The Black Gondolier and Other Stories

The Black Gondolier

Daloway lived alone in a broken-down trailer beside an oil well on the bank of a canal in Venice near the café La Gondola Negra on the Grand Canal not five blocks from St. Mark's Plaza.

I mean, he lived there until after the fashion of intellectual lone wolves he got the wander-urge and took himself off, abruptly and irresponsibly, to parts unknown. That is the theory of the police, who refuse to take seriously my story of Daloway's strange dreads and my hints at the weird world-spanning power which was menacing him. The police even make light of the very material clues which I pointed out to them.

Or else Daloway was taken off, grimly and against his will, to parts utterly unknown and blackly horrible. That is my own theory, especially on lonely nights when I remember the dreams he told me of the Black Gondolier.

Of course the canal is a rather small one, showing much of its rough gravel bottom strewn with rusted cans and blackened paper, except when it is briefly filled by one of our big winter rains. But gondolas did travel it in the illusion-packed old days and it is still spanned by a little sharply humped concrete bridge wide enough for only one car. I used to cross that bridge coming to visit Daloway and I remember how I'd slow down and tap my horn to warn a possible car coming the other way, and the momentary roller-coaster illusion I'd get as my car heaved to the top and poised there and then hurtled down the opposite dusty slope for all of a breathless second. From the top of the little bridge I'd get my first glimpse of the crowded bungalows and Daloway's weed-footed trailer and close behind it the black hunch-shouldered oil well which figured so strangely in his dreads. "Their closest listening post," he sometimes called it during the final week, when he felt positively besieged.

And of course the Grand Canal is pretty dismal these days, with its several gracefully arching Bridges of Sighs raddled with holes showing their cement-shell construction and blocked off at either end by heavy wire barricades to keep off small boys, and with both its banks lined with oil wells, some still with their towering derricks and some -- mostly those next to beach side houses -- with their derricks dismantled , but all of them wearily pumping twenty-four hours a day with a soft slow syncopated thumping that the residents don't hear for its monotony, interminably sucking up the black petroleum that underlies Venice, lazily ducking and lifting their angularly oval metal heads like so many iron dinosaurs or donkeys forever drinking -- donkeys moving in the somnambulistic rhythm of Ferde Grofe's Grand-Canyon donkey when it does its sleepy hee . . . haw. Daloway had a very weird theory about that -- about the crude oil, I mean -- a theory which became the core of his dreads and which for all its utter black wildness may still best explain his disappearance.

And La Gondola Negra is only a beatnik coffee house, successor to the fabulous Gashouse, though it did boast a rather interesting dirty drunken guitarist, whose face always had blacker smears on it than those of his stubbly beard and who wore a sweatshirt that looked like the working garment of a coal miner and whom Daloway and I would hear trailing off (I won't venture to say home) in the small hours of the morning, picking out on his twangy instrument his dinky "Texas Oilman Suite", which he'd composed very much in imitation of Ferde Grofe's one about the Grand Canyon, or raucously wailing his eerie beatnik ballad of the Black Gondola. He got very much on Daloway's nerves, especially towards the end, though I was rather amused by him and at the same time saw no harm in his caterwauling, except to would-be sleepers. Well, he's gone now, like Daloway, though not by the same route . . . I think. At least Daloway never suggested that the guitarist was one of their agents. No, as it turned out, their agent was a rather more formidable figure.

And they don't call the plaza St. Mark's, but it was obviously laid out to approximate that Adriatic-lapped area when it was created a half century ago. The porticos still shade the sidewalks in front of the two blocks of bars and grimy shops and there are still authentic Venetian pillars, now painted salmon pink and turquoise blue -- you may have seen them in a horror movie called Delirium where a beautiful crazy slim Mexican girl is chased round and round the deserted porticos by a car flashing its headlights between the pillars. And of course the Venice isn't Venice, Italy, but Venice, USA -- Venice, California -- now just another district and postal address in the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles, but once a proud little beach side city embodying the laughably charming if grotesque dream of creating Venice, Italy, scaled down but complete with canals and arched bridges and porticos, on the shores of the Pacific.

Yet for all the childish innocence of its bizarre glamor, Venice developed an atmosphere, or became the outpost of a sinister deep-rooted power, that did in Daloway. It is a place of dreams, not only the tinseled ones, but also the darker sort such as tormented and terrified my friend at the end.

For a while toward the beginning of this century the movie folk and real estate agents and retired farmers and the sailors from San Pedro went to spanking-new Venice to ride the gondolas -- they had authentic ones poled by Italian types possibly hired from Central Casting -- and eat exotic spaghetti and gambol romantically a bit with their wide-hatted long-skirted lady friends who also wore daring bathing suits with bare arms and rather short skirts and long black stockings -- and gamble too with piled big yellow-backed green bills -- and, with their caps turned front to rear, roar their wooden-spoked or wire-wheeled open touring cars along the Speedway, which is now a cramped one-way street that changes direction every block.

But then Redondo and Laguna and Malibu called away the film folk and the other people with fat pocketbooks, but as if to compensate for that they struck oil in Venice and built wells almost everywhere, yet despite this influx of money the gambling never regained its éclat, it became just bingo for housewives, and the Los Angeles police fought that homely extramural vice for a weary decade, until sprawling LA reached out a pseudopod one day and swallowed Venice up. Then the bingo stopped and Venice became very crowded indeed with a beach home or a beach apartment or a beach shack on every square yard that wasn't sidewalk or street -- or oil well! -- and with establishments as disparate as Bible Tabernacle and Colonic Irrigation Clinic and Mother Goldberg's Home for the Aged. It would have been going too far to have called Venice a beach slum, but it was trending in that direction.

And then, much later, the beats came, the gutter geniuses, the holy barbarians, migrating south in driblets from Big Sur and from North Beach in Frisco and from Disillusion, USA, everywhere, bringing their ratty art galleries and meager avant garde bookstalls and their black-trousered insolent women and their Zen and their guitars, including the one on which was strummed the Ballad of the Black Gondola.

And with the beats, but emphatically not of them, came the solitary oddballs and lone-wolf intellectuals like Daloway.

I met Daloway at a check-out desk of the excellent Los Angeles downtown public library, where our two stacks of books demonstrated so many shared interests -- world history, geology, abnormal psychology, and psychic phenomena were some of them -- that we paused outside to remark on it. This led to a conversation, in which I got some first intimations of his astonishing mentality, and eventually to my driving him home to save him a circuitous bus-trip, or, more likely, as I learned later, a weary hitch-hike.

Our conversation continued excitingly throughout most of the long drive, though even in that first exploratory confabulation Daloway made so many guarded references to a malefic power menacing us all and perhaps him in particular, that I wondered if he mightn't have a bee in this bonnet about World Communism or the Syndicate or the John Birch Society. But despite this possible paranoid obsession, he was clearly a most worthy partner for intellectual disputation and discourse.

Toward the end of the drive Daloway suddenly got nervous and didn't want me to take him the last few blocks. However, I overcame his reluctance. I remarked on the oil well next to his trailer -- not to have done so would have implied I thought he was embarrassed by it -- and he retorted sardonically, "My mechanical watchdog! Innocent-looking ugly beast, isn't it? But you've got to keep in mind that much more of it or of its domain is below the surface, like an iceberg. Which reminds me that I once ran across a seemingly well-authenticated report of a black iceberg --"

Thereafter I visited Daloway regularly in his trailer, often late at night, and we made our library trips together and even occasional brief expeditions to sleazily stimulating spots like La Gondola Negra. At first I thought he had merely been ashamed of his battered aluminum-walled home, though it was neat enough inside, almost austere, but then I discovered that he hated to reveal to anyone where he lived, in part because he hesitated to expose anyone else to the great if shadowy danger he believed overhung him.

Daloway was a spare man yet muscular, with the watchful analytic gaze of an intellectual, but the hands of a mechanic. Like too many men of our times, he was amazingly learned and knowledgeable, yet unable to apply his abilities to his own advancement -- for lack of connections and college degrees and because of nervous instabilities and emotional blockages. He had more facts at his fingertips than a Ph.D. candidate, but he used them to buttress off-trail theories and he dressed with the austere cleanly neatness and simplicity of a factory hand or a man newly released from prison.

He'd work for a while in a machine shop or garage and then live very thriftily on his savings while he fed his mind and pondered all the problems of the universe, or sometimes -- this was before our meeting and the period of his dreads -- organized maverick mental-therapy or para-psychology groups.

This unworldly and monetarily unprofitable pattern of existence at least made Daloway an exciting thinker. For him the world was a great conundrum or a series of puzzle boxes and he a disinterested yet childishly sensitive and enthusiastic observer trying to unriddle them. A scientist, or natural philosopher, rather, without the blinkered conformity of thought which sometimes characterizes men with professional or academic standing to lose, but rather with a fiercely romantic yet clear-headed and at times even cynical drive toward knowledge. Atoms, molecules, the stars, the unconscious mind, bizarre drugs and their effects, (he'd tried out LSD and mescaline), the play of consciousness, the insidious interweaving of reality and dream (as climatically in his dreams of the Black Gondola), the bafflingly twisted and folded strata of Earth's crust and man's cerebrum and all history, the subtle mysterious swings of world events and literature and sub-literature and politics -- he was interested in all of them, and forever searching for some unifying purposeful power behind them, and sensitive to them to a preternatural degree.

Well, in the end he did discover the power, or at least convinced himself he did, and convinced me too for a time -- and still does convince me, on lonely nights -- but he got little enough satisfaction from his knowledge, that I know of, and it proved to be as deadly a discovery, to the discoverer, as finding out who is really back of Organized Crime or the Dope Traffic or American Fascism. Gunmen and poisoners and scientifically-coached bombers would be loosed against anyone making any of the last three discoveries; the agent who did away with Daloway was murkier-minded and deadlier even than the man who shot Kennedy.

But I mentioned sensitivity. In many ways, it was the hallmark of Daloway. He'd start at sounds I couldn't hear, or that were blanked out for me by the ceaseless ponderous low throb of the oil wells, especially the one a few yards beyond the thin wall of this trailer. He'd narrow his eyes at changes in illumination that didn't register on my retinas, or dart them at little movements I usually missed. He'd twitch his nostrils for special taints that to me were blanketed, at least in Venice, by the stench of the petroleum and the salt-fishy reek of the ocean. And he'd read meanings in newspaper articles and in paragraphs of books that I would never have seen except for his pointing them out, and I am not exactly unsubtle.

His sensitivity was almost invariably tinged with apprehension. For example, my arrivals seemed always to startle and briefly upset him, no matter how quiet or deliberately noisy I made them, and regardless of how much he seemed afterwards to enjoy my company -- or at the very least the audience-of-one with which I provided him. Indeed this symptom -- this jitteriness or jumpiness -- was so strong in him that, taken together with his solitary fugitive mode of life and his unwillingness to have his dwelling known, it led me to speculate early in our relationship whether he might not be in flight from the law, or the criminal underworld, or some fearsomely ruthless political or sub-political organization, or from some less tangible mafia.

Well, considering the nature of the power Daloway really feared, its utter black inhumanity, its near-omnipresence and almost timeless antiquity, his great apprehension was most understandable -- provided of course that you accepted his ideas, or at least were willing to consider them.

It was a long time before he would unequivocally identify the power to me -- give me a specific name to his They. Perhaps he dreaded my disbelief, my skeptical laughter, even feared I would cut him off from me as a hopeless crank. Perhaps -- and this I credit -- he honestly believed that he would subject me to a very real danger by telling me, the same danger he was darkly shadowed by, or at least put me into its fringes -- and only took the risk of doing so when the urge to share his suspicions, or rather convictions, with someone capable of comprehending them, became an overpowering compulsion.

He made several false starts and retreats. Once he began, "When you consider the source of the chemical fuels which alone make modern civilization possible, and modern warfare too, and the hope -- or horror -- of reaching other planets --" and then broke off.

Another time he launched off with, "If there is one single substance that has in it all of life and the potentiality for life, all past life by reason of its sources and all future life by the innumerable infinitely subtle compounds it provides --" and then shut tight his lips and opened them only to change the subject.

Another of these abortive revelations began with, "I firmly believe that there is no validity whatever in the distinction between the organic and the inorganic -- I think it's every bit as false as that between the artificial and the natural. It's my absolute conviction that consciousness goes down to the level of the electrons -- yes, and below that to the strata of the yet-undiscovered sub-particles. The substance which before all others convinces me that this is so, is -- "

And once when I asked him without warning, "Daloway, what is it you're afraid of, anyhow?" he replied, "Why, the oil, of course," and then immediately insisted he was thinking of the possible role of hydrocarbons and coal tars -- and their combustion products -- in producing cancer.

I had better state as simply as possible Daloway's ideas about the power, as he finally revealed them to me.

Daloway's theory, based on his wide readings in world history, geology, and the occult, was that crude oil -- petroleum -- was more than figuratively the life-blood of industry and the modern world and modern lightning-war, that it truly had a dim life and will of its own, an inorganic consciousness or sub-consciousness, that we were all its puppets or creatures, and that its chemical mind had guided and even enforced the development of modern technological civilization. Created from the lush vegetation and animal fats of the Carboniferous and adjoining periods, holding in itself the black essence of all life that had ever been, constituting in fact a great deep-digged black graveyard of the ultimate eldritch past with blackest ghosts, oil had waited for hundreds of millions of years, dreaming its black dreams, sluggishly pulsing beneath Earth's stony skin, quivering in lightless pools roofed with marsh gas and in top-filled rocky tanks and coursing through myriad channels and through spongy rocky bone, until a being evolved on the surface with whom it could realize and expend itself. When man had appeared and had attained the requisite sensitivity, and technical sophistication, then oil-like some black collective unconscious -- had begun sending him its telepathic messages.

"Daloway, this is beyond belief!" I burst out here the first time he revealed to me his theory in toto. "Telepathy by itself is dubious enough, but telepathic communication between a lifeless substance and man --"

"Do you know that many companies hunting oil spend more money for dowsers than they do for geologists?" he shot back at me instantly. "For dowsers and for those psionic-electronic gadgets they call doodlebugs. The people whose money's at stake and who know the oil lands in a practical way believe in dowsing, even if most scientists don't. And what is dowsing but a man moving about on the surface until he gets a telepathic signal from . . . something below?"

In brief, Daloway's theory was that man hadn't discovered oil, but that oil had found man. Venice hadn't struck oil; oil had thrust up its vicious feelers like some vast blind monster, and finally made contact with Venice.

Everyone admits that oil is the lifeblood of modern technological culture -- its automobiles and trucks and airplanes, its battleships and military tanks, its ballistic missiles and reekingly fueled space vehicles. In a sense Daloway only carried the argument one step further, positing behind the blood a heart -- and behind the heart, a brain.

Surely in a great age-old oil pool with all its complex hydrocarbons -- the paraffin series, the asphalt series, and many others -- and with its subtle gradients of heat, viscosity, and electric charge, and with all its multiform microscopic vibrations echoing and re-echoing endlessly from its lightless walls, there can be the chemical and physical equivalent of nerves and brain-cells; and if of brain-cells, then of thought. Some computers use pools of mercury for their memory units. The human brain is fantastically isolated, guarded by bony walls and by what they call the blood-brain barrier; how much more so subterranean oil, within its thick stony skull and earthen flesh.

Or consider it from another viewpoint. According to scientific materialism and anthropologic determinism, man's will is an illusion, his consciousness but an epiphenomenon -- a useless mirroring of the atomic swirlings and molecular churnings that constitute ultimate reality. In any such world-picture, oil is a far more appropriate primal power than man.

Daloway even discovered the chief purpose animating oil's mentality, or thought he did. Once when we were discussing spaceflight, he said suddenly, "I've got it! Oil wants to get to other planets so that it can make contact with the oil there, converse with extraterrestrial pools -- fatten on their millennial strength, absorb their wisdom . . . "

Of course a theory like that is something to laugh at or tell a psychiatrist. And of course Daloway may have been crazy or seeking a dark sort of laughter himself. I mean it is quite possible that Daloway was deceiving and mystifying me for his own amusement, that he elaborated his whole theory and repeatedly simulated his dreads simply as part of a long-drawn-out practical joke, that he noted a vein of credulity in me and found cruel delight in fooling me to the top of my bent, and that -- as the police insist -- even the starkly material evidence for the horror of his disappearance which I pointed out to them was only a final crude hoax on his part, a farewell jest.

Yet I knew the man for months, knew his dreads, saw him start and shiver and shake, heard him rehearse his arguments with fierce sincerity, witnessed the birth-quivers of many of his ideas -- and I do not think so.

Oh, there were many times when I doubted Daloway, doubted his every word, but in the end his grotesque theory about the oil did not elicit from me the skepticism it might have from another hearing it elsewhere - - perhaps, it occurs to me now, because it was advanced in a metropolis that is such a strange confirmation of it.

To the average tourist or the reader of travel brochures, Los Angeles is a gleaming city or vast glamorous suburb of movie studios and orange groves and ornate stucco homes and green-tiled long swimming pools and beaches and now great curving freeways and vast white civic centers and sleekly modern plants -- aviation, missile, computer, research and development. What is overlooked here is that the City of the Angels, especially in its southern reaches stretching toward Long Beach, is almost half oil-field. These odorous grim industrial barrens interweave elaborately with airfields and showy tract housing developments -- with an effect of savage irony. There is hardly a point from which one cannot see in the middle or farther distance, looming through the faintly bluish haze of the acrid smog, a hill densely studded with tall oil derricks. Long Beach herself is dominated by Signal Hill with oil towers thick as an army's spears and cruel as the murders which have been committed on its lonely slopes.

The first time I ever saw one of those hills -- that near Culver City -- I instantly thought of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds and of his brain-heavy Martians on their lofty metal tripods wherewith they strode ruthlessly about the British countryside. It seemed to me that I was seeing a congeries of such tower-high beings and that the next moment they might begin to stride lurchingly toward me, with something of the feeling, modernistically distorted, of Macbeth's Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane.

And here and there along with the oil derricks, like their allies or reinforcements, one sees the gleaming distillation towers and the monstrous angular-shouldered cracking plants with muscles of knotted pipe, and the fields of dull silver oil tanks, livid in the smog, and the vaster gas tanks and the marching files of high-tension-wire towers, which look at a distance like oil derricks.

And as for Venice herself, with the oil's omnipresent reek, faint or heavy, and with her oil wells cheek-by-jowl with houses and shacks and eternally throbbing, as if pulsing the beat of a vast subterranean chemic heart -- well, it was only too easy to believe something like Daloway's theory there. It was from the beach by Venice, in 1926, that Aimee Semple McPherson was mysteriously vanished, perhaps teleported, to the sinisterly-named Mexican town of Black Water -- Agua Prieta. The coming of the illusioneers to Venice, and of the beatniks -- and of the black oil, aceite prieto -- all seemed alike mindless mechanic movements, or compulsive unconscious movements, whether of molecules or people, and in either case a buttressing of Daloway's wild theory -- and at the very least an ironic picture of modern man's industrial predicament.

At all events the black savage sardonicism of that picture, along with Daloway's extreme sensitivity, made it easy to understand why his nerves were rasped acutely by the Ballad of the Black Gondola, as the black-smeared lurching beatnik guitarist came wailing it past the thin-walled trailer in the small hours of the night. I heard it only two or three times and the fellow's voice was thick to unintelligibility, though abominably raucous, so it was mostly from Daloway that I got the words of the few scattered lines I remember. They were a half-plagiarized melange of ill-fitted cadences, but with a certain garishly eerie power:

Oh, the Black Gondola's gonna take you for a ride
With a cargo of atom bombs and Atlases and nightmares...
The Black Gondola's gonna stop at your door
With a bow-wave of asphalt and a gravel spray...
The Black Gondola'll...get...you...yet!

Even of those five lines, the second comes -- with a few changes of word -- from a short poem by Yeats, the fifth derives from Vachel Lindsay's The Congo, while the Black Gondola itself sounds suspiciously like the nihilism -- symbolizing Black Freighter in Brecht's and Weill's The Three-Penny Opera. Nevertheless, this crude artificial ballad, in which the Black Gondola seems to stand for our modern industrial civilization -- and so, very easily, for petroleum too -- may well have shaped or at least touched off Daloway's dreams, though his Black Gondola was of a rather different sort.

But before I describe Daloway's dreams, I had better round out his picture of the power which he believed dominated the modern world and, because he was coming to know too much about it, menaced his own existence.

According to Daloway, oil had intelligence, it had purpose . . . and it also had its agents. These beings, Daloway speculated, might be parts of itself, able to move independently man-shaped and man-sized for purposes of camouflage, composed of a sort of infernal black ectoplasm or something more material than that -- a darkly oleaginous humanoid spawn. Or they might be, at least to begin with, living men who had become oil's worshipers and slaves, who had taken the Black Baptism or the Sable Consecration -- as he put it with a strange facetiousness.

"The Black Man in the Witch-cult!" he once said to me abruptly. "I think he was a forerunner -- spying out the ground, as it were. We have to remember too that oil was first discovered, so far as the modern world is concerned, in Pennsylvania, the hexing state, though in another corner than the Dutch territory -- at Titusville, in fact, in 1859, just on the eve of a great and tragic war that made fullest use of new industrial technologies. It's important to keep in mind, incidentally, that the Black Man wasn't a Negro, which would have made him brown, but simply a man of Caucasian features with a dead-black complexion. Though there are dark brown petroleums, for that matter, and greenish ones. Of course many people used to equate the Black Man with the Devil, but Margaret Murray pretty well refuted that in her God of the Witches and elsewhere.

"Which is not to say that the Negro's not mixed up in it," Daloway continued on that occasion, his thoughts darting and twisting and back-tracking as rapidly as they always did. "I think that the racial question and -- as with space flight -- the fact that it's come to the front today, is of crucial significance. Oil's using the black as another sort of camouflage."

"What about atomic energy? You haven't brought that in yet," I demanded a little crossly, or more likely nervously.

Daloway gave me a strange penetrating look. "Nuclear energy is, I believe, an entirely separate subterranean mentality," he informed me. "Helium instead of marsh gas. Pitchblende instead of pitch. It's more introspective than oil, but it may soon become more active. Perhaps the conflict of these two vampiristic mentalities will be man's salvation! -- though more likely, I'm afraid, only a further insurance of his immediate destruction."

Oil's dark agents not only spied, according to Daloway, but also dispersed clues leading to the discovery of new oil fields and new uses for oil, and on occasion removed interfering and overly perceptive human beings.

"There was Rudolf Diesel for one, inventor of the all-important engine," Daloway asserted. "What snatched him off that little North Sea steamer back in 1913? -- just before the first war to prove the supremacy of petro-powered tanks and armored cars and zeppelins and planes. No one has ever begun to explain that mystery. People didn't realize so well then that oil is as much a thing of the salt water -- especially the shallows above the continental shelves -- as it is of the shores. I say that Diesel knew too much -- and was snatched because he did! The same may have been true of Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared at almost the same time down in the oil lands between Mexico and Texas, though I don't insist on that. The history of the oil industry is studded with what some call legends, but I believe are mostly true accounts, of men who invented new fuels, or made other key discoveries, and then dropped out of existence without another word spoken. And the oil millionaires aren't exactly famous for humanitarianism and civilized cosmopolitan outlook. And every oil field has its tales of savagery and its black ghosts -- the fields of Southern California as much as the rest."

Copyright © 2000 by The Estate of Fritz Leiber