tonk joints and finally picked up a De Soto Indian girl. I stayed most of the night in a windswept cottage with her until she kicked me out. I was sleepy now so I went into the first house I saw down the street and went to sleep on the couch.

  “I kept convincing myself it was the back room of a honky-tonk joint. But when the sun came up, I found that there were two other guys from my ship sleeping on the floor and that we were in the front room of somebody’s home because you could hear the family at the breakfast table in the kitchen down the hall. Finally t
he man of the house, a miner, came clumping down the hall with his lunch pail and then saw us in the parlor. He said, ‘Good morning boys,’ and went out. I never had seen anything to beat it, it was so crazy.

  “We left the house and passed a store and the first thing I knew one of the jackoff seamen put his fist through the plate-glass window. We ran in all directions and finally I got back to town on a trolley and went into a bar. I had a few drinks and decided to get some sleep.

  “None of us dared to go into the seaman’s club because the MPs would surely keep a lookout there for us, but I decided to go anyway because I was tired and it was time to give myself up. Funny thing was, the MPs weren’t there. Nobody was there, just a big hall full of empty cots, with everybody gone hiding or arresting one another. So I went to sleep on one of the cots and had a good long rest.

  “I woke up refreshed and went downtown that night and got drunk again. I noticed I didn’t have any money left, to speak of, so I boarded a Liberty boat and went back to my ship. That night, we pulled out with everybody accounted for, and I was one of the last of the stragglers. I was logged five bucks.

  “We got to Boston three days later after a stopover in Halifax, and it started all over again. Here were these seamen with their thousand-dollar payoffs staggering drunkenly off the gangplank with all the things they’d picked up in Greenland: small kayaks, harpoons, fish spears, stinking furs, skins, everything. I had a harpoon. Me and a few other guys stashed all our stuff away in the baggage room of North Station and wired home most of our money. Then we started out on a binge.

  “It was a Saturday night, I remember, and October. I drank at least forty-five or fifty glasses of beer that night, and that’s no lie. We were down in South Boston taking over joint after joint and singing over microphones on bandstands and banging on drums and all that. Then we sort of drifted toward Scollay Square and wound up in that joint of joints, the Imperial Café. Here were two floors and five rooms of sailors, soldiers, and seamen, women, music, whiskey, smoke, and fights.