Man Overboard
Mayer, Milton
MAN OVERBOARD MILTON MAYER Le Havre If we hadn't already decided, Ms. Baby Mayer and I, to split the scene for a while, the notice on the door of the Montecito, California, YMCA would...
...And Milton Mayer, The Progressive's Roving Editor and professor of the humanities at Windham College in Vermont, will be visiting professor of American Studies at the University of Paris this spring...
...At the end of the month you're ready to exchange that, too...
...And they all played chess...
...Another day, another dollar...
...No doctor aboard...
...It's the old man's tree-house...
...No radio, no television, no newspaper, no news, no Nixon...
...The sharks are watching the gauge...
...Baby Mayer and I, to split the scene for a while, the notice on the door of the Montecito, California, YMCA would have decided US: INTERMEDIATE BELLY DANCING WEDNESDAYS 11 A. M. You keep saying that it can't get any nuttier, and lo...
...Maybe misses a stitch here and there...
...We were in the 25th...
...Charley Ford (or is his name George...
...Better, once in a while, to exchange these sorrows for those on a round trip ticket...
...Over the side, everybody...
...Nobody in the engine room...
...The carpenter sews up the burial bag by hand...
...And down it goes, because nobody, and not just the Americans, believes that the American oil shortage is real...
...It takes $615 apiece to travel from beautiful downtown Oakland to beautiful downtown Le Havre through the Panama Canal aboard a somewhat seedy freighter called the Rochambeau...
...MAN OVERBOARD MILTON MAYER Le Havre If we hadn't already decided, Ms...
...Better to take a flyer once in a while...
...It rolls...
...A freighter gets knocked to pieces pretty fast, and the company keeps it going continuously, so it's never repaired or refitted...
...Hamlet's decision to hang in there rather than (via the bare bodkin) exchange the sorrows he knew for those he knew not, was not an imaginative decision...
...Tilt...
...They have eyes on the sides of their head...
...there's nobody to tell you about it...
...The Captain gave us French lessons and let us hang around the bridge and listen to the joke about navigating with the nose and making the island of Flores, 'way out there beyond the Azores...
...The Captain is reassuring...
...Heavy going...
...last I heard I'll be on strike, in support of the Communists, the party of Law and Order, against the Gauchistes, or Leftists, who cherish the hallucination (as I do, and as Hamlet didn't) that any old change is a change for the better...
...This baby," says a member of the crew, all of them Law and Order Communists, "rolls in drydock...
...M. Nicolas, the Second Mate, gave me some oil of cloves out of his little pharmacy...
...The officers were wonderful...
...I got a toothache the last day out...
...His most recent book t is "If Men Were Angels," published by Atheneum in 1972, who knows—maybe the French franc will go down in spite of the sale of all those nice Mirage fighter-bombers to the Arabs...
...One evening M. Bureau and I were sitting down to chess—hold on there, she's rolling—and there were two toots of the whistle and M. Bureau was off like a streak...
...The Rochambeau, with bulk cargo below, is up to the masthead with containers on deck...
...M. Nicolas played the violin, M. Mottieaux the guitar, and M. Mielet the banjo...
...The Rochambeau is (or was, in its prime) sleek like a greyhound...
...Roll or no roll, the Compagnie Generate Transatlantique wanted speed...
...A container ship—no bulk cargo—of 100,000 tons takes a crew of six and no passengers...
...The last best hope, the two-way bare bodkin...
...It turned out to be a steam leak, and the heat of the steam activated the computer...
...The carpenter threaded his needle...
...The $615 buys a month's midwinter passage plus room and French board...
...Nobody knows just what or just when...
...Heavy seas...
...No zipper...
...In Europe it is...
...None of these Compagnies Generates wants passengers any more at any price...
...Short shrift...
...It isn't going to be any better in Europe, but you won't know it...
...Helas...
...And wife...
...They are great engineers but still greater artists...
...20°-25° roll...
...More alive than dead—but just...
...They wanted us in the 25th...
...Another man, another dollar...
...The French they are a funny race...
...If it takes more of the ready than a red-blooded American happens to have ready, the answer is a job...
...Where Abelard lectures, there lectures Mayer...
...He assures you that the containers contain pig iron and the hold cargo is ping-pong balls...
...turns up, in the space of sixty days, as the leading Republican ton-tender for the 1976 Presidential nomination...
...The other three passengers are Americans going nowhere, with nothing to take there...
...And it rolls, and everything with it...
...What's a ship, grandpa...
...A passenger-carrying cargo ship of 6,000-8,000 tons like the Rochambeau takes a crew of thirty...
...M. Loiseau explained the fire-alarm system in the pilot-house, complete with computer...
...Fire in the hold...
...Homme a la mer—man overboard...
...It's something like an airplane, sonny, but it goes on the water...
...35° and the cargo shifts...
...Or went...
...Horace is said to have said it, but for all I know it may have been Juvenal, who, with Robert Lowell's help, said, "Devoured by peace, we seek devouring war...
...If they shift, you've had it...
...A change of worlds is not a bad thing, in spite of the classic assertion that no ship ever sails leaving sorrow behind...
...A month of no Nixon...
...For a while at least, until the local Securite . fingers you, No...
...Instead of having been built like a scow, or beer-truck, it is tapered like a liner—but without the stabilizers...
...And it rolls...
...Don't get gangrene, or anything like it, two weeks out, or you've had it even if the cargo doesn't shift...
...It takes money, but what's money to a red-blooded American in the age of the hundred-dollar bill...
...Over the side of the American Titanic and roll away from it all in the Rochambeau...
...351-07-5541 on the U. S. Public Enemies List is nowhere and nobody...
...The job is to pretend to teach something—nobody knows just what—at the University of Paris...
Vol. 38 • March 1974 • No. 3
