And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks

by William S. Burroughs

  In front of Pier 4, I said to the guard, “Is the Harvey West here?”

  “She sure is, son.”

  We showed him our identification papers.

  “She’s all yours, son.”

  We stomped across the floor of the cool, damp warehouse that smelled of coffee beans. There were hundreds of longshoremen loading on ships on both sides of the wharf. Winches screeched, foremen yelled, and a little truck trailing a string of wagons darted in front of Phil and me from around a corner and almost ran into us.

  “Is that her?” Phil said, pointing to the right.

  There was the great hull of a Liberty ship showing, at intervals where the shed doors were open, all streaked with oil and rust and with water pissing out of her scuppers.

  “That’s her,” I said.

  “Is she big!” he exclaimed, feasting his eyes on the ship as we walked nearer to the gangplank.

  Then I heard some yelling behind us and turned and saw some seamen coming toward us, waving their hands. Some of them were carrying their sea bags. I recognized a few of them from the Union Hall.

  “You guys goin’ on this Harvey West?” one of them asked, dropping his bag.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He said, “I’m supposed to be goin’ on as bosun. What about you?”

  “AB and ordinary,” I told him.

  “Well listen,” the bosun said, looking over my shoulder at Phil, “we’re almost the whole deck crew right here.” He turned and gestured to the five other guys with him. “Now, none of us here are goin’ to sign on until we get the lay of the land.”

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “I shipped out with the mate on this one before, and he is a bastard, let me tell you. The work’s never good enough for him. Now, look. This ship’s goin’ upriver to Albany to load on, and then it’s comin’ back to New York and out. None of us has to sign on till it gets back, but they’ve already set out the articles up there. None of us guys intend to sign on till we get back from Albany, because the mate is a prick and we gotta see he acts right with us.”

  “Well,” I said, “what will the mate say?”

  “We’re playin’ it safe, all of us. All you do, you two guys, is lay low and say nothin’. The mate is a prick and none of us are gonna take any shit from him.”

  “I guess that’s all right with us,” I said.

  “Okay,” said the bosun, “that’s what we wanted to talk to you about. So just lay low for a while and don’t say anything.”

  “Okay,” I said, “and after you.” I moved aside from the gangplank and let the bosun go up first. The five guys followed and Phil and I took up the rear.

  When we were aboard, I stepped quickly into an alleyway and led Phil to an empty fo’c’sle. “We might as well appropriate two lower bunks,” I said. “Throw your gear in that locker.”

  I could see this was going to be some trip, all right. Trouble already.

  “Now,” I said to Phil, “I’ll show you around.”

  I took him up to the bow and had him lean over and look at the anchor and then at the anchor chain. I showed him the jumbo block. “This thing weighs over a hundred pounds,” I said, “and it’s just one of the little gadgets you work with on deck.”

  Phil slapped the jumbo block and it didn’t budge.

  Then I took him topside to the bridge and showed him the wheelhouse, then belowdecks to the refrigerator storage. There was no padlock on the door, so we went in. There were whole cold roasts of beef and gallons of milk in cans.

  Phil ripped off a piece of beef with his fingers. I ran topside for some glasses and came back a minute later and poured out some cold foaming milk from the cans.

  “This is the balls,” Phil said.

  We were very thirsty and hungry from running all over in the hot sun, looking for the Harvey West.

  After we had had our fill, I led Phil back up to our fo’c’sle and we undressed to take a shower. After that, we dried up with some clean towels I got from the Negro steward belowdecks in the linen locker. Then we fished some clean work clothes out of our sea bags and put them on.

  “When do we work?” Phil wanted to know, and I told him probably not before tomorrow morning.

  I stretched out on the bunk and turned on the bulkhead light over my pillow. I picked up a book and started to read, and said, “See? This is the way you do at sea, just lie down in your bunk and read.”

  Phillip reached up and took down a gas mask and a steel helmet from the top of his locker. “We’re going to see action,” he said, and put on the steel helmet.

  Then I decided it was about time to find the chief mate and give him our job slips, so I told Phil to wait for me and went first to the mess. Some navy gunners were sitting there drinking coffee and playing cards.

  “Where’d this ship go last trip?” I asked.

  One of them, a husky blond sailor in shorts, said, “Italy. This time France, I think.”

  I went topside to the mate’s stateroom. No one was there, so I went back to my fo’c’sle and stretched out on my bunk again. Then it occurred to me for the first time that Phil had laid Barbara last night.

  “Say,” I said, “you finally did it last night, didn’t you?” I started to applaud, clapping my hands. Phil had dug out some books from behind a locker and was throwing them away as he glanced at the titles.

  “Tonight,” I went on, “we’ll go ashore and see our goils again.”

  At this point, a six-foot-four red-haired man wearing a dirty officer’s cap and some old khaki stepped into our fo’c’sle.

  “What’s your names?” he yelled.

  I told him.

  “Did you sign on yet?”

  “Are they signing on yet?” I asked innocently.

  “Yeah, we’re signing on.”

  “Well,” I said, “the bosun ... and the other guys ... told us to wait until later ... or—”

  “Yeah?” said the red-haired giant. I began to realize that he was probably the bastard chief mate.

  “Get off the ship,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Ask me once more,” he said, “and I’ll throw you off myself.”

  “Well—”

  “Never mind!” he shouted. “Who do you guys think you are, anyway? You come on a ship, you sign on. If you don’t want to sign, get off.”

  “The bosun—” I began.

  “Never mind the bosun!” he yelled. “Get off the ship. And you ought to drop a couple of quarters in the kitty for using that water for showers.”

  I sat up indecisively.

  “Did you hear what I said? Get off!” he shouted. “I don’t want anybody in my crew that won’t cooperate.”

  “Are you the chief mate?”

  “Yeah, I’m the chief mate.”

  “Well,” I said, “what about the rest of the deck crew? I was led to understand that—”

  “Never mind that. Get off now!”

  I said, “All right, don’t get your water hot,” and started to pick up my shirt. Phil was standing in the corner of the fo’c’sle, looking at the mate. The mate scowled awhile at me and then left.

  I jumped up from my bunk and went over to the locker and took out my gear. “Get your stuff,” I said. “We’re not staying on this damned ship.” I took my two canvas bags out of the locker and slammed them on the deck. Then I rushed down the alleyway to the officers’ mess.

  They had the shipping articles laid out on tables in there, and there were several officers, some seamen signing on, and the shipping commissioner puffing on his pipe.

  “What about Ryko and Tourian?” the shipping commissioner barked at me when I told him our names. “Is that you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “What’s the story?”

  “There’s no story. The chief’s ordered you two off the crew list.” With this the commissioner turned his head away.

  I went back to the fo’c’sle, picked up my bags, and stepped out in the alleyway. “Fuck you all!”
I hollered down the alleyway, and started for the gangplank with Phil at my heels.

  The bosun was standing in front of the gangplank.

  “Gettin’ off?” he asked.

  “What the hell,” I said. “You told us to wait. What’s going on around here?”

  The bosun looked at me a little blankly. He didn’t seem to know what it was all about, and evidently he didn’t even know that he had started it all himself.

  “Are you signed on?” I finally asked him.

  “I just did,” he said.

  That was the payoff. I walked down the gangplank with Phillip.

  The bosun followed us down. “Listen,” he told us on the dock, “you guys want to sign on and they won’t let you? Okay. That means you go down to the beef window at the Union Hall and collect a month’s pay from this company, see? Union rules say a seaman can’t be turned away once he’s assigned to a ship. Do you follow me?”

  “Yeah,” I said, a little wearily.

  And he went on to tell us everything about the union rules, and the month’s pay we had coming by rights, and how we should beef and beef, and how the mate had nothing on us.

  In the end, I asked him to give us a dime so we could get home and he handed me a quarter, saying, “Don’t let that prick of a chief mate put anything over on you.”

  So Phil and I started to walk back across the dock.

  Longshoremen were loading on some U.S. Army tanks on a freighter across the way, and outside the shed a freight train was puffing in, hauling a string of flat-cars carrying tanks, jeeps, and trucks. In the slip a barge was docked, alongside another Liberty ship, and a tremendous crane was hauling up 20mm antiaircraft guns to the platform on the flying bridge of the ship.

  Phil and I watched some of this for a while, then we picked up our bags and left.

  It was still hot and sunny, so we stopped halfway up Montague Street to buy a quart of orange soda in a variety store. We sat on our sea bags outside the store and drank the soda, which was lukewarm and sweet.

  “Don’t worry,” I said to Phil, who looked disconsolate. “Monday we’ll go to the beef window at the hall and get another ship.”

  He didn’t say anything, so I went back into the store and cashed in the bottle, and then we walked to the subway at Borough Hall.

  14

  WILL DENNISON

  BY SATURDAY I WAS TIRED OF BEING A DETECTIVE. The boss was an all-around heel and he kept encroaching on my leisure time with errands to do on the way home that turned out to be at the other end of town from where I live and took hours to do.

  I got to Al’s about eight o’clock after one of these errands which involved a trip to the Bronx. We decided to go down to Washington Square and wish the sailors bon voyage.

  When we walked into Apartment 32 I saw Barbara and Phillip lying on the couch. Phillip had nothing on but his khaki merchant marine pants, and Barbara was in her slip. They just lay there without moving. Phillip looked up at Al sullenly and moved a little closer to Barbara.

  I walked past them into the other room. Mike and Janie were in the bedroom. Mike put on a pair of khaki pants and came out and said hello.

  I sat down and said, “What time do you boys ship out in the morning?”

  Mike said, “We’re not shipping out. We got fired.”

  I said, “Fired? I never heard of such a thing.”

  “Well that’s what happened. When we got on the ship the bosun came up to us and advised us not to sign on because the chief mate was a bastard. Well, we went downstairs, drank some milk, took a shower, and pretty soon the mate came down. Great big bastard, six-foot-four and red-haired. He says, ‘I hear you boys can’t decide whether to sign on or not. Get the fuck off this ship. I ought to charge you for taking a shower.’ So we were fired.”

  Janie came out of the bedroom. She said, “I knew they wouldn’t leave.”

  Mike said, “We’ll ship out Monday for sure.”

  Janie said, “Yes you will.”

  I sighed and said, “Have you people eaten yet?”

  They all said no, and there was one of those discussions should we go out to eat or bring food back to the apartment. Janie said, “Let’s go out. I’m sick of sitting around this apartment. We’ve been here all day.”

  Everyone began putting on clothes.

  We walked over to a lunch counter on Sixth Avenue. I ordered some ice cream, since I had eaten an early lunch. Then I changed my mind and ordered a stuffed pepper. They both arrived together. The pepper was pretty bad.

  Phillip sat down next to me at the counter, as far as possible from Al, who was at the other end of the counter.

  After this terrible food, for which I paid since no one else had any money, we walked out onto Sixth Avenue and stood on the sidewalk by a high wire fence that ran around an apartment-house park. Al climbed over the fence and lay down in the weeds on the other side. Barbara sat on a bench and Phillip lay down with his head in her lap. People walked by in the hot night.

  I was talking to Mike about the merchant marine and asked him why he didn’t wear a uniform around, to get all the free handouts.

  He said, “It seems like a finkish thing to do.”

  I said, “This is a finkish world.”

  There was talk about going to see La Grand Illusion, but Barbara said she had seen it five times and knew just what Erich von Stroheim was going to do all the time.

  The head-in-lap act had broken up and the young couple were on their feet now. Phillip was talking about his father. I heard him say: “The old man should be out in a couple of years now.”

  We decided to go across the street for some beer. Climbing back over the fence, Al slipped and fell heavily to the sidewalk. I helped him up and said, “Are you hurt?”

  He said, “I think I twisted my ankle.”

  Phillip and Barbara were already halfway across the street. We all went into a bar and sat at a table in the back. Al was limping.

  There was a silly drunk dancing around in front of the jukebox, so we had one round, then Janie said, “Let’s go to the Germania and get some good beer.” So we paid and left.

  I walked ahead with Phillip and Barbara. I asked Phillip when he was going to get a ship, and he said Monday. Then we talked about Rimbaud. Barbara walked along not saying anything. I thought she was sulking. Al was limping busily along, about ten feet to the rear, but Phillip paid him no attention.

  We went into the Germania. Before the war this was one of the noisiest and most disagreeable places in the whole of New York City. There used to be young people sitting around in large clusters singing college songs, and fights kept breaking out in the men’s room where drunken college boys suffered from delusions of homosexual persecution. Now there was nothing to distinguish it from any other place.

  We sat at a long wood table and ordered beer, which arrived in large steins. Phillip sat opposite Barbara and he stuck his head across the table from time to time and she petted him on the hair. It was disgusting. Finally he leaned over and took her right index finger in his teeth. The nail makeup was a little loose and he peeled it off with his teeth.

  Mike repeated the story about how the mate threw them off the ship. Janie belched, and everyone else was yawning or cleaning their nails or looking around.

  Finally Barbara said she had to catch a train back to Manhasset, and Phillip got up to go with her to the subway. Al looked at him imploringly, like a dog that wants to accompany its master. Phillip walked away without looking at him.

  Mike was telling about the sinking of the S.S. American Star, a troopship, in the North Atlantic. He’d heard this story from a survivor, one night in a bar in Chicago.

  “It was a terrible thing,” the survivor had said. “It was all dark and you couldn’t see anything. I was on a life raft with a nigger cook, and all around me I could hear those drowning soldiers calling for their mothers.”

  15

  WILL DENNISON

  SUNDAY I DID NOT SEE AL UNTIL AROUND SIX o’clock, wh
en I was ready for dinner. The fact is, I was not in a hurry to hear the events of Saturday evening gone over piece by piece.

  Al was asleep when I knocked at his door. He said to come in. I found him lying on the bed, covered with a light blanket. The shades were drawn and the room was dark. I asked him if he was ready for dinner and he said yes. Then he closed his eyes. I sat down and turned on the light and glanced through a copy of the New Yorker that had been on the floor.

  Al pushed the blanket aside and swung his legs to the floor. He was completely dressed, except for his shoes. He yawned and smiled. Then he walked over to the washbasin, dabbed some water on his face, and combed his hair.

  I was reading a short story in the New Yorker. Something about two women in Schrafft’s.

  Al put on a pair of cracked shoes and we went out to buy some food. We bought some hard rolls, sliced ham, cheese, apples, and milk in a delicatessen on Sixth Avenue. Then we walked back to Al’s room and started to eat.

  Al said, “You know, Dennison, there’s something vampirish about that girl.”

  “Barbara? Yeah. Do you notice how red her lips are and how pale her skin? Fah! ’Tis unnatural.”

  Al said, “When I came into the room and saw them lying there on the couch, I had the feeling she was sucking all the life out of him.”

  “There certainly isn’t much sex in that affair,” I said. “It gives me the horrors.”

  “He looks pale. He doesn’t look well at all.”

  We ate for a while in silence, and I was getting ready to hear Al say why did Phillip have to get involved with all these women when he obviously wasn’t in love with them and why couldn’t Phillip love him, or maybe he did already in which case he ought to show it. Al did say all that, and I went on eating.

  Al continued. “I wonder if I should ship out anyway. Perhaps when he found out I was on the ship he would be glad.”

  I said, “I don’t know. Do what you like. My advice is to stay here and make yourself some money. He’ll be back in five or six weeks. If you can build up a marijuana business while he’s away, you’ll have something to offer him.”