Entrapment and Other Writings by Nelson Algren
“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.
NOTES
1. Bettina Drew. Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side. New York: Putnam, 1989. 284.
2. Drew 284.
WATCH OUT FOR DADDY
1. That day so still so burning
By the brought-down look of that gas-plate trap you’d scarcely have guessed it was the best deal we’d had yet. Everybody in LA was driving convertibles and us two fools thinking if a place had a rag carpet it had true class. This place had a carpet and cups, too. I was glad not to have to drink out of that shaving mug any more.
I got a job car-hopping but Daddy is too hard of hearing to do much along those lines himself. His right ear is as good as anyone’s, but the left is the one the guard at Industrial bust. What Daddy is best at is just hanging around the house in his tattery shorts with a stick of tea in his teeth.
Now and then he’d make a deal with a Mexican for half a can of backyard tea, double-wrap it and sell it to some other hill-billy as the pure Panama. That way we’d catch up on the rent and have enough left for a bottle of gin.
Other times people paid Daddy off in a pair of two-tone shoes the wrong size or a wristwatch with a home-made hairspring for me. “Daddy,” I told him at last, “this stuff is nowhere. Why take just anything?”
“For that grade of pot you’re lucky to get just anything.”
“But all you get is junk. Sheer junk.”
“I’ll take that too if I can get my hooks into it,” he told me.
I was still that simple I didn’t know what he meant.
I found out in due course. In that same room right under the roof where you had to battle for every breath.
On that day so still so burning.
I woke up with a lawnmower that had one blade missing ricketing around the room, cutting corners and coming back. It took me a full minute to realize the racket was all inside my head. I was face-down on the sofa with a hangover like a cliff.
I could feel my arm just hanging. And the watch with the home-made hairspring, that hadn’t run for days, hanging onto my wrist. Everything in that room was just hanging on. Everything in the world needed fixing.
“If I’m going to wake up feeling like this,” I told him, “I might as well drink whiskey.”
“You start on that again, Little Baby, you’ll be drunk again before night.”
“What makes me sick will cure me,” I told him. It was what he’d so often told me.
“There’s better cures than whiskey, Beth-Mary,” he pulled a switch on me.
“If submitting to that spike in your pocket is what you’re driving at, forget it,” I told him, “I’d sooner do without care.”
“I’m not asking you to undergo anything at my hands I’m not willing to undergo at yours.”
“I don’t want you to undergo a thing
He come to sit beside me on the horsehair sofa and took my hand in his own.
“Baby,” he told me, “Little baby. Once we agreed that I was to take care of you in the big things and you were to take care of me in the little ones.”
“But why begin with the big ones, Little Daddy?” I asked. For at sight of that needle my strength simply drained.
“What kind of man do you think I am? You think I want to see my little wife go to work sick? Don’t she deserve my care?”
“Daddy,” I told him with what strength I had, “you’ll be more sorry than you now know if you do me this way. For your own heart’s sake, don’t do me this way.”
“Baby,” he told me, “a fact is a fact. And today’s fact is, are you going to work sick or well?”
There wasn’t any question of not going to work at all. I’d already missed one day’s car-hopping. When you missed two they automatically de-hopped you.
“Fair is only fair, Beth-Mary,” he told me, “so hold out your pretty arm.”
Fair is fair. And a fact is a fact. Yet I didn’t hold out my arm. I just let him have it, he took it so gentle. He hadn’t been gentle in so long. He began stroking the down, up and down. Watch out for Christian Kindred when he starts being gentle.
“Don’t jerk, Little Baby,” he told me so soft—and no sooner had he said it than my arm jerked of itself and jerked the whole outfit clean out of his hand and left the needle shivering in my hide. I hadn’t got Drop the First.
“Blowing a whole sixteenth! Fool! After what I distinctly told you”—Daddy went into a simply terrible huff—“you realize you just cost us two-seventy-five?” How that child did huff and puff about my spendthrift ways.
In that room so close so burning.
We couldn’t afford to blow another two-seventy-five, that was plain. So I looked the other way for the sake of thrift. And felt a gentle whoof, like someone had touched my heart. And felt the gentlest tingle; like someone saying “Darling.”
That was all. But Daddy felt much better.
“Was that the real thing, Daddy?” I asked. For somehow I’d expected something far greater.
“It’s the real thing alright, Little Baby.”
Us two fools. We didn’t either us know what the real thing was. “Lucky for you we had a sixteenth-grain left in the paper,” Daddy told me, “lucky for you that needle didn’t snap when you blew the shot. God must have his arms around you, girl, that’s the only way I can figure it.”
Somebody got his arms around me alright but I’d hate to think it’s the party he claims. The minute I got my blouse off that night he banged me again. “That one is history, Baby”—like that he said it. As if he’d been lying in wait all day just to bang me.
“That one is history”—I didn’t know what he meant till it brought me up deathly sick over the wash basin.
“Why, it wasn’t no bigger shot than the first,” he pretended he couldn’t for the life of him figure that one out—“it was only a sixteenth-grain, Little Baby.”
“It may have been only a sixteenth, Little Daddy, but it was into the vein and the first was just into the skin.” I let him know I was on. “A fact is a fact,” I reminded him.
“What makes you sick will cure you,” he reminded me. And grinned. Just grinned.
The way that boy makes history on my hide since, he ought to be a professor in a school. What if that vein collapses? Will History collapse, too? O, I forgive him for the money he threw away like it was afire! the clothes he hocked to get more money that were my clothes. I can forgive him for making me do time for him.
After all, if he made a whore out of me, I made a pimp out of him. If I did time for him, he done time for me. If he hocked my clothes to support his habit, I’ve hocked his to support mine.
For Little Daddy, much as he likes to dig, never digs too deep. He never fools with that one spot in my heart where I’ll never forgive him ever. For all his brags, he has never yet said to me, “Baby, who took you from your baby?”
Little Daddy, the day you say that to me will be the day I’ll take my turn on you. And I won’t stop with banging you. I’ll bone you like a fish.
Little Daddy wants someone to give him credit for something so bad, but I don’t give him Credit the First. Why make things easy for him? Since when did he ever make things easy for me?
“You were a hare on the mountain,” he’ll brag right to my face, “when I fired your way you were done for.”
“I was done for before ever you took aim, Little Daddy,” I have to remind him, “every sport in town was firing my way two years before you came calling, bringing me caramel candy like I’d never seen the back room of a bar. Little Daddy, I felt sorry for you with your haircut out of Boys’ Industrial and the town sports laughing because you thought nothing had changed since you’d gone. You made it so plain, Little Daddy.
“But I weren’t no hare on the mountain. I’d been pigmeat two whole years.”
“Who made a whoor out of you? Who turned you out?”
O, it goes right through me when he says whoor like that. And well he knows it. “Little Daddy,” I tell him sweet as sugar candy, “don’t trouble your poor heart so. I did it to send money back for the baby’s care, nothing more. All you done was tell me what a fair price was for the product I was marketing. For that I’m still grateful to you.”
“You were against working with a sponge when your time came around,” he keeps trying, “but I made you work with one all the same. Who ever treated his old lady harder than that?”
“If I hadn’t worked through how would I have made enough money to keep my Little Daddy knocked out?” I ask him. And pat his little cheek.
He slaps down my hand, peevey boy—“Baby, who made a dope fiend out of you?”
He’ll get that needle under my hide in more senses than one.
“I don’t consider myself a fiend about dope or anything else,” I’m forced to point out to him. “I’ve taken a little liking to the stuff and don’t know how to quit, that’s all.”
“Then you’re not actually against it, Baby?” And grins. Just grins.
“I’m against it in my heart, Little Daddy. Right there’s the difference between me and you.”
“That’s what I like so much about you, Beth-Mary,” he tells me, “your mind is so weak.”
“I know I can’t ever be so strong as you, Little Daddy,” I have to admit to him, “for I’m not so weak to begin.”
“Then take your own chances and suffer the consequences,” he says.
I’m suffering the consequences every hour since that day on South San P. Street.
That day so still so burning.
2. Watch Out for Daddy
“Stuff is making a regular little go-getter out of you, Baby,” my Daddy begun getting proud of me the hour we got off San P. Street, “now all you need to get is a little know-how,” I told him.
“Daddy, I already know how.”
“You know how all right but you don’t know with who. Your small-town ways don’t fit out here. Don’t ever tell a trick you’re married and have a baby daughter. You don’t ask him to buy you a drink. You don’t drink with him at all. You ask him does he want to play house or not? Buy your own drink, Baby. Don’t you want to be real great? Don’t you want to keep your Daddy knocked out?”
We got so great, shortly thereafter, that we were both kept knocked out. Every time we walked into a joint someone was sure to holler, “Look who’s here!” Usually the bartender. Everybody with class was hollering hello. I got over being bashful and advanced clear to the Anxious-to-Please stage. “Are you satisfied, Mister? You’re not disappointed?”
And Daddy got even more anxious than me, “Are you alright, Baby?” He’d sneak me a fast whisper from behind a potted palm in the lobby where he had no right whatsoever to be—“You want to go home and rest now? You tired, Baby???
You call that a pimp?
“Baby, did that cat act married-like? Does he want to see you again? How did he come on, Baby? Fairly great or so?”
“Not too bad,” I answered offhanded one time—“as a matter of fact, not bad at all.”
“Why don’t you marry the man for God’s sake then?” he turned on me—“I won’t stand in your way! Imagine it—a hustler falling in love with one of her own tricks! And you can call yourself a whore? Why, I think you like this trade.”
He’d never said a thing that hard to me before.
“I’ll go back to car-hopping tomorrow,” I told him. “I think I make as sorry a whore as you make a macker.”
That hurt his feelings.
“No wife of mine is going to be seen hustling hamburgers,” he got real stern to make himself out the real thing in mackers.
And I never answered him so offhand again. “Daddy, that fellow was just no good whatsoever,” I’d report, “if he got an old lady I’m sorry for her.”
After a spell Daddy just stopped asking. And I just minded my own peace and didn’t use so much platinum nail polish.
LA people like a young country-looking couple. There were gifts almost every day. Ankle-bracelets and earrings and perfume for me and nylon shorts for my Daddy. Right up to the end, everyone tried to help. Even the old clerk at the desk tried to warn us the night Daddy came into the lobby with an envelope in his topcoat pocket.
“A message for you,” he told Daddy—and scribbled nabs on a phone slip. Daddy folded the slip without looking at it. It was still in his hand when I opened for him and they followed in like I’d opened for them.
One on each side, patting Daddy all over, and Daddy giving them the wrong pocket every time he turned. I set tight as a little gray mouse. You do yourself nothing but harm to ask, “Where’s your warrant?” They’ll tell you, “We don’t need one for a rooming house.” You can tell them, “This ain’t no rooming house this is a hotel” then if you want. But one will wait while the other fetches and they’ll make the warrant stick then if they have to plant something to do it. Well, you asked for it.