Algren at Sea

by Nelson Algren

  When you’re drinking another man’s booze and yet you feel his success is a hollow fraud, your obvious move, as a gentleman, is to say good night.

  Lucky for me, I’m no gentleman. Even when asked to leave, if the booze is free I stay on in the event that some one may start frying eggs. After that I may say good night, but only when force is resorted to and not always then. What I wanted to get straight, before leaving here, was which generation, the Beat or the Upbeat, was the most revolutionary. I wanted to stick around long enough to see whether Allen Howlberg or Gregory Corset would drop in. Their poetry, like Hefner’s cartoons, had always spoken as the voice of a group. Of “We” but never of “I.” I felt they would be at home among people who preferred dances in which nobody touched another.

  One eye on the entrance to the grotto in event next month’s Playmate of the Month should swim in, and the other squirrel-eyeing Vic Lownes’s door in the ceiling, I had a hard time reading Mr. Davidson’s piece in the Post.

  “The emphasis on hi-fi, sports cars, good food and drink,” Hefner kept explaining to Mr. Davidson, who seemed to be getting bored, “good entertainment, good literature and good music”—“is to stimulate our young men to educate themselves so they can make enough money to enjoy these benefits. In this way we can help overcome the educational gap between ourselves and the Russians. Our mission is to make this the Upbeat Generation instead of the Beat Generation and thus perform a service for America.”

  One more time!

  One more time!

  Meaning, I took it, that “we’ll eat so well and dress so well and drive so many sports models that the Russians will break at last. ‘We can’t stand the pace,’ they’d have to admit. ‘Please take us over.’”

  And overnight the conquering symbol of the Upbeat Generation, a pair of bunny ears, would be flying over the Kremlin!

  For it wasn’t, as Marx had thought, hunger that led to revolution. It was affluent rebels buying Hollywood beds and nylon carpeting, rotating sunlamps and Playboy party kits who were overthrowing the old regime. I glanced apprehensively about me: these people were dangerous.

  Which was the real Hefner, the Post inquired; the playboy or the businessman? And promptly plumped for the businessman who was selling “mail-order sophistication” to middle-aged American sophomores who think they can buy good taste “for a six-dollar magazine subscription.”

  The Post’s Mr. Davidson had just scored a near miss. He was right in pointing out that Hefner is a businessman and no closer to being a playboy than Pepsi Cola is to being a Martini, but the product Hefner is selling is more than mail-order sophistication. Hefner himself provides the lead:

  “My whole early life was a telescoping of the Puritanical, unproductive years that the entire country went through. Maybe I have become a symbol of revolt because of that, because I was never really free until the day my magazine was born. Before then I had lived through one series of restrictions after another. We had three unhappy years,” he adds of his marriage, “and the walls around me grew higher.”

  In recalling his early embarrassment at putting an arm around a girl, the interviewer had given his subject the benefit of the doubt that he no longer suffers such embarrassment. But the bosomy girls blooming in the pages of Playboy or serving the key holders of the Playboy Club are not blooming in order to gain a lover’s caress; but, rather, to serve as an object of temptation that the righteous man (read “business” for “righteous”) will resist.

  The weakness in our society that the Post accredits Hefner with discovering is not a weakness so much as it is a falsification, and one of which H. L. Mencken made much. It is the puritan falsification that damns the act of love as evil because it leads to birth, and birth brings original sin.

  No matter that the maddened fathers of Salem dressed their women in black instead of bunny suits: the feeling toward women was the same, and they sang it:O lovely appearance of death,

  No sight upon earth is so fair

  As the flesh when the spirit hath fled—

  and as life that comes from women is evil, so women are evil. The force behind Hefner’s image of a woman is one of contempt born of deepest fear. What he is selling is Cotton Mather Puritanism in a bunny outfit.

  These were young men and women who saw that the promise of America lay in what the country could do for them. It kept them doing the Twist to all hours.

  Hefner’s salary, as editor and publisher of Playboy, is $100,000 a year. He also receives $300 a week from International Playboy Clubs, Inc.

  “These are material things,” he explains, “but awfully fundamental and what made this country prosper. It was losing sight of them in the thirties and forties that placed this country in jeopardy.”

  Upstairs I could hear them getting the country out of jeopardy.

  One more time!

  One more time!

  O’Daddyland was a secret country that rose on West Congress Street a decade ago, flourished secretly, then ceased to be when His Imperial Majesty, Our Lord High Sovereign Dingdong Daddy, ceased to be. Just as the first jackhammers of the new expressway began breaking stone a mile away.

  Nobody came to the bare wood door of O’Daddyland but Daddy’s old cellmate: some shambling piece of psychotic refuse who had his own knock late in each brown afternoon. And left after dark with several brown boxes, bound with brown twine and marked First Class, for depositing in out-of-town postal stations.

  For there flowed behind O’Daddyland’s door a ceaseless Niagara, a true rushing cataract, a winding Blue Nile of girls, girls, girls.

  Don’t-Care girls and Won’t-Care girls and Can’t-Care girls. Girls from the country looking flattered, girls from the brothels looking wronged. And some, it seemed, who were strangely praying.

  All in attitudes of carnal passion. Blue films, stag films, stills, postcards, and comic strips that would have caused the mind of the creator of Daisy Mae Hawkins to snap instantly—all left like brown ships topheavy with obscenity for ports where love-making is never thought of as anything but a game.

  So all day long the half-crazed king went slipper-slopping through the dark old flat, coughing, hawking, sneezing, sleezing, one shoulder higher than the other from sleeping forty years on federal iron, now and then spitting against the wall.

  How young had he been when he’d gone up? So young, for certain, that he had never had a woman. And a leadpipe cinch he’d not had one since.

  Why, the judge had wanted to know of the boy forty years before, had he not backed off from the man and gone his way? The boy had not known then, and the man still did not know now. Time and the goat had had Dingdong Daddy, and he still did not know why. The charge had been murder in the second degree.

  It had turned out to be murder in the first.

  “Not a can in the joint but wasn’t there on a woman’s account,” Daddy would tell his old mate, and the old mate would nod on, nod off: he had heard all this before.

  In a dream, a week before he died, Daddy saw himself binding a box marked First Class with brown twine. Just as he drew the twine taut, it went slack in his hands, and he wakened feeling there was barely time, just time. All day, in waking, he drew brown twine taut. And at night, the whole day’s work unraveled in dreams.

  He slept. And had bad dreams.

  He died on a day when the birch beneath his window had just put on her first spring greenery. The old mate knocked once, knocked again; then let himself in.

  Dingdong Daddy had the glaze on his eyes. But he sat up, when he sensed someone near, and began to sing—I’m a Dingdong Daddy from Dumas

  ’n’ you oughta see me do my stuff.

  He died on the first day of spring greenery, when jackhammers of the new expressway were breaking stone a mile away.

  The old mate covered him. and went through the flat to see what he could pick up. He found nothing—yet he paused when the kitchen light went on. To see what Daddy had drawn on the wall above the sink.

  It was a crud
e caricature of a naked woman, knock-kneed, bald, buttocks sagging, breasts hanging to her navel, and the whole stippled by a disfiguring hair. Below it he had scrawled:WOMIN DRAW FLIES

  That was Dingdong Daddy’s message to the world.

  “Hef is the playboy of the western world who, at 34, has built a sixteen-million dollar empire by doing exactly what he wants, surrounding himself with more beauty than a pasha of the past, not as a sultan with a harem but because he seeks brains in bright packages.”9

  I reread that, and it came out the same: “Hef ” employed good-looking women just in order to surround himself, and I had had no idea that there could be that much in merely being surrounded. Could there be something wrong with the interviewer?

  “Hef had no idea of founding a successful magazine enterprise,” I read on, “it was just that he wanted to publish a magazine in which he could do the things he wanted to do. He wanted to write and draw and crack jokes. He was champing at the bit, ready to break with whatever security he had—if only he could make a bare living at what he wanted to do. His is the wondrous tale of a Chicago boy who became the Midas of the Midwest.”

  It was the interviewer. Who, in the first rush of his excitement at finding himself in the living room of a pasha of the past, had nipped Hef unintentionally by naming him a Midas. Croesus was whom he had in mind, for the reputation that operator acquired for having amassed incredible wealth. Midas was merely a Greek scapegoat afflicted by Apollo with ass’s ears for preferring the music of Pan to that of the gods.

  Yet Midas succeeded in keeping the ears hidden from everyone but the town barber. The barber promised not to snitch, and kept his word. All he did was whisper a certain state secret to a hole in the ground.

  And out of the hole grew a reed purely bursting with information. That tipped the wink to a passing breeze, and the breeze carried the shame of Midas to every Woo Grotto in Greece! That’s how it is in mythology, men. That’s how it really is.

  It didn’t necessarily follow, I took cognizance, that Hef Pasha was wearing ass’s ears. They not only better befitted the interviewer but constituted a step upward, from kennel to stable, for him.

  Thus absently dreaming on brains in bright packages, I folded the interview back into its nest and shuffled through other treasures of American journalism until one flipped open to an article entitled “Playboy’s Number One Playboy.”10

  This was more like it. Now I was going to get the real lowdown on how fifty dollars for a key with a bunny engraved on it would put me back into circulation. I could get a Division Street locksmith to scratch a bunny’s ears on a tin key, and who’d know the difference, if it unlocked the door to making me a key-club Rubirosa with the fast international set? In no time at all I’d be exchanging continental reminiscences with Porfirio and Ramfis. I’d be saying “How’s Kim and how’s Maria and how’s Aristotle and guess what we had for breakfast with Mr. Wonderful—hog snout ’n’ fried chitlin’s! Yuk! Yuk! Yuk!”

  Although the air of the grotto remained untroubled by pleas of maidens weary of being unmolested, the curious phrase “brains in bright packages” kept buzzing about inside my skull like a bee without wings. I tried to rid myself of the creature by flipping through the demands of Playboy advertisers.

  WHAT SORT OF MAN READS PLAYBOY? was the first full-page challenge.

  “A young man, both urban and urbane, who lights up a cigarette or a young lady’s eyes with equal ease, the Playboy reader is as quick on the draw with his favorite smoke as in drawing admiring feminine attention. Facts: According to the latest Starch Report, 77.1% of Playboy male readers smoke some form of tobacco—the percentage reported for any leading magazine. Each month 6,893,000 men (plus a bonus of 4,319,000 women) read Playboy—enough to kindle a new demand for any brand. And Playboy has more male smokers per 100 copies than any other magazine reported by Starch—69.9% of them smoke cigarettes, 29.9% enjoy cigars and 27.8% pack their smoking pleasure in a pipe.”11

  “You drive it, it doesn’t drive you,” was the sporty-O warning an automobile manufacturer gave me—then went to pieces like a fourth-hand Maxwell and plainly begged—“Is it a date? ”

  “I don’t double-date, Dad,” I had to explain, and read on.

  “Real men demand this masculine smoke,” a tobacco king told me in hopes I’d buy one of his de-Cubanized Havanas. Instead of appealing to my craving for tobacco, he was playing on hope of my having doubts of my virility. Although I was dying for a smoke I had to turn him down to keep my self-respect. He didn’t care what he rolled into that cigar.

  A fur-lined canvas jacket was next offered me because it was “the most masculine thing since the cave-man.” I hadn’t apparently been giving sufficient attention to the question of how masculine I wished to be. Was it possible that I really didn’t want to be the most masculine object since the cave-man? And how do we know that Neolithic man wasn’t as careless as ourselves in distinguishing between sexes?

  The overall idea by now seemed fairly plain: this was a magazine that showed me what to be, how to be it, and when to show up with the evidence. The evidence being a line of accessories I had already lived without for half a century.

  No real distinction was made between the primary uses of convertibles, canvas jackets, cigars, or girls: all were now required to fill an inner vacuum caused by the question, “Am I flagrant queer or a latent heterosexual?” My own psychology has always been that of the cop who once told me, “I don’t want to frisk you—I’m afraid of what I’d find.” I don’t believe in frisking my innards simply because that would entail loss of time that can better be put to gaining the interest of a woman. And if I don’t want her interest, or any woman’s interest—why, then, there is the whole great world whose interest I want. And the world won’t give it to me unless I grab it and say: “Look here what I got for you, World. And it won’t do me any good to say “look here” unless I got it.

  Thus we came to a parting of the roads, the Playboy reader and myself. The party who believes that the world is an endless department-store counter enclosing accessories, leaving him with no obligation in life except to choose what best lends him the appearance of being a man in the world of men—and myself as a party who happened to come up at a time when there was no way to become a man in the world of men except by identifying oneself with those who grab good hold well dressed or no, and do their very damnedest to change it.

  “Life,” Peer Gynt felt, means “passing safe and dryshod down the rushing stream of time.”

  “Man is Man,” Mme. de Beauvoir disagrees with Herr Gynt, “only by his refusal to be passive; by the urge which thrusts him toward things with the aim of dominating and shaping them; for him, to exist is to remake existence. To live is to will to live.”

  PLAYBOY HEFNER REALLY A REBEL, I read: “His whole life has been a revolt against authority. His strict Methodist upbringing led him, while in his teens, to draw bosomy nudes.”

  So it’s been the Methodists marking up those washroom walls. I thought so all along.

  Three Playboy Clubs are presently operating in Chicago, Miami, and New Orleans. By the close of 1963 there will be fourteen (in order of opening: in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Boston, Dallas, Washington, D.C., and San Juan). Most elaborate of these will be the Los Angeles club, where, in addition to the usual Playboy Club playrooms—“The Playroom,” “The Penthouse,” and “The Library”—there will also be a 200-room hotel with a heliport.

  “It will be a regular Disneyland for adults,” Hefner promises.

  It seems too good to be true.

  Twenty thousand memberships to the Chicago Playboy Club, symbolized by a key bearing a rabbit’s ears, have been bought at twenty-five dollars per ear. LP jazz albums, jet-propelled bachelor tours to Europe, Playboy party kits, Playboy cufflinks, and a Playboy jazz festival also operate profitably under the sign of the available bunny. A TV show called “Playboy Penthouse,” and a magazine, Show Business I
llustrated, were unsuccessful.

  A Playboy sports car and a Playboy building, housing a museum of modern art, are contemplated. A biographical film of Hugh Hefner’s life, produced by Columbia Pictures, will star Tony Curtis. I always knew there was lots of salt air on the ocean but I never guessed there was that much crazy stuff in the sea.

  The reader who buys the magazine to get a leer at prostitution without danger of infection, or a fireside guffaw at homosexuality, must be disappointed. Nowhere does the magazine offer mechanical sadism mixed with mechanical sex for fans of Mike Hammer. Its nudes do not strip garment by lacy garment. They are simply businesswomen who have removed their clothing.

  The playmate of the month is a businessman’s beauty. She folds out into an image of total accessibility, saying, “Take all of me,” while requiring of him no output in passion or cash.

  The young woman whose trade it has become to sustain this image of a surrender devoid of sexual content is herself a business-child recruited from a filing cabinet or a desk. She has learned that Man’s highest law is the sanctity of a business contract, and she folds out under contract only. She knows there is no higher bliss, here below, than to be seen on the arm of an executive high in the Playboy hierarchy.