Entrapment and Other Writings by Nelson Algren
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.
V.
And All the Rest
(1957–1981)
In “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 Lon
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.
G-STRING GOMORRAH
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.
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 jugula
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 the jukes just keep trying to blow the blues away
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.