Vanity of Duluoz by Jack Kerouac

Author:Jack Kerouac
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2011-06-09T04:00:00+00:00

V

I dont wanta go into it too much because there’s so much else and too much to tell, but our sister ship the SS Chatham was torpedoed and sunk at about this time off Belle Isle Strait, I believe, with a loss of many, many lives, about a thousand. We had steamed out of Boston Harbor together. The Chatham and the Dorchester were very valuable old tubs and finally they got the Dorchester too.

VI

On our return trip to Boston Harbor, without the weight of the five hundred construction workers and a lot of their earthmoving equipment in the hold, and the construction dynamite and all the stuff, we were as light as a cork and bobbed in a huge October tempest, the likes of which I only saw fifteen years later. Me god and bejesus but what a blast of wind and waves. We werent scared really, but me and some of the boys went upstairs to the old dormitories where the workers had slept and started a big pillow fight with all the pillows in sight on hundreds of bunks. Feathers flew everywhere in the dark ship as she thundered in the night. ‘Night aint fit for man nor beast.’ It was a walloping storm. I went out on deck and practiced the halfback jumpoff practice run so I could be ready for Columbia College football the following week. There’s this nut practicing football on a bounding deck in the howling Arctic gales. But we made it to Sydney Nova Scotia where I wasnt allowed to go ashore on leave because of that mountainclimbing episode which had been officially recorded as AWOL because we were absent at noon work. Didnt bother me, but at little old Sydney everybody including Captain Kendrick went ashore on bumboats and I was left alone as ‘watch’ on this empty ship with a cook or two and a pilot or somebody I dunno who, I couldnt find anybody. So I went up to the captain’s bridge and pulled the goddam rope calling a bumboat from the harbor of Sydney. A little boat shining warm human lights came rushing to the ship. I ran down from the captain’s bridge (where I felt as guilty, from pulling that rope, as I did later on the railroad in California pulling the engineer’s rope for the crossing call, BAAA BAAA BUT BAAA). But okay, for fifty cents they took me ashore. I think the whole ship was entirely abandoned. Everybody and his uncle was drunk and got drunker.

It’s a nice little town, with collieries, miners, guys with grimed faces like in Wales, they go underground, etc., with little lights on their hats, but there were also little wartime dance parties and a lot of booze and bars and I went ashore AWOL for real this time. After several whiskeys I saw thru a haze that several of my seaman buddies were sore at Wallingham because he was hiding in a shack on the pier with a big bottle of whiskey and wouldnt come out and give us any shots.

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