Entrapment and Other Writings (7 page)

Tell the 26-game nifties they can all go home now:

The streets are getting lighter and the Clark Street cats are running again;

Each can turn off a little green night bulb

Lay the nightlamp lengthwise along the green baize of the 26-board

Put the big colored dice back in the faded shaker,

Have one last cigarette in the can and go home.

For the glasses are empty and the kitty is almost full,

The streets are getting noisy and the music-box is still.

And running a 26-game on North Clark Street

Has sitting all night in a Pixley and Ehlers’ over a single cup of coffee

Beat any fifty ways you could name.

The boys in the three-piece orchestra can go home now,

And the come-on girl fingering a pink paper gardenia and saying,

“My feet is killen me but I’m still dancen”—

Can walk two blocks east and have breakfast No. 9 at the Greek’s with her best boyfriend

And be back dancing in bed; all in twenty-five minutes flat.

But the brown boy who gets an indifferent hand for imitating Stepin Fetchit,

Saying in a studied drawl while kneeling for pennies,

“Thank yo’ all fo’ de neckbones, suh,”

Will have to ride out to 47th and Prairie,

The longest ride of all.

And who can say certainly whether the music-box will ever play
My Heart Belongs to Daddy
again?

Who can be so sure that the big colored dice will be rolling 26 tonight just the same as any other night?

And even Mushky Leviton,

Ex-pug crawling on canvas in a South State sideshow after even fewer pennies than the brown boy picks up,

After the fake match is over and he starts sweeping out,

When the girl who takes tickets is long gone and her cage long darkened—

Even Mushky, once he’s through sweeping, can go home

Now that it’s full morning, now that it’s full summer,

Now that everything’s going to turn out all right after all,

Now that we know each other so much better,

Now that this is America, now that we’re in Chicago,

Now that neither you nor I have anywhere special to go now that we’re both broke.

(The girl in the little room smelling of Lifebuoy can say for the last time tonight,

“Goodnight, Daddy. But come again sometime.”

And all the boys named Homer, and all the boys named Dewey, all the boys named Grover Cleveland

And all the boys named Blaine and Orville,

All the girls called Queenie, all the girls called Bébé, called Sherry and Roxy and Ginger and Renée,

And the punched-out Madison Street strip-teaser singing
Red Sails in the Sunset

Since the
State and Congress
closed going on seven years now—

All can go home now that it’s morning and the ticket cages are darkened

And the Clark Street cars are running again.)

Remember the murmurous breathers at morning

In the stalled bus on the highway

The pale Americans stricken with pale blue sleep

On rented pillows

Beside blind windows on US 61.

Remember above, a rented neon moon

Tethered all night to an all-night restroom:

Bathing American breathers in a blue and rented sleep.

Remember the darkened bus in the ruined town by the levee,

The boarded windows and broken panes by the river,

The abandoned feed-stores facing the moving Ohio.

Long freights passed in the woods in Kentucky,

Their shadows, as any army’s shadows, moved south on the moving waters,

Their engine boilers lit fragments, of flood-time in old October,

Strewn on Kentucky’s shore.

O big rivers of the republic

Running the unplanted land and the littered shores of Kentucky.

Big wet sky of the republic over the big wet land,

That afternoon the cottonwoods crowded in the hot swamp

Behind the abandoned filling station

And a thousand nameless weeds thronged the prairie waterfront:

These grew rankly by day and stank by night

Beside the Civil War hotel where Ulysses S. Grant lay drunken

Before Fort Defiance.

(Leaning muddied boots on the twisted French railings and spitting Old Blue Seal Scrap.)

The Hotel US Grant still squats like a blind red ox,

Blind and squat as Grant himself
Staring blindly toward Vicksburg at midnight,

At barricades built against flood-time

Above the blockaded river,

Above fragments of old October.

Above an endless army’s shadows,

Moving south through the woods through Kentucky.

Skidmarks across the street from the 34th Street wall of Comiskey Park indicate Piccioli was thrown from an auto going west. Three .25 calibre bullets fired at close range into the back of the neck.…

—Item,
Chicago Daily Times

He was born above a rear-lot garage facing an alley,

And once got lost between Chicago Avenue and West Division.

He was raised between the change of a Damen Avenue stoplight from red to green,

Between the clack of an ivory-tipped cue in a North Avenue poolroom

And the fall of the fifteen ball into a corner pocket.

Between a poolroom grin of triumph and a single dying groan.

Between the time it takes to rack up for rotation

And the time to pay off. No massé shots allowed.

Between the warning whistle for the first round of a welterweight windup at White City

And the final bell.

Between the hammer

And the anvil.

They found him necking his waltz-night girl at the Cherry Gardens

While the chandeliers were changing slowly from lavender to orchid.

Between the mezzanine and the balcony, wearing patent-leather pumps,

And Jerry Johnson’s Royal Swingsters playing
My Last Goodbye to You
.

They spoke softly to him in a shadowed corner of the newly-tiled urinal.

While the lights turned slowly to a sad sea-green.

When he asked the cloakroom blonde for his topcoat

The vast marble lobby turned the heavenliest pink.

He left between them with the topcoat slung over his arm

And the toes of the pumps reflecting the pink of the lights.

The Royal Swingsters swung easily into
Blame It on My Last Affair
.

With a pansy doing the vocal.

PLAYERS WILL KEEP ONE FOOT ON THE FLOOR
.

NO TRICK SHOTS OR LOUD TALKING ALLOWED
.

KINDLY RACK UP YOUR CUE
.

The car moved, as any other shadow,

Beneath the shadowed El.

Two of them held him while another loosened his collar.

There was no use leaving a tell-tale burn in the shirt.

They stopped speaking softly between Wabash and State.

And parked in the alley beneath the Congress Street station

Until the groan of the El overhead could muffle the shot.

He fainted once during that wait, and came to in a sweat.

Just as the El overhead began slowing down toward the station.

They stuffed him into the topcoat,

Feet first for the sake of time,

And buttoned it high so he wouldn’t catch cold

Wrapping the collar carefully about the pointed pumps

And draping him over the side, to let him drip:

The moving El clattered faintly, curving south toward Twelfth.

They turned east on the Drive and west down 34th.

They let his heels drag for one darkened mile

That almost ruined his shine

And got rid of him at last, without slowing down,

Passing the darkened park.

He lay among other undersized weeds

In the prairie behind the grandstand.

The grey-gloved fingers twitched once

And the trouser legs stirred in the wind.

The toes scratched a bit in the sand:

It was that that ruined the pumps

It wasn’t the ride at all.

NO LOUD TALKING PERMITTED
.

NO TRICK SHOTS ALLOWED
.

THIS TABLE ON TIME ONLY
.

Kindly rack up his cue.

Pity Pietra Lefkowicz Schmies

Scrubbing the office of Ed. J. Kelly

His stairs are of steel and his walls are of marble

She scrubs his urinal on her knees.

Pity all such on their knees in Chicago

Pity all cabbies without a fare,

Pity the sick thief seeking a bondsman

Pity the city where Kelly is mayor.

The neon sign in the funeral home

Burns jade beside a potted palm,

A hatless drunk in an arc-lamp’s light

Confides to the lamp the Fourteenth Psalm.

It is twenty to two by the potted palm

It is twenty to two in the best hotel,

It is twenty to two by a hatless drunk

It is twenty to two on the Lake Street El.

What time will it be when the last El crashes?

What time will it be in the funeral home?

Will a neon sign by a potted palm

Light a hatless drunk to a crumbling tomb?

Go home, Pietra Lefkowicz Schmies

Grab the Lake Street El and crawl into bed,

The wall is falling behind your mop

The floor is falling beneath your knees.

(1943–1947)

O
ver the course of his life and career, Algren wrote and published a vast amount. And some things never changed. His fiction and poetry remained studies in reality (although, as his good friend Studs Terkel always noted, perhaps in part to differentiate Algren’s books from his own, Algren’s characters were different from the people he based them on). But other things about Algren’s writing did change over the years. There was an identifiable trend that differentiated his major accomplishments of the 1930s and 40s—the years that produced
Never Come Morning, The Neon Wilderness
, and
The Man with the Golden Arm
—from the books he wrote in the 50s (
Chicago: City on the Make, A Walk on the Wild Side
, and the never-completed
Entrapment
) and those of the 60s: the travel writings that formed the bulk of
Who Lost an American?
and
Notes from a Sea Diary
, and the short reportage and fiction collected in
The Last Carousel
. The trend was away from the robust ambition of the great American novelist inspired by the great Russian and European novelists of the nineteenth century, and towards a much more humble and sardonic—and more distinctly American—outsider role for Algren, although the production never stopped and hardly even slowed down for the better part of five decades.

Here are three largely unknown works from the 1940s, Algren’s most prolific and powerful decade as a writer. One is an essay on writing, the other two are stories. “Do It the Hard Way,” the earliest of the several essays gathered here, appeared in the
Writer
in 1943 (“America’s Oldest Magazine for Literary Workers” is how the magazine saw itself). The burden of Algren’s argument in this piece of encouragement to young writers is that one need not sell out, that “despite the temptations of the big rewards of hack serialization
and of the How-Did-He-Get-Rid-of-the-Corpse market,” it is still possible “to write honestly, for honest men; for the milkman, for the janitor, for the street-car conductor …”

“Hank, the Free Wheeler” offers something decidedly different from Algren. Begun in the 1930s for “Chicago Industrial Folklore,” a collection sponsored by the Federal Writers’ Project (part of Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Project Administration), “Hank” is one of several such assignments undertaken by the cash-strapped Algren. Ostensibly told to Algren by an unnamed workingman, the story has been polished to conform to the conventions of the tall tale—here, the account of an entrepreneur who valued speed and efficiency above all else. “Hank, the Free Wheeler” was included in
A Treasury of American Folklore
, edited by B. A. Botkin (1944).

“Single Exit,” first published in 1947, is one of the more interesting of Algren’s uncollected stories, and reasons for its omission from
The Neon Wilderness
, like that of “The Lightless Room,” are not known. The story, conjuring an aura of spooky mystery, concerns the barely respectable Katz, a man who has slept “nightly with shame” and who, after “years of furtive living in rented rooms,” dreams one midnight that he has awakened and left his sleeping wife behind for an adventure in the hotel bar downstairs, a place where all “respectability [is] suspect.”