Entrapment and Other Writings (12 page)
Read Entrapment and Other Writings Online
Authors: Nelson Algren
It had all been spick and span behind the glass, everything had gone off in tip-top legal order, there had not been so much as a tell-tale flickering of the lights throughout the vast building.
Four buttons had been pushed by four unnamed men—but only one had pushed a live one. No one would have to think it was himself had pushed the live one and none would ever know who had.
They had used an amperage of eight, everyone knew, because that was the regular amperage for white men. Everyone said. Just like the regular amperage for colored men was seven and a half.
Then they’d thrown him nine hundred extra volts just to make dead sure. Everyone knew all about it. Everyone told everyone else just how it had gone off just as if each had been the sole witness.
It wasn’t until after he’d been released, two months later, that Frankie Machine learned that Little Lester hadn’t reached the chair. He had died on his death-cell bed with fourteen weary hours yet to go.
A heart attack or strychnine, the warden said one thing and the coroner’s physician another.
It depended so much upon whom you asked. And mattered so little either way.
A light rain brought the spring, that year, to a cold, autumnal close.
Frankie Machine came down Division, where only arc-lamps and fire-hydrants grow, feeling that a tightly wound spring within himself had snapped, and that there could be no re-winding. A stretch at 26th and California had left his fingers feeling weakened by the lack of a fresh deck’s touch; five months is too long for a dealer to be kept out of a dealer’s slot.
“But once you got the touch,” he assured himself, “it’s always with you, you get it back in the slot.”
In his frayed army jacket with the faded PFC stripe still on the sleeve, he returned to his city’s bivouac like a weary AWOL returning to barracks from which his own home outfit has long been scattered and their name forgotten. And so turned into his own dark hall.
Schautzy the Carpenter, and Schautzy’s dimwitted twenty-year-old, Stefan, crouched there in the darkness together, upon the stairwell they had been repairing since fall. He knew his job, this Schautzy insisted, and that was the very reason the broken tread was still broken. He had torn up the sound treads above and below it, the better to get at the offending one, he explained, confidentially, to make the job look as tough as possible to the landlord; an attitude which has its appeal to all good tenants.
And had brought along Stefan to plant artificial flowers in the
cracks of the first flight’s treads. It kept the motherless slug out of the way of the taunts of brighter children. Though he was not permitted to plant his precious flowers higher than the first flight. Even on rainy days, when Schautzy would spend the whole long afternoon getting soused in the Tug & Maul Bar next door, Stefan would be contented to remain alone in the stairwell’s darkness, planting, pulling and rearranging his fantastic crops; and moving humbly aside for the occasional traffic of the stairs.
Everyone knew Schautzy didn’t bring his hammer and nails to fix the stair so much as he did to argue with Violet Koskoska, the redheaded barfly of the fourth floor rear. Hammer and nails were really the symbols of Schautzy’s courtship: the courtship of the hurled insult and the ready threat.
“No hammering on Sunday!” Violet was demanding, as the dealer entered the door, from the fourth-floor banister. “Drunk carpenter! Go home! Hammer by Mrs. You!”
“Mrs. Me not permit on Sundays, hammering,” Schautzy defied her. “Too much hammer all week!”
“All winter he hammers one board!” There was feigned scorn in her voice.
“Come down I hammer
your
board,” the carpenter invited her with a leer the dealer could almost feel in the dimness. “You try carpenter’s hammer! You try, you like! Try for size! Come quick!”
“Sha-a-ame, Carpenter,” Violet reproached him, with a hint of softness in her voice—“drinkin’ up your boy’s milk at the bars!”
“Leave the helpless child out of this!” Schautzy sounded stern and waved the hammer threateningly, like something not for helpless children at all.
While the boy himself went on placidly planting faded daisies in the staircracks and did not even look up at the rear of his father’s courting.
Both Stefan and Frankie knew that the old man was all motion and wind. If Violet came down the steps toward him, the hammer would fall to his side and he would press himself against the wall, in an access of shyness, to let her pass like a stranger.
Frankie stepped softly past Stefan, taking care not to trample the paper daisies. But the old man caught his hammer’s claw in the belt of Frankie’s jacket and hauled him back firmly.
“Don’t think you done wrong, Dealer,” he assured Frankie with such earnestness that Frankie wondered, watching that grizzled, grayish, boozed and furrowed mug, why the old man was always so intent on lending fresh heart to everyone else.
“Don’t torture yourself! Don’t suffer!”
Frankie got the big veined hand off sleeve, though it took all the strength in his fingers to do it. “All I done was a little stealin’, Carpenter,” he assured the old man gently, “ ’N I done my time, so it’s all forgot.”
But as Schautzy bent once more to the stairs, with a nail, for the sake of appearances, in his teeth, Frankie heard him murmur fiercely, through his clenched jaws: “There’s those who ought to be knocked in the head—I want that kind knocked in the head!”
Then the hammer’s touch, light and calm and sane, a master carpenter’s hammer, showed that the old man felt better for having said something he had had in his heart.
“You got a good heart all the same, old man,” Frankie thought, as if just realizing it, though everyone knew that the old man had a good heart.
It was only that there was so little demand for good hearts these days.
For hearts shaped like valentines are long gone out of fashion. What is more in demand are hearts with a bit of iron about the edges—and a twist to the iron at that. That’s the kind that comes highest of all these days.
A heart, say, with a claw like a hammer’s iron claw, better for ripping than tapping—that’s what is needed to get by of late. It’s the new style in hearts, they say: the non-corrugated kind don’t wear as well as they used to do.
On the second flight the dealer passed the desk that still held a sullen, soiled cardboard warning to stranger and friend alike:
QUIET
OR OUT YOU GO TOO
.
And since he’d been gone, he noticed, the twenty-watt bulb at the head of each stair had been painted red, for some reason.
His own door still bore, in bright bald tin, the number he had himself nailed to its scarred wood on the day before he had taken his fall: ‘48.’ Like the number of a forgotten year, when he himself had been nailed to the wood. And as he paused before that number, heard, on the other side of the door, his own clock ticking within, like the tick of a metal-bound heart.
Clocks with a touch of metal in the tick—that’s what makes a good dealer’s hours pass the fastest.
Fingers that never fail in the slot—that’s what makes a good dealer’s fingers.
Paper daisies in a stairwell’s cracks—that’s what makes the very best sort of idiot’s garden.
And hearts with a bit of a twist in the iron—that’s what makes a good hustler’s heart.
Entrapment
(1951–1953)
B
uoyed by the tremendous reception of
The Man with the Golden Arm
, Algren set out to write
Entrapment
, which was to be an even more powerful evocation, an even more ambitious undertaking. In place of the more traditional, if ironic, omniscient narrator he usually favored for his novels,
Entrapment
was to lean heavily on the first person voice, a technique he had used to great effect in his stories, but had not attempted before in a novel. And the first person voice here was going to be a woman’s voice, again an ambitious departure for Algren.
As he worked on the novel, laboring over draft after draft in which only a few words or a section title might change in the retyping and rethinking of an entire chapter or scene that went on for twenty or thirty or fifty pages, the storyline evolved. This was to be about a woman and a man who are brought down, gradually, by the antic, desperate terms of engagement in the world they inhabit, that of drug addiction, petty crimes, and bare survival. But in the end, and this too was a departure for an Algren novel, the woman, fallen though she may be, escapes to a better life, leaving behind the man who, for the first time in an Algren novel, is a supporting actor, yielding the leading role to Beth-Mary/Baby. This is a love story, too, an epic romance, Algren’s
Doctor Zhivago
if you will. But in the end, perhaps partially due to the narrative arc of Algren’s own personal story during the years when we was working on
Entrapment
, it became the book he couldn’t write, and what remains are these tantalizing fragments of what could have been.
The basis for the character of Beth-Mary, who is the central character of
Entrapment
, was Algren’s longtime friend and sometime lover Margo, someone he’d met in 1946 or ’47. Margo had come
from Ohio where she’d been a prostitute and had started shooting heroin. Algren had been researching the addiction angle for
The Man with the Golden Arm
. And in a way,
Entrapment
was to be the continuation of Man, a book that would push the envelope even further perhaps, since for all the acclaim he’d received for
The Man with the Golden Arm
, Algren still ended up feeling it “hadn’t made a dent,” hadn’t really changed our society in even the smallest way. So maybe this new novel would.
There is a wonderful autobiographical piece in
The Last Carousel
called “Previous Days,” first published in the
Chicago Sunday Tribune
in 1972, in which Algren recounts some of his observations of people who interested him. In one passage, he describes Margo and the time he tried to get her off heroin, a memory among those he used to create the core love relationship in
Entrapment
. Here in the nonfictional original, it is already imbued with the surfeit of emotional content that characterizes Algren’s transformation of reallife people he knew and loved into the inhabitants of his novels:
Shortly after I got out of the Army, in 1945, I fell in love with a West Madison Street hooker. She was twenty-two, a country girl who’d become street-wise, cynical, comical, and vulnerable. I didn’t know she was on heroin. I’d never met a user. All I knew about drug addiction was what I’d read in the Sunday supplements.
And I was too square, when I did find out, to grasp what that meant. No habit on earth but could not be broken by simple willpower: I really
believed
that! And became absolutely determined to break hers.
I was living in a two-room $10-a-month rear-lot flat on Wabansia and Bosworth. I cut off her connection and put her to bed there. “I don’t want you to see what I look like when I’m kicking,” was her only protest. But she was already too sick to protest further.
Did I say
sick?
For what began hitting that child toward
evening, “sick” is no word. And that was only the beginning. By midnight she’d gone blind. I was really into something now: the girl was either going to die or go mad, that was plain. I had to leave her to find help.
I had never seen her connection. All I had to go on was that his name was Max. Try locating a heroin pusher named Max on West Madison between midnight and 4 a.m. some rainy morning. Can you imagine a square, still in his Army jacket and fatigue cap, stopping every doorway hooker with the curious approach, “I’m a friend of Margo’s and she needs help.” They fled into the shadows, they fled into halls; they vanished in silence or just turned away.
Finally I went into a White Tower hamburger stand, on the northwest corner of Aberdeen and Madison, that had a full view of the street. And sat there watching the night-people pass in hope of spotting someone who looked like a pusher. Even though I had no idea what a pusher looked like.
A little lame man, wearing double-lensed glasses and a cap shadowing his eyes, came in and sat at the counter. He looked so wrong he had to be
somebody
. I sat beside him looking into the mirror trying to catch his eye. He wasn’t trying to catch mine. I didn’t speak until he had a cup of coffee almost to his lips.
“I’m a friend of Margo’s,” I told him softly, “she needs help.”
The cup clattered against his teeth. He had to put it down to keep from spilling it. It took him a minute to get up his nerve to look at me in the mirror. Then he looked relieved.
“She ought to know better than to send a square down here,” he told me irritably.
He was Max.
We heard her calling feebly for help before we opened
my door. She had thrown herself out of the bed and, having no strength to get back in, was lying blindly, face down, in a pool of her own perspiration.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Max began scolding her before he touched her—and a kind of miracle happened. A faint pink flush touched her cheeks at the sound of his voice, a faint smile came to her mouth; and, by the time we had her back on the bed, she’d begun getting well before the needle had touched her.
“Did you see that?” the lame pusher asked me.
I saw it all right. And I still bless that small begoggled outcast. And when I read one of those scapegoat pieces about the “viciousness” of drug pushers, and extolling the basic humanitarianism of the nark-squad hero, I’m saddened. Because it isn’t Margo and it isn’t Max who keeps the traffic moving: it’s that same nark-squad hero with a small, brown paper bag that hustlers and pushers alike have to keep filled if they want to stay on the street.
Margo had been seduced by a man from a carnival passing through the small Ohio farming town where she lived. She married him, bore him a daughter, and let him lead her into prostitution and heroin addiction after he moved her to a big city. This would be the precise biography Algren gave to Beth-Mary/Baby in
Entrapment
. Eventually, Margo’s husband abandoned her, and over the years her relationship with Algren was characterized by kindness, intense affection, and loyalty. In many ways, Algren’s love for Margo was the antidote to his love of Simone de Beauvoir and, in a different way, to Amanda, the woman he married twice but was never happy with. To Margo, Algren was a lifeline. His belief that she was miscast as an addict and his fierce attempts to help her kick her addiction were what kept her trying to get clean. Ultimately, she found the strength to be drug-free and lead a normal life.
Bettina Drew, Algren’s biographer, describes how in the fall of
1956, Algren asked Margo to marry him. But, perhaps because he was joking about it as he was saying it, his overtures only angered and upset her. By this time she had already been clean for four years. A couple of months later, in December 1956, Margo “called to tell Nelson she was marrying a working man with a steady job, and she wanted the two to meet. It was unlike him to be so cold with her, but he told her he wasn’t that unselfish, and hung up.”
1
This scene is repeated and expanded upon in
Entrapment
.
Algren failed to understand why Simone de Beauvoir wouldn’t leave Sartre for him after their intense love affair. His disappointment when she finally made clear to him her devotion to Sartre and spoke to him of her other love affairs may have figured into the narrative arc of
Entrapment
, and also in his failure to complete it. But it may have been Margo’s rejection of him that stung more deeply. Drew quotes Algren’s friend, Dave Peltz, saying that Margo “was [Algren’s] true muse, more like his inner self than his other relationships. She was raggedy, a stray cat, and so was he. She corresponded to all the sad lonely things that were Algren.”
2
There has always been genuine sympathy for women in Algren’s writing. But if Algren’s women characters were always finely drawn and memorable, they were also always cameo roles to his fallen leading men, dead-end heroes and good-for-nothing chumps. Here it was going to be different, not quite a feminist’s book, but definitely a woman’s book, and for that reason a more hopeful book, a story whose hell isn’t eternal.
“Watch Out for Daddy” is the only piece included in this book that was collected previously, in Algren’s 1973 miscellany,
The Last Carousel
. We include it here in its primary aspect as a chapter from what would have been an integral narrative work, perhaps Algren’s most ambitious, the novel
Entrapment
. The other piece is derived from a tantalizing manuscript of some 300 pages, largely repetitive, deposited in the Algren archives at Ohio State University. We have edited for the sake of readability and to render this portion of the novel consistent with the earlier one, which Algren himself had finalized
for its
Last Carousel
appearance. There are also some inconsistencies of biography between the first and the final excerpt here from Algren’s unfinished novel: Christian Kindred has evolved from a pimp into a bookie, and his age has become Algren’s own, forty-four in 1953/4. And, again like Algren, he is now a veteran of the war. But the dissonant and broken music of the doomed couple, and the flashbacks to their earlier happiness and many other details, reveal the work to have been continuous in Algren’s mind, even if changing as he wrote it.
“Moon of the Arfy Darfy,” included in
The Last Carousel
alongside “Watch Out for Daddy,” is also extracted from
Entrapment
. The characters of Baby, Zaza, Daddy, and Enright the barkeep, and his place, the Southsea Isle, all reappear here. But long after he’d abandoned the novel, Algren, in the early ’60s, reworked this material with the idea of writing a new novel about a former jockey who gets caught up in a gambling scheme around the horses. We decided not to include it here because while the intensity, the complexity, and the vividness are that of
Entrapment
, the voice and the story have been changed to those of a different book. For the curious, or the studious, go have a look in
The Last Carousel
.
