I don’t know which of them won, but we all got back to the ship utterly, thoroughly, overwhelmingly soused. The first mate carried me up the Jacob’s ladder upside down with my legs locked around his neck and the rest of me over his shoulders. He took me to the purser’s cabin and dumped me in a chair in front of my typewriter desk. “If you are really William Tenn and can write stories that get published,” he said, waving a wobbly forefinger in the air, “prove it. Write one now.”
With the immense dignity of total drunkenness, I said, “I’ll do that. You just sit down here and just watch me do it.” He sat on my bunk and bleared at me.
I typed four pages and had to go to the toilet. When I came back he was sound asleep on my bunk, fully clothed, occupying all of it. He was an enormous Norwegian and there was no chance of moving him even a little. I staggered back to the chair, cradled my arms around the typewriter, and went out cold.
He was gone when I woke up the next morning.
But the captain was there, with a briefcase under his arm. “Get up, Purser,” he said. “We have to go to the custom house and officially enter the ship. I hear you tied a big one on last night. You must have a hell of hangover.”
I rolled over, sat up, stood up. I felt my head. “No,” I said, relieved and astonished. “Can’t say that I do. I feel fine.”
The captain stared at me. “You’re a wonder,” he said. “After what you drank! Are all Jews like that?”
What do you say to such a question? “Most,” I told him.
We got a taxi and went into Antwerp. It was a very hot day, and by the time we had finished the paperwork on entering the ship we were both perspiring heavily.
There was a cafe, L’americain, across the street from the custom house with a sign in its window advertising cold beer. “That’s what I want,” the captain said. “Could you go for one, too?”