Fo'castle Waltz

Louis Slobodkin FO'CASTLE WALTZ

Raison d'Etre

NOW, WHY SHOULD A FAT, SOFT GUY WITH GLASSES BE WAITING for (believe it or not) a Brooklyn streetcar at six o'clock on a brilliant, hot July morning? That's what I asked myself as I leaned against a cast-iron lamppost still warm from yesterday's sun. And as I idly squinted up the sun-slashed street I found my answer in the fear-widened eyes of a flapper kitten who had backed herself into the corner of a building as a protection from a lecherous old tomcat.

There were many answers why I was taking the trolley, if it ever came along, to that Bay Ridge dock to board the freighter, the S.S. Hermanita. For one, there had been some dame. I knew that wasn't the real reason for sticking my neck out. I had no feeling left for her; for these past six months I'd been stretching my emotional concern. Besides, I'd been reading a lot of Conrad and Melville lately that should have acted as an antidote for this kind of adventure—the men I'd read about were hard, competent people, hardly my type of schlemiel.

The pitiful mewing of the virgin kitten with her backside wedged into that corner of the red-brick wall reminded me why I was starting on this hunt for the S.S. Hermanita and adventure.

She was so much like the thin young cat who had walked into Old Man McQuarrie's studio the winter before. She, too, had had the wide blue eyes of innocence and virginity. The old man had ordered her fed, and for a few days she lived the luxurious life of a pampered darling—as much pampering as she could get in the busy, architectural-sculpture studio where I'd worked that winter. The old man (he was about fifty) was very concerned that all studio windows be locked fast at night. It was not that he feared ordinary marauders. What could you steal in an immense studio full of large clay models, plaster molds, and miscellaneous sculpture paraphernalia? No, it was the kitten. He'd taken it upon himself to protect her honor from those unscrupulous brigands, the alley cats, who prowled our roof on moonlit nights—or perhaps to save her from her own moon-madness.

But one night the skylight window had been left open. Our little cat did not appear at the studio until late in the morning and then—with her sleek fur ruffled and a world-weary expression on her dainty little muzzle—gone were the blue eyes of virtue; they had changed overnight into a wise, calm gray. Unquestionably, our pampered little darling had been put. She'd gone over that fence from which there is no returning. The kitten had become a cat.

Seemingly, all that has nothing to do with my looking for trouble aboard this tramp, the S.S. Hermanita. But when our cat returned, the old man looked at her sharply over his shoulder and then through his teeth told one of the studio boys to put her out.

We all felt bad about it, but no one protested. Later that morning there had been a bit of talk about the relative merits of England and France. The old man had spent some three weeks drunk in Paris and no time at all in England. He talked with authority of the superior qualities of England, and his yes-men, working on the clay panels alongside him, yes'd Mr. McQuarrie's every preposterous statement. I don't know whether it was the rankling resentment I felt about the injustice done the cat or irritation at the old man's pomposity, but I broke into the conversation with an impassioned defense of France. All I'd ever read, all I'd seen of her art and heard of her music, women, perfume, wines, food, went into my argument for her superiority to the cold-mutton, horse-faced women and blunt men of England and their culture.

The old man turned his head slowly, eyed me coldly, and asked, "Slobodkin, where have you ever been?"

I'd given some weak reply... I'd read, seen the work, and heard about... but it was true, I'd been no place. I'd been as far north as Lake George, as far east as Long Island, west to Madison, New Jersey, and south to Staten Island.

Well, there I was waiting for the streetcar that would take me to a ship bound for the Argentine, six thousand miles away —farther away than any of that dreary bunch had ever been— far enough away so that I could argue about any place when I came back and no one could cut me down with a "Where have you been, Slobodkin?" again.

It strengthened my resolution to think back, and in gratitude I shied a chunk of brick at that growling old tom and sent him scurrying. The rescued kitten scampered in the other direction with her honor intact for one more day, or until I'd boarded that trolley which lurched off down the street, looking for the S.S. Hermanita and the other end of the world.

1. Deck Boy on a Trolley

AN EMPTY TROLLEY IN THE EARLY MORNING is a good place to think and repent. There are few faces to see, and those usually belong to night workers going home to sleep or someone like yourself with a bleary-eyed, half-awake, empty pan. They stare back at you or through you, and you soon lose interest in one another.

So I thought back over the events that had brought me this far and vaguely repented my own impetuosity. It had been so much trouble to get to this point with my seaman's passport and my physical examination card, which smugly guaranteed me from venereal infection for forty-eight hours only—(Who are they to control my love life?) I'd passed that fool lifeboat test. . . .

I had been doing a portrait head of a Mrs. Grub, whose husband had had a stirring in him—he, top, had studied the fine arts, he had drawn in evening class -when he was very young and had grown up to be a short, overstuffed, and oversuccessful silk salesman. Whenever he spoke of those few evening classes in which he'd sketched from the nude, a faraway look came into his eyes and a sad, bitter smile creased his rather thick lips. He had a sympathy for me because he felt that he, too, had been a starving, young artist for a few weeks. He encouraged me to talk of my ambitions, my hopes, my yearnings.

Now and again I'd ventured a thought that had just begun to brew—I'd like to get a job aboard a small freight ship. I'd even made some half-hearted attempts to get one. Once or twice I'd gone down to the Shipping Board agencies and stood at the outskirts of a motley gang of men—deckhands, firemen, mess-men, sea cooks, and so on—as they scanned the bulletins of the help wanted aboard the thousands of ships down at the docks.

None of the listings seemed to want my kind of guy. Since I could draw, do sculpture, and paint water colors, I should make excellent material for a deck boy who, I understood, did nothing but get in the way of the real sailors, or I thought I might be an ordinary who does just a little more. I never aspired to be an able-bodied seaman; as a Boy Scout I was a perennial tenderfoot. I could never box the compass: I'd forget what followed East Northeast.

But the want ads for the toilers of the sea were mainly concerned with ship technicians—and so many dishwashers, waiters, and galley hands, mainly for passenger boats. I understood why years later, when I'd crossed the ocean a few times as a passenger. We ate, sat, and slept, slept, sat, and ate all over again, one monotonous day after another—there must have been an awful lot of dishes used. I hate dishdashing lukewarm water or cold, greasy stuff on my hands nauseates me so I hunted a freighter to ship out as a deckhand, which I eventually did, and instead of merely immersing niv dainty- hands in smelly dish water up to my elbows on the S.S. Hermanita, my dream ship, I had them dunked up to the shoulders and down my lily-white body in the stinking mess of a thick black, green and brown bilge soup for almost four long weeks. But to twist a cliche, I'm slopping about six thousand miles ahead of my story.