Cain’s Book

by Alexander Trocchi

  Everything is damp this morning, cigarettes, the paper on which I write, the wood with which I kindled the fire to make coffee, and the sugar. I smell my own damp smell, wood, tar, jeans that cling smoothly to my thighs.

  A foghorn sounds somewhere. It is difficult to tell from which direction it comes. The water is about me and the sudden billowing yellow shapes of fog, and somewhere in it, like a signal for me alone, the foghorn sounding. The sun came up a while ago but the mist is still low on the water and no land is visible. The scow also is very low in the water.

  I lay for three days at the quarry without being loaded. There is a cement strike and contractors are reluctant to stockpile stone. Approaching the quarry, the works on the green hillside are like the carcass of some gigantic grey insect glinting grey in the sun. The sun making shadows on the dock; offices, stockrooms, and the housing shaft of the long stone conveyer belts running like an endless shanty up into the excavation. The days were sunny. The work of loading went on slowly. I waited for the daily tows to arrive – the fight scows began to pile up – hoping to see Geo, or Jacqueline.

  Most of the time I was abstracted from it all. Sometimes I sat outside my cabin and watched the men on the dock, the loaders, the carpenters, the scowmen going to and from the company store. I felt like a Martian: slightly puzzled, fundamentally uninterested. Sometimes when I was high I watched it all with an overpowering sense of benevolence, the green valley of the river, the water grey-silver, its shimmering surface sliding away down towards Newburgh where seriously damaged scows are repaired, the little grey motor tug pushing scows about, like a terrier pushing floating coffins, the white-helmeted loaders all looking bronzed and fat and healthy and unimaginative, working the moving lip of the stone chute, the scows, light and loaded, ranged up in tiers against the dock, the trucks, the cranes, the pneumatic drills sounding sporadically, and an occasional explosion from the quarry at the other side of the hill; nearer, the bucket of slops hurled suddenly towards the eddying water by a shapeless-looking woman of fifty who had been screaming all morning that her man was a drunken sonofabitch, another woman, slightly drunk, older or younger, occupied with a tub near a line of fluttering clothes, both of them unkempt, tough, ignorant, angry – involving myself in a daydream of white buttocks striking savagely against the wooden sideboards of a bunk. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck... Those unbeautiful women could still be beautiful in their lust... or could they? Currrrrump – attention distracted by a distant explosion from the hillside quarry. Then both women were gone, and a loader, six foot four, is standing in his white helmet, light-blue shirt and dungarees, his large red hands on his hips, watching me. I nod to him. His grimace is not particularly friendly.

  “You bastards sure get it easy!” he said.

  “Yeah, it’s a way of life.”

  I was wondering whether he was going to get over his resentment. I was wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and I was relaxing in the sun with a cigarette and a can of beer. My feet were dirty. I hadn’t shaved for three days. He looked disgusted. Perhaps he didn’t like to think of men like me existing in the same world as the wafer-white and odourless flesh of his teenage daughter.

  “You bums’s not supposed to drink on board, you know that?”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  “What did you say?”

  “Ug mug tug dug,” I said.

  “You trying to be funny?”

  I drank some beer. “You want to start a war, is that it?”

  “Maybe I do,” he said. He hesitated, spat, turned away. “You bastards sure get it easy,” he said as he went.

  The loader originally dislikes the scowman because the scowman doesn’t work. That makes the job unpleasant from time to time, finding oneself having suddenly to deal with the animosity of a man who makes a virtue of his work. It is difficult to explain to the underprivileged that play is more serious than work.

  So I was glad when they finally loaded me and I joined the tow going downriver again. The sun still shone and I spent most of my time lying on the roof of my shack under a sky which streamed sunlight down on to the twelve scows of the tow. The bank on either side rose steeply up from the water’s edge, brown masses of bald rock grown in and over by trees. It is a historic part of America, this stretch of the Hudson, from Manhattan to Albany. The trees were very green. The scowmen were sitting at the sterns of their scows, on the roofs of their shacks mostly, watching, on chairs, like admirals on the aftercastles of galleons. Some had their women with them, on deckchairs, under gaudy beach umbrellas. And everything was very relaxed and peaceful until we passed under the George Washington Bridge.

  At Pier 72 I had no opportunity to go ashore. A tug was already standing by to pull me out. That was last night. And this morning when I awoke there was the fog.

  They loaded me with 1½” stone. Good and bad. Not so much dust so they don’t use so much water and it comes aboard drier than smaller stuff. The stone comes down the hillside to the river’s edge from the stockpiles near the quarry on a narrow canvas conveyer belt about two feet wide. The grey tube-like housing shaft high enough for men to walk in contains the mechanism of the conveyer belt. From a distance it has the distinctness of a grey arrow pointing sharply from the hilltop to the water, and, as I said before, with the other constructions might be the carcass of a grey lizard or insect. It is an el-train27 for crushed stone. A man in a pillbox high over the water’s edge at the end of the housing shaft controls the flow of stone, gravel or dust, which moves down a metal chute onto the scow. The smaller the stuff the more water they use to control dust. When it is dust that is being loaded it comes aboard the scow like a flood. This can be a pain in the ass. The water leaks through the wooden planks of the deck into the massive boomed bilges for hours after loading and it has to be pumped out. A deck scow carries its whole load on deck. What would be the hold in a ship is simply a heavily beamed compartment to insure buoyancy. After loading this is a dark, dripping, slimy place, murkier than under the darkest pier. I sometimes stash my spike down there in an airtight box, below water level. The trouble with 1½” is that it doesn’t usually go as quickly as smaller stuff at the unloading yards of the various sand and stone corporations, so that it is likely that one will be hung up for days without overtime, waiting to be unloaded.

  I was thinking about this coming downriver and I am thinking of it now, somewhere in Long Island Sound, isolated from all things by fog.

  – What the hell am I doing here?

  Why am I not in India, or Japan, or the moon?

  Everything changes; everything remains the same.

  – What the hell am I doing here?

  I arrived in London the night before I sailed for America.

  I decided not to look anyone up. It would have meant explanations... just passing through on my way from nowhere to nowhere.

  I left the railway station and mingled with the other people on the street. It was the rush hour. Shops were closing. People swarmed in the dusk towards the underground. Men, small bent men, were selling newspapers. As usual I felt myself overcome by the cheerful sense of orderliness Londoners seem to exude. At times it had amused, at times infuriated me, and once or twice during the war, I remember, the sense of solidarity it implied gladdened me. This time, however, leaving France for no good reason, on my way to America for no good reason, with an acute feeling of being an exile wherever I went, I found it oppressive. I was heavy with the sense of my own detachment.

  And that had been with me for as long as I could remember, gaining in intensity at each new impertinence of the external world with which I signed no contract when I was ejected bloodily from my mother’s warm womb. I developed early a horror of all groups, particularly those which without further ado claimed the right to subsume all my acts under certain normative designations in terms of which they would reward or punish me. I could feel no loyalty to anything so abstract as a state or so symbolic as a sovereign. And I could feel nothing but outrage at a system in
which, by virtue of my father’s name and fortune, I found myself from the beginning so shockingly underprivileged. What shocked me most as I grew up was not the fact that things were as they were, and with a tendency to petrify, but that others had the impertinence to assume that I would forbear to react violently against them.

  At that moment I found myself standing in the middle of moving traffic, hesitating, unable to go forwards or back, clutching bag and raincoat, until the signal changed. Finally I reached the far side and moved quickly into the crowd on the other pavement. From time to time in just that way my absent-mindedness startled me. Although I was walking quickly I had no idea where I was going. I had thought about it on the boat journey from Calais to Dover, wondering what had moved me to take a ship from Southampton which I could have boarded as easily at Le Havre. For some reason or other I had wanted to spend the last night in London. I had no desire to see anyone in particular. I had been careful to keep the fact of my arrival to myself. I remember feeling a sense of nostalgia for this national metropolis in which I had seldom spent more than a few days. When I first visited it at the age of seventeen I remember thinking I would one day live there, but after years abroad on the continent I wasn’t so sure. Somehow or other I found it difficult to take the English seriously. I had often been appalled by the absurd contrast between what they said and their manner of saying it, between a frequent lack of talent and imagination and the degree of respect they hoped to exact by virtue simply of acquiring a particular accent.

  When I say that I loved London I mean it was a place I recognized as one in which it would be possible for a man like me to live, where people in spite of their many absurdities tended to respect an individual’s privacy, to a limited degree, to be sure, but more so than in say, Moscow, New York, Peking. (I was feeling already that when I returned from America it would be via London-Paris.) I am not saying that Londoners are not inquisitive. They may be more so than either Russians or Americans for all I know, but they are a conservative people, like most people who are not desperate, and the hard core of constitutional law governing the status of the individual in society is not likely to die overnight. In London policemen do not carry guns in their everyday business.

  It had begun to rain. The streets and the grey buildings around Victoria depressed me. I had many memories of Victoria Station. During the war I had arrived and departed from Victoria many times and the streets and buildings round about were quite familiar. I remembered seeing Gill’s Stations of the Cross28 in Westminster Cathedral, refusing a prostitute who offered to masturbate me in one of the air-raid shelters opposite the station, going with a prostitute to one of the streets nearby and thinking she might be older than my mother, the railway bar, the tearooms cloudy with steam from huge tea urns and coffee pots, and dusty at the same time, and the dry sandwiches under glass, the long tiled lavatories with their shifting men, and the rush of commuters with bowler hats and umbrellas in the early morning.

  It was after six o’clock; fifteen hours in London before the boat train; time to get drunk and sober up, to eat two meals, to go to bed with someone. Plenty of time, and at the same time short, like a bee’s visit to a flower, and no commitments.

  I took a taxi and told the driver to take me to Piccadilly Circus which was central enough and where I knew I could find a room easily in one of the big hotels which corresponded to the anonymity of my visit... no questions, all the necessities, all visitors passing through. Across broad carpets to the lift, silently upwards to the nth floor, along a corridor, realizing they had given me a room in the rear which would open onto an airshaft and wishing now I had asked specifically for one which opened onto the street, the key in the lock, the door thrown open and the light switch on, the room looking blankly as it always was and would be, impervious to the stream of human beings who had come and gone, the neatly made bed, the bed light now being switched off and on by the porter to indicate where it was, vague hotel noises from the airshaft, the smiling face... “All right, sir?” – tipped, gone, the door closed silently behind him. I squashed my cigarette in the ashtray on the glass-topped table beside the bed, protect it against cigarette burns; lay on the bed and looked up at the white ceiling at the centre of which was a small, vaguely noticeable grille. It occurred to me that it might be used to house a camera or a microphone or to inject a poison pellet to fill the room with gas.

  When I had taken a shower I left the hotel again and made my way on foot into Soho where I dined at a small French restaurant. Walking down Charing Cross Road afterwards I experienced a pleasant glow from the wine I had drunk. At Leicester Square I hesitated. I wondered whether after all I should have contacted someone. What to do now? For the moment I didn’t feel like drinking any more and it was still relatively early. I was vaguely regretting having come to London instead of going directly to Le Havre. If I had done so I would already have been aboard. The ship had probably docked by this time at Southampton. But what the hell, what did it matter? A man should be able to waste time without being seized with anxiety.

  The rain was falling steadily, making the streets glisten. A taxi raising little streams of water at its wheels turned the corner in front of me and moved towards the bright lights at the busy part of the square. I hesitated a moment longer and then followed after it. – See a film, might as well. There was nothing else to do.

  I entered the cinema and went straight to the cloakroom. The girl took my raincoat and hung it on a peg. The cloth of her uniform was shiny; big buttocks of a red mare. She returned unsmiling with the coat check. I walked over the pearl-grey carpet towards the three crimson usherettes who stood with chromium-plated flashlights before the swing doors of the auditorium, big, tight-skirted girls with golden buttons and neat pageboy caps. Two brunettes, one blonde. The smaller of the brunettes tore my ticket in half and guided me down the aisle with her flashlight. I passed in front of seven pairs of knees to my seat. A man with glasses and thin pale hair sat on my left. The girl on my right glanced at me and then back at the screen as I sat down. She was about twenty-two. On the screen were depicted some Asians and a flame-thrower and some burning corpses, grilled guerrillas, five hundred of them according to the commentator, being flushed from their nest. I glanced beyond the girl. The old woman at the far side of her was obviously not with her. She was putting a sweet into her mouth. When I glanced back across the profile of the girl to the screen a stick of bombs seemed to slip from the gaping belly of a bomber and the camera tilted downward towards the eruption. Smoke and amorphousness. The commentator said that according to the latest communiqué the mopping up phase of the battle was over and a big push could be expected soon. The news ended with a close-up of HM the Queen in the uniform of Colonel of the Coldstream Guards. A cartoon in Technicolour came onto the screen. It was as though a weight were suddenly lifted from the audience. The girl beside me moved her leg. In the faint glimmer of coloured light her naked ankles were very pale. As the colours within the beam shifted the paleness was tinted with green and the skin seemed to move. The alcohol had made me feel warm and outgoing, and I experienced a vague lust. It was pleasant to imagine her amazing white arse and the very soft skin of the insides of her thighs. She would speak over-correctly as many English girls do, at least until I got my fingers between her legs, and then she would be hotter than hell, as many English girls become when they are groped, and possibly clumsy, probably, and I remembered Charlie’s observing in retrospect how much cleaner all French women were about the cunt than English women (girls), Anglo-Saxon women generally, how a French woman’s vitals would be sweet to the taste, while with those of an Englishwoman one risked being confronted with a holy sepulchre, a repository for relics, as in an altar, forged somewhere in the gas-inhabited foundry of the girl’s unconscious, under centuries of propriety, if I took his meaning. Not that he wished to make a value judgement. Not him. Tastes differed. Look at Henri Quatre of France, who advised his mistresses three weeks beforehand to omit their ablutions. The cat on
the screen had just received the lower part of a window on the back of its neck and was seeing stars. The mighty mouse was stepping backwards with his hands on his hips into a trap which was sibilantly reflected in one of the stars the cat with one evil eye saw. A charming housewife, entering the room as though she expected it to delight her, saw the plight of the mouse and saved him in the nick of time. Having done so she espied the suffering cat. She tapped her high-heeled toe and moved menacingly towards him where he was staggering about, recovering, and with the rolling pin she happened to be carrying near her pretty apron she struck the cat a ninety-degree blow on top of the skull, causing him to fold up like a concertina, and, as like a spring he opened, she belted him one on the kidneys and sent him through a splintering window and by the neck into a neat crotch of branches in a tree. The narrator left us there in the daze of the starry-eyed cat. As the silk drapes moved majestically across the massive screen a multicoloured Wurlitzer rose like a whale from the sea, and the organist, rising with it in white tie and tails, drew from it a few spectacular bars of Rachmaninoff before falling into the enthusiastic melody of ‘I Want to Be Happy’29... When he had run through that he took a bow and announced that he wanted the audience to accompany him with the words. This promised to be very painful indeed. I remembered it was the practice for it to go on for about ten minutes with the words of the songs and the beats projected on the screen and I looked quickly at the girl at my side. No visible discomfort. She appeared to be interested in the distant stalls in all directions. I debated for a moment whether or not to offer her my opera glasses and decided against it. See the film, go to bed. I would have a couple of drinks at the hotel and go to sleep easily. I didn’t really want her. A cunt was a cunt, and she could be little more for me in the short time at my disposal. I began to repress all movements which might have elicited a response on her part. Not now. Not again. Early in the morning I was leaving London for Southampton and New York. And although from the moment I had arrived at Victoria I had been overcome by a sense of isolation, from time to time almost nauseous in intensity, and though it was to kill time I had entered the cinema, I couldn’t at that moment face getting to know another human being, or rather, not getting to know another human being... at best it had been like the perfect correlation of Leibniz’s clocks.30 Stopped by my own exaggeration I sat through the main feature and left immediately after it. Walking back to the hotel I was accosted by a woman as I turned into a side street. I apologized and as I moved away she offered to lower her price; she asked me what I could afford. I couldn’t think of anything to say and walked on in the rain back to the hotel.