by Paul Theroux
I was reading a great deal—the serious paperback was having its vogue in the early fifties (they were thought to be somewhat salacious: “He’s just reading a paperback” was considered mockery)—and I was encouraged by the biographical notes, less frequent today, which listed the previous occupations of the author on the back cover. “Jim Sidebottom has had a varied career,” they’d begin, and go on to list twenty back-breaking jobs. I imagined my own biographical note: “After his discharge from the U.S. Army, where he reached the rank of corporal, John (“Jack”) Fiori worked as a hat blocker in his father’s tailor shop, and then in succession as a printer, draftsman, short-order cook, bartender, dishwasher, lifeguard, baker, and fruit seller. He has always considered fiction to be his chief aim, and has this to say about the present novel: ‘I believe that mankind struggled from the sea to—’” It was a good biographical note, enhanced by an imagined photograph of me smoking a cigarette over a typewriter. I smoked. I bought a typewriter and learned to use it. I typed my biographical note. But that was all: there was no book. I had nothing to write. I knew nothing beyond my name and the face I practiced. I didn’t understand danger or regret; a book was an extensive biographical note.
Twenty years later William Leigh turned up and asked me urgent questions, and died with a foolish sentence on his lips before I could reply; and I burned him to dust. So this memoir was provoked. Writing a book is a splendid idea, but it was not mine. My notion was simpler, just a picture of my experienced face and the list of jobs that made the face that way. This memoir is not the book or the work I imagined; it was urged upon me, like a complicated, necessary enchantment I did little to inspire, made mostly of terror, which forced me to learn, laboriously, to conjure: an imprecise trick, half accident, half design, begun as a deliberate memory (“Mister Hing vaunting Mister Jack . . .”) and completed by the kind of magic that to discover thoroughly is to fail at.
I thought I could learn at college. It was my only reason for going. I found myself among a few earnest veterans and many fresh-faced kids. The older fellers never flunked out, but at the same time never excelled, resenting being lectured to and corrected by educated fellers the same age or younger, draft dodgers or fairies with leather elbow patches, whom they could only nag with the reply, “I’ll bet you don’t even know how to clean a gun!” The ones on the GI Bill lived with their harassed wives and children in gray Nissen huts, referred to as “married quarters.” Most of the older fellers were economics majors or engineers (the pocketful of pens, the slide rule in a scabbard) and had too much homework on their hands to take an interest in the college routine. Besides, they had problems at home, and so they treated their education as a job, being punctual and tidy, carrying creased lunch bags, and keeping regular hours. I saw them in the student union salting a hard-boiled egg and underlining a physics book.
Some, of whom I was one because I was unmarried and majoring in English, were accommodated by the fringe people, the art majors, would-be poets, weekend winos, hangers-on, and hitchhikers. That was the enterprise then, saying, “Aw shit, I gotta bust out” and hitchhiking in sweat shirts across the country, aiming for California or Mexico, and staying drunk the whole way by gagging down whole bottles of Tokay or Muscatel. These fellers would show up with stories of their travels (“I met this beautiful sad old man in Denver, and he says to me. . .”) and some poems about America which they’d shout, taking swigs out of a can of beer. The writers they respected had all been deck hands on freighters, and going to sea was the height of their ambition. Some hung around the Seafarers’ International Union in Brooklyn, hoping for a job, but few of them succeeded—they were too young and not strong enough for the work. They talked about Zen Buddhism, Ezra Pound, the atom bomb, mystical experiences. There was a little marijuana around, but the big kicks were in drinking three bottles of terpin hydrate cough syrup or washing down a can of nutmeg with a glass of milk. Or getting drunk like Dylan Thomas; or trying to grow a beard.
It was my beard that gained me entry. I had stopped shaving when I worked the night shift at the bakery and still had it the day I shambled in to register for classes. It was bright red, cut square across the bottom. They complimented me on it and I explained its redness by saying that Vivaldi’s hair was the same color.
I suppose I should have kept to myself, but I had been doing that joylessly for ten years, and I liked the company, the spirit of careless romance in the younger kids. People called them “beatniks,” already a dated word then, but they thought of themselves as “the folk.” I moved into the top floor of a coffee shop, and generally I stuck close to them, proving my friendship the only way I knew, buying beer for them, lending them money, trying to set them straight on Ezra Pound, who was a fake poet but a genuine fascist; and I kept my hot eyes on the long-haired girls who strummed guitars and wrote poems in black sweaters and dancers’ tights. I wrote poems, too, unfashionable rhyming ones:
Is that the wind? I asked my friend,
That shakes the trees and makes them bend?
In a group of six or seven grim-looking undergraduates I was the big bearded one in army fatigues, older than the others and trying to look inconspicuous; and more than likely there would be a small pale girl next to me, who couldn’t stand her parents. “When you were my age,” she would say, and go on cracking my heart, bending my ear.
It did not last long. My reading only trained me to read better. What I wrote sounded like what I read: “A cold dark November in my soul,” I’d write, and then furiously cross it out, or again and again, “I was born in the year 1918, in the North End of the city of Boston, the second child of two transplanted Italians—” Then half a chapter about childhood fears—not the informed apprehension of the adult, but the impatient uncertainty of the little boy who was always made to wait, who thought he might die in his bed if the lamp was switched off and whose pleasures were his thumb, and the minutes after confession and the time spent in a slate urinal, pissing with one hand and eating an icecream sandwich with the other. To sit down and write Chapter One—Childhood was to begin a book rather than a story, a bold guarantee against ever finishing it. My character’s name was Jack Flowers, not John Fiori. A first-love chapter and an army chapter loomed, and Jack was going to discover the simplicity of love and the surprise of wealth. If the book succeeded I would write another about success; if it failed, about failure. The fellers in the coffee shop asked me what my book was about. I said, “It’s about this guy who’s trying to write a book—”
Writing bored me, and it sickened me in my attic to.be staring at a white sheet of paper (“Chapter One”) while the sun was shining outside and everyone else was at play, for every word I wrote seemed a denial of the complex uniqueness I could see just outside the window. My descriptions reduced what lacy trees and grass I could see to sorry props on the page, and my characters were either brutes or angels, too extreme and simple to be human. Still, fiction seemed to give me the second chances life denied me.
But there were other difficulties. In my short time as a student the artistic fringe people switched from getting drunk to getting high. I could cope with alcohol, but drugs baffled me, and I didn’t even know that the pills I was taking to get my weight down, little heart-shaped orange tablets, were a kind of pep pill.
“John,” a girl said, seeing me swallow one, “what’s that?”
I was too embarrassed to explain that they had been prescribed to reduce my waistline. They killed my appetite: skinny fellers had more girl friends. I said, “It’s just a tablet. I don’t even know the name—”
“Dexedrine,” she said. “Fantastic.”
“You want one? Here, take a dozen.”
“Cool.” She swallowed three.
“You won’t want any lunch,” I said.
“Crazy.” She shuddered.
That amused me. Handing out these reducing tablets won me the girl friends I had hoped to get by being thin. Briefly, I was happy. But happiness is a blurred memory of sensation
al lightness; fear and boredom leave me with a remembrance of particular details. I recall the discomfort: squatting or sitting cross-legged on the floor, listening to long poems by nineteen-year-olds beginning, I have seen . . .—getting cramps behind my knees, my back aching—And I have seen . . . I made myself sick on that sweet wine (“Look out, John’s barfing!”) and they talked about Zen, rejection slips from quarterlies with names like The Goatsfoot, ban-the-bomb, Ezra P. I would be dying for a hot bath. I admired their resilience; they could stay up all night gabbing, eating nothing but Dexedrines and cough syrup; I’d say, “Hell, I hate to be a party-pooper, but—” and crawl off to bed, hearing And I have seen—all the way to my room. The next morning I’d see them stretched out on the floor, paired up but still chastely in their clothes, and all of them sleeping in their shoes.
They invented a past for me. I deserved it; I had not told them a thing about myself. They intended flattery, but the stories were truly monstrous: “You’ve got a wife and kids somewhere, haven’t you?” a girl whispered to me in my attic, candid in the dark after love. Another, rolling over, said, “Do anything you want to me—I know you’re a switch hitter.” I was a genius; I was a deserter; I was shell-shocked; I was a refugee; I sometimes took a knife to bed; the Germans tortured me. The stories were too ridiculous to deny, the truth too boring to repeat. I had grown to like the kids; I did not want to disappoint them. I used to make the eyes of those lovely girls bright by saying, “If I laid you once I’d turn you into a whore.”
It ended badly. The coffee shop was in a residential area, and the late nights the kids spent discussing music and poetry were interpreted by the neighbors as sex orgies. We got strange phone calls, and visits at odd hours from well-dressed men. The police raided us. I say “raided.” Two cops opened the door and said, “We’ve had a complaint about you.”
“Let’s see your search warrant,” I said. It seemed a good gambit, but they weren’t buying it.
“Out of the way, fatso,” they said, pushing past me. They went upstairs, rousing people and saying, “Nothing here,” and “Okay in here.” Soon they were back in the hall, surrounded by angry poets and pretty girls.
One cop showed me his white glove. The palm was filled with Dexedrines. “Whose are these?”
They weren’t mine. I had stopped taking them, though I still passed them around. I said, “Mine.”
“No, they’re not,” said a girl named Rita. “Those are mine.”
“They’re his,” said the cop, “so shut up.”
“Anyway, what’s the problem?” I said. “I take these things to kill my appetite. I got a weight problem.”
“You got a problem, fella,” the cop said, “but it ain’t no weight problem. Better come along with us.”
Rita screamed at him.
In the squad car the cop driving said, “We know all about you and those kids. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
I was charged with possessing drugs without a prescription, procuring drugs for a minor, and on hearsay, on charges of fornication, bigamy, homosexuality, and petty theft. My trial would be in three weeks. Bail was steep, but the coffee shop fellers and some sympathetic faculty members started a fund and bailed me out; they told me I was being victimized.
Jumping bail was easy; the only loss was the money. I took a Greyhound bus to Los Angeles, and leaving everything including my name, flew to Hong Kong and signed on the Allegro. It was not despair; it was the convenience of flight, an expensive exit that was possible because it was final. I had no intention of going back. It would have been bad for my heart, and I’m using that word in its older sense.
And: “Flowers,” said the skipper of the Allegro, reading my name from the crew list. He made a mark on the paper. “Age—thirty-eight. Single. No identifying marks or scars.” He looked up. “Your first contract, I see. Know anything about oiling?”
“No,” I said, “but I don’t think it would take me long to learn.”
“What can you do?”
“Anything,” I said. “I suppose you’ve heard this one before, but what I really wanted to do was write.”
“Take that pencil,” the skipper said.
“This one?” I selected one from a pewter mug on his desk.
“And that pad of paper.”
The letterhead said, Four Star Shipping Lines.
“Write,” he said.
“Shoot,” I said.
“Carrots, eighty pounds,” he said. “White flour, two hundred pounds. Fresh eggs—”
5
A YEAR LATER, nimble in my soft white shoes, I was guiding a deeply tanned cruise passenger in his club blazer through the low sidewalk corridors of Singapore back lanes. It was night, dark and smelly in the tunnel-like passageways, and quiet except for the occasional snap of mahjong tiles and the rattling of abacus beads—no voices—coming from the bright cracks in burglar doors on shophouse fronts. Some shops, caged by protective steel grates, showed Chinese families sitting at empty tables under glaring bulbs and the gazes from the walls of old relations with small shoulders and lumpy heads in blurred brown photograph ovals—the lighted barred room like an American museum-case tableau of life-size wax figures depicting Chinese at night, the seated mother and father, ancestral relics, and three children’s little heads in a coconut row at the far edge of the table. Sikh watchmen huddled, hugging themselves in bloomers and undershirts on string beds outside dark shops; we squeezed past them and past the unsleeping Tamil news vendors playing poker in lotus postures next to their shuttered goods cupboards. Here was a Chinese man in his pajamas, crouching on a stool, smoking, clearing his throat, watching the cars pass. Farther along, four children were playing tag, chasing each other and shrieking in the dark; and under a street-corner lamp, a lone child tugged at an odd flying toy, a live beetle, captive on a yard of thread—he flung it at us as we passed and then pulled it away, laughing in a shy little snort.
“Atmosphere,” murmured the feller.
“You said it.” There was a quicker way to Muscat Lane, but that took you over uncovered sidewalks, past new shops, on a well-lighted street. The atmosphere was an easy detour.
“It’s like something out of a myth.”
“Too bad the shops are closed,” I said. “One down this way has bottles filled with dead frogs and snakes—right in the window. Frog syrup. Sort of medicine. The mixture—two spoonfuls three times daily. Hnyeh!”
“You seem to know your way around.”
“Well, I live here, you see.”
“Funny, meeting someone who actually lives in a place like this,” said the feller. “I’m glad I ran into you.”
“Always glad to help out. You looked a bit lost,” I said. I had met him in the Big South Sea, and all I had said—it was my new opening—was “Kinda hot.”
“By the way, it’s not very far from here.”
“Wait,” he said, and touched my arm. “Is that a rat?”
A smooth dark shape, flat as a shadow, crept out of the monsoon drain and hopped near a bursting barrel.
“Just a cat,” I said. “Millions of them around here.” I stamped my foot; the rat turned swiftly and dived back into the drain. “A small pussy cat.”
“I’ve got a thing about rats.” There was a child’s fearful quaver in his voice.
“So do I!” I said, so he would not be embarrassed. “They scare the living daylights out of me. Feller I know has dozens of them in the walls of his house. They scratch around at night—”
“Please.”
“Oh, sorry,” I said. “Not to worry. Take a left—mind your head.”
We passed under a low black archway into Sultana Street; a darkened shophouse smelling gloriously of cinnamon made me slow down to take a good whiff of the sweet dust in the air. Then we turned again into an alley of wet cobblestones where there was no sidewalk, Muscat Lane.
“I never would have found this place alone,” the feller said behind me, and I could tell by his voice that he had turned to
look back. He was nervous.
“That’s what I’m here for!” I said, trying to calm him with heartiness. “I just hope they’re not all asleep.” I stopped at an iron gate, the only opening in a high cement wall, burglar-proofed with rows of sharp iron crescents instead of broken glass bristles. The house had once belonged to a wealthy Muslim, and the iron gate was worked in an Islamic design. Across the alley, four yellow windowsquares in the back of a shophouse illustrated the night: a Chinese man and wife faced each other in chairs at one; above them a schoolboy, holding a fistful of his hair, wrote at a desk; next to him, an old man looked into a mirror, scraping his tongue with a stick; and in the yellow window under the old man’s an old lady nuzzled an infant.
“It’s night,” said the feller, “but it’s so hot! It’s like an oven.”
A padlock chained to the bars held the gate shut. I was rapping the lock against a bar.
“Yes?” A dim face and a bright flashlight appeared at the side of the gate.
“Mr. Sim, is that you?”
“Jack,” said Mr. Sim.
“Yeah, how are they treating you? I thought you might be in the sack. Look, have you got a girl you can spare?”
