Cain’s Book

by Alexander Trocchi

  I returned to Geo’s bed and lay down on it. The cabin of his scow is painted white and it always reminds me of a hospital room. Apart from his works... the big box of surgical cotton, the miscellaneous eye-droppers and needles... he has a vast supply of medicines, unguents, and disinfectants.

  “I don’t know why you don’t do something about your damn cabin,” I said.

  “What’s wrong with it?” He sounded surprised. “I just painted it.” He grinned. “It’s not finished. That white’s the undercoat. But if I finished it I’d have nothing to do.”

  “I knew a guy once, Geo, who wanted to paint big. He used to sit in front of a pretty big canvas, nine by twelve, and it was already covered with size and white. He had a little room in a cheap hotel on the Rue de Seine, near the river, and this thing on the easel used to be stuck out there in the middle of the floor like a screen and you were always walking round it and turning it and ducking under it. It was an object, anonymous, you know what I mean? And it was always intruding itself. And yet you were willing to play along with him and to accept his object and talk about it like I’m willing now to talk about the inside of your chicken coop.”

  “Don’t stop,” Geo said, grinning.

  “That big white canvas must have been there for nearly four weeks. I was staying with him at the time. I was camped on him, and when we ate or when we were spending time in the room for one reason or another we used to sit there and discuss what he should do next. He’d thought of putting a kind of orange splotch over half of it and we agreed we knew what he meant, not quite half, and not to make two oblongs like Mondrian might have, but just a splotch, like to surprise it. But although he’d thought of that he’d rejected the idea because he thought it might be too violent. He said he wanted the background to be tranquil whatever else he painted on the canvas. Well, he didn’t do anything to it until one day we went to a Miró16 exhibition at the Galerie Maeght. There were a couple of really big canvases there, shape and colour objects against a great airy blue background. And the very next day when I came back from seeing a girl I was planning to make he grabbed me and screamed that it had come to him suddenly, just out of nowhere, and he dragged me round the easel to get a good look at it. He’d painted it blue, the whole thing, airy blue, just like Miró’s. He was a small guy with black hair and he wore thick-lensed glasses. “It just came to me!” he kept on saying. “It just came to me!”

  Geo, grinning, turned on the radio. To the tune of ‘Reuben, Reuben, I Been Thinking’17 a little girl’s voice sang:

  For a real treat this Thanksgiving

  Chock-lit turkeys sure are nice

  Get a chock-lit cross for Easter

  And for Criss-muss, chock-lit Christ!

  How can a man not write? How can a man not paint? How can a man not sing? But everything in measure. Let a man be measured, for there is no part of him greater than the whole man. Isn’t it so?

  There are times when I should allow a man to die beautifully, though in a man I expect self-consciousness, judging him less than a man if he is not, but granting his legal title still, which, without examining the heart of the matter, I accept at once on the level of prudence, which is also counselled to me.

  Who speaks, knows not; who knows, speaks not.

  WINDY MARCH and I make another beginning.

  To bleed a stone. The anguish of this compulsion to record that swells beyond meaningful record. It is positively d.i.s.h.o.n.e.s.t. If I could find something to compel me equally. Marijuana has a tendency to set me against myself. My shadow waits for me, an instant of time in advance of me, and my knowledge of it can cause us to freeze into long abeyances. This practising of deceit against oneself, while it might be felt to be a waste of time, worse, perilous to one’s integrity, is common knowledge to the wise. To live within one’s imagination is brave, necessary; a man should know that the victims of his imagination can be many. The mass of men is afraid of imagination for this reason; with good reason, the tribunes will claim. Tell the tribunes that there can be no good reason for fear. It is fear that will destroy us.

  The 8th Avenue bus took me to 34th Street, the crosstown on 34th to Pier 72. The tug was already there and I boarded the Samuel B. Mulroy under a flood of insults from the tugboat captain. The scowman is the leper of the New York waterfront; he is old and can’t work or he is a zombie who won’t. The four scows linked together single file lay with the down tide from a corner of Pier 73 for three hours. Shortly after midnight the tug returned and the short slow haul down the Hudson to the stake boat in Upper Bay began. Mine was the last scow and I sat aft at my open cabin door and watched the dark west waterfront of Manhattan slide away to the right. I thought of a night a long time ago when I had a girlfriend aboard for a short trip and how at the same kind of midnight we went naked over the end of a long tow, each in the hempen eye of a dockline, screaming sure and mad off Wall Street as the dark waves struck.

  We arrived at Bronx Stake Boat No. 2 shortly after three in the morning and the tug, churning foam on the black water, backed away, its bell clanking instructions to the engine room. She slewed round then and moved quickly away into the darkness. I watched her for a few minutes until the glow from her deck lights dimmed and only the mast lights were visible. Then I entered the cabin.

  A chair, a typewriter, a table, a single bed, a coal stove, a dresser, a cupboard, a man in a little wooden shack, two miles from the nearest land.

  I remember feeling the night was going to be interminable.

  I split a log and got the fire going. That helped... for a few moments, until I smoked a cigarette, stubbed it in an overflowing ashtray, and wondered what to do next. Even then, and all this is a long time ago now, I was no sooner alone than I would begin urgently to take stock.

  I had come from London to New York and when I realized that the long affair between Moira and me was over I got a job on the scows. Time to think, to take stock. The grey table in front of me strewn with papers, inventories from the past, from Paris, from London, from Barcelona, notes neatly typed, notes deleted, affirmations, denials, sudden terrifying contradictions, a mass of evidence that I had been in abeyance, far out, unable to act, for a long time.

  I wrote for example: “If I write: it is important to keep writing, it is to keep me writing. It is as though I find myself on a new planet, without a map, and having everything to learn. I have unlearnt. I have become a stranger.”

  Seated at the grey table in front of cigarettes, matches, the dregs of a cup of tea. No radio. Dead silence broken only by dripping, on deck, at the windows, on the roof, in the bilges below. Sometimes the cabin shook in a gust of wind. And the sound of the bell came, giving me a sense of the emptiness of the night beyond the walls, and of the trackless water. For two hours I fought panic. I feared those moments and yet sometimes I felt a faint lust on me to live them again; and then I slid into a relentless movement which carried me again to the brink of hysteria.

  It rained all night.

  10 a.m. Samuel B. Mulroy, deck scow, bobs around on tide and currents, a low-slung coffin on the choppy grey water. The day is dull. The sky is low and greywhite. Tugs come and go, hauling linked scows, like toy boats playing dominoes. They come suddenly out of the mist which obscures Manhattan Island, hooting importantly. Leave two, take one. It goes on all the time the scows lie here. At the moment there are eleven of us strung out on wet ropes at the stake boat. The stake boat, which provides temporary moorings for scows on their way to unloading stages in Brooklyn and Newark, NJ, is uninhabited. It is an engineless hulk painted green and red and set with bollards, cleats, a winch and a few hawsers. A painted wooden board identifies it as Bronx Stake Boat No. 2. The stake boat swings about its anchors with the tide, the scows stranded out behind it in three rows, like beads on a string. Somewhere, not far off but invisible, a bell clanks dully and monotonously, a banshee wailing her dead. It comes from a marking buoy which flashes at night at regular intervals, a sudden explosion of white light which seem
s to hesitate before it occludes. And at night, if the mist rises, the lights on the lower end of Manhattan strike upwards out of the dark like an electric castle.

  It was dawn when I went out on the catwalk.

  The sun was struggling to break through a low mist and the surface of the water, glassy at this hour, was vaguely tinted with colour. I counted four scows behind me, a chain of three lying directly behind the stake, and, on the far side, three brick scows piled high with red bricks and two yellow sand scows. This small shanty town had come to exist during the night.

  The front scow of the centre chain is grey and red. It is one of seventeen scows of a small sea transport corporation.

  I sat on an upturned bucket at the stern on the port side and gazed across the water towards the gradually appearing Brooklyn waterfront. I had been drinking coffee all night and I had smoked some marijuana. The smooth water, grey-yellow, the tilting black cones of the distant buoys, and the passing freight which moves slowly across the estuary towards the North and East Rivers all contributed to the profound sense that came over me that I was living out of time. It was cool on deck. I was waiting to catch the junk boat which comes out to the moorings from time to time to buy old ropes and to sell newspapers and cigarettes.

  Day. The rain is off. I am alone, suspended between land and land, waiting to go with my load of grey stone to my destination, Colonial Sand and Stone, Newark, NJ. I watched dawn come near the open door of my little white cabin, looking across the water at the extinguished sign of Isthmian Lines,18 and I was wondering what I was doing, doing just that.

  It had been the same for years. The same situations. Sometimes I thought I was learning something of my own constructions. A scow on the Hudson, a basement room in London, a tiny studio in Paris, a cheap hotel in Athens, a dark room in Barcelona... and now I was living on a moving object, every few days a new destination... but always into the same situation. The voices, judging and protesting, seemed familiar.

  There was the Swede again.

  It was around noon and I had been going to make a cup of coffee but I was out of milk. Scow behind me was Harry T. O’Reilly. I climbed up the short ladder on the bows onto the load of stone chips. I like walking across a load. The stones crunch under your feet as you walk the length of the scow. There are 800 to 1,300 tons of crushed stone to a load. A thread of thin grey smoke was coming from the smokestack of the cabin at the stern. Get some sugar. Two oil tankers were moving slowly towards the East River. A helicopter hovered not far away. It was heading towards Manhattan.

  The Swede was using a hand pump to clear his bilges of water. He looked up as I approached. Broad face with cropped grey hair, stocky, small blue eyes, and a thick red neck. I’d forgotten it was his scow. He was a deep-sea man, on the scows only until they were laid off for the winter, he said. And then he’d ship out.

  Another time I ran into him I made the mistake of accepting a cup of coffee. We had just begun the voyage downriver from the quarry. I couldn’t get rid of him all day after that. He was always corning over to my scow on one pretext or another.

  “How ya doin’?”

  The man didn’t read, not even a newspaper. He was always doing something with ropes or a hammer. The gallows carpenter of the Bothnian Gulf.19

  “How moch water ya got?”

  He referred to the water which seeped in between the heavy planks and lay darkly like water under a pier in the bilges.

  “Not much, I pumped her out yesterday.”

  He went away and I pretended to be engrossed in a newspaper. If it had been a book he would have asked me to tell him about it. “I no read moch bot you tell me, ’sgood?”

  Five minutes later he was back.

  “Ja, ya got seven inches... more. I measure. I thought yo tell me yo pomped?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I bin down’n looked. What ya say I bring my pomp over, hey?”

  “No, man. Just leave it, see? I like a bit of water for ballast.”

  “Ballast! Yo sink. Then it’s not so fonny.”

  “OK, sailor, but just leave it. I’m busy.”

  If he came with his pump he would be around for hours. It would break down. He would need my assistance to repair it. “Fon an games, hey?”

  All afternoon he kept coming back. He spoke about women like a glutton might speak about pork chops (they were his enemies but he focked them), of one particularly whose legs he had broken in New Orleans. He described a frog crushed under a buffalo’s weight. A white buffalo, a skinny brown frog. “Sure I got de doc, de best, an he ask me how dat happen, an I say hey hey you never mind how it happen, doc, ya go ahead and fix it. I pay. Sure I pay. Dat coss me fifteen hunred dollars! Tree hunred for de doc an twelve hunred for de girl, hey hey! I gotta loak out! I doan know my own strength!” He was grinning and his big chest was expanded for inspection. “Ya shore ya doan want dat pomp?”

  I was surprised to see him using the hand pump.

  “What happened to your pump?” I said as I climbed down onto the deck beside him.

  “Yeah, dem bastards tuck it. Said I doan leak enough. I quit. You see.”

  “I came to see if you had any milk.”

  “Milk? I got damn-ass all. I bin out tree fockin’ days. I doan get ashore tomorrow I quit. I go down to New Orleans’n get me a piece of ass.”

  “Break some more legs,” I agreed. I was glad he didn’t have any milk. I didn’t want him on my back.

  A tug was approaching with three scows.

  “Dey kom for me I tink,” the Swede said.

  They hadn’t.

  The tug came alongside and dropped off two of the scows. I knew one of the scowmen, Bill Baker. His wife, Jacqueline, was hanging some clothes on an outdoor line. Her thick white legs tensed as she stretched upwards to clip the pegs on.

  I got some sugar from her.

  As I went back to my own scow the Swede stopped me. He leered. I was aware of his forearms, heavy like two cods, and tattooed from wrist to elbow. His broad teeth were stained the colour of a neglected urinal.

  “Hey,” he said, “what yo mean about I break legs?” He looked dangerous.

  “You said it.”

  “Ach, yeah... shore! But dat’s all right. I pay. Shore, I remember. But I get me a big time down there in New Orleans. I not always like dis.” He indicated his filthy sweatshirt. “I got seven new suits, eight wid the one I got before, smart, de best material, an I got a 1955 Buick convertible. Dem clothe coss me near a tausen dallar. I go there I have all the ass I want.” He hesitated and nodded in the direction of the woman who had returned to her chore. “Nat like her,” he said. “All I want. Yong pussy. I wouldn’ toch her wid a goddam pole, heh, heh!” He grinned. “Yo kom mit me, yo see!”

  I made my way for’ard, ignoring his restraining gesture. In my own cabin again I had just lit a joint when he knocked at the door. I stubbed the joint and dropped it in the table drawer. He stood in the doorway, one hand on the portal, leaning there.

  He said: “Yah! Sa great contry Amerika! People kom here! You take de Poles or de Germans, or even de English. And dere’s de Irish too... I like de Irish, dey’s good people... hey, hey, yo lok what de English done to dem, heh? Dey all kom here. Man worrks, he git paid, de bess monney in de worrld, an hey! man free to go where he want, nut like de Rooskies. Dey got anodder tink kommin to dem, dem Rooskies, yah! Dat Eisenwhore knows what he doin’, yo see. Yah! Here in Amerika yo got de great mixture. All kom here. Too many wops maybe. An dere’s de niggers. I’m not for to discriminate against any man’n here in Amerika dey’s all equal, dass de law...”

  “Yeah, big deal,” I said. “Now look, Swede, I want to read.”

  “Yo read too moch,” he said, and he burst out laughing and tapped his close-clipped skull with his broad forefinger. “Yo read too moch yo get sick op here!”

  “Yeah,” I said, “book-learning. Now, fuck off!”

  When he had gone I found I’d got sugar instead of milk. I didn’t want to disturb
Jacqueline again so I drank my coffee black.

  I smoked the rest of the joint.

  It was nearly dusk when I went on deck again. A small boat was pulling away towards Brooklyn with Bill aboard. He was seated at the stern, beside the man who handled the outboard.

  “Where’s he off to?” I spoke to a scowman who stood on his quarterdeck near by.

  “His son’s in trouble.”

  “His wife not go?”

  “Her! Na. Not her son.” He spat in the water and went into his cabin.

  A wind had sprung up. The water, a few feet away, was the colour of oiled slate and growing darker. Dark clouds overhead. It felt like rain. A fast ripple was spreading over the water like a dark jingling mirror towards the distance of Manhattan Island, small and black, like jutting granite rock. The water choppy, dangerous. Most of the men had already hung out their lanterns which swayed and creaked at the swaying masts.

  I hung my own lanterns and returned to the cabin.

  I must have decided to smoke some pot because I found myself lying on my bed with my pipe in my mouth. I was staring at the bulkhead on which the corpses of the previous summer’s insects were encrusted.

  Experts agree that marijuana has no aphrodisiac effect, and in this as in a large percentage of their judgements they are entirely wrong. If one is sexually bent, if it occurs to one that it would be pleasant to make love, the judicious use of the drug will stimulate the desire and heighten the pleasure immeasurably, for it is perhaps the principal effect of marijuana to take one more intensely into whatever experience. I should recommend its use in schools to make the pleasures of poetry, art and music available to pupils who, to the terrible detriment of our civilization, are congenitally or by infection insensitive to symbolic expression. It provokes a more sensual (or aesthetic) kind of concentration, a detailed articulation of minute areas, an ability to adopt play postures. What can be more relevant in the act of love?