I was very hungry.
My last ride had innocently pointed it out as a place both good and cheap.
And I didn’t see anyplace else near it.
I stood there about two and a half minutes, deciding what to do. In this sun-soaked land, my complexion was ambiguous enough that I couldn’t see the point of going in the colored entrance unless I wanted to make some kind of statement. Only—did I want to make a statement, right at this moment?
I wanted something to eat.
Remembering the guy in the car (“… you look like you could have some colored blood in you …?”) I went through the unmarked (so presumably white) entrance and took a seat at the ten-foot counter—inside, there didn’t seem to be any particular colored section at the six-seat counter. The two Hispanic workmen eating either side of me were both substantially darker than I. A redheaded waitress took my order for a combination enchilada and taco plate, with rice and refried beans—and served me with a smile and a usual, “There you go. Enjoy that, now.”
It was very good.
56.2 And in Freeport, after not getting a ride for half an hour, Bob wandered back into town to linger on into evening, finally hooking up with some guys who were stalking from bar to bar, buying drinks for every one around; and, by two in the morning, had got himself pulled in, for drunk and disorderly, and kicked out on the road the next morning. …
Whatever the charges against him a year or two back, they’d long since been forgotten, he explained to me when we met up again on the docks of our destination.
I think he was disappointed.
23. Ibid., p. 22.
57. A dusty pickup let me off by the Aransas Pass waterfront. You could walk from one end of it to the other in ten minutes. I did, walked back, then went into a dark, clapboard hamburger place with a Coca-Cola sign nailed to one wall and a chewing tobacco advertisement on another, to get a soda and burger. Inside, a white-blond guy with dark-burned skin about my age loitered, shirtless, at one of the tables. I started up a conversation.
His name was Jake. Where was I from, he wanted to know.
Up north, I told him. (To say New York, I already knew, was often to set off a kind of unnecessary challenge.)
Why’d I come down here? There weren’t nothin’ to do in this little shit hole of a place.
I was looking for a job on the boats.
Well, that sure shouldn’t be too hard. Jake was workin’ on a boat, himself. Maybe if I stopped by later, his captain would tell me where I might best go. But all I really had to do was ask up and down the waterfront, and I would probably get one ’fore the day was out. The nigger boats was down at the other end, he told me knowingly.
I wasn’t sure if that meant I should try them or avoid them. But I figured this probably wasn’t the time either to make a stand or find out. And Jake was already asking, did I know any jokes?
Jokes? I’d never been very good at remembering jokes. But I brought out one. It was pretty lame, but it got a chuckle from Jake. Come on, he said, let’s go back to my boat. Captain’s off somewhere till this evening. But there’s a case of beer in the galley icebox. He won’t mind if we take one or two. Lemme tell you one, now.
The guy who was cook and waiter both said I could leave my guitar case behind the counter for a few hours, and it would be safe. I thanked him profusely.
“You play that thing?” Jake asked, as the heavy man in his apron lifted the dark case over. “Whyn’t you bring it along and maybe make us a little music?”
“Naw,” I said. “I don’t play that good. Besides, one of the strings is busted and I’ve got to get it fixed.” It was a lie. But after lugging that hard case more than fifteen hundred miles in four days (most of them, memory told me, full of rain and mud), I didn’t want to see it again for a few hours.
We went outside.
Sitting in the empty galley of Jake’s boat, we drank a beer apiece and swapped stories. Jake’s third was the one about the cocksucker who was working on the guy in the bushes, and after he finished, the guy looks down at him and say, “Okay, you sucked my dick, faggot. Now I’m gonna beat the shit out of you.” And the cocksucker looks up at him and says, “There’re two things I always liked. …” I frowned. But half the jokes Jake told that afternoon were ones Bob had told me on the subway, that first February evening, riding down from Bernie’s. I asked Jake a few questions about himself. He was twenty-five. He was from Georgia. Two of the last three years he’d spent in jail.
What had they got him for?
“Paper-hangin’. Shit, I had bad checks out all over Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi! But it was my first felony, so I got out after two, on parole.”
He was married and had a kid, but he wasn’t sure it was his. The wife was six years older than him—her third marriage, his first. But he’d just gotten sick and tired of arguin’ with her and had run off last month; now he was gonna work here on the boats for the summer. Maybe he’d go back some time … only he was afraid the law might still want him in the Georgia town he’d just left. And maybe, he added, looking at the electric alarm clock on the galley’s red linoleum counter with the aluminum catch rail running around the rim, you better take off, too. The captain’ll be back soon, and it wouldn’t do for him to catch a stranger sittin’ around and drinkin’ up his beer, you know what I mean? But if I didn’t find something, I should come on back and ask him. You know some good stories, too. I ain’t heard half the ones you told.
You know some good ones, too, I said. Thanks for the beer. Then I went out on the deck, jumped down on the dock, and started walking again.
The Sonnys of the world notwithstanding, neither Marilyn nor I had ever met anyone like Bob before. But here, in his own territory, I’d met a man within minutes who was Bob’s sociological twin. Thinking about it, I decided Bob was unique. But what was unique about him was that he’d read Moby Dick five times in jail—not jail itself; what was unique about him was his invention of two-sided tape; what was unique about him was his bravery in coming to New York at thirteen—not to mention his willingness to live in a three-way relationship as long as he—or any of us—had. But much of the rest, in which so much color had lain, I now knew had been dealt him in a hand as fixed in its form as that of any number of hoary jokes.
For now, though, with a dollar-eighty in my pocket, I had to find a job.
A bit down the piers, a blue pickup truck had pulled up to park. A middle-aged guy was pulling boxes from the back, and a younger guy was carrying them out across the dock and taking them on board.
Between them and me, a guy in his mid-twenties was perched on some bales, hugging his knees and looking down at me. His hair was brown and curly. He had no shirt. He was barefoot. And he was very dirty.
As I walked by, I stopped and said, “Hi!”
He nodded.
“You know where I can get a job?”
He came back with an answer in an accent so thick and local, I couldn’t catch a word. With one tarry hand, he reached out to point.
I let my eyes follow his forefinger—nail half black from some recent blow—among the slanted and dilapidated buildings across from the dock, to the back of the red brick supermarket I’d walked by coming down here. It didn’t mean too much. The one word I thought I could make out in his pronouncement was “fuckin” something. His smile, though, was friendly.
“I want to get a job,” I said again.
He answered again in his incomprehensible drawl. He pointed down at the notebook under my arm.
“Would you like to see it?” I asked, holding it up. “It’s only a notebook. …” My own diction was becoming clipped and precise in order to make myself clear, even as I realized he’d understand me better if I let my speech drift as far south as my father’s or even Bob’s.
He shook his head, still smiling, but with a kind of sadness, a kind of incomprehension. He said something else. Maybe it was that he didn’t know how to write. Or read. But I couldn’t tell.
Jak
e’s accent had been thick. But I hadn’t known there was American speech, still a form of English, this far from the intelligible. For a moment I thought of asking him where he was from, just to note it down. But then, I probably wouldn’t recognize the name.
“Thanks,” I said, doubtfully, and smiled. I had no idea what I was thanking him for, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Thank you.”
I walked on by the boats.
The beefy guy unloading his blue pickup wore a shirt clutched around the flanks by giant, sweaty palm prints. All the buttons were gone, and he’d tied the front corners across a rug of belly hair bulging above and below the knot.
The guy carrying the boxes by me onto the boat looked pretty much like the guy I’d just talked to. He was barefoot and shirtless in the lancing heat, back and shoulders burned dark as a penny. His hair was spikey; his hands were grimy. Another carton on his shoulder, he trudged by no more than two feet away, without glancing at me—though he had to have seen me.
Standing on the gray dockboards, I thought: Most popular person in the eighth grade …? The guy who can make friends with anyone …? But if I can’t understand him, what will it matter? Maybe I should try the guy at the truck? But even as I turned, the older guy finished setting the last carton down and went around to the pickup’s other side.
The younger guy stepped down from the boat rail again, and paused a moment to take a breath.
I took one too and said, “You’re working on the boat there?”
He looked at me, nodded.
I took another one. “Do you know if there’s any chance of my getting a job around here?”
He said, “There is if you want to work.” His accent was as northern as my own and could have come from any New England state university senior.
“Sure,” I said. “That’s what I’m looking for!”
He rubbed his sunburned neck and called over to the truck, “Hey, Elmer!”
The middle-aged guy with the hairy belly stood up, frowned across the cab’s blue roof, and rubbed his dripping forehead with the heel of his hand. “What you want?” Elmer’s accent was rich with Texas twang.
“We’ve got a guy here looking for a job.”
Elmer came back around the pickup to stand in front of me. He looked me up and down. “You wanna paint a boat deck, you got a job. We’ll see how you do paintin’; then maybe I’ll take you on as a header. I need a third man.”
“Thank you, sir!”
“You a northern boy, like Ron here?” Elmer grinned.
“That’s right. I’m looking to work here for the summer. On the boats.”
The grin became a grunt. “Ron’ll show you what to do. He’s my first mate.” Elmer turned back to the truck.
I was still not sure if I actually had a job. If I did, though, it had been simple.
Ron must have intuited my confusion. He said, “I guess you’re hired. Elmer’s the captain. It’s his boat. And what he says goes. My name’s Ron. Where you from?”
Elmer had gotten in the truck; the tires crunched over gravel and sparse grass. “See you boys tomorrow,” he called from the window.
I considered a moment. Then I said, “I’m from New York.”
“No shit!” Ron grinned. “I’m from New Jersey!”
The boxes they’d been loading were full of cans of white deck paint.
I spent the rest of the afternoon with Ron, painting the deck of Elmer’s seventy-two-foot shrimp runner dead lead white, leaving a gray strip to the door of the cabin. By six I’d discarded my shirt like every other male under forty on the Aransas docks. Standing a moment to thumb sweat out of my eyes, I saw Jake walking by the boats. “Hi!” I waved.
“Captain came back.” Jake grinned at me. “And I just got my fuckin’ ass fired!”
“What happened?”
“After you left, I drank up the rest of the fuckin’ beer. You know any place ’round here I can get a job?”
Ron stepped up beside me. “This boat’s full,” he said. “We got our three men. But you just ask around, up and down the docks, here. You’ll get on.”
Ron bought me dinner since Elmer had gone home. I slept in the boat that night.
The next day, near two o’clock, when I was walking up toward the hamburger place, I saw a familiar figure coming down the dirt path beside the supermarket. He looked at me, grinned, and declared, “Well, howdy, stranger …!”
And my experiment in exhaustiveness is done.
58. But there’s a surprising amount I remember from those weeks in Texas. To recount some, then, with neither an eye for completeness and only a musical order:
That month I crewed on Elmer’s shrimp boat as “header”—the third man in the three-man crew, who pulls the heads off the shrimp, after they’re caught and before they’re iced down and stored in the boat’s deep, aluminum-sided hold. I slept in a blanket on a bare mattress in the forepeak, from under which, on my first night, I cleaned out a lot of used condoms and cigarette butts—left from the last header who’d had the job. Out at sea, the work ran twenty-four hours around the clock: three to sleep, four to fish, three to sleep, four to fish—a killing schedule to follow five or six days straight.
Kept up seven, eight, or ten days, it made some people really crazy. One first mate working out of the docks that summer was called Red, a name he had picked up in adolescence when his hair had actually been a fiery copper. Today it was just an overlong, nondescript blond with, around sunset, a brickish undertone. In his late twenties, lanky, and sunburned, he had freckled hands and cheeks.
As we were coming out of the hamburger place where I’d heard the waiter call him by name, I’d started talking to him because of a story Bob had told me about Aransas during his first days with us in New York. In his initial summer there, leaving Joanne behind in Florida, Bob had hung out with a bunch of fishermen, drinking, partying in motel rooms, fighting in bars, roistering in the smalltown streets, passing out with them around sunrise on their days away from the boats. “There was this one older guy, named Red. I always knew he kinda liked me. We’d all be sleepin’ in someone’s room, drunk out of our gourds, and I’d wake up ’cause I feel someone suckin’ on my dick. I’d look down and there he’d be, workin’ away. ‘What the fuck you doin’?’ I’d say; though I couldn’t help laughing. He did it pretty good. He’d shush me and whisper, ‘Don’t worry. It’s just me.’ Then he’d go back to work—right there in the room with all the others. But they was passed out. He did it regular, too, the whole summer. I swear, nobody else knew about it—unless he was doin’ all of us!”
I spent a couple of afternoons, sitting on barrels in the sun, talking with Red—but realized within the first ten minutes he was not the Red from Bob’s story. This was his first summer in the Aransas Pass. Nor did he know Bob at all. He had a pretty even temperament. And, in his Kentucky drawl, he could fish up a surprising amount about classical music! The header on the boat where Red was a first mate was a wino and oft-times derelict called Billy. Older than Red or the captain, Billy’s hair was red and stuck in matted, carroty hanks from under a navy blue cap gone coal color with grease. Billy’s eyes ran. All his toenails were smashed up and black—he went barefoot. And when he got to talking with you, he’d clutch your arm or shoulder, babbling on non-stop, repeating himself a lot, splattering a lot, and not making much sense.
Red’s captain was taking the boat out on a two-week run—which everybody said was pretty long. But after six days, they sailed back in.
In two tan Texas cars, the lights on the top like sun-dimmed eyes squinting about the noontime dock, the police were waiting at the waterfront. The rumor ran among the boats that Red was being put under arrest.
“For what?” I asked Jake.
Attempted murder. Red had tried to kill Billy. Out on the boat.
“How? What in the world did he do?”
Tried to drown the sorry son of a bitch. (The information had come in over the radio from the boat captain, Jake
explained.) Threw him off the goddamn boat, right over the goddamn side.
“Why? What happened?”
Said he couldn’t stand the sorry fucker. Said he didn’t like the way he looked, the way he smelled, or the way he washed dishes (the header is the dishwasher on the boat—and, in my case, on Elmer’s boat, cook too), or the way he splats all over you when he talks, and if he said another three words to Red, he was gonna drown him—
“Three words? That would be pretty hard with Billy.”
Yeah. Billy kept on hangin’ on him, so Red threw Billy over the rail. And when Billy tried to climb back on, Red took a goddamn gaff and began to bang on his hands and knock him back into the water. The Captain told him to cut it out, a joke is a joke, but Red said he wasn’t joking, he was gonna drown him. And when Billy swum up, Red tried to poke him underwater with the gaff—then the Captain said, hey, come on now, and he and Red had a fight, and the Captain finally had to tie Red up and haul Billy back on board; and Red said he’d better keep him tied up, too, ’cause if he let him loose again he’d just finish off what he’d already started. So the Captain called in to the shore patrol and they told him to call the goddamn police …!
With a dozen other boatmen, we watched the waterfront officers lead Red off the deck. He was just handcuffed, now; and he had an expression somewhere between annoyance and bewilderment. He nodded at a couple of people, including me, while he was getting in the car. He didn’t say anything, though. They drove him up into town.
Red’s captain, who’d stopped it all, was a guy about twenty-seven, a little younger than Red. He was big and pretty easygoing himself. He looked kind of like a bear.
A fist on his jeans at his cowboy belt, he stepped down on the dock, now to talk to a waterfront policeman, now to squint after the police car driving off, now to furrow his bare, shaggy chest with broom-handle thick fingers on which the wide nails were bitten back till they were shorter, oil-lined cuticle to dirt-rimmed crown, than most five-year-olds’.
The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village Page 52
