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Authors: John Steinbeck

The Log From the Sea of Cortez (Penguin Classics) (42 page)

BOOK: The Log From the Sea of Cortez (Penguin Classics)
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George was lonely. He wanted the company of men, the camaraderie and warmth and roughness and good feeling and arguments of men. He got very tired of a woman’s world of perfumes and periods, of hysterics and noisy mysteries and permanents. Perhaps he had no one to boast to of his superiority over women, and it bothered him.
We watched him try to associate with the bums sitting on the timber in the sun, and they would have none of him. They considered a pimp as abysmally beneath them socially. When George wandered up through the weeds and sat with the boys they would turn away from him. They did not insult him or tell him to go away, but they would not associate with him. If an argument was going on when he arrived, it would stop and a painful silence would take its place.
George recognized his ostracism and he was sad and hangdog about it. We, watching from the window, could see it in his wilting posture and his fawning gestures. We could hear it in his too loud laughter at a mildly amusing joke. Ed shook his head over this injustice. He had hoped for better from the boys.
“I don’t know why I thought they would be better,” he said. “Of course, being bums does give them advantages, but why should I expect them to be above all smallness just because they are bums? I guess it was just a romantic hopefulness.” And he said, “I knew a man who believed all whores were honest just because they were whores. Time and again he got rolled—once a girl even stole his clothes, but he would not give up his conviction. It had become an article of faith, and you can’t give such a thing up because it is yourself. I must re-examine my feeling about the boys,” he said.
We watched George fall back, in his craven loneliness, on bribery. He bought whisky and passed it around. He loaned money like a crazy man. The bums accepted George’s bribes but they would not accept George.
Ed Ricketts did not ordinarily meddle in the affairs of his neighbors but he brooded about George.
One afternoon he confronted the boys on the timber. “Why don’t you be nice to him?” he said. “He’s a lonely man. He wants to be friends with you. You are putting a mark on him that may warp and sour his whole life. He won’t be any good to anyone. I wouldn’t be surprised if you were responsible for his death.”
To which Whitey No. 2 (there were two Whiteys, known as Whitey No. 1 and Whitey No. 2) replied, “Now, Doc, you’re not asking us to associate with a pimp, are you? Nobody likes a pimp.”
It must be noted that when the hustlers spoke to Ed formally he was Doc. When they hustled him, he was Ed, Eddie, or Eddie boy.
I don’t think that Ed had any idea how accurate his prediction was. But not very long after this George killed himself with an ice pick in the kitchen of the whorehouse. And when Ed berated the boys for having been one of the causes of his death, Whitey No. 1 echoed Whitey No. 2’s words.
“Hell, we can’t help it, Doc. You just can’t be friendly with a pimp.”
Ed mused sadly, “I find it rather hard to believe that the boys were moved by any moral consideration. It must have been an un-scalable social barrier that no argument could overleap.” And he said, “White chicks will kill a black chick every time. But I do hope it isn’t as simple as that.”
Ed’s association with Wing Chong, the Chinese grocer, and later, after Wing Chong’s death, with his son, was one of mutual respect. Ed could always get credit and for long periods of time. And sometimes he needed it. Once we tried to compute how many gallons of beer had crossed the street in the years of our association, but we soon gave up as the figures mounted. We didn’t even want to know.
Ed had many friends, and in addition he attracted some people from the lunatic fringe, like the Chinese detective and the snake woman. There were others who used him as a source of information.
One afternoon the phone rang and a woman’s voice asked, “Dr. Ricketts, can you tell me the name of a tropical fish with so many spines on the dorsal fin and so many on the ventral? The name begins with an L.”
“Not offhand,” said Ed, “but I’ll be glad to look it up for you if you want to call back in half an hour.” He went to work, saying, “Lovely voice—fine throaty voice.”
Twenty minutes later the phone rang again and the fine throaty voice said, “Dr. Ricketts, never mind. I worked it out from the horizontals.”
He never did meet the puzzle-worker with the throaty voice.
 
In appearance and temperament Ed was a remarkably unmilitary man, but in spite of this he was drafted for service in both World Wars. One would have thought that his complete individuality and his uniqueness of approach to all problems would have caused him to go crazy in the organized mediocrity of the Army. Actually the exact opposite was true. He was a successful soldier. In spite of itself, the Army—at least that part of it which sheltered him—was gradually warped in his favor and for his comfort. He was quite happy in the Army in both wars.
He described his military experience in the first World War to me with satisfaction. “I was young then,” he said, “and I am amazed that I showed such good sense. I have often thought,” he went on, “that if any big company like General Motors or Standard Oil should start a private army, no public army would stand a chance against it. A private company is organized to do something or to produce something, profit or gold or steel. It has a direction. But a public army is made up of millions of individuals all working for themselves. Some want promotions, some want to steal, some want personal power or glory, and some want simply to get out. Very few have any interest in winning a war.”
He told me about his first war experience. “I gave it a good deal of thought before I decided what to be,” he said. “As I said, I was young then, but I have always admired my choice. Literacy was not terribly high in 1917, and it was comparatively easy for me to become company clerk without any danger of being driven into officer’s training school. I definitely did not want to be an officer. No one wanted the job of company clerk.
“People are singularly blind,” he continued. “It escaped the greed and self-interest of the other men that the company clerk makes out the passes and that if the captain and lieutenants happen to have hobbies like golf or women, this duty and even the selections are left in the hands of an efficient company clerk.” He sighed with pleasure. He had enjoyed the Army. “In almost no time,” he said, “the rumor got about that I liked whisky. It became quite common knowledge. And do you know, when I was demobilized I had over three hundred pints left, and that in a time of prohibition, if you will remember.”
A little venom crept into his voice. “You know,” he said in an outraged tone, “there was one christing son-of-a-bitch who complained to the captain about me. Can you imagine that? He put it on a moral basis. He didn’t drink. I wonder why nondrinkers are so often vicious.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“He was a silly man,” Ed said. “He didn’t get a single pass for eighteen months. He wrote complaint after complaint. He was a very silly man.”
“But how about the complaints?”
“If he had given it any thought he would have realized that complaints go through the hands of the company clerk.” He chuck-led. “I guess I should not bear a grudge,” he said, “but I still don’t like that man. Word got about—you know how rumors move in the Army. Anyway, the word got out that the good, kind company clerk was being persecuted. I guess the poor fellow had a rough time of it—from latrines to kitchen police to the brig. I think it ruined his whole military career. I’m pretty sure it ruined his stomach. A very silly man.”
I have always felt that drafting Ed in the Second World War was spiteful on the part of the draft board. He was one week under forty-six when his call came, and his birthday had passed when he was examined. I think there were people in Monterey who were jealous of him. He was really not good soldier material from any point of view. He wore a beard, which is frowned on by Army psychiatrists. The doctor who examined him came from the interview puzzled and worried, but he passed Ed, and the Army made him shave off his beard.
He did not resent being drafted because he remembered the first war with such pleasure.
“I thought that with my subsequent experience and maturity I might be all right,” he said.
Because of his long laboratory experience they put him in charge of the venereal disease section of the induction center at Monterey. This job had its compensations. He could go home every night and he had complete charge of an inexhaustible medicine chest. He was still in no danger of being hustled off to officer’s training school. Ed didn’t want to command men. He wanted to associate with them. His commanding officer had a hobby—whether golf or women I do not know, but it was strong enough so that he let Ed do all the work.
Ed liked that and did a very good job with his section. Possibly because of the medicine chest a little group of passionate admirers clung to him and protected him and defended him against any possible charge that Ed didn’t get to work before ten in the morning and sometimes went away for long weekends.
Quite early in his second hitch in the Army Ed got tired of the sameness of laboratory alcohol and grapefruit juice. With his unlimited medicine chest, he began to experiment. Now another rumor crept about the Presidio of Monterey that a fabulous drink had been invented. It had a strange effect. No one had tasted or felt anything quite like it. It was called “Ricketts’ Folly.” It was said that the commanding officer of the unit, and he a major at that, after two drinks of it had marched smartly and with no hint of stagger right into a wall, and that he had made a short heroic speech as he slid to the ground.
After Ed was safely and honorably discharged I asked him about the drink that had achieved a notoriety as far east as Chicago and that was discussed with hushed respect on the beachheads of the Pacific.
“Well, actually it was very simple,” he said. “It’s components were not complicated and it
was
delicious. I never could figure why it had such a curious and sometimes humorous effect. It was nothing but alcohol, codeine, and grenadine. It was a pretty drink too. You know,” he said, “it made every other kind of liquor seem kind of weak and flabby.”
 
This account of Ed Ricketts goes seesawing back and forth chronologically and in every other way. I did not intend when I started to departmentalize him, but now that seems to be a good method. He was so complex and many-faceted that perhaps the best method will be to go from one facet of him to another so that from all the bits a whole picture may build itself for me as well as for others.
Ed had more fun than nearly anyone I have ever known, and he had deep sorrows also, which will be treated later. As long as we are on the subject of drinking I will complete that department.
Ed loved to drink, and he loved to drink just about anything. I don’t think I ever saw him in the state called drunkenness, but twice he told me he had no memory of getting home to the laboratory at all. And even on those nights one would have had to know him well to be aware that he was affected at all. Evidences of drinking were subtle. He smiled a little more broadly. His voice became a little higher in pitch, and he would dance a few steps on tiptoe, a curious pigeon-footed mouse step. He liked every drink that contained alcohol and, except for coffee which he often laced with whisky, he disliked every drink that did not contain alcohol. He once estimated that it had been twelve years since he had tasted water without some benign addition.
At one time when bad teeth and a troublesome love affair were running concurrently, he got a series of stomach-aches which were diagnosed as a developing ulcer. The doctor put him on a milk diet and ordered him off all alcohol. A sullen sadness fell on the laboratory. It was a horrid time. For a few days Ed was in a state of dismayed shock. Then his anger rose at the cruelty of a fate that could do this to him. He merely disliked and distrusted water, but he had an active and fierce hatred for milk. He found the color unpleasant and the taste ugly. He detested its connotations.
For a few days he forced a little milk into his stomach, complaining bitterly the while, and then he went back to see the doctor. He explained his dislike for the taste of milk, giving as its basis some pre-memory shock amounting to a trauma. He thought this dislike for milk might have driven him into the field of marine biology since no marine animals but whales and their family of sea cows give milk and he had never had the least interest in any of the Cetaceans. He said that he was afraid the cure for his stomach-aches was worse than the disease and finally he asked if it would be all right to add a few drops of aged rum to the milk just to kill its ugly taste. The doctor perhaps knew he was fighting a losing battle. He gave in on the few drops of rum.
We watched the cure with fascination as day by day the ratio changed until at the end of a month Ed was adding a few drops of milk to the rum. But his stomach-aches had disappeared. He never liked milk, but after this he always spoke of it with admiration as a specific for ulcers.
There were great parties at the laboratory, some of which went on for days. There would come a time in our poverty when we needed a party. Then we would gather together the spare pennies. It didn’t take very many of them. There was a wine sold in Monterey for thirty-nine cents a gallon. It was not a delicate-tasting wine and sometimes curious things were found in the sludge on the bottom of the jug, but it was adequate. It added a gaiety to a party and it never killed anyone. If four couples got together and each brought a gallon, the party could go on for some time and toward the end of it Ed would be smiling and doing his tippy-toe mouse dance.
BOOK: The Log From the Sea of Cortez (Penguin Classics)
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