Document text
Forms to be Filled out for Each Interview
STATE
NAME OF WORKER
ADDRESS
DATE
SUBJECT
FORMA
Circumstances of Interview
New York
Herman Partnow Saul Levitt
557 lest 144th Street
June 13, 1939
Maritime folklore
1. Date and time of interview
June 6, 1939
2. Place of interview
Waterfront, 20 Street, 11 Avenue
3. Name and address of informant
Anonymous
4. Name and address of person, if any, who put you in
touch with informant.
5. Name and address of person, if any, accompanying, you
6. Description of room, house, surroundings, etc.
FOLKLORE
NEW YORK
(Use as many additional sheets as necessary, for any of the for:as,
each bearing the proper hoadinL and the number to which the mnterial
refers.)
-2
I'll give ye a version. I strolled over to Park Raw and got this tattoo
on. J -O -A -N. Joan. I'm a sensible man, my old man was a commeroial artist,
I went to Cooper Union, I been married but I messed up with the wife, I'd never
think of gettin my arms scarred up like this but when I busted up with the wife,
I let everything go to the four winds, I went the way of all flesh, whenever
I'm under the weather I get tattooed. I'd rather have a job ashore. The sea
ain't no home. Look my next trip out is Wednesday. I'll get my shaving
gear and dungarees and sea boots, whatever I need, at Benny's. He always gives
ye a break until the next trip. Regulations calls for a 24 -hour sign -on, I'll
sign them foreign articles. Coastwise you can sign any time. All right, we
leave for Le Havre. First stop is Cobb, Ireland. No time ashore. Next stop
is Southampton no time ashore. Next is Le Havre. Well, we blow our tops.
The Rue de Gallianne, Cognac, we drink with the gals. BEE GIRLS THEY attu THEM
IN FRISCO? ON THE WEST COAST, THEY GET A PERCENTAGE. Then we come back late
or metre drunk or we miss a hatchy so we get logged for it. All right. We gotto
Hamburg. If we take too much dough we get picked up, then we come back drunk and
we get logged for it. After all, I been married, a married man gets used to it,
if he don't get it he's lookin for it. Over there in Havre I'm a second Fred As-
taire, I got them Frenchmen all showed under. I like singing too, literature. In
other words, I'm no horse. I turned out to be the best in the family until my
father died, then I was the black sheep, everything vent to the seven seas, I'm
just a sailor, one of the boys, I gotta do common shipwork, it's boresame. When
the boss puts me on lettering work I'm happy, I whistle. But that don't happen
often. Most of the time I'm just a tattooed son of a bitchy 8 to 12 lookout, re-
lieve the wheel half an hour, paint, chip, wash, maintenance work souji. Souji
floogie, crap. The whole marine is in violation of all the laws. Underscore that.
-3
We sailors, our dungarees can be clean as a pin, but we're a bum anyway.
A year ago Easter Sunday we're goin out through the Narrows on the excursion
boat, Romance. We're in the Glory Hole havin beer. The alarm pops. "Man the
life boats." In eighteen minutes we hunkies take off 365 passengers. So Johnny
Sharp shakes each one of us by the hand and gives us a medal. Them boasses were
lordin us to the skies. We're heroes. A week later all them fellers went out on
strike. You shoulda heard. This some crew was jailbirds, unfit to sail, the
worse kind of labor agitators, scum. Only a week later. We was dirt, a lotta
dirty seamen, worse than college plinks and summer sailors.
In that 1937 flood, you remember it, we sailors hiked dawn there, why we
didn't ask what we were gettin. 7,000 volunteers, they asked for life boat credits,
alla them seamen had the tickets. Did they put that in the press? Of course not.
The only time they put the sailor in the press is when they gotta report some mischiev-
ious battling in the streets. Or some lies. Listen, I run into more human nature
down here on the waterfront than uptown or in the World's Fair. Down here we're
always a friend, nine out of ten. After all, we're workin together.
Listen, is a sailor on a ship or in it? I say a sailor is an integ-ral
part. A passenger is just spare gear. He's a temporary placement. A ship with-
out a sailor is only a piece of dead metal. He's in it with the rest of the
machinery. All them rosy-cheeked college boys, for instance, is on that ship.
They're like a saddle on a horse. But the sailor is in it. Not them officers
or cadets. Why, I known officers who were so lazy they couldn't get out of
their bunk to pee. One guy, it was on a mail ship, he used to take a bottle to
bed with him and then throw it out of the porthole. Captains. I asked one of
them if he'd let me go around like a horse, you know. He asks why? I says If
you're gonna make me work like a horse I manna look like a horse too. Hey, can
you tell me where the smoke goes when a submarine submerges? You know where?
They get the captain, see, and back him up against the stack and all that smoke
-4
Here's a supposition, an example. Destroy all the ships, machines, every-
thing:, every industry. Then strip the laboring man to his skin. The captains
and bosses, too. Strip them too. Them have em all revert to their primeval
instincts. Then we'll see who survives. Why, man, we'd have a new order. One
thousand top dogs workin the ass of a hundred million guys, it ain't right, run-
nin the factories. Why, they buy our collective ideas, that's all. Shoot, a
salt water bath would give any of them blisters.
I say we need a revolution, no bloody revolution. An industrial revolution.
I say give the superior brain worker the advantage, he deserves it but give him a
motor car and private baths, but no surplus, for Chrissake, accumulations are stag-
nant, laying back that's not goin to do you or me no good ever.
If I had the dough, boy, I'd get me a freight train and put plus bottoms on
the rods. Then I'd jump my own soft cushion rods and hire my own cops to put me
in the cooler. My own cooler. Mhhoops. Shoot. All ya needa do is stick a
feather up my nose and I'm a friggin submarine. A goddam beautiful sea -jamming
submarine, for Chrissake. I sound as if I was gassed up on the Embarcadero, for
Chrissake. Nice girls out there, nice girls all over the world. But the biggest
disappointment was Turkey, their religion is to shave the hair off the organs,
a goddam bald skillet, that's all it is In Pyreus, Greece, also. You couldn't
give crabs to nobody. But Turkey's the rottenest place. You're comm n dawn the
street and there are the soldiers. You ask ems "Where's the house, boys? We
don't know. What do you mean, you don't know/ We don't know, nobody knows. Well,
what do you do for your pleasure? One of the boys, he says, the women is for of-
ficers only Down to your shirt you are, and what a shirt. Comes from Bong
Kong, I bummed it off a guy in Frisco, one washing and it shrank up to my elbows.
That's the sea for you.