Collected Prose

the parking lot. When the driver showed up a few minutes later, he started cursing. “Goddammit,” he said. “Goddammit to hell. If I’d known you were calling from here, I wouldn’t have come.” “Why not?” I asked. “Because this is the worst fucking place in Houston,” he said. “They’ve had six murders here in the past month. Every damn weekend, somebody else gets shot.”
    In the end, the months I spent on that ship felt like years. Time passes in a different way when you’re out on the water, and given that the bulk of what I experienced was utterly new to me, and given that I was constantly on my guard because of that, I managed to crowd an astonishing number of impressions and memories into a relatively small sliver of my life. Even now, I don’t fully understand what I was hoping to prove by shipping out like that. To keep myself off balance, I suppose. Or, very simply, just to see if I could do it, to see if I could hold my own in a world I didn’t belong to. In that respect, I don’t think I failed. I can’t say what I accomplished during those months, but at the same time I’m certain I didn’t fail.
    I received my discharge papers in Charleston. The company provided airfare home, but you could pocket the money if you wanted to and make your own travel arrangements. I chose to keep the money. The trip by milk train took twenty-four hours, and I rode back with a fellow crew member from New York, Juan Castillo. Juan was in his late forties or early fifties, a squat, lumpy man with a big head and a face that looked like something pieced together with the skins and pulps of nineteen mashed potatoes. He had just walked off an oil tanker for the last time, and in appreciation of his twenty-five years of service to the company, Esso had given him a gold watch. I don’t know how many times Juan pulled that watch out of his pocket and looked at it during the long ride home, but every time he did, he would shake his head for a few seconds and then burst out laughing. At one point, the ticket collector stopped to talk to us during one of his strolls down the aisle of the car. He looked very natty in his uniform, I remember, a black Southern gentleman of the old school. In a haughty, somewhat condescending manner, he opened the conversation by asking: “You boys going up North to work in the steel mills?”
    We must have been a curious pair, Juan and I. I recall that I was wearing a beat-up leather jacket at the time, but other than that I can’t see myself, have no sense of what I looked like or what other people saw when they looked at me. The ticket collector’s question is the only clue I have. Juan had taken pictures of his shipmates to put in the family album at home, and I remember standing on the deck and looking into the camera for him as he clicked the shutter. He promised to send me a copy of the photo, but he never did.
    *

    I toyed with the idea of going out for another run on an Esso tanker, but in the end I decided against it. My salary was still being sent to me through the mail (for every two days I’d been on the ship, I received one day’s pay on land), and my bank account was beginning to look fairly robust. For the past few months, I had been slowly coming to the conclusion that my next step should be to leave the country and live abroad for a while. I was willing to ship out again if necessary, but I wondered if I hadn’t built up a large enough stake already. The three or four thousand dollars I’d earned from the tanker struck me as a sufficient sum to get started with, and so rather than continue in the merchant marine, I abruptly shifted course and began plotting a move to Paris.
    France was a logical choice, but I don’t think I went there for logical reasons. That I spoke French, that I had been translating French poetry, that I knew and cared about a number of people who lived in France—surely those things entered into my decision, but they were not determining factors. What made me want to go, I think, was the memory of what had happened to me in Paris three years earlier. I still hadn’t gotten it out of my system, and because that visit had been cut short, because I had left on the assumption that I would soon be returning, I had walked around with a feeling of unfinished business, of not having had my fill. The only thing I wanted just then was to hunker down and write. By recapturing the inwardness and freedom of that earlier time, I felt that I would