Gonorrhea

Gonorrhea is presented through its consequences for Joe Williams’s work, money, and daily life rather than as an abstract medical condition. After leaving a barge job in East New York with forty-five dollars, Joe is diagnosed by a local physician and told to return for treatment each afternoon. The illness interrupts his attempt to find work and delays his return to sea; treatment costs and the possibility of another infection test make his recovery a financial decision as well as a medical one. He eventually ships aboard a tanker before completing the course the physician says is necessary, and the narrative does not say whether the condition is cured.

Diagnosis and immediate circumstances

After a falling-out with the barge’s owner, Old Man Gaskin, Joe leaves the job and looks for lodging in Red Hook. He spends a couple of days reading job advertisements and searching around Brooklyn before becoming ill and visiting a doctor recommended by an older man at his boarding house. The doctor diagnoses gonorrhea and instructs him to come in every afternoon for treatment. He offers to cure Joe for fifty dollars, with half due in advance, and advises a blood test to determine whether Joe also has syphilis, which would cost fifteen dollars. The possibility of that second condition remains unresolved: Joe pays twenty-five dollars toward the treatment but says he will think about the test.

The diagnosis arrives when Joe has little financial security. His forty-five dollars must cover lodging, food, and the search for another job, as well as the doctor’s fee. The cost of treatment therefore competes directly with the practical need to earn a living. The narrative connects that pressure to Joe’s next choices, but gives no further medical findings and does not confirm syphilis.

The bridge and the narrowed horizon

After his first treatment, the physician advises Joe to walk as little as possible. Unable to settle back in the boarding house, Joe nevertheless wanders through Brooklyn on a hot afternoon and reaches a bridge beneath the elevated railway, which he thinks must be Brooklyn Bridge. From a bench at the first pier, he considers the chain of consequences before him: he has found work and contracted the illness, cannot see how to write to Del, still owes for his board, needs another job, and must return for treatment. The bridge gives this predicament a brief place of pause, but no solution; his thoughts remain fixed on obligations he cannot easily meet.

An evening newspaper offers no immediate way out. Its headline calls for more troops to be sent to the Mexican border, and Joe considers whether he could join the National Guard and go to Mexico. His illness rules out that possibility as he understands it; even if he could enlist, he dreads returning to the Navy. He reads job advertisements and notices offering ways to supplement an income, then stays on the bridge until dark. The episode places the diagnosis beside his frustrated wish to find work or travel: the condition limits the choices he can imagine at precisely the time he is trying to regain independence.

Treatment, isolation, and Mrs. Olsen’s help

Joe’s room offers little respite. During a thunderstorm, rain comes through the window while he lies weak and sick on his cot; it takes him a long time to get up and close it. The next morning, the landlady complains that the bed is wet. Their exchange turns into shared laughter, and Joe comes to know her as Mrs. Olsen, a woman who raised six children, including three sons who went to sea. Her husband has been away in the South Seas for years, and her account of his repeated arrests in Brooklyn adds to the household’s history of precarious circumstances.

As Joe’s money runs out, Mrs. Olsen lets him stay and lends him twenty-five dollars when he tells her he is sick, enabling him to pay the doctor. In return, Joe helps with cleaning and takes on small painting and carpentry jobs around the house. Her assistance does not end the illness or remove the need for treatment, but it keeps him housed and helps him continue paying for care. Joe grows fonder of her than he had been of his own mother. That attachment develops amid dependency and practical kindness: she lends money, gives him work, and makes room for him when his own resources have failed.

During a sleety winter, treatment and waiting structure Joe’s days. In the mornings he studies a navigation course from the Alexander Hamilton Institute in the steamy kitchen. In the afternoons he sits in the doctor’s office, which smells of carbolic, waiting for his turn and looking through old, frayed issues of National Geographic. The waiting room is quiet; the men there rarely speak to one another. Joe sometimes encounters men he had spoken with while waiting, but on the street they pass him as if they do not recognize him. The account shows the treatment’s social circumstances as well as its routine: illness brings repeated visits among strangers, while embarrassment or avoidance follows the patients beyond the office.

In the evenings, Joe sometimes goes to Manhattan to play checkers at the Seamen’s Institute or hangs around the Seamen’s Union to learn which ships might offer him a berth once the doctor has finished treating him. His return to maritime work remains conditional on getting well, while his money and patience continue to diminish. The disease is thus woven into the ordinary details of waiting, study, companionship, and job-seeking, rather than isolated as a single dramatic episode.

Departure before the stated course is complete

The doctor later asks Joe for another twenty-five dollars to complete the cure. Joe refuses to pay more and signs on as an able seaman aboard the new Standard Oil tanker Montana. The decision follows his growing exhaustion with the cold, sleet, grimy Brooklyn streets, and navigation tables he cannot master. Mrs. Olsen’s teasing, which he has valued, has also begun to feel to him like an effort to direct his life. He can recognize her kindness and still decide that it is time to leave.

The ship takes him away from the conditions in which treatment had become part of each day. Yet the account records departure, not recovery: Joe leaves before paying the additional amount the physician demands, and no later medical outcome is given here. Gonorrhea therefore marks a period when the need for care collides with poverty, social isolation, and a sailor’s impulse to move on. Its significance lies in that unfinished tension. Treatment is available but costly; assistance makes it possible for Joe to remain ashore for a time, while the prospect of a berth finally pulls him back to sea.