Joe had been hanging around New York

Joe had been hanging around New York and Brooklyn for a while, borrowing money from Mrs. Olsen and getting tanked all the time. One day she went to work and threw him out. It was damned cold and he had to go to a mission a couple of nights. He was afraid of getting arrested for the draft and he was fed up with every god dam thing; it ended by his going out as ordinary seaman on the Appalachian, a big new freighter bound for Bordeaux and Genoa. It kinder went with the way he felt treated like a jailbird again and swobbing decks and chipping paint. In the fo’c’stile there was mostly country kids who’d never seen the sea and a few old bums who’d never seen the sea and a few old bums who weren’t good for anything. They got into a dirty blow four days out and shipped a small tidal wave that stove in two of the starboard lifeboats and the convoy got scattered and they found that the deck hadn’t been properly caulked and the water kept coming down into the fo’c’style. It turned out that Joe was the only man they had on board the mate could trust at the wheel, so they took him off scrubbing paint and in his four hour tricks he had plenty of time to think about how lousy everything was. In Bordeaux he’d have liked to look up Marceline, but none of the crew got to go ashore.
From the book ‘U.S.A.’ by John Dos Passos