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.
57
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.