Entrapment and Other Writings (30 page)

And never once come in contact with the way in which Americans actually live their lives. For the only records we have, of the way in which we live, are those which men like Theodore Dreiser and Jack London had the unkillable gall to face up to and write down firsthand.

Creative Writers’ Workshops do not derive from the tradition of challenge. They derive, rather, from the tradition of smiling optimism which William James once summarized as “the smiling side of American life.” It was the writer’s duty, Professor James decided, to avoid writing “anything that might bring a blush to a maiden’s cheeks.” This reduction of American writing, to what might lie within the grasp of a retarded teenager, was violently blasted when Stephen Crane published
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
.

The conformist tradition, however, persisted among those who found sanctuary in “a soberer and less coltish spirit.” Sanctuary, that is, from the dark, unsmiling side of American life.

“Are you one of the quiet ones who should be a writer?” the Famous Writers School used to ask in all the magazines just as if no one had pointed out that the loudest mouth and the most belligerent bore, in any group, was inevitably the writer. “If you are reserved in a crowd you may be bottling up a talent that could change your life. If you’ve been keeping quiet about your talent, here’s a wonderful chance to do something about it. The first step is to mail the coupon below for the Free Writing Aptitude Test.”

The minute you’ve unbottled your money you’ve passed the test. The Creative Writers’ Workshops are the campus extension of the Famous Writers’ philosophy.

“Whether Dreyfus is guilty or innocent,” Chekhov wrote at the time of the Dreyfus trial, “Zola is still right.” Meaning that, in defending Dreyfus, Zola was right simply in defending the accused, guilty or innocent. Zola, to Chekhov, was right simply because he stood in opposition to the Establishment.

Creative Writers’ Workshops, by and large, are conducted by people in the service of the court. Having long ago compromised their own integrity, in return for security, their business has now become that of inducting the young into the necessity for compromise.

But if the proper study of mankind is man, it follows that, in order to report man, one must first become one. How is one to create something unique without first having, himself, become a unique being?

The style is the man: the unformed personality cannot create form beyond itself.

I am all in favor of Creative Writers’ Workshops. They pay me more, for talking about writing, than I get paid for actually writing it. But the young people to whom I talk are not the ones who are going to do any serious writing themselves. If they were they wouldn’t be listening to how someone else does it: they’d be doing it their own way, by themselves; without literary field trips through the dead past.

While I was wandering idly around Times Square recently, nothing in particular to do and nothing particular in mind, someone shoved a handbill in my hand. I put it in my pocket and didn’t read it until, staring above a martini at the wall behind the bar in Sardi’s, I pulled it out simply to look at something besides the wall. “Free Admission,” it said. “No Cover” and “No Minimum Charge,” it said. There was also something about nude girls and topless dancers. Martinis are expensive at Sardi’s, so I wandered down Eighth Avenue.

“Six French models direct from Paris,” a skinny Puerto Rican was ballyhooing in front of the joint—“They’re takin’ ’em off in here, men, six beautiful French models in the
extreem nood!
”

They weren’t French and they weren’t models. A naked black girl, so emaciated she appeared to have been rescued from Buchenwald earlier in the day, jiggled herself about on top of the bar near the entrance. At the bar’s farther end, a naked white girl, with shoulders so narrow and thighs so heavy that she looked like a flatiron turned upside down, also jiggled herself. I ordered a beer. The barmaid looked stupid.

“Three seventy-five,” Miss Stupidity told me. Wow. I handed her a ten-dollar bill.

“Give me fifty cents,” she told me before giving me my change.

I gave her fifty cents.

A rather pretty young black girl, wearing a leotard, came up to me and asked me to buy her a drink.

“Only one,” I told her, thinking of the six and a quarter I had coming.

Miss Stupidity poured something which looked like white wine from a bottle into a cocktail glass.

“That will be thirty dollars,” she told me.

I glanced about to see whom she might be talking to. She
appeared
to be talking to me. In fact, she was looking right
at
me.

“Pardon me?” I inquired politely.

“That will be thirty dollars,” she repeated.

I looked at her. She meant it. She really
meant
it.

“No way,” I assured her. “No way.”

“You ordered a drink for the lady.”

“I didn’t order that.”

She called to someone up front and here he comes: the Animal.

Race: white. Height: six feet four and one half inches. Weight: 240–245. Hair: brown, worn shoulder length. Eyes: gray. Identifying marks: Pancho Villa mustache; silver earring in lobe of left ear; tattoo on right forearm, in red, bearing inscription, not decipherable, in blue.

Every midtown-Manhattan bar employs one Animal. He is employed because he is big.
Very
big. So big that barflies trapped between paying an extortionate price and fighting him almost invariably choose to pay.

Animal isn’t necessarily dangerous: Animal is not a fighting man. If he were, he’d be working in a gym instead of a bar. When you’re over six feet high and weigh 200 pounds when you’re only thirteen years old, you don’t have to fight. Your size suffices. Lacking, thereafter, an ability to earn a living by any other means, Animal comes to depend on his size for his livelihood. His proportions become his trade. He can’t fight, he can’t wrestle, he can’t make the police force. He’s too big to be a sanitation engineer and not quite big enough to travel with a circus. He becomes a barroom conqueror who has never fought a battle.

Animals are taught to do two things: first, to
loom;
second, to make ominous-sounding noises, like: “You ordered the lady a drink: pay!”

Before he did either of these things, Animal handed me a dirt-stained price list: beer, $3.75; bottle, $30; cocktail, $10.

Beneath, this gained legal support: “These prices are registered and approved by the State of New York Department of Consumer Affairs.”

Some department. I’d like to see one of its members put out thirty dollars for a cocktail glass of cheap white wine. If he did, he is unfit for public office.

“You ordered a drink for the young lady and now you refuse to pay—is that it?” Animal demanded to know. Then he loomed.

“I never offered to pay the young lady’s rent and buy her a new pair of shoes. I never read the price list.”

“That shows you’re not a
gentleman
,” Animal informed me. “If you were a gentleman, you
would
have read the price list. Gentlemen
always
read the price list.”

Well, what do you know. That was what those men were doing studying a menu pasted into a restaurant window. And I’d always thought they were just studying prices.

Animal went into his ominous-sounds routine. “Call the cops!” he shouted to someone up front. “Man refuses to pay bill! Call the squad car! Take him away! Lock him up!”

“They’ll be here in a couple minutes, sir.” The little black girl in the leotard tried to support the house.

“It’s all right, honey,” I assured her, “I don’t mind getting locked up.”

“Oh, don’t think you’re going to get out tomorrow, Pops,” Animal warned me. “Tomorrow’s a holiday. You won’t go to court till Friday.”

“Friday is all right with me,” I told him. “I’m not doing anything in particular over the weekend anyhow. Being locked up ain’t too bad. I been locked up before.”

“I don’t doubt
that
,” Animal attempted to be cutting. “I’m sure you have.”

“The cops are on their way,” Miss Stupidity warned me.

“I’m waiting,” I told her.

“Don’t worry,” Animal reassured me, trying to sound as if he weren’t weakening, “they’ll be here all right.”

“You’ll be better off to pay up.” The little black girl tried to help her boss. “It’s their
policy
.”

“
Their
policy,” I pointed out, “not mine.”

Animal sat down beside me.

“What they’re going to do to you, Pops, is send you to
Bellevue!
”

“Bellevue?”
I looked at him in astonishment. “Hell, Bellevue is where I come from! I’m out on a liberty pass. I ain’t due back till Monday!”

“I don’t doubt it,” Animal repeated himself. I saw the seed of doubt begin forming in his eyes. He rose and went to the front and stood peering out as if expecting the police. I waited until he came by again.

“Where’s the cops?” I inquired.

“We’ve decided to let you go, Pops,” he let me know. “Get out.”

I got up but didn’t go straight to the door. I went down the bar to where Miss Stupidity stood in front of the cash register.

“You owe me six and a quarter,” I reminded her. “I gave you a ten-dollar bill.”

“I don’t owe you nothin’, mister,” she told me promptly. “You
owe me
.”

“Look, Dad,” Animal came up to give me full warning, “we’re trying to be good to you, and you keep bustin’ our balls.”

“Take him in the back room, Emil,” Miss Stupidity urged him. This one really wanted
action
.

“You better go now, mister.” The rather pretty black girl came up, looking worried.

I still didn’t feel Animal was dangerous. But over his shoulder I could see the Puerto Rican blocking the door.
He
was.

Animal followed me to the door. There he gave me final warning:

“You’re getting off light, Pops. You come around here again, I’m going to get another old man to whip your ass.”

I was safe in the broad daylight of Eighth Avenue.

“Because you can’t do it yourself,
can
you?” I hollered loud enough to get the attention of passersby. “You motherless alley fink, Bellevue is too good for you! You ought to be
caged!
”

I sauntered off, having just scored the first technical knockout of my life.

It took me six weeks to get back to Eighth Avenue with two summonses, one for Animal and one for Miss Stupidity, for harassment and for short-changing respectively.

A great iron gate had been lowered over the front of the doorway. A bystander assured me the joint had been closed for some days.

Who was he? I hadn’t even learned Animal’s name.

Sooner or later I’ll see him again. He may be wearing shades and have his head shaved, but I’ll know him. Then I’ll deliver, personally, the message I had planned to deliver in court.

Russia was our Soviet fatherland. It was the one country where artists were truly free: there the novelist wrote of reality as he saw it; there the painter painted the world as he saw the world; dancers there danced without having to account for this step or for that, to some bureaucrat. It was the one country in which prostitution no longer existed. Jews were only one of numerous grateful minorities who now had their own nation within the fatherland; in which their own culture was cherished and defended.

“I have seen the future and it works,” said Lincoln Steffens. (Or was that Bernard Shaw?)

(Or was it both?)

We began our letters: “Dear Comrade.” We signed them: “Comradely yours.” “Mister” was a derisive word. When we expelled a member of the John Reed Club (our Marxist art club) we derided him as “Mister” and he shuffled out looking broken.

Stalin was our leader.

We would not be moved.

Here and there among us, of course, there were those to whom the lure of big money, fancy clothes, parties aboard the yachts of multimillionaires proved too strong. They denounced Stalin, snatched their dirty money and ran.

They were Trotskyist running dogs of the imperialist warmakers of Fascist capitalism. They were rotten.

James T. Farrell denounced Stalin.

Subsequently I reviewed a novel of his in which I employed more spittle than words. I really
splattered
that book.

Farrell reviewed a book of mine favorably.

What? Run out of spittle, Mister?

I was not to be easily placated. I reviewed another Farrell book: a denunciation of the author as well as the book.

He reviewed another book of mine favorably.

I was ahead two to zero. Or was I?

In the late 1950s I met Farrell on a TV talk show. He gave no indication of resentment. We spoke about the old time Black Sox.

I told Farrell that every kid on my block had had to have a favorite player. Mine had been Swede Risberg and I had been subsequently named after him.

Farrell had seen his first White Sox game in 1911. He told me how the lineups had then been announced on the field by a man with a megaphone.

On a Sunday in August, 1920, I recalled to Farrell, when I’d been eleven I’d seen Eddie Cicotte strike Babe Ruth out three times. The crowd had spilled over from the bleachers into the outfield. I stood, in the final inning within touching distance of Shoeless Joe Jackson. Final score: White Sox 3, Yankees 0.

A month later the lid blew off. On the stand, on a charge of conspiracy, Jackson attempted to explain how he had gotten into the gamblers’ big fix to throw the World Series of 1919 to the Cincinnati Reds. He had been forced, he said, by threats from Swede Risberg. “The Swede,” Jackson told reporters, “was a hard guy.”

In a blank verse poem written sometime in the ’40s, I had used Jackson’s phrase for a title, I told Farrell.

“I know,” Farrell told me. “I read it. I liked it.”

At that moment my resentment toward Farrell began to fade. He had
liked
it!

The news, of course, had long been in by then:

Orwell had been right about Big Brother.