Entrapment and Other Writings (24 page)
Read Entrapment and Other Writings Online
Authors: Nelson Algren
“I can’t imagine what,” he said out loud. “I just can’t imagine it.”
The trouble was he could imagine it too well, even if he said he couldn’t. The picture came clearer. Turning off the light wouldn’t darken it, and turning on the TV wouldn’t drown out her voice saying, with his arms around her, “Don’t let me go.”
Behind the closed door, in the gloom of the little room, he remembered the night-blue hours, night when all hours were one. Night of the slow-stroke-and-holding hours when the little prude of a clock put both hands up and pretended not to see, yet hadn’t missed a thing.
The realization that she was a bride had wakened her with a nervous start. The bridegroom delayed. She heard him moving in the bathroom and it seemed to her he had been in there an unconscionably long time. She called; he did not answer.
A hell of a way. A hell of an hour. My wife is going to be married
, he thought numbly, though he had not wife at all. But when he thought it, his face, the mirrored face, looked like that of a man hit unexpectedly in the right side just below the ribs.
You’re just griped to the heart because somebody had more heart
than you
. Then he found another straw.
I’m just not used to being the loser. I’ll just get used to it and the next time I’ll know better
.
He had to half-smile at his easy optimism, for he was a man who knew there would not be, could never be, a next time.
He retrieved the note from the wastebasket, looked at it again for the name.
She’s certainly being cautious, not even giving Virgil’s last name. That must be for the same reason that she left out where she’s traveling—she didn’t want to leave me any handy way of throwing a rock into the works. She knows that if I asked her for a drink with me she would have to say yes, and that if we did, we’d wind up in bed and everything would be like it was. And I’d go with her to tell Virgil it had all been a terrible mistake. And I would say, “Baby, I’ll never let you go.”
The man in the rumbled gray suit considered the text of the note in the gloom—gloom like the late-evening gloom of any second-rate hotel—considered the paper in hand. It was so heavy it felt like cloth. “P.S. I’ll write occasionally …”
P.S. to you, sister
. He crumbled the note and sank again to the bed.
Who do you think you’re kidding tacking
that
onto the financial statement? P.S. to Virgil: You better start saving up your sleep now, Pops. You’re going to need at least three nights of unbroken rest a week, Pops
, he told the man who, for all he knew, was no older than himself.
What will you do when the Marine is called up, Pops? How many crutches are
you
on?
He was beginning to feel really sly now. A carhorn blew one short, imperious note below, and the sound took a long time, within his mind, to die.
What will you do when the Marine is called up, Pops?
I wouldn’t take that route if I were you
, he cautioned himself.
Pops is probably a head taller than you anyhow, and looks ten years younger, too. Yes, and spends when he has it, too
.
I would’ve spent if I would’ve had it
, he flattered himself.
I would’ve spent my right arm. You know that, don’t you, Baby?
How was it then
, he asked himself as though it were she asking him,
how come that day at the track when you hit the long one, you showed one ticket and ducked the other. You were real great that day …
I have to hand it to you
—he had to have the final word with Virgil
—how you have the nerve to marry my wife …
He heard a knock at the door and looked at his watch. The knock came again, more insistent now. He knew, just by looking at the watch, who it was and went to the door at last.
It was a fellow named Riley, who had two dollars for him to place. He took it mechanically, closed the door, and went back to the bed. He lay down with Riley’s crumpled money in one hand and her note in the other.
Deep in the mirror’s restless depths the green and sea-gold mermaid stirred. That submarine exchange was always busy.
After all, if she phones in a year I’ll only be forty-five. It won’t be too late then. If I move, I’ll get the phone listed
, he decided.
As soon as I hear her voice I’ll know it’s busted up. She’ll be sunburned and better dressed than she ever was. I’ll have to take it easy, not let her think I’ve been waiting
.
Maybe I’ll come on like I’m not sure which Baby she was
.
And he looked at his hands again and saw only two palms of empty light.
If you’re looking for nail holes
, he again told himself slowly,
there ain’t none
. And put his hands away.
Nothing shook down straight. No coin rang true.
But it was night again. When everyone would break even in the end.
This isn’t my day
, he decided, without caring whose day it might be.
And All the Rest
(1957–1981)
I
n “G-String Gomorrah” (
Esquire
1957), Algren visits the strip clubs of Calumet City, Illinois, and “Ain’t Nobody On My Side?” (1957) was Algren’s unlikely contribution to
The Race for Space!—
showing him willing at the time to seize any opportunity to make his case. “Stoopers and Shoeboard Watchers,” which appeared in
Sports Illustrated
in 1959, takes Algren to the racetrack for an essay on those who pursue “a calling within a dream”: the search for discarded winning tickets. Stoopers are a recurring, iconic archetype for Algren, inhabiting both his nonfiction, as here, and his fiction, where in the present volume they reappear in.
By the 1960s, Algren was supporting himself largely by writing for magazines. From time to time, his venues were men’s magazines:
Playboy, Dude, Cavalier
, and
Rogue
. “Afternoon in the Land of the Strange Light Sleep” is one such piece. Described by Matthew Bruccoli in his Algren bibliography as an article, and by the editors of
Cavalier
, where it appeared in 1962, as both a story and a prose poem, “Afternoon” is in fact a bit of all three, yet not quite any of them. Whatever it is, here it is: a peek into the life of a “rain-colored girl” on the nod whose god is junk and whose peddler is Jack-the-Rabbit.
“Down with Cops” and “The Emblems and the Proofs of Power” assess the condition of 1960s America. The former essay appeared in the
Saturday Evening Post
(1965). Here, Algren explains the psychology of those attracted to law enforcement before concluding that “the cop is no more […] than the extension of our own vindictiveness.” Accompanying Algren’s text was an advertisement hawking Yello-Bole pipes, should the reader care to know, the “easy way” to “change your smoking habits” and the official pipes of the
New York World’s Fair. “The Emblems and the Proofs of Power” (
Critic
1967) offers an impassioned attack on an America whose foreign policy—“geared for nothing but destruction”—is fascist at heart and “recoils” on us (what the CIA calls “blowback”) in the form of Lee Harvey Oswald, Richard Speck, and other disaffected men and women otherwise excluded from society.
Dripping with cynicism and yet still brimming with curiosity and a love of the humanity of a churning city like Chicago or, in this case, Saigon, “Nobody Knows Where Charlie’s Gone” is a great example of Algren’s reportage from the late 1960s, following his trip to Vietnam in the winter of 1968/69.
“On Kreativ Righting,” a 1975 piece for the
New York Times
, attacks school-taught writing as the erasure of real writers from the American scene, averring that art is, rather, “a solitary search for one’s true self.” “Topless in Gaza” (New
York
magazine 1978) takes a feisty, sixty-eight-year-old Algren into a Times Square strip bar for an adventure, and “ ‘We Never Made It to the White Sox Game’ ” (
Chicago Tribune Book World
1979) pays homage to James T. Farrell, some of whose work Algren had panned for what he suggests here were unfair political reasons.
Undated but written near the end of his life (probably 1979, given the references to New York City mayor Ed Koch’s 1979 “John Hour” crusade against prostitution), “No More Whorehouses” finds Algren visiting the Lucky Lady brothel on New York’s West 45th Street and lashing out at “that chicken-headed mayor” for sticking his nose into the author’s sex life.
“There Will Be No More Christmases” (1980) and “Walk Pretty All the Way” (1981) are the last two stories Algren published during his lifetime. Both appeared in
Chicago
magazine. Comic but melancholy, “There Will Be No More Christmases” returns to a favorite theme (and to the world of
The Man with the Golden Arm
) to sketch an inept cop who loses his mind when his incompetence is exposed in the press. “Walk Pretty All the Way” is a comically told tragedy, following two fourteen-year-old girls as they head off for
lives they cannot yet imagine, lives on the wild side—where Algren began, and where, alas, as regards his fiction, we leave him. Finally, “So Long, Swede Risberg” (
Chicago
magazine 1981) returns Algren to his youth and a favorite subject—the White Sox players implicated in the conspiracy to throw the 1919 World Series. The essay appeared two months after Algren’s death on May 9, 1981. The reader may wish to compare the present essay with “Go! Go! Go! Forty Years Ago” and “Ballet for Opening Day: The Swede Was a Hard Guy,” both of which are included in
The Last Carousel
.
Cumulatively, the essays, reportage, and stories here display Algren’s virtuosic range, but also his constancy and his ceaseless productivity. Whether writing briefly or at length, for the
Saturday Evening Post
or
Rogue
, Algren, for almost half a century, produced work in which his signature sensibility remained intact, his concerns those that informed his writing first to last, and his commitment to those for and about whom he wrote undiminished.
One hour south of Chicago, just this side of the Indiana line, there’s a patchwork burg that looks by day like any midland patch you see from any railroad right-of-way: the same small frame houses, quietly curtained, where 20,000 squares bless their state of grace and gratefully tuck themselves in by ten. Where Daddy gets up at five a.m., bangs pots about the kitchen a while, and leaves with a black lunch bucket under his arm to be on time at the roundhouse by six.
Where crossing bells dong the whole forenoon, warning Daddy to get his work done and get back between walls again, lest some creature of the cat’s twilight creep over the state line and snatch him into Indiana.
Under the patchwork a baby Babylon lies sleeping. Bar-broad and booth-broad, both alike, pimp and puller, each the same, stripper and bartender, owner and drummer, M.C. and trumpeter, cats that have howled the whole night through, all, all lie dreaming while crossing-bells toll.
Now the jukes sleep like tired horses. In a country where eleven a.m. is the very dead of night. For even jukes need rest.
Rest till that hour that twilight falls in, and squares begin to feel tuckered; then the baby Babylon will stretch and yawn. The night’s first juke will waken, neighing,
Your cheating heart will tell on you
.
From somewhere down the other side of the strip a bigger juke will neigh reply,
You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dawg
.
By nine p.m. the girls in their gowns will be playing booth and bar stool for “spitbacks”—shot glasses of tea or sherry, but never of hard liquor; her work is to get the mark loaded, not herself.
Spitback kittens get a dollar and the house six bits for every shot. The waitress, humble child, tips herself two bits and doesn’t ask for more. If you think you can get off cheaper by buying beer, give one of the hillbilly caves a play. You’ll get off cheaper. But you’ll drink alone.
The straight spitbacker, the girl who doesn’t get a chance to undress publicly because she doesn’t quite own the grace, the looks or the build, has to press the mark harder than the stripper. The stripper has a salary besides what she can hustle off drinks; the spitbacker has none.
“I could of been a stripper myself,” one of these chicks assures me, “only my hips was just a mite thin. I could of been a model except my bust was just a mite low. I could of been a typist, but my fingernails was just a mite long. Once I could of been a copper’s old lady, only I can’t bear no copper. I could of married a airlines pilot, I think. Then all I’d have to do was just sort of fly around. I could of married lots of men, I could of been most anything. Only, a funny thing, sometimes I really don’t care for men. That must be why I’m doing what I’m doing now. I just don’t care for them.”
And what are you doing now, my rain-colored kitten, is a question well left unasked. And yet, in the hour of the outcast cat, that is long past twelve yet far from morning, you’ll see the very same chick, the girl who doesn’t care for men, in an evening gown and a fur wrap over it, hurrying away from the music and the lights toward the darkness at the end of the world.
