Algren at Sea (48 page)

Kowloon was the town for Japanese transistors and Ho-Phang Road was the street for lovely girls. We would find a bar leaping with merriment was THE PLAN: There Quong and I would wait while Concannon purchased transistors for one-third of what we would be able to sell them for in Bombay.

Time was of the essence. The
Malaysia Mail
would stand off Hongkong for four hours, including the minutes that would be taken by the ship's shore-launch. So Concannon asked the driver to put in at Kowloon when we boarded the launch. The motor was going when Manning climbed in. Nobody had sent for him: he just climbed in.

“We're not going to Hongkong,” Concannon told him. “We're going to Kowloon.”

Manning didn't reply. He just sat at the end of the launch by himself. It looked as if he had it in mind to follow us around Kowloon to see whether we were buying Japanese transistors.

Concannon was our leader. Transistors was our mission. Lovely girls would be our reward. But how was Quong, who sometimes took as long as half an hour to fall in love, going to find time to fall in love twice in Kowloon? If he didn't it would be the first port in which he would fall in love only once. Concannon, of course, held the ship's record by falling in love five times in two hours. But there was a fifteen-minute limit in that whorehouse.

“You don't have a wife in every port because you're a seaman,” I reminded him, but he cut me short.

“You've used that bit before,” he told me dryly.

When we stepped onto the Public Pier, the heat hit us straight out of the airless vault of a Chinese slum—and straight down into that vault we went.

Multitudes: multitudes: haulers of carts and bearers of water, bicyclists, pedicabs, taxis, drivers of jeeps, honking vendors of fish in a heat the hue of a yellow dream. Ho-Phang Road lay between tenement terraces festooned with clothes drying in the scorching air.

Concannon milled ahead of us. Sparks never picked a boulevard to stroll when there was an alley to prowl. He wasn't content simply to make his way somewhere—if he didn't have to force his way he was unsatisfied. We had to hurry to keep the crown of his head, where the hair had thinned, in view. His object being to lose Manning, he dodged into a bar under a sign that said:
The Lion of Kowloon.

A wave of cold air rushed over me as soon as the door shut behind me. After the murderous heat of the street, this air-conditioning felt like a plunge into a pool for seals. When the dimness lifted I looked around.

The whores of that cave were waxen horrors transfixed by times long gone. One Chinese hooker loomed so huge, flesh enfolding flesh, that her eyes began melting helplessly as her belly began to swell. Beside her sat one so gaunt that her shadow had bones. I felt the wind of a cold depravity.

A Japanese girl on a bar-stool in a bright dirndl swung about darting her pink tongue-tip at me and then smilingly spread her legs. She wasn't more than sixteen and her dress was high on her black-mesh thighs. The Lion of Kowloon growled low. We took seats either side of her.

A Japanese seaman left a drink standing to come over, take the girl by her arm and lead her out. Protectiveness turns fast to love.

His move left the cave looking more like a wax museum than ever.

“This looks worse than Korea,” I accused Quong, “you told me things were going to get better.”

“Wait,” Quong promised me.

“Wait for
what?
”

Quong, out of the memory of his seaborne years, began searching for some port where I would be happier.

“
Sitagong!
”—he hit on it—“Ooo-ooo—When you get to Sitagong!
Muts
better gel, Sitagong.”

“
Really
better in Chittagong, Quong?”

“
Betta? Ooo-ooo!
Pretty gel come
get
you in Sitagong! Very pretty Sitagong gel take you home! Sit on lap! Fan you! Kiss-kiss!
Ooo-ooo
—How pretty Sitagong gel kiss-kiss!”

“How much is this going to cost me, Quong?” I inquired calmly.

“
Cost
you?” He looked at me incredulously. “Not cost
you.
Sitagong gel, she not
like
Pakistani man—
American man for Sitagong gel!
” He started swinging his right hand over his head as though he were pitching for a girl's indoor softball club; and a girl took the bar-stool next to mine as if she wanted to play catcher. Quong whispered into my ear, “
And
give you bath! Put you in perfume-bubboo! She get in perfume-bubboo
with
you!”

“Quong!” I tried to stop him by sternness. “You aren't expecting me to believe that this girl is going to get into the bath
with
me?”

“Sure!” he insisted. “Very pretty sixteen-year-old Sitagong gel, she get in, scrub back, you foat.”

“I
float?
”

“Sure, when she hit you on head, you foat. Assy-end up you foat.”

I got to my feet. “Why should she hit me on the head for God's sake?” “Wha'
for?
For take you pants. For take you shoe. For take you money. Hit one time real good you foat down River Tsangpo.” He threw back his head in a Chinese convulsion and almost fell off the bar-stool. “Assy-end up! Assy-end up in River Tsangpo!”

The humor of the Oriental is apparently based upon the superstition that, no matter how preposterous a premise, mere repetition entails comedy. Although I could visualize a corpse floating down the River Tsangpo I failed to see that it was funny if it were mine. Assy-end up indeed! I turned to face the girl who'd joined us.

“What the hell
you
laughing at?” I asked this fool.

“My name Suzi,” was her stupid reply.

“Where you from?” I asked her magnanimously.

“Sumatra.”

“Meet Suzi Sumatra,” I introduced her to Quong, “Frank's sister.”

Now, if any, was the moment for hilarity.

Nobody laughed.

“Buy Lady-Drink?” Suzi—she had eyes of taximeter brown—inquired.

“She wants you to buy her a drink,” I assured Quong.

“Lady-Drink,” Suzi insisted. And what do you know, the bartender already had it poured!

I tasted it. Suzi drank it. Quong paid for it. It was my turn to buy.

“Short-term?” Suzi asked, “long-term?”

“This girl has fallen in love with you,” I assured Quong, and left the pair of them to make a closer inspection of the whores of Ho-Phang Road.

One woman was so thin I paused to see whether she was a vertebrate. She thought I was flirting but all I was doing was trying to see whether she was held together by wire or string.

Lashes by
Maybelline,
talc by
PX—Even in the dark you know.
She wore one earring of amber and one of jade. Those things have a way of working loose in bed. Then you try to match one of each as best you can. For a ghost she had attractive cheekbones.

“Me Alina,” she told me so tenderly that I decided to buy her a drink if she could swallow. “Two beers,” I instructed the waiter.

“Wee-skee,” my tender ghost corrected me.

I looked for marks on her arms but she didn't have veins. We went to a table. Quong and Suzi left to find short-term happiness.

What I found so winning about Alina was her combination of unearthly reflexes with a deathlike pallor. “Must be on muggles,” I thought. But where could she hide a pipe beneath her dress without poking out some honest seaman's eye? If she weren't sniffing cocaine she must be taking heroin in her earlobes. It would have been nice to have found an opium-eater; but old-fashioned girls are hard to find.

Yet it has to be admitted that Kleenex, flesh-colored talcum and sixteen-gauge hypodermic needles have improved hygiene in free-trade ports. A girl who used to have to sneak down to a dirty opium pad at risk of her social standing, can now carry a sixteen-gauge hypodermic needle manufactured
in New Jersey, in tissue manufactured in Ohio, and keep herself presentable on heroin brought in by American seamen. The exchanging of the poppy for the hype has brought the Orient closer to the Free World. More than one opium den has been swept out and now boasts a neon sign, saying MOM'S GOOD EATS; where you can get anything from redbirds to yellow jackets.

“Me Nepal gel,” my ghost informed me. I had to keep an eye on the door for Concannon.

“Nepal gel very strong,” she added, “make good pong-pong.”

“You don't look too strong,” I had to tell her.

“In Nepal me no make The Bad Busyness,” Alina explained, “Bad Busyness no good for Nepal gel.”

“How long you do Bad Busyness?” I asked just to get a line on her age. She looked so young yet so old.

She studied her fingers and finally held up two: “By Railroad Station, Madras, two year.” She held up another: “By Suklaji Street, Bombay, one year. Me get sick, go home Nepal, one year.” Now all she had left was one thumb.

“You tell,” she asked me, “in your country, do priest kiss priest?”

“Why do you ask
that?
” was all I could think to answer.

She took it for confirmation of what must have been an old suspicion. “My country best,” she decided, “there we don't know
anything.
”

When who walks through the door but The Unacknowledged Champion of Everything, Ship's Fink W. McAdoo Manning. And headed right for our table.

“Meet Miss Sumatra,” I invited him.

Nobody laughed again.

“The ship-launch leaves in an hour,” Manning informed me. “I just wanted to check it out with you.”

He just wanted to get me out of the Lion of Kowloon, that was all.

“I'm waiting for the radio officer,” I explained.

“Do you consider
him
reliable?” he asked me at the precise moment that Concannon, loaded with boxes, bottles and bags, loomed in the doorway.

“
Very
reliable,” I told Manning.

Concannon began ambling about in the dimness—his eyes were weak even in the light of day. I guided him to our table. Manning waited until
Concannon had dumped his packages on the table. I knew he hadn't yet seen Manning.

Suzi and Quong returned. That had been
really
short-term.

“
Loot!
” Alina cried happily. “
Loot! Loot!
”

“You're going to get the ship in trouble, Concannon,” Manning spoke at last.

Concannon surveyed him without surprise.

“Are you coming?” Manning asked me sternly. He couldn't get over the idea that I was his charge.

I didn't answer. Yet he waited.

Sparks embraced both girls and kissed each in turn. Revulsion shadowed Manning's face like a wind rippling water. Why didn't the man leave?

A waiter came whizzing around the bar with a tray of drinks. Alina poured the gin.

Concannon extracted a transistor from one of the boxes, pulled out the aerial, and a hillbilly voice came droning in from some army base—

Manning left in a high-wheeled huff. He actually thought the good times were o'er.

Concannon didn't think so. The whores of Ho-Phang Road didn't seem to think so. I'm sure
I
didn't think so. Alina sat on my lap.

“You look out,” Quong told me, smiling his everlasting smile, “you not wait to foat in River Tsangpo—you foat,
here
.”

I didn't know what Quong was driving at.

“He means the slouch at the bar,” Concannon informed me casually, “that's
his
old lady on your lap.”

The Slouch, across Alina's shoulder, looked like one of those men so ineffectual you think he's English until his accent sounds Greek; and sure enough, he turns out to be Italian. I rotated Alina's skull toward him.

“Who
him?
” I inquired fluently, and unrotated the head.

She giggled Chineasily.

“Him nutty-nut,” she told me. The Slouch came over with a slouching motion.

“I am
sea-
man,” he told us, and we had to take his word even though he looked like he'd been putting in more time trailing John Gielgud than swabbing decks. Nonetheless I asked him to sit down and nonetheless he coldly declined. It wasn't, apparently, roaring good fellowship he was after in the Lion of Kowloon.

“May I have con-were-sation?” he requested me politely—putting this down with an injured air.

“Sure,” I let him know.

“
Private
con-were-sation, if you please,” he asked me.

I put Alina down and followed The Slouch into a stockroom back of the bar. I let him slouch in first. It was dark in there.

I followed.

“I am not
offended,
” he assured me, “I wish all Americans to have joyous time.”

I'll just bet you do.

“Good time, happy time”—and he gave me his hand as though he'd completed his message. Then he choked up, twitched, clasped his hands and unclasped them.

“My fiancée,” he finally came out with it, “
good
woo-min.”

“
Alina?
” I asked. “You wish me to enjoy myself but
not
with Alina?”

That I'd gotten the message relieved him; while his admission of jealousy left him more miserable than ever.

I didn't tell him that I'd invited her to have a drink only because I feel sorry for ghosts in need of somebody to haunt. I'd had no idea she was haunting
him.
He held my arm.

“A
great
woo-min!” He dropped his voice to a confidential whisper—“
Do not offer her money—you will only wound her feelings.
”