Entrapment and Other Writings by Nelson Algren
Excuse me, sir—would you mind moving your foot?
AFTERNOON IN THE LAND OF THE STRANGE LIGHT SLEEP
Between seven and eleven a.m. it is quiet on the street; the cats are sleeping the strange light sleep. They have their hour now of neither fever—dream nor dread. Till the sleeping blood begins to stir and they wake up sneezing with watering eyes. Jack-The-Rabbit is on his way.
Loot is heavy and risks are light, grift is fast and The Nab greases easy. Around the corners where ghosts have ghosts and something is always about to burst, whether you push or whether you peddle, times have never been more lush.
“What do you do all the day?” I heard the judge ask the sixteen-year-old in Narcotics Court.
“I lean,” the boy replied, still adrift on a rain-blue cloud, “just lean. I find a hallway or washroom ’n take a shot. Then I lean. Lean ’n dream.”
An evening country where ten a.m. looks like five in the afternoon. Where purple jukes just lean ’n dream.
“How did you get on stuff in the first place?” I asked a girl, some rain-colored cat between cash-register and juke.
“There were so many little troubles floatin’ around,” Not-Yet-Twenty explains, “I figured why not roll ’em all up into one big trouble?”
“Why should a young girl like yourself want to live like this?”
“Don’t bother me with why. For God’s sake, only tell me how.”
It is afternoon in the purple tombs.
Afternoon in the land of the strange light sleep before the piano-men come to work.
“You’re scared of the way I live,” the rain-colored girl goes on. “I’m scared of the way you live. If I lived like you live, I’d be crying all the time. Now, I never cry at all.”
In the lights and glooms of the little bar the juke box, too, looks armored.
“What became of Johnny Ray?” she suddenly wants to know. “He’s the only man ever made me cry. Not when he sang about that little white cloud—that left me dry. It was when he came on pretending to be happy, like ‘Walkin’ My Baby Back Home’—that was what used to break my heart. It wouldn’t just make me cry, either. It would give me the blues. And I don’t mean just the blues. What I got one time was a whole set. What became of him anyhow?”
“I guess he came down with a set himself,” I took a guess. “How did you get on stuff in the first place?”
“Too much vitality. Vitality was runnin’ away with me. I’d go three days ’n nights without sleep ’n knock off for two hours ’n be ready to go again. I got into more hell than the Alamo for no reason—just to make something happen was all. Now I go two hours ’n I’m ready to knock off for three days. To hell with that Alamo. What happened to Coleman Hawkins anyhow?”
“I didn’t hear much about him after Lester Young came along.”
I sat watching her having her lunch: five bennies, five nembutols, two and a half grains of morphine.
“How can you walk with all that stuff in you?” I wanted to know.
“How can I walk without it?” the rain-colored wanted to know. “Tell me, how do you think Coleman Hawkins felt when Lester Young came along?”
“I guess he just had to change his style,” I took another surmise.
“That’s how it is all the time,” she took a guess herself. “Every now and then something comes along and you got change your style. I used to be a real shy chick, so scared of everything. Everybody I knew was making sixty–seventy a week and all I could make was twenty-two-fifty. Some days I couldn’t lay by a dime. Now I make more than that some days before noon. Stuff makes a real little go-getter out of you. And you don’t have to go so far to get it. Actually I’m not a dope fiend at all. I’m just a broad who goes for anything.”
Down in the caves where water drips between old walls and a cellophane moon sends a misting light. They were raised in the ruins and know their own country’s caves as well as you know yours.
“Junk is like God,” says the rain-colored girl, “it makes a place in your heart you’ll never forget. You know you got to be punished for believing, but you go on believing all the same. It’s like being a martyr sort of.”
Before the piano-men come to play.
Who are followed by dozens of phony martyrs, zigzagging zanies, young band rats, and elderly satyrs. Down here where times were never so lush, The Nab greases easy and a cellophane moon bums with a night-blue light.
“And you know it’s not habit-forming,” she gives me a sly nudge, “it just makes you want to try it again.”
In the night-blue bars of the wilderness where the peddler’s name is always Jack-The-Rabbit. And all anyone really wants is just lie down to rest.
“Say, how do you think Slim Gaillard felt when Dizzy came along?”
“l think Slim Gaillard came along before you came along,” I had to remind her. “Times have changed.”
“Times never change. All times are the same.”
Down where long-gone go-getters have little go-getters to guide them about. Down where times never change.
Where the time is always a time for M or a time for H, a time to goof or a time to taper. Where the rhythms of the night or day forever follow the rhythms of the blood. For the blood that moves as the Jack-The-Rabbit moves. As time is told only by the chill that comes up from deep inside and the user needs no watch to know he is starting to freeze. And there is no other time.
“You don’t have to feel sorry for me,” the rain-colored girl assures me. “All I have to do is shove a paper of strychine into my next hype and all you squares will be dead.”
DOWN WITH COPS
I may or may not concede that some cops honestly try to maintain law and order. I will concede part of this, or all of this partly. If an old lady in respectable clothes falls down on the street, the cop will heroically try to help her, but the sight of an old bum on the same street brings out some atavistic desire in the cop with the cop mentality. The fakery of his charity reveals itself. He loves the old lady? Maybe; but, if so, only because it gives him a justification to beat up the old bum.
Not long ago a small girl complained that she had been molested in a Chicago park by a man walking a dog. Two cops, shortly after, discovered a man walking a dog in the same park. They knocked him down without warning, drove him to an abandoned station, and pushed him around until it became clear that they had the wrong man. The man was Judge John T. Dempsey of the Chicago Circuit Court.
“What would have happened to me if I didn’t happen to be a judge?” Judge Dempsey marveled wistfully. He might be doing one-to-life.
The small girl dressing dolls in search of her own femininity, and failing to find it, may grow into a successful fashion designer: still in search. The boy enduring a sickly childhood may become a physician, a clergyman, or an athlete. What of the boy in whom need of social approval runs so deep that he becomes the kid with the cleanest ears, the best table manners, and never smokes, swears, nor insults the girls? When besieged by midnight passion to possess every girl in class and the teacher as well, small wonder he feels there is something wrong with him. Nobody else has such strange desires, he feels, waking in a sweat out of a dream. What is he, some kind of freak?
He doesn’t know he’s healthy. He thinks he’s sick. And from this dangerous illusion his life is pervaded by a conviction that he is inferior. Between the image the world approves and the fantasy he indulges, he drives to the hour when the approval is made official by the badge on his breast; and immunity is granted him to indulge such fantasy. Now at last those who have made him toe the mark are going to have to take their turn at toeing. Now the girl trying to make her room rent by sitting in front of a whiskey glass with a false bottom had better take care: she doesn’t know that she has a lot to make up for to the good-looking, neatly dressed, friendly fellow sitting down next to her.
He must be the same ex-honor student, now striving to get out of patrolman’s blue and into plainclothes, who put a flashlight on the face of a friend of
“What’s your story, buddy?” the cop asked cheerfully. “What’s your excuse?”
Since my friend had no excuse he had no story; so he handed the cop his driver’s license. Upon which the cop leaned over and whispered, man-to-man, “Not here, buddy—why don’t you drive around to that parking lot behind the boathouse—nobody’s parked there this late.”
Up to that moment there had been no lovemaking: the couple had parked, actually, to talk. Now, however, that the man-to-man fuzz was so helpful, the idea began to appeal to them. They drove around to the lot behind the boathouse.
You know the rest of the story: this time two cops, two flashlights, and one the same cop and the same flashlight:
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, mister—saving room rent?”
The cop demanded fifty dollars for himself and another fifty for his partner. My friend gave them ten dollars to divide between them and they appeared to be contented.
After all, the satisfaction of entrapping the pair had been worth something too.
These suspects got off light because they had homes and friends. But what if you don’t own a Diner’s Club card, and your GI insurance is the only asset? What if you’re a part-time fry cook, or an unemployed house painter, or a man without any job at all? Cops can spot an out-of-work man by the walk. In a country where ownership is synonymous with virtue, the moment the cops start to question a nonowner he’s in trouble.
All police departments know that mere rugged health and courage aren’t enough to make a good cop out of a rookie. This is why it is not unusual to have him make his first pinch at a prostitute’s expense. And it’s revealing that he sometimes ends by marrying one. This was remarked upon by a former sheriff of Cook County, and a partial answer supplied by him: “A prostitute who has not gone down the drain can become one of the most tolerant, wisest, and generous human beings imaginable.” The answer is only partial because it overlooks the phenomenon of conscience. The policeman’s conscience is based upon the presumption of guilt: the devil is at the bottom of it all, he knows. But the prostitute presumes innocence. She knows, as soon as a man looks her way, what he has in mind, and regards it as natural. Thus she provides, for the policeman, a connection with the world of freedom of action, while he provides, for her, a connection with the approval world.
Having employed the tone of a man who knows more than the average cop knows, I would do well to ask whether there isn’t something the cop knows that we don’t know.
There is. He knows that if we didn’t want there to be women available for hire, there would be no such women available; he knows that if we did not want to look at “blue” films, there would be no blue-film industry. And he knows that if we did not actually believe that every man is guilty until he is proven innocent, there would be fewer policemen employed to catch those who are merely suspicious.
By virtue of an ordinance known as “The Bad Girl Ban,” Chicago plainclothesmen were empowered to arrest any woman asking a man to buy her a drink. “A clean sweep,” the press called it, yet nobody has yet proposed that we make a really clean sweep by simply arresting all the unescorted women in town.
“One week we’re up and one week we’re down,” a temporarily unemployed bartender remarked philosophically. “If the police wanted the joints shut down, why don’t they just shut them down?” The police aren’t about to shut down the honky-tonk joints. Chicago has a businessman’s police force in a convention city, dependent upon the happiness of out-of-town spenders.
And who, in this law-enforcement-by-scapegoat, is the biggest scapegoat of all if it isn’t the cop?
For isn’t he the man whom we pay to sustain the presumption of innocence? Isn’t he the man whom, in the long run, we pay to exact an eye for an eye, while we piously shrink from the very idea?
Doesn’t the cop become a cop, not merely by putting on a uniform, but when he sees which side his bread is buttered on?
Despite the newspaper crusades, the TV dramas, the movies and pulpit and radio and magazines, all protesting the growth of crime—when it comes right down to the facts, we do want law by entrapment, law by retribution, and law by the strong against the weak.
The cop knows this because of the sanction given him (however displeasing to most judges) to hold court in the streets.
“If you didn’t have it in mind to hit some poor old man on the head and rob him,” the cop demands of the drifter-of-no-trade, “what were you doing in the bar?” This pinch comes under the heading of “reasonable cause.”
The devil being at the bottom of it all, it’s the cop’s duty, he feels, to keep people from acting funny before they do something funny. As in this scene, enacted in the court of a judge of the Criminal Court of Cook County:
Officer: This man was arrested by two officers of our unit last night at seven o’clock. He’s been in custody ever since, and we have nothing on him.
Judge: Why was this man arrested?
Officer: Well, it would probably come under the category, your honor, of a routine pickup in instances like this.…
Judge: Can you explain to the court why, after the interrogation ended, this man was kept in custody all night?
Officer: No sir, I would not be able to explain to you, your honor. All I can say is that it’s been going on for years relative to the same thing.
Some of these things, “relative to the same thing,” are sufficiently comical if you don’t happen to be the poor joker they happen to. Such as that nocturnal drifter-of-no-trade trapped washing his clothes in a laundromat in Florida wearing nothing but a sheet.
“When I walked in,” the arresting officer complained somberly, “here’s this guy, cold sober, standing over a washing machine, whistling, with no clothes on him. So I asked him where were his clothes.”
“In the machine,” the drifter-of-no-trade replied, “they were dirty. I’ve washed them. Now I’m waiting for them to dry.”
“People aren’t supposed to wash their clothes in public with nothing on them but a sheet,” said the officer.
“There wasn’t anybody in here when I came in,” the suspect explained. “Now everybody’s coming in.”
“Put on your clothes.”
“I can’t,” the drifter-of-no-trade said. “They’re wet.”
“Put them on all the same.”
The prisoner was booked into the county jail. He explained, “I was just in there for thirty days. That’s how come my clothes got so crummy.”
The sanction given the officer here, to keep running the same poor clown in and out of the clink, is merely pathetic. When such sanction passes from the courts to television, it becomes ominous.
Chicago viewers some time ago were treated to a TV special whereon TUF (Task Undercover Force) provided the heroes and West Madison Street inadvertently played the villain. It was quite a treat.
The opening shot showed us a coiffeur and a cosmetician ministering to two cops, one white and one Negro. Given hairdos, artificial lashes, and falsies, and putting their big feet into high-heeled shoes, the two went promenading, their handbags swinging.
Thirty feet behind them, concealed in a beat-up truck advertising itself as a mover’s van, a hundred thousand dollars in electronic equipment rolled slowly. And, behind the truck, a platoon of armed cops, keeping out of sight but on the ready. All this to a soundtrack ticking off seconds to remind viewers that our boys in blue were getting ready to go over the top.
The phony hookers must have looked too good to be true, because they got no play at all. But a lone cop, collar open, hair mussed, in plainclothes and staggering, picking himself up to hum a few bars of “Auld Lang Syne” and stagger on, was finally stopped by a genuine hooker.
“Mister,” she told him, “you better go home. Somebody is going to rob you.” Then she walked on. You could feel the disappointment all over town. The camera shifted to a character leaning against a wall. As the decoy came by, th
While the editorials, on the day after, expressed self-satisfaction, and TV columnists continued on that day to express alarm because some actress did a bump and grind on a program presenting The Beatles, not one had the ordinary decency to disapprove of a display of lynch law on TV. So why should we be shocked that thirty-eight people in a New York City residential district witnessed from their windows a murder of a woman, and didn’t make a move? Are we to assume that these thirty-eight are somehow more callous than any other thirty-eight men and women in any other residential section, coast to coast?
You can’t have it both ways. Between a city wherein millions sit, eating TV dinners with complacency or glee, to watch a man in need of hospitalization be roughed up by the city’s finest, and one wherein thousands turned out to witness a public hanging, I fail to see a large choice. The thousands, too, brought their lunches.
“I call upon you to remember,” Sir Samuel Romilly warned a century and a half ago, “that cruel punishments have an inevitable tendency to produce cruelty in the people.”
Thus, ultimately, the cop is no more than the instrument which fulfills us; no more than the extension of our own vindictiveness. And his secret enjoyment of flashing his light on the parked couple, or of crying, “Open the door!” on the midnight stair, is no more than our own secret enjoyment.
THE EMBLEMS AND THE PROOFS OF POWER
Mr. Joel Wells
The Critic
180 N. Wabash
Chicago, Ill.
Dear Mr. Wells,
Thank you for asking my opinion of young Americans “who are making a cult of neo-Nazi paraphernalia.” I’m pleased to hear the market is coming back.