Cannery Row: Introduction - Chapter 8

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.

Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.

The canneries rumble and rattle and squeak until the last fish is cleaned and cut and cooked and canned and then the whistles scream again and the dripping, smelly, tired...men and women, straggle out and droop their ways up the hill into the town and Cannery Row becomes itself again—quiet and magical.

When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch.

The grocery opened at dawn and did not close until the last wandering vagrant dime had been spent or retired for the night.

Not that Lee Chong was avaricious. He wasn’t, but if one wanted to spend money, he was available.

Lee Chong’s station in the grocery was behind the cigar counter. The cash register was then on his left and the abacus on his right.

On an evening when he stood in his place on a pad of newspaper to keep his feet warm, he contemplated with humor and sadness a business deal that had been consummated that afternoon and reconsummated later that same afternoon.

It was deeply a part of Lee’s kindness and understanding that man’s right to kill himself is inviolable, but sometimes a friend can make it unnecessary.

Lee had already underwritten the funeral and sent a wash basket of groceries to the stricken families.

Lee had already underwritten the funeral and sent a wash basket of groceries to the stricken families.

Mack was the elder, leader, mentor, and to a small extent the exploiter of a little group of men who had in common no families, no money, and no ambitions beyond food, drink, and contentment.

It had been sweetly done, almost in a spirit of philanthropy.

And Lee carefully packed the bones, femurs, and tibias really straight, skull in the middle, with pelvis and clavicle surrounding it and ribs curving on either side.

Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest.

And by the same token she is hated by the twisted and lascivious sisterhood of married spinsters whose husbands respect the home but don’t like it very much.

There must be no drunks, no fighting, no vulgarity, or they close Dora up.

Through the windows he could see Mack and the boys sitting on the pipes in the vacant lot, dangling their feet in the mallow weeds and taking the sun while they discoursed slowly and philosophically of matters of interest but of no importance.

After a while William went disconsolately back to the Bear Flag and through the window he saw the conversation spring up again and it saddened him.

He had a dark and ugly face and a mouth twisted with brooding.

It sells the lovely animals of the sea, the sponges, tunicates, anemones, the stars and buttlestars, and sun stars, the bivalves, barnacles, the worms and shells, the fabulous and multiform little brothers, the living moving flowers of the sea, nudibranchs and tectibranchs, the spiked and nobbed and needly urchins, the crabs and demi-crabs, the little dragons, the snapping shrimps, and ghost shrimps so transparent that they hardly throw a shadow.

The basement is the storeroom with shelves, shelves clear to the ceiling loaded with jars of preserved animals. And in the basement is a sink and instruments for embalming and for injecting.

And through the back door comes the smell of kelp and barnacles when the tide is out and the smell of salt and spray when the tide is in.

Everyone who knew him was indebted to him. And everyone who thought of him thought next, “I really must do something nice for Doc.”

And black eels poke their heads out of crevices and wait for prey.

The anemones expand like soft and brilliant flowers, inviting any tired and perplexed animal to lie for a moment in their arms, and when some small crab or little tide-pool Johnnie accepts the green and purple invitation, the petals whip in, the stinging cells shoot tiny narcotic needles into the prey and it grows weak and perhaps sleepy while the searing caustic digestive acids melt its body down.

Hazel got his name in as haphazard a way as his life was ever afterward. His worried mother had had seven children in eight years. Hazel was the eighth, and his mother became confused about his sex when he was born.

“The remarkable thing,” said Doc, “isn’t that they put their tails up in the air—the really incredibly remarkable thing is that we find it remarkable. We can only use ourselves as yardsticks. If we did something as inexplicable and strange we’d probably be praying—so maybe they’re praying.”

A training army which has not been equipped with guns and artillery and tanks uses artificial guns and masquerading trucks to simulate its destructive panoply—and its toughening soldiers get used to field guns by handling logs on wheels.

Mack, with a piece of chalk, drew five oblongs on the floor, each seven feet long and four feet wide, and in each square he wrote a name. These were the simulated beds.

Each man had property rights inviolable in his space. He could legally fight a man who encroached on his square.

However, an unprecedented rainfall which went on for over a month changed all that.

The next day Mack puffed up the hill carrying a rusty set of springs he had found on a scrap-iron dump. The apathy was broken then. The boys outdid one another in beautifying the Palace Flophouse until after a few months it was, if anything, overfurnished.

They were some time acquiring a stove and when they did find what they wanted, a silver-scrolled monster with floriated warming ovens and a front like a nickel-plated tulip garden, they had trouble getting it.

It was too big to steal and its owner refused to part with it to the sick widow with eight children whom Mack invented and patronized in the same moment.

The mixture of rye, beer, bourbon, scotch, wine, rum and gin was fairly constant, but now and then some effete customer would order a stinger or an anisette or a curaçao and these little touches gave a distinct character to the punch.

Eddie sipped speculatively from his glass and smacked his lips.

“Yes,” he said somberly, “it’s little things make the difference.”

Then it was that Mr. Malloy took to renting the larger pipes as sleeping quarters for single men at a very nominal fee.

“Only $1.98,” Mrs. Malloy quavered, “and you begrutch me $1.98,” and she sniffed and her chest heaved.