As I worried over to the passport office, a thought struck me that almost turned me back—and would have turned me if I had not already paid my nickel for the subway ride downtown.
That physical-examination card guaranteed me free from venereal infection for forty-eight hours, and here it was already fifty-two hours—fifty-two and a half before I'd reach the passport office!
I'd been very careful—but would they believe me? I did have a haggard look, all this running around and worrying...
I gently put all my papers down on the passport man's desk. As he shuffled through them I hastily explained about that birth-certificate date, name, and so on. He slapped the papers down on the desk and gave me a long, weary spiel about signed affidavits and a lot of other stuff I'd have to do to rid myself of this Slopotzwkyi with which I'd been saddled. But he hadn't lingered on the forty-eight hour purity clause, so I sighed and settled for Slopotzwkyi.
I was fingerprinted, raised my right hand, and, presto!—I had a seaman's passport.
So the following morning found me rattling along on that trolley car until the motorman turned his head and said, "Hey, Jack, here's Vesey Street. . . . It'll take you to your pier 45."
2. The "Hermanita"
IT WAS COOL AND DAMP ALONG THE STREETS that skirted the waterfront, and I finally sighted the big warehouse with a large, stained, white 45 painted high on the front of it.
There was no one around. No men, no ships near it—at least not on the side I'd approached. I'd been told that my ship was a little one, maybe her stacks didn't even reach the dock level, or maybe she'd sunk! I went around the warehouse to look down into the water. An old man was coiling some wet rope as I turned the comer.
I asked if the S.S. Hermanita wasn't supposed to be docked at this pier. He squinted up his eyes in the manner of those who can't hear very well.
"Which?"
I shouted, "The S.S. Hermanita. Is she supposed... or could you tell me..?"
"The Hermanita, huh?"
"Yes."
He slowly straightened up.
"There she is—out in the stream," and he pointed in the general direction of Europe.
Sure enough, there she was, looking cool and a bit rakish, with patches of red lead on her hull, riding high on the limpid waters of the East River. Panic seized me—here I hadn't even stepped aboard my ship, and already I was a deserter! True, I hadn't really signed on yet, but how was I to know that desertion now might not be considered a sort of breach of promise?
I asked the old man what to do—where was she going, where could I catch her? To all my frenzied questions he answered I dunno or just shook his head and went on coiling rope. I stood there.
"Sorry, fella, can't help you. I jes' ties 'em up when they comes in and unties 'em when they go. I jes' work here."
When he walked off with the coil, he turned and said, "Phone yer Port Captain. He oughter know."
I hunted a phone booth. Now was as good a time as any to come to a final decision about this foolhardy venture to take my soft fat life in my hands and risk it aboard some seagoing, leaky old tub. That first impression I had of the S.S. Hermanita out there in the cool East River was not too persuasive. Seemed to me she had a list to her, and her empty hull smeared with large patches of red lead didn't look any too safe. Maybe I'd call the whole thing off. What could they do me? Let them sue for breach of promise. I'd skip town.
I'd already arranged to give up my studio—or rather it had been done for me. The arranger had been my landlady. Old Dogfaced Keegan they called her, and not without reason. She was a sour, bandy-legged old woman with a face as much like the scowling mug of an English bulldog as I'd ever seen. Her bloodshot eyes were set far apart and bulged. A nondescript button of a pug nose (which seemed to have been broken at the bridge) nestled between her ashy gray jowls. They hung below the dewlaps of her chin—all that with a voice to match.
There was about a block of studio buildings west of Sixth Avenue that she rented to artists, writers, and hangers-on. They were cold-water, rickety walk-ups, but you could mess them up with your work, and there was no curfew on noise. For these niggardly quarters Old Dogface charged a stiff rent—which she sometimes got. As she made her early tour of rent collecting, she was fond of repeating:
"You know what they do to artists where I come from? [England, I'd been told.] They get out their shotguns as soon as they sight them and shoot them as they come up the road."
Having placated her as well as I could with more promises of money I hoped to get, I'd crawl shivering back to bed and dream of being chased through a Constable landscape by Yorkshiremen in chin whiskers and gaiters taking potshots at me with their old blunderbusses, while I ran hugging huge portfolios and plaster casts to my bosom.
After I'd been given three or four eviction notices, been down to court as many times, with each presiding magistrate greeting her as an old friend and granting her victim another few weeks to pay up or be thrown out—some of the best artists in America had lived in her building and been ignominiously evicted in time—it didn't bother me too much when she finally got an eviction order that stuck. I'd hastily made the rounds of my friends and patrons. Patrons—those were people who commissioned one portrait for about one hundred dollars, for which you do the portrait of them or their wife, mother, or child, give them a lot of drawing for free, a few small sculpture sketches, have to eat dinner at their house for about a month (that was part of the payoff), lecture them continually on art and art values, advise on the purchase of prints, paintings, art books, appear every Sunday for tea, where you are shown off as the young genius they have discovered—and throw in dozens of tours, with lectures, of the museums, art galleries. . . .
Why, I know of rich art collections bought with ham sandwiches!
So, to repeat, I visited some of those leeches and offered to board out some of my sculpture and stuff they had liked—but not well enough to buy—and gave away a lot of material, clay, stands, etc., to my friends. There was nothing holding me down. I could just disappear—but by the time I came to this conclusion I found a phone booth in a barroom and automatically inserted my nickel and rang information for the Universal Tropical Line's number. There again my parsimonious nature shoved me along: for fear of wasting that nickel, I waited until I was connected with the number.
The boy with the suspenders answered, and I hopefully asked him if the S.S. Hermanita had sailed without me. "Naw," he snapped. "She's going to drydock." "Well, they won't need me in drydock, will they?" "Just a second."
I heard him rustle some papers—maybe he was tearing up all reference to me. Maybe this was an out. Then I heard again. "She's tying up at Pier 12—up the river." Then he shouted ominously, "You get aboard that ship," and slammed the receiver. Why, that tug-bottomed little...
It was almost noon when I found Pier 12. I climbed up a shaky gangplank to the littered deck of the S.S. Hermanita. A man wearing khaki trousers, a collarless striped shirt, sporting a bright collar button and a white yachting cap, stopped me. "What you want?"
I thrust my papers at him and the big Swede (he was obviously Scandinavian) looked at me from under the shiny visor of his cap, then took a quick glance at my credentials, and flung them back at me so quickly that I fumbled and had to pick them up from the greasy deck.