I DRINK MY OWN URINE

It was about eighteen months ago when I made the acquaintance of Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good. This is what happened: I was up by Bamangwato hunting elephants and shit just kept hitting the fan, and I got the dengue, so I gave up and limped back into Cape Town and got a passage back to Natal on a ship known only as the Dunkeld.

‘Dunkeld, Dunkeld, never heard of her,’ I told the station master, fear and worry evident in my face and aching luggage bearers. ‘Are you sure it ain’t the Dunker?’

‘It’s the Dunkeld,’ insisted the man, a clown trapped inside the body of a rat and a liar. ‘That’s all she’s known as.’

‘Known as, schmown as,’ I scowled, tipping back my safari hat and squinting across the harbor at a ship known only as the Edinburgh Castle. ‘How about that ship, the pudgy low one out of jolly England? How much to go on board that one?’

‘About three times what you’re paying to get to Natal,’ stammered the man I was talking to. ‘She’s due back to London in a week.’

‘But I don’t want her to go back to London,’ I whined, as the servant under my third trunk swooned and fainted away. ‘I want her to go to Durban. I want her to take me home.’

‘The Edinburgh Castle isn’t going to Natal,’ replied the man, stubborn as a baby’s fist around the finger of an exasperated mime – as the fist of an ornery raccoon stuck in the knot of a tree full of delicious ripe nuts. ‘It’s the Dunkeld that is going where you want to go.’

‘You don’t understand,’ I moaned, raising myself to my full height – five foot two, or three, ‘I don’t WANT to get on the Dunkeld. I want to ride on the Edinburgh Castle. The Edinburgh Castle is the ship for me.’

‘So you want to go to London.’

I saw that it was time to get out of Cape Town, come hell or tigers with inside-out coats. Would their stripes still show? I shuddered and boarded the so-called Dunkel, pausing to note the name it was known by in my trusty ledger, threw my bags in my berth somehow, then lounged my body by the lee rail to watch the other passengers come aboard and leer at them. I often get excited looking at people, and this occasion was to be no exception.

‘Jux janee,’ I exclaimed, because the third or fourth man up the gangplank aroused me to a state of curiosity, and itchiness, and total loss. ‘Am I looking at a modern-day Viking?’ I asked myself, rubbing my eyes in this, their sallow, shrunken saucers, ‘or is he rather a white Zulu whose forebears, seizing a paddle, pushing off a mud bank in some primitive tippy flat-keeled vessel, made their way deliriously, impossibly to the shores of old Denmark, and there mated with a race of tall, yellow-bearded, chisel-featured goliaths?’

‘Who are you talking to?’ asked the ship’s boy, interrupting me rudely – with callous intent.

He went into the water.

I returned my attention to the large passenger and pictured him in a shirt of iron rings, in a fighting cap with spikes coming out of the top, in heavy leather greaves, in my house, clutching a hammer and an axe, raising a magnificent horn that was his vessel for his beverage of choice that I got out of my sideboard, shouting ‘Skol’!

Only later did I discover that he was, in fact, of Danish extraction.

‘They got me out of Denmark the only way they knew how,’ he giggled, brawny fingers never slipping from his ivory chalice.

‘How?’ we all demanded. ‘How did they get you out of Denmark? With a tractor? Was it an epidemic of cholera that they chased you out with, or a persecution by the leaders of a new voodoo sect? Did you kill a man back there?’

We said, ‘Tell us now, for the love of Jesus, please sweet mercy, we are begging you, Hank,’ for Hank was this big man’s moniker amongst friends – chums – brethren – stags.

Hank said, ‘They extracted me, like I said. Took me out with a crane.’

Standing in a God-damned swoon on the deck of the Dunkeld, however, a strange cloud or doubt passed my face and life, for I suspected I knew the man from somewhere. It was like a déjà vu, when you are on top of a son of a bitch with your hands around his throat and his face goes purple and then white and in that moment there is this little twitch of recognition and you wonder, shit, do I KNOW this guy from somewhere?

His companion, on the other hand, also the third or fourth man up the gangplank, I giggled, fingers in my mouth, was neat and clean-shaven and had something of the navy man about him.

‘You remind me of a semen I met once,’ I gagged, coughed. I said, ‘of a seaman I met once,’ I told him. The air was full of déjà vu that summer.

‘Seventeen years with the Royal Navy,’ replied Commander Good, straightening to his full five inches – to his full five feet, ‘lathed and bounced on the lap of the mothering, fathering sea til my heart and mind was clean of the city vice and pollution,’ he said in something like my own words, taking snuff, sipping brandy, slapping a woman, and licking the tip of a shuddering cigar.

‘Turned out because you could not be promoted, and could not stand to remain a mere Commander, Captain,’ I mused sadly, twirling a lock of my trunk bearer´s hair with one finger – inclining one shoulder in a coquettish manner.

‘How do you know so much?’

‘I looked in the ship’s log. It’s all there,’ I said in that hurried falsetto. I don’t mean to be nosy, but in this life sometimes you just have to read what is right in front of you.

‘You don’t say,’ he said in dialogue.

‘I do say,’ I demurred.

The conversation stalled.

I remarked, ‘You are stout and dark,’ standing from my rail position and casting Captain Good a sidelong glance, ‘of medium height, and never take your eye-glass from your right eye, no. What’s the matter, can’t see very well with that one, or is the glass for shooting?’ I demanded.

Captain John Good said, ‘It’s for shooting.’

‘Do you sleep with it in, or do you take it out and put it in a special case?’ I inquired, tentative – timid as always – afraid to hurt his feelings.

‘That’s private,’ he barked, but with such a vicious movement of his crewcut that his teeth flew absolutely straight from his mouth, chattered far out over the lee rail, and hit the Atlantic Ocean with a splash.

We both looked aghast. A ghost looked both we.

Deliberately, stolidly, reluctantly, I removed my own teeth and chucked them in after.

‘Miner gelling oil, goon,’ I commiserated, patting my new chum – stag pal – sailing pard – on the shoulder. I confessed to him that my own sets of dentures were often poor and shaggy, as he had just himself witnessed, a fact that often caused me to break the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth commandments.

‘You fucked and murdered your neighbor’s wife, stole her jewels, framed her husband for the crime, and yet your mind will still not be still or stop sinning?’ he did not exclaim. He was completely unintelligible without his clickers in.

‘Nada urging,’ chuckled good old Good, regaining some of his composure – glaring down the bitches on the sun deck, lest their laughter need be stifled with a tray of club sandwiches, pushed in the long way, ‘Ava moth au pair,’ he said, and did not lie – produced it on the spot, a gorgeous flashing second set of false teeth still in their wrapper, and popped them in.

Teeth, the glory of a woman, I sneered – turning my back to get my own second pair in, that somehow still stank of pubic hair and lotion – that tasted of crotch rot and grease of a wagon axle.

Turned back and grinned, approved Captain John Good.

Yet by this time we were underway, and soon hit the big swells that are the signal for lubbers that their days as upright, striding fellows have gone – that all they know and love is worth a wooden nickel, because we were in for some stiff gales, heavy seas, and wanton rolling decks.

With a scream I hustled my slipping, caroming, corpselike face and trembling undercarriage into the engine room where it was warm – where there were walls to keep me from flying off the star or larboard board, or prow, or poop, I shat.

‘The pendulum is wrong,’ shouted Captain John Good’s impossible mouth into my stretchy, wincing eardrum. The little tufts of hair I keep on both ears lifted and fell. The inscrutably small boat reared, lifted, leapt, and yawned. All around us water crashed and light crashed. Timbers and a choir of surly dead monks groaned, I groaned. Captain John Good said, ‘Or else we are going to the bottom,’ I said.

I shot him a look of terror. My eyes were like my eyes when I have just stepped off a horse and missed the boardwalk. You know the look, Harry. They were like my eyes right before I dive out of the way of a runaway carriage, right before it plunges into the ravine – like the eyes of the damsels screaming from its padded yet fragile insides.

‘Why do you say that?’ I shouted back.

I said, ‘Why would you ever say that?’

The vessel kicked like a horse, then actually moved sideways. I slammed against the bulkhead in all I had to call clothes. Under me the Dunkeld slipped into a steep and endless trough, not asking permission, no apologies, just down down down. It buried its nose in eight billion kilotons of water, then – as I explored the upper soprano parts of Bizet’s Carmen and threw my arms around Captain Good’s best trousers – shot up the other side.

‘We probably won’t make it,’ explained that Good Captain, indicating the instruments, ‘unless these damn lubbers have got the weight all wrong on this thing,’ he mused, tapping the pendulum. The pendulum swung – merciless and determined, like a tight-lipped toddler that has got out the front door, through the garden gate, and is charging out into the street.

‘Please, let it be the lubbers,’ I gasped, and it was the lubbers.

‘It’s the lubbers,’ concluded the Captain, in some of the filthiest language you can imagine, observing the pitch and roll of the craft and deciding that we were in no danger whatsoever.

‘We are in no danger whatsoever,’ he assured me, kicking his leg to get free of my surprisingly wiry clutches.

The dinner bell rang.

‘Rang,’ it said. ‘Rang rang.’

Both Captain John Good’s eyes and my own lit up like one of those human torches you see so often up in the Transvaal – like four such torches in the night, and I was not sorry. I leapt straight to my feet and rode the swell, and took my first step as a seaman.

Some call me weak, others fainthearted, still others strong-willed, and yet others slow-witted.

They can call me anything they want as long as they don’t call me late to dinner.

The sounds of our sailor, seamen feet pounded down the hatch.

Down the hatch, down the hatch, we sang.