Entrapment and Other Writings by Nelson Algren
“What if them tennis-shoe laces break,” Frankie worried to himself late that night—“Would that punk just tie them up and forget it or would he send for a new pair, just as though he was going to be around to wear them out? Did Lester really believe he was going to die? Actually die? A break in the shoe laces, Frankie realized tensely, would put Lester to the test: if the punk ordered a new pair it would show he didn’t believe in his own death. If he didn’t, it would show he didn’t have the nerve to pretend any longer. But what if they broke—and he ordered a new pair just to show off? Or if he said, “Don’t bother with a new pair, Warden. I’m kicking off on the 15th of next month, I’ll make these last until then.”
Frankie harassed himself into an uneasy sleep.
At night, they said, Little Lester had not been sleeping well. He would waken and ask to play casino with the night screw through the bars. The night screw had taught him the game, Lester had grown to like it as the shadows behind him grew longer.
One night, somebody told Bonarue, somebody who’d had it right from the night screw, Lester had had a long laugh at a misplay the screw had made. He had been happy because of beating the guard at the guard’s own game.
And that, somehow, hit Frankie worse than if they’d said he was lying on his bunk in a dead-cold nightmare, sweating out the chair. Instead he was sitting there killing the time with casino and “sigerettes.” Just as Frankie himself had, so often at home, sitting by the sink, while a clock ticked off the hours and his own shadows had lengthened.
Here there were no clocks. Yet each man knew the hour. All clocks were set forever here at midnight. If you wanted to know the time you asked the screw and were told, inevitably, “What you want to know for? You’re not going nowheres.”
And always it seemed to Frankie that it was wrong of Little Lester to tie his shoelaces neatly as it was for him to be reading his favorite book, something called How to Write Better Business Letters. As wrong as it had been for him to crow over beating the night-screw or sending for the barber to have his sideburns trimmed. The punk would be asking to have the collar starched on that last white shirt he’d ever wear, Frankie felt. And waited.
Everyone waited, with something like resentment, for Lester to break. Everyone sensed he had only been acting to keep up his nerve.
“He’ll forget his act when they take him downstairs,” Bonarue assured Frankie on the execution night. “Wait till they trim off them side-burns and make him try on them long black tights for size.”
It was rumored that Lester had already boasted of what his last meal should be: “A t-bone wit’ enough sheenie-bread so’s I can sop up the gravy.” A copy of Esquire and a package of gum was the rest of it.
“He won’t even be on his legs when he goes through the little white door,” Bonarue decided. “They’ll have to lift him into the seat ’n shove his nose through the helmet. Wait till he feels that sponge pressin’ his ankle and his leg gettin’ bound to the voltage clamp. He’ll konk out. I know that brave-guy type.”
And as Bonarue spoke so, in the bunk above his own, the figure of Little Lester became, to Frankie Machine, more and more that of his own; till the finger of the accusing past seemed to touch his forehead and he wanted to sweat and couldn’t; till he wanted to be sick, and couldn’t. All he could do was heave.
If only Lester would break down. It would be so good for Frankie’s soul. If the punk would only start bawling like a baby, beg for mercy like a girl, scream for his dead mother—if he didn’t, Frankie felt, Frankie Machine might start screaming himself: there was a small panic in his throat that he had to keep swallowing down; and had to keep assuring himself that there was nothing on the books against him more serious than the theft of an electric iron.
A single senseless cry, from some con fighting the same pressure which Lester’s pretense had been putting upon them all, rang through the walls. Immediately a hundred sleepers wakened, calling passionately to each other, none knowing why he called or what it was that all feared so wildly. The night-guards came off their stools shouting, it was one of those reasonless tides of panic which seize men and women in jails and asylums, which cannot be subdued by blows but dies instead, as abruptly as it has begun, of its own accord; and just as reasonlessly.
They said, between the bakery and the laundry, between print-shop and mess, they said he’d come out of the cell wearing the long black tights and the white shirt buttoned over one shoulder like a fencer’s shirt, looking proud as he could be of his fancy outfit. They said it had taken hardly a minute to adjust the chair. They said, they said. They said there had been one contact for the nape of the neck and one for the pale right ankle. They said that after the unseen switch had been pulled the left knee had kicked up just once, as if tapped by a sharp ruler. Just once was all, they said. Toward the chin already hanging loose.
They said the single shoulder button had been stripped off in taking the shirt down, to expose the poor seared heart. Six doctors then, in alphabetical order, had pronounced the heart as dead as any Westside punk’s heart can get: a charred lump of spoiled meat sagging where once the living heart had burned.
There had been one hundred and twenty men and two women on the benches, one of the trustees said, in the front row reserved for newspaper men.
It had all been spick and span behind the glass, everything had gone off in tip-top legal order, there had not been so much as a tell-tale flickering of the lights throughout the vast building.
Four buttons had been pushed by four unnamed men—but only one had pushed a live one. No one would have to think it was himself had pushed the live one and none would ever know who had.
They had used an amperage of eight, everyone knew, because that was the regular amperage for white men. Everyone said. Just like the regular amperage for colored men was seven and a half.
Then they’d thrown him nine hundred extra volts just to make dead sure. Everyone knew all about it. Everyone told everyone else just how it had gone off just as if each had been the sole witness.
It wasn’t until after he’d been released, two months later, that Frankie Machine learned that Little Lester hadn’t reached the chair. He had died on his death-cell bed with fourteen weary hours yet to go.
A heart attack or strychnine, the warden said one thing and the coroner’s physician another.
It depended so much upon whom you asked. And mattered so little either way.
PAPER DAISIES
A light rain brought the spring, that year, to a cold, autumnal close.
Frankie Machine came down Division, where only arc-lamps and fire-hydrants grow, feeling that a tightly wound spring within himself had snapped, and that there could be no re-winding. A stretch at 26th and California had left his fingers feeling weakened by the lack of a fresh deck’s touch; five months is too long for a dealer to be kept out of a dealer’s slot.
“But once you got the touch,” he assured himself, “it’s always with you, you get it back in the slot.”
In his frayed army jacket with the faded PFC stripe still on the sleeve, he returned to his city’s bivouac like a weary AWOL returning to barracks from which his own home outfit has long been scattered and their name forgotten. And so turned into his own dark hall.
Schautzy the Carpenter, and Schautzy’s dimwitted twenty-year-old, Stefan, crouched there in the darkness together, upon the stairwell they had been repairing since fall. He knew his job, this Schautzy insisted, and that was the very reason the broken tread was still broken. He had torn up the sound treads above and below it, the better to get at the offending one, he explained, confidentially, to make the job look as tough as possible to the landlord; an attitude which has its appeal to all good tenants.
And had brought along Stefan to plant artificial flowers in the cracks of the first flight’s treads. It kept the motherless slug out of the way of the taunts of brighter children. Though he was not permitted to plant his precious flowers higher than the first flight. Even on rainy days, when
Everyone knew Schautzy didn’t bring his hammer and nails to fix the stair so much as he did to argue with Violet Koskoska, the redheaded barfly of the fourth floor rear. Hammer and nails were really the symbols of Schautzy’s courtship: the courtship of the hurled insult and the ready threat.
“No hammering on Sunday!” Violet was demanding, as the dealer entered the door, from the fourth-floor banister. “Drunk carpenter! Go home! Hammer by Mrs. You!”
“Mrs. Me not permit on Sundays, hammering,” Schautzy defied her. “Too much hammer all week!”
“All winter he hammers one board!” There was feigned scorn in her voice.
“Come down I hammer your board,” the carpenter invited her with a leer the dealer could almost feel in the dimness. “You try carpenter’s hammer! You try, you like! Try for size! Come quick!”
“Sha-a-ame, Carpenter,” Violet reproached him, with a hint of softness in her voice—“drinkin’ up your boy’s milk at the bars!”
“Leave the helpless child out of this!” Schautzy sounded stern and waved the hammer threateningly, like something not for helpless children at all.
While the boy himself went on placidly planting faded daisies in the staircracks and did not even look up at the rear of his father’s courting.
Both Stefan and Frankie knew that the old man was all motion and wind. If Violet came down the steps toward him, the hammer would fall to his side and he would press himself against the wall, in an access of shyness, to let her pass like a stranger.
Frankie stepped softly past Stefan, taking care not to trample the paper daisies. But the old man caught his hammer’s claw in the belt of Frankie’s jacket and hauled him back firmly.
“Don’t think you done wrong, Dealer,” he assured Frankie with such earnestness that Frankie wondered, watching that grizzled, grayish, boozed and furrowed mug, why the old man was always so intent on lending fresh heart to everyone else.
“Don’t torture yourself! Don’t suffer!”
Frankie got the big veined hand off sleeve, though it took all the strength in his fingers to do it. “All I done was a little stealin’, Carpenter,” he assured the old man gently, “ ’N I done my time, so it’s all forgot.”
But as Schautzy bent once more to the stairs, with a nail, for the sake of appearances, in his teeth, Frankie heard him murmur fiercely, through his clenched jaws: “There’s those who ought to be knocked in the head—I want that kind knocked in the head!”
Then the hammer’s touch, light and calm and sane, a master carpenter’s hammer, showed that the old man felt better for having said something he had had in his heart.
“You got a good heart all the same, old man,” Frankie thought, as if just realizing it, though everyone knew that the old man had a good heart.
It was only that there was so little demand for good hearts these days.
For hearts shaped like valentines are long gone out of fashion. What is more in demand are hearts with a bit of iron about the edges—and a twist to the iron at that. That’s the kind that comes highest of all these days.
A heart, say, with a claw like a hammer’s iron claw, better for ripping than tapping—that’s what is needed to get by of late. It’s the new style in hearts, they say: the non-corrugated kind don’t wear as well as they used to do.
On the second flight the dealer passed the desk that still held a sullen, soiled cardboard warning to stranger and friend alike:
QUIET
OR OUT YOU GO TOO.
And since he’d been gone, he noticed, the twenty-watt bulb at the head of each stair had been painted red, for some reason.
His own door still bore, in bright bald tin, the number he had himself nailed to its scarred wood on the day before he had taken his fall: ‘48.’ Like the number of a forgotten year, when he himself had been nailed to the wood. And as he paused before that number, heard, on the other side of the door, his own clock ticking within, like the tick of a metal-bound heart.
Clocks with a touch of metal in the tick—that’s what makes a good dealer’s hours pass the fastest.
Fingers that never fail in the slot—that’s what makes a good dealer’s fingers.
Paper daisies in a stairwell’s cracks—that’s what makes the very best sort of idiot’s garden.
And hearts with a bit of a twist in the iron—that’s what makes a good hustler’s heart.
IV.
Entrapment
(1951–1953)
Buoyed by the tremendous reception of The Man with the Golden Arm, Algren set out to write Entrapment, which was to be an even more powerful evocation, an even more ambitious undertaking. In place of the more traditional, if ironic, omniscient narrator he usually favored for his novels, Entrapment was to lean heavily on the first person voice, a technique he had used to great effect in his stories, but had not attempted before in a novel. And the first person voice here was going to be a woman’s voice, again an ambitious departure for Algren.
As he worked on the novel, laboring over draft after draft in which only a few words or a section title might change in the retyping and rethinking of an entire chapter or scene that went on for twenty or thirty or fifty pages, the storyline evolved. This was to be about a woman and a man who are brought down, gradually, by the antic, desperate terms of engagement in the world they inhabit, that of drug addiction, petty crimes, and bare survival. But in the end, and this too was a departure for an Algren novel, the woman, fallen though she may be, escapes to a better life, leaving behind the man who, for the first time in an Algren novel, is a supporting actor, yielding the leading role to Beth-Mary/Baby. This is a love story, too, an epic romance, Algren’s Doctor Zhivago if you will. But in the end, perhaps partially due to the narrative arc of Algren’s own personal story during the years when we was working on Entrapment, it became the book he couldn’t write, and what remains are these tantalizing fragments of what could have been.
The basis for the character of Beth-Mary, who is the central character of Entrapment, was Algren’s longtime friend and sometime lover Margo, someone he’d met in 1946 or ’47. Margo had come from Ohio where she’d been a prostitute and had started shooting heroin. Algren had been researching the addiction angle for The Man with the Golden Arm. And in a way, Entrapment was to be the continuation of Man, a book that would push the envelope even further perhaps, since for all the acclaim he’d received for The Man with the Golden Arm, Algren still ended up feeling it “hadn’t made a dent,” hadn’t really changed our society in even the smallest way. So maybe this new novel would.
There is a wonderful autobiographical piece in The Last Carousel called “Previous Days,” first published in the Chicago Sunday Tribune in 1972, in which Algren recounts some of his observations of people who interested him. In one passage, he describes Margo and the time he tried to get her off heroin, a memory among those he used to create the core love relationship in Entrapment. Here in the nonfictional original, it is already imbued with the surfeit of emotional content that characterizes Algren’s transformation of reallife people he knew and loved into the inhabitants of his novels:
Shortly after I got out of the Army, in 1945, I fell in love with a West Madison Street hooker. She was twenty-two, a country girl who’d become street-wise, cynical, comical, and vulnerable. I didn’t know she was on heroin. I’d never met a user. All I knew about drug addiction was what I’d read in the Sunday supplements.
And I was too square, when I did find out, to grasp what that meant. No habit on earth but could not be broken by simple willpower: I really believed that! And became absolutely determined to break hers.
I was living in a two-room $10-a-month rear-lot flat on Wabansia and Bosworth. I cut off her connection and put her to
Did I say sick? For what began hitting that child toward evening, “sick” is no word. And that was only the beginning. By midnight she’d gone blind. I was really into something now: the girl was either going to die or go mad, that was plain. I had to leave her to find help.
I had never seen her connection. All I had to go on was that his name was Max. Try locating a heroin pusher named Max on West Madison between midnight and 4 a.m. some rainy morning. Can you imagine a square, still in his Army jacket and fatigue cap, stopping every doorway hooker with the curious approach, “I’m a friend of Margo’s and she needs help.” They fled into the shadows, they fled into halls; they vanished in silence or just turned away.
Finally I went into a White Tower hamburger stand, on the northwest corner of Aberdeen and Madison, that had a full view of the street. And sat there watching the night-people pass in hope of spotting someone who looked like a pusher. Even though I had no idea what a pusher looked like.
A little lame man, wearing double-lensed glasses and a cap shadowing his eyes, came in and sat at the counter. He looked so wrong he had to be somebody. I sat beside him looking into the mirror trying to catch his eye. He wasn’t trying to catch mine. I didn’t speak until he had a cup of coffee almost to his lips.
“I’m a friend of Margo’s,” I told him softly, “she needs help.”
The cup clattered against his teeth. He had to put it down to keep from spilling it. It took him a minute to get up his nerve to look at me in the mirror. Then he looked relieved.