Entrapment and Other Writings (25 page)

For the end of State Street is the end of the G-string Gomorrah, the end of Babylon, the edge of her honky-tonk country. And where she goes when she goes, nobody knows nor how long she’ll be gone.

She may not care especially for men, but so long as juke boxes blow blues away between midnight and dawn, she’ll need them to get by.

Because she doesn’t depend so wholly on a percentage off drinks, the stripper often gives the spitbacker first crack at a mark. Her investment is in her act, and a few have fairly elaborate productions.

One uses a shower stall and a bed to help her simulate a girl showering before turning in, with all manner of soapless fancies seizing her as she strolls about all dry. Another, under a floppy chapeau, does
Mademoiselle de Paris
, lyrics in G. I. French and lined out in good clear voice despite a trumpet blaring off key behind her.

Others play it Cuban, Turkish, or Hindu. The farther from home you get, it would seem, the wilder the women.

Yet none so wild-seeming as the doll who comes out dancing with an effigy of a Satanic after-theater type in black and scarlet cloak, dancing out a losing struggle to keep her honor. This is sometimes done with a gorilla, though why a gorilla would be coming on with a cotton-headed blonde when he could stay home and have a lady gorilla without risking a pinch is one of those things I can never quite figure.

“Get off your cotton-pickin’ hands,” the M.C. challenges his public, “the more you give out, the harder she works, the harder she works the more you see of her, the more you see of her the less you see of me.” Fair enough. To judge just by his mug, he’s an ex-pug who didn’t do too well pugging, and he isn’t doing too much better M.C.’ing. Once in a while, he’ll trill, “Now I’m trolling for fairies,” and sail away through the light with his shirt flowing behind and his pants falling till they bind his ankles and he stands in the spot in his baggy shorts, making motions like a crippled butterfly.

“God give me strength,” he prays as he pulls up his pants, “this is as funny as we get.” Female impersonation is sure fire for laughs.

Fortunately, nobody expects him to get truly funny. His trade seems to be chiefly to encourage applause for the strippers, and he works hard at it. Sometimes, to get them off their hands, he’ll twirl a girl’s breast like a pinwheel. If you don’t have talent you work without.

Sometimes he’ll play a Jolson recording offstage and mug along with it, pretending it’s himself doing the singing. This is called record-micking, a trade honest as most.

And season of sun or season of sleet, the patient old pullers hold the big doors wide to seduce the marks that pass and repass, weather wet or weather dry. The wandering conventioneer, the Indiana preacher or the side-street solitary from Chicago’s deeps, all appear, to the puller, to be wearing an ‘M’ for ‘Mark’ right in the middle of the forehead.

“This is the place, buddy, this is
it
, the show where they go all the way. She’s takin’ ’em off right now, you’re just in time.” The puller never notices the ‘M’ in the middle of his own brow.

Yet there’s more to being a puller than grabbing the sleeve and hauling it in. These are old survivors of jungle and carnival, operators of bingo, ferris wheels, and floating crap games, that own a discerning eye for the law that wears neither badge nor uniform. They are outposts as well as haulers, guardians of the doors as well as openers. For, syndicate or no syndicate, you’re never sure when some captain’s man in plainclothes will sneak inside, pinch a couple of girls and run the customers off, and keep the heat on for as long as three days.

Several years ago the mayor of Cal City got himself taken along on just such a raid. But when the girl he had pinched was brought to trial, the judge ruled that the mayor, who had been the movement’s rear guard, had been too far from the stage to qualify as a material witness.

The following May a candidate for mayor, running on a “close-the-joints” platform, made a successful campaign. Not a joint was closed.

Though reforming elements do succeed in pinching a stripper and fining an owner now and then, they can’t board up the strip because it’s the town economic jugular. You don’t fool around with jugulars.

The cabarets have been running since the lighting was still by gas, and they’ll still be honky-tonking when the neon is lit by atomic power. The strip is forty years old and looks good for forty more.

Some assume that when the St. Lawrence Waterway comes in, Calumet Harbor will become the world’s greatest inland port and
the joints will have to close just to lend the city a dignity worthy of its size.

My own notion is that the day the first translatlantic crew disembarks, forty new joints will open. There are only about a hundred and fifty now. That won’t nearly meet the demand. When you see some of the chicks having to work both booths and bars to make a living, and some of the pullers having to haul for two joints, you realize that the future of Calumet City may well be imperiled by lack of chicks and pullers.

Local reform groups labor for the day when the pullers and strippers, M.C.s, and owners alike, all go down the darkness at the end of State and never come back. They’d rather see State Street lined with honest business enterprises, such as loan offices and used-car lots, than have a single marquee burn. They look to the day when the coming of the St. Lawrence Waterway will put a stop to the present riot.

It’s true that the waterway is certain to bring great changes here. Yet so long as there’s a conventioneer, a sailor on the loose, or a side-street solitary with his cap pulled over his eyes, somewhere beyond the traffic’s iron cry a G-string Gomorrah will flicker off and on.

And there one sits now, his little cap yanked forward to shade his face so close to the stage that he has to bend his neck to look up, the single-O solitary with paws wrapped tight about his dollar bottle of Budweiser, come to lose his loneliness without sacrificing his solitude.

A rain-colored cat who has lived away from women so long that a spotlight on one, burning from purple to pink, weaves a mystery about her nakedness as ancient as that through which Eve once walked.

Back in her gown, she comes up behind him, puts her arms about him and lets her breath run like a warm bath down his neck. Though Time and The Goat have seared her and her face is a bit
lopsided with its secret load of gin, he will still see her walking naked through the rainbow-colored air. From her cheap perfume he’ll catch an ancestral magic. When she captures his cap gently and says, “My name is April. What’s yours?” he’ll give the Budweiser full tilt to his lips, drain it, and answer, “Mark. Just Mark.” And beam. Just beam.

Now here’s one doll wise enough to know that some men can stare harder for companionship than for sex; and will pay for it where they won’t pay for sex. A solitary like this may be affected more by the touch of April’s hand saying, “I’m on your side, Marky dear,” than by the offer of her breast.

Look, Marky dear is buying the buck-six-bits’ stuff, a shot for himself and a shot for her. Well, good.

For the jukes are blowing the blues away, and now is the Daddy-Can-I-Have-One-More-Hour. Now is the Of-Course-I’m-Single-Honey time. The Daddy-Let-Me-Have-Your-Little-Cap, Please-Don’t-Ever-Leave-Me hour. Now is the What-Color-Are-Your-Eyes-Little-Daddy, I-Live-With-An-Aunt-Who’s-Out-Of-Town time. When single-O cats get their fur stroked just like married ones. For an hour.

Yet the whiskey in the glass goes dry. And neon, though it burn ever so scarlet, burns less red against the ordinary day. Trumpet man and drummer grow weary. Yet the jukes keep trying to blow the blues away.

Taxis will wheel back from the curbs; even the pullers will begin giving up. A bar-broad will lay her head on her arms and nod off, and the bartender will just let her nod.

Sooner or later someone will hear crossing bells. Someone will yawn, “I’d rather be in bed than be riding a passenger train.”

And the big jukes will sleep in their stables.

They tell me that Russia’s Sputnik has placed us in gravest peril; that unless we win the missile race we are lost; that the nation whose flag is first planted on the moon will inherit the earth.

Yet I feel the race is not for the skies, but for the hearts of men. Not amidst meteorite and star, but in those forests of furnished rooms behind the billboards, burning all night long. That so long as we remain dedicated to the proposition that every man is entitled to the pursuit of his own happiness, in his own fashion, we are unconquerable. So long as every man is innocent until proven guilty, all is well. But that when the innocent man must prove his innocence or stand convicted on the word of an unseen accuser, though we own the moon, we are lost.

I suspect we are well on our way toward gaining a moon and losing ourselves. For nowhere before has there been such a monstrous division between the actual lives of a people, and representation of those lives as purveyed by Cinerama, Colorvideo,
Life, Time
or The Reverend Peale. Though ten thousand voices announce our national contentment coast to coast, every hour on the hour, through editorial, headline and the fashion magazines, actually we are living today in a laboratory of human suffering as vast and terrible as that in which Dickens and Dostoevsky wrote.

“I say,” Walt Whitman prophesied, “we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some
deep disease. Never was there more hollowness of heart than at present, and here in the United States. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believed in nor is humanity itself believed in.… It is as if we are being endowed with a vast and thoroughly appointed body and left with little or no soul.”

Surely never before has any people lived so tidily in the midst of such psychological disorder. Never has any people deodorized, sanitized, germproofed, cellophaned and hygienized itself so thoroughly, and still remained stuck with the sense of something dead under the house. Never have so many two-baths-a-day people gone to so many analysts to find out how to quit washing their hands. Never have so many analysts made appointments with other analysts. How can we be so satisfied that God is on our side, and at the same time be so apprehensive lest he be not?

No other people, I suspect, has set itself a moral code so rigid, while applying it so flexibly. Surely nowhere before has any people possessed such a superfluity of physical luxuries companioned by such a dearth of emotional necessities. Never has any people been so completely at the mercy of its own appliances.

“ ‘Those who now decry our methods will be the first to imitate them,” Adolf Hitler warned the Western Powers. And what people has ever taken such a deep pride in its heroes, while permitting the enforcement of its laws to depend upon professional informers?

It looks like Walt was right. It looks like Adolf wasn’t far wrong. So long as we are more passionately concerned with the latest type of tail-fin than we are with the girl who asked, because our narcotics courts provided no defense to the penniless—“Ain’t nobody on my side?”, we are in the shadow of a peril more terrible than that cast by any Sputnik.

“Except as you, sons of earth, honor your birthright,” an ancient Babylonian told his people, “and cherish it well by human endeavor, you shall be cut down, and perish in darkness, or go up in high towers—a sacrifice to the most high God. Look you well, therefore, to yourselves in your posterity. Keep all close to earth, your feet
upon the earth, your hands employed in the fruitfulness thereof be your vision never so far, and on high.”

So sput me no Sputniks, mutt me no muttniks. Spare me all flying saucers and spacemen dangerous or kind. Just hire a good lawyer for the girl who got trapped by the narco squad. We need her on our side.

You may spot him, the man who never looks at a horse above the knees, studying the shoeboard a few steps from the saddling paddock. He’ll have pencils behind both ears and he never calls it a shoeboard. To him it’s the plateboard, for horses don’t wear shoes. They wear plates. Mud calks, jar calks, block heels, block-heel stickers or bars.

“How can you bet a horse without you consult the board?” is what he’d like seriously to know. “I lose a bet, I want to know was he wearing the right plates. I find out he’s wearing no stickers on a soft track, I got a beef. That trainer cost me money. You don’t read the board how do you find out why your horse didn’t come in? For every dime I lose I can account—that’s my philosophy.

“I’ll give you another piece of philosophy. Lay off No. 6. Somethin’s wrong. Otherwise why they putting bar plates on her? You don’t put no bar plates on no horse on a track like this unless her hoof is spreading. Lay off hoof spreaders. That’s my philosophy too.”

The man is really gone. If you let him get any closer he’ll take you behind the paddock and offer you the Dancer’s right foreplate for five dollars. “It’s a block-heel sticker,” he’ll tell you if you don’t pull away. “Ain’t that worth a fin to show your friends?”

He’s not the only one around the paddock whose living is below the knees.

Equally dedicated but not nearly so gone is the player who doesn’t care whether a horse is barefoot or wearing basketball shoes. If you showed this one a horse he’d say, “For God’s sake what’s
that?
” He thinks a paddock is something you put on a stable door to keep it locked. When he comes out into the light he doesn’t look up. He’s never seen a cloud.

His habitat is in the shadows under the stands, below the boxes or beneath the seats, high in the mezzanines or under your feet. But he knows something neither you nor the plateboard player knows. And never even could guess. That is simply that you don’t beat the horses by going to the seller’s window. You beat them by going to the cashier’s cage. And
only
the cashier’s cage.