An ocean voyage! Improbable and frantic as any carnival. Hard men and the hard air of the docks swarm for a confrontation with the watery element of the wily ocean. My damned step-dad, General Aupick, has pulled off a miracle as surprising as any bouquet fluoresced from an old clown’s sleeve. He has pulled the world out from under me and replaced it with mystic waters as salt as my blood. My troubles have edged me from the earth onto this splintery deck swiveling drunkenly under my feet.
Debts beset me. On every side I hear the cry of my creditors as persistent as seagulls. My inspiration has fled me after Jeanne (that damned prostitute–pinched in the face and vain as a queen) dismissed me from the cathouse steps with a pale finger. And now I go to my wounded drowning in the ocean. Perhaps… perhaps I will be transformed in the blue element. Perhaps, when I rear into the air and return to land someone will say of my yattering corpse ‘those are pearls that were his eyes.’
So, a change of venue for my insanity and insouciance, as the General says; new stars for my ruined eyes. My first good turn from that quarter! Enough perhaps to balance out the rest of his nitpicky betrayals. Two days ago, I slung a gunny sack across my back, packed my finest cigars, and called for a stylish hansom to deliver me to the docks. On the S.S. Croesseus I put to sea, embarking as, of all things, a pilot’s apprentice. But my periplum begins and ends in the spine, casting its vigor through the ribs perhaps, taking in the exotica of the splayed pelvis, and the rank pursuits of the hand and head. Those are the inner journeys that I endure and that pull all oceans into a single tear from my eye.
At the docks I met Capt. Souz, to whom I am ‘apprenticed.’ –Oh, a vile man, as full of tough talk as the sailors with their Spanish mustachios and idiot cynicism. None of them have read a literary journal out of Paris in their lives, and any talk of poetry or the sublime crimes of the heart come through an awkward discoursing on sea chanties, the Lay of Lillian and her Wagging Sea Beastie, or that sad masterpiece, whose pathos they could not parse to save their souls, Reginald, Reginald.
The commercial passengers are worse, for one comes to expect nothing at all from the seadogs, mere hooligans of the waterways, but the passengers seem like men on a Paris street, just misplaced–by the plucking of a puppet string–onto a jumping deck, the slick soles of their shoes causing them to slide into each other in a type of random hazard, a shuffleboard effect where the pucks are people.
They think their cheap perfumes and political opinions out of Le Monde make them gentlemen of consequence. Any idea that cuts against their piggy prejudices–inculcated in childhood–causes an expression to surface to their faces that I can only imagine describing as hideous.
The sailors, with whom I sling my hammock in a darkness clotted with the rank rot of a stable, are all about my age. I attempted on a few occasions to get some of them to unpuzzle a poem with me, but they merely used the occasion to mock by smallness, my delicate nature, and what they kept calling, in a sing-song dismissive way, ‘the insanity of poetry.’
The abuses! Confined in my cloth coffin last evening, I lay inflamed by half wakeful dreams of Jeanne, the triumphant terror of her hair, the deranged insistence with which her clear cuticles kept thrusting themselves into my mind without a moment’s respite! The constant loudness of the sea performed an unpitying act of mesmerization on me.
The ceiling swung back and forth in the gap of the hammock above me; then six strong and hairy hands leapt across the canvas and pinched the hammock closed, until I was shut in tight as the proverbial pea. Between my legs, the canvas thumped and bulged, once. I had no idea what was going on.
In the next moment, everything became deliriously clear, as blow after blow landed on the hammock, and was transmitted to my body and skull like a cascade of rocks. If I had rolled blind down a steep desert slope, my injuries could not have been more complete. My every inch suffered insult and assault.
The next instant, as I retched on myself in a shameful nausea of relief, the beating of the virgin sailor, his shrieking initiation–for that is indeed what it was–was over. I crawled like a sick dog onto the deck, unable to bear breathing the same cabin air as my persecutors. I stared at eternity from a lifeboat hanging to port until the sky herself shaded from its immense nightblue into a recognizable shade–of bruise.
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