The Sea is My Brother Read Free Page A

saunterers pass by, for all outward purposes at peace with the world. But he was broke and he knew it; by tomorrow he would be penniless. With a shade of a smile, which he accomplished by raising a corner of his mouth, he tried to recall how he had spent his eight hundred dollars.
    The night before, he knew, had cost him his last hundred and fifty dollars. Drunk for two consecutive weeks, he had finally achieved sobriety in a cheap hotel in Harlem; from there, he recalled, he had taken a cab to a small restaurant on Lenox Avenue where they served
nothing but spare ribs. It was there he’d met that cute little colored girl who belonged to the Young Communists League. He remembered they’d taken a taxi down to Greenwich Village where she wanted to see a certain movie. . . . wasn’t it Citizen Kane ? And then, in a bar on MacDougall Street, he lost track of her when he met up with six sailors who were broke; they were from a destroyer in dry-dock. From then on, he could remember riding in a taxi with them and singing all kinds of songs and getting off at Kelly’s Stables on 52nd Street and going in to hear Roy Eldridge and Billie Holliday. One of the sailors, a husky dark-haired pharmacist’s mate, talked all the time about Roy Eldridge’s trumpet and why he was ten years ahead of any other jazz musician except perhaps two others who jammed Mondays at Minton’s in Harlem, Lester somebody and Ben Webster; and how Roy Eldridge was really a phenomenal thinker with infinite musical ideas. Then they had all rode to the Stork Club, where another sailor had always wanted to go, but they were all too plastered to be admitted in, so they went to a dime-a-dance joint where he had bought up a roll of tickets for the gang. From there they had gone to a place in the East Side where the Madame sold them three quarts of Scotch, but when they were finished, the Madame refused to let
them all sleep there and kicked them out. They were sick of the place and the girls anyway, so they rode uptown and west to a Broadway hotel where he paid for a double suite of rooms and they finished the Scotch and flopped off in chairs, on the floor, and on the beds. And then, late the next afternoon he woke up and found three of the sailors sprawled about in a litter of empty bottles, sailor caps, glasses, shoes, and clothing. The other three had wandered off somewhere, perhaps in search of a bromo seltzer or tomato juice.
    Then he had dressed up slowly, after taking a leisurely shower, and strolled off, leaving the key at the desk and making a request to the hotelkeeper not to disturb his slumbering buddies.
    So here he sat, broke except for fifty cents. Last night had cost $150 or so, what with taxis, drinks around, hotel bills, women, cover charges, and everything else; his good time was over for this time. He smiled as he remembered how funny it was when he woke up a few hours previous, on the floor between a sailor and an empty quart bottle, and with one of his moccasins on his left foot and the other on the bathroom floor.
    Casting away his cigar butt, he rose and moved on across the Drive. Back on Broadway he walked slowly
uptown taking in the small shoe stores, radio repair shops, drugstores, newsstands, and dimly lit bookstores with a calm and curious eye.
    In front of a fruit stand he stopped in his tracks; at his feet, a small cat mewed up at him in a plaintive little cry, its pink bud of a mouth opened in a heart shape. The young man stooped down and picked up the cat. It was a cute little kitten with grey-striped fur and a remarkably bushy tail for its age.
    â€œHello, Tiger,” he greeted, cupping the little face in his hand. “Where do you live, huh?”
    The kitten mewed a reply, its fragile little frame purring in his hand like a delicate instrument. He caressed the tiny head with his forefinger. It was a minute shell of a skull, one that could be crushed between thumb and forefinger. He placed the tip of his