A Walk On The Wild Side

by Nelson Algren

  Later, with one foot planted on the floor to keep himself from falling off the narrow cot, he grew confidential.

  ‘My stomach is swoll,’ he told her.

  ‘Next time drink whiskey,’ she advised him and added, ‘Country boy, your time is long up.’ Then hooking his trousers on one green-tinted toenail, derricked and dropped them with dainty disdain across his knees at the same moment that his wallet dropped from the pocket and curiously vanished beneath the sheets.

  ‘M’am,’ Dove declared, ‘you are the very darnedest galperson ever I have met up with.’

  ‘How’s that?’ she sounded suspicious about something.

  ‘Why, them toenails.’

  ‘You’ve had your money’s worth and more,’ she decided as though suddenly resolved not to be good friends after all. ‘Get dressed and get out.’

  ‘I’m just layin’ here gettin’ myself up an apology to you, m’am. I’ll have it done quite soon.’

  ‘Apology for what?’

  ‘Why, for callin’ you scarce-hipped like I done. There was no call for my takin’ an advantage such as that. As a matter of fact, you got what railroading folk call a mighty trim caboose.’

  ‘The bathroom’s to the right.’

  ‘M’am, I’m right sorry, indeed and double-deed I am. But the fact is I’m plumb fatigued and now I got to rest a spell.’

  She padded around the bed and peered out into the hall. ‘I’ll get a party who’ll restore your strength,’ she promised.

  Her back was to him, her hand on the knob and the pocket of her parade pantie bulged with his wallet so plainly he could see the grain of the leather through the sheer of the cloth; but he didn’t try to snatch it. Instead he hooked a fingertip in the rubber-band that bound it, stiffened his arm exactly as he had just seen her stiffen her leg, and thus derricked it as neatly and nervelessly as she had derricked his pants.

  She sensed a slight movement behind her and whirled toward the bed. There the big boob lay pretending to sleep and anyone could see at a glance he was faking. ‘Mister, I don’t know who you think you’re fooling, but it isn’t me,’ she gave him final warning and stepped into the hall – ‘Knifey! Knifey-Love! A party to meet you!’

  Dove sprang out of the cot, into his pants and was out the window shoes in hand.

  Two Negro girls directly across the way, watching for men to come out the front – they spent their afternoons keeping count – appeared mildly surprised to see one come out the window instead. How do you count that?

  Someone, it seemed, was forever thinking up ways of doing things that no one else had thought up before.

  There’s one advantage women have over men: they can go down to hell and come straight up again. An old song says so and it says just right. Yet it fails to allow for special cases like Dove Linkhorn’s.

  Dove knew he’d been underground all right. The moment he stepped back onto the Canal Street side of the Southern Railway Station it seemed he had either come up out of somewhere or else the sky had risen an inch.

  The city fathers, Do-Right Daddies and all of that, Shriners, Kiwanians, Legionaires, Knights of this and Knights of that, would admit with a laugh that New Orleans was hell. But that hell itself had been built spang in the center of town – this they never could admit. For panders and whores are a plain disgrace, and Do-Right Daddies are family men whose families are part of themselves like their backs.

  But not many a daddy (do-right or do-wrong) is satisfied simply to own a back. He has to kick loose of home and fireside now and again. He has to ball with outlaws, play the fool on the door-rock, and have a handsome hustler call him by his first name in the presence of an out-of-town friend. That makes daddy feel like a man again. Three shots of corn likker and the whole stuffed zoo – Moose, Elks, Woodmen, Lions, Thirty-Third Degree Owls and Forty-Fourth Degree Field Mice begin to conspire against the very laws they themselves have written.

  It was all right to take a slug of whiskey from your own flask in a taxi, but forbidden on a trolley-car. That didn’t help those who rode trolley-cars. You couldn’t carry liquor down the street, but if you owned a car you just bypassed that. For every statute they had a little loophole – that by coincidence fitted their own figures as if measured for them. Those who had no hand in writing statutes – panders and madams and such as that – had a harder time squeezing through.

  It was an ancestral treachery that all do-righters practice. When opening time was closing time and everyone was there, down where you lay your money down, where it’s everything but square, where hungry young hustlers hustle dissatisfied old cats and ancient glass-eyed satyrs make passes at bandrats; where it’s leaping on the tables, where it’s howling lowdown blues, when it’s everything to gain and not a thing to lose – when it’s all bought and paid for then there’s always one thing sure: it’s some Do-right Daddy-O running the whole show.

  There were stage shows and peep shows, geeks and freaks street. It wasn’t panders who owned the shows. There were all down old Perdido Street. But it wasn’t geeks who ran that chippified blondes and elderly rounders, bummies and rummies and amateur martyrs. There were creepers and kleptoes and zanies and dipsoes. It was night bright as day, it was day dark as night, but stuffed shirts and do-righties owned those shows.

  For a Do-Right Daddy is right fond of money and still he don’t hate fun. He charged the girls double for joint-togs and drinks, rent, fines, towel service and such. But before any night’s ball was done, he joined in the fun.

  Later he had to be purged of guilt so he could sleep with his wife again. That was where the pulpit came in. There had to be something official like that to put the onus on the women. The preachers, reformers, priests and such did this work well. Some girls were just naturally bad, they explained. Others were made bad by bad men. In no case was it ever the fault of anyone who profited by the shows. Daddy, you can go home again.

  Pulpit, press, police and politicians pushed the women from crib to crib and street to street – yet never pushed any but diseased ones out of reach. Daddy still wanted some healthy good-looker available for his weekend and there had to be a retriever to fetch her. That was what helped keep pulpits filled, increased newspaper circulation, made the arrest blotters look respectable and gave politicians a record to ride.

  When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only one way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don’t have enough. If everybody has more than enough, what good is my more-than-enough? What good is a wide meadow open to everyone? It isn’t until others are fenced out that the open pasture begins to have real value. What good is being a major if you can’t have more than a second lieutenant? What good is a second lieutenant for that matter?

  The girls themselves read of the latest crusade, but their eyes skimmed idly over the print. When the last sermon was preached, the last editorial written and the last raid done, then those who had preached, written and raided would be coming down to see them for a bit of fun again.

  That was the ancestral treachery no one would admit.

  Yet over the treachery, under the revelry, there hung, that airless summer, a feeling that this was all as sad as hi-jinks in an invaded land. In the ravaged faces of young girls and the painted faces of boys in secret bars there hung the sense of impending defeat.

  Lonely bones of the old French Graveyard, that had slept contented decades through, felt it and wakened to work their dusty way out through brick, through wood, through stone.

  Dove Linkhorn, passing a crumbling wall, peered in and saw how harshly death dealt with old bones.

  Old bones that death would not let lie still. Spaniard and Frenchman, Creole and Kentuckian, bones of sailor and hunter alike, women of honor and women kept, all bones bleached the same in the Saturday sun. They too had been to Hell and come up again.

  Dove’s own bones felt sore. ‘Too dern much runnin’ ’n jumpin’,’ he scolded himself, ‘nothin�
�� to show for it but a suit of clothes ’n a pair of shoes ’n a dollar watch. Things could be worse.’

  When a girl with eyes that could only have been gotten in a box of tacks demanded, ‘Boy, you got a dolla?’ Dove didn’t feel it was right to lie to her.

  ‘I got a dolla,’ he admitted, ‘but I don’t feel like foolin’.’

  She opened the door. ‘Come in here. I’ll make you feel like foolin’.’

  Ten minutes later Dove came out hungry enough to eat snake. There was a poor-boy sign at the end of the block, but before he could reach it another girl stopped him by swinging a screen door right in his path. ‘Boy, you got a dolla?’

  ‘I got a dolla but I need it for eatin’.’

  ‘You can eat here,’ she promised him. He stepped inside. It didn’t look like a restaurant.

  Ten minutes later he came out, leaned a moment against the crib, then proceeded slowly, head down to get past the rest of the doors till he came to the sign with the poor-boy painted on it. But when he looked inside all he saw was one more brassiereless girl opening a coke.

  He shuffled on and on, block after block, finding his way toward food more by scent than by sight.

  And so at last entered a certain sea-cave acrawl with the living smells of lobster and shrimp, steaming with simmering oyster stew and awash with gumbo in which little snails paddled about. He sat at a table as scarred and aged as the Old French Market itself.

  When his eyes had got used to the deep-sea light he discerned a Negro the size of Carnera, naked to the waist and shining with iron-colored sweat, decapitating snapping turtles with silvered precision.

  Now the trouble with turtles is that they believe all things come to him who will but struggle. There’s always room at the top for one more, they think. And in this strange faith the snapping kind is of all the most devout. For it’s precisely that that makes them the snapping kind. Though the way be steep and bloody, that doesn’t matter so long as you reach the top of the bleeding heap.

  The dark butcher looked to Dove like Doctor Death in person.

  Doctor Death whose patients come one by one along an ever-narrowing plank, each confident of ultimate mercy: a last-minute reprieve, with full civilian rights restored – the knife would snap in mid-air, a modern miracle. Death was all right for certain classes, sand turtles and such, but didn’t suit noble old sea-going families of true terrapin lineage.

  Losing his head didn’t lose one his footing. His legs kept seeking yet bloodier heights. Say Not The Struggle Naught Availeth, Onward and Upward was the cry.

  Indeed, once the knife had done him in, to raise oneself in the world became more urgent than ever. Sensing that time was against him, he worked all the harder to succeed. Till the floor about the pyramid streamed black with blood, with some on their backs and some on their bellies.

  Dove felt another’s eyes watching the growing pile: down on the floor beside him a severed terrapin’s head, big as his own hand, stared cataleptically at its own body slipping and flipping up the distant heap. It could be no other’s body, for it alone matched the king-sized head that stared with faith unshakable.

  Stepping on the stumps of a hundred bleeding necks, hauling itself over other backs, giving one a kick there and one a shove there, the body sent a dozen rival climbers sprawling over the cliff to failure. Dove and the Head watched together to see if the Body would make it.

  Driven by some strength greater than that of others, wading contentedly over mothers and orphans, it got its blind flippers at last onto the tail of a red snapper, hauled itself onto the snapper’s back, pushed Red out from under and landed smack in the middle of the heap.

  He was the King of the Turtles.

  The king waved his arrogant flippers triumphantly – ‘Always room for one more at the top’ – just as something bumped him hard from behind and his short day was done. Sliding, sprawling, skidding, he slipped off the heap in a bloody skein and landed flat on his back below the table wigwagging frantically.

  ‘Dear friends and gentle hearts,’ he wigwagged, feeling the final cold creep up – ‘Will you stand by to leave your old friend die? I wanted nothing for myself – money, comfort, power, security – I worked for these only because those dear to me wanted them. (Of course, as long as they were handy I shared them from time to time.) Would you really leave me here to die?

  ‘True, I ate well. But that was only to keep up my strength for the sacrificial ordeal of my days. For I never knowingly harmed a fellow creature unless he got in my way. I never took unfair advantage unless it profited me. Can you really leave so lovely a turtle to die?

  ‘A devoted father, a loyal citizen, a faithful employee, a kind employer, a considerate neighbor, a regular church-goer. Out of purity of heart I respected the laws of God and man. Purity, and fear of jail. Could you really stand by and watch so saintly a turtle die?

  ‘I seemed a bit intent a moment ago, you say, on grinding my brothers’ necks to gristle? I confess – but that was a moment ago, and now I’ve changed my ways. Could you bear to see such an open-minded turtle die?

  ‘Lift me up, lift me up, gentle hearts – lift me up to let me look one last time at the top of the heap where once I ruled so.’

  And with that most slowly drew in his dark tail. His flippers grew rigid. His struggles forever ceased.

  The wisest of turtles was dead.

  Just as Bing Crosby came onto the juke singing I Aint Got Nobody.

  ‘What’ll it be, boy?’ the waiter asked.

  Dove didn’t hesitate. ‘I’ll take the tarpon soup.’

  He didn’t yet know that there was also room for one more at the bottom.

  TWO

  IN THE CHEERY old summer of ’31 New Orleans offered almost unlimited opportunities to ambitious young men of neat appearance willing to begin at the bottom and work their way up the Ladder of Success rung by rung. Those with better sense began at the top and worked their way down, that route being faster.

  In the cheery old summer of ’31 some states were dry and some states were wet. Russ Columbo was singing Please. Al Capone was quoting Mark Twain and someone held women to be equal in aviation to men. A woman refused to answer the questions of a Senate committee and the American Legion claimed that state legislatures were handicapping sales of products turned out by the American working man.

  A New York minister discovered that Jerusalem had had a worse administration than Jimmy Walker’s and said he’d rather live under Hoover any day than Hezekiah.

  The excesses of that year were due to a backward swing of the moral pendulum, Harry Emerson Fosdick proclaimed, adding that if the saloon were still around it would be even worse. The President pressed a button in Washington that lit a fifty-two million-dollar building, highest yet raised by the hand of man, at Thirty-Fourth Street and Fifth Avenue in New York. Wallace Beery was saying What I Like About a Mama is Plenty of Mama and cotton prices dropped to a new low.

  The Ladder of Success had been inverted, the top was the bottom, and the bottom was the top. Leaders of men still sporting gold watches were lugging baby photographs door to door with their soles flapping. Physicians were out selling skin lighteners and ship captains queued in hope of a cabin boy’s mop and pail.

  Offices of great fire insurance companies went up in smoke, which seemed no more than just. When the fire department – long unpaid – cleared off, little remained but scorched files, swivel-chairs on which no one would ever swivel again, lovely heaps of frosted glass, and all that mahogany.

  All that mahogany that hadn’t helped anybody but brokers after all. Then the brokers began jumping off rooftops with no greater consideration for those passing below than they’d had when their luck was running. Emperors of industry snatched all the loose cash on which they could lay hand and made one fast last run. Lawyers sued one another just to keep in practice.

  And every bughouse had one little usurer hidden away in a cell all his own where he did nothing but figure percent with his fingernail o
n the wall, day after day after day.

  In less time than it takes to say God with your mouth open, the go-getting door-to-door canvasser became the backbone of the American economy. He went to work for Realsilk Hose or Hoover Vacuum long enough to go-get himself a dozen pair of Realsilk hose or a second-hand sweeper by stealing it part by part. There was also small change, milk money and such, left lying about on shelves and sills while housewives studied one proposition or another. Change-snatching too came under the head of go-getting, for hundreds subsisted upon it week in and week out.

  However, the secretary of the Federation of Labor pointed out, Business was resisting further decline.

  Self-reliance for the penniless and government aid to those who already had more than they could use was the plan. But park benches were wet of a morning whether it rained or no; and it was possible to tire even of bananas.

  Still and all times weren’t as hard as some people grew fond of pretending. All that had happened really was a withdrawal from abnormal prosperity with business progressing on a downward grade toward new planes of normality and increasing equalization of opportunity. In short, we were going full steam ahead. Only this time one exciting opportunity was precisely as good as the next exciting opportunity. Which was to say, simply, that nobody got paid any more.

  The pimps alone didn’t seem to catch on that the country was progressing downward to new rates of normality. They had been progressing downward for some time without even knowing that they were in style. Now of a sudden they discovered themselves with more girls than beds to put them on. Scarcely-twenties looking for a daddy, any old daddy who’d tell them where to lie down. Landlords and landladies passed them on to the cabbies and the cabbies passed them on to the pimps. It was then, between prostitution and Prohibition, that the ancient color line was finally breached.

  Negro bellboys had gained a virtual monopoly on the delivery of illicit alcohol and had found that white male guests either wanted a woman with the bottle or a bottle with the woman. This errand boys’ work evolved into soliciting. Immediately, he looked with scorn upon his own women. Like the Negro policeman, the Negro ponce was harder on his own people than was the white pander.