A Walk On The Wild Side

by Nelson Algren

  ‘Why you just said yourself boys without shoes rise more high than them that has them. Don’t handicap yourself further by puttin’ on shoes, you comical fool.’

  Someone tried the latch of the door, then padded softly off. Dove saw the pot almost within reach and felt himself gaining ground inch by inch.

  ‘Your belt-buckle botherin’ me, country-fool.’

  The old-fashioned rocker went creakety-creak.

  ‘Now grind cawfee and goddamn your country shoes!’

  But Dove only stood waggling his loose tooth, carefully gauging the distance to the pot with his pants around his ankles. He got his little finger around the spout when he heard a swamp mosquito taxiing in: he knew it was a swamp mosquito because it had two motors. It raced down the runway of his left buttock, rocked to a stop, then tried the flesh tentatively as if testing for density. Dove gave his rump a waggle to shake it loose and the movement cost the insect its footing. With the fury of any dignified individual shoved without warning into the street, it planted both feet to gain the greatest leverage and sank its avid proboscis so deep Dove leaped like a hare with the pang.

  ‘O CAWfee man! O you MIGHTY CAWfee man! O you cawfeegrinding CAWfee man! O you grind so good! O you my cawfiest cawfee man!’ The bug began drilling for bone but the girl gripped both his wrists. All Dove could do was waggle and jerk in a perfect frenzy and the harder he waggled and jerked the more resolved the bug grew to get a bit of bone.

  ‘I get you shoes! I get you shirts! I get you hats ’n all that! O proud-size cawfee man!’ – then her voice was drowned in a grateful animal groaning – ‘Gawd! Gawd! Gawd!’ And with every ‘Gawd’ she regained lost ground, climbing his back and forcing him further and further from the pot. By the time her ankles were locked behind his neck Dove knew he was losing territory fast. As the old-fashioned rocker went creakety-creak.

  ‘Out of that!’ The girl’s foot slipped around Dove’s chin and by her instep catapulted him as if he’d been kicked by a mule. He landed entangled in his pants just as Smiley crashed through the window bringing sash, screen and all with him.

  Minnie-Mae met Smiley mid-room with the full momentum of the chair behind her – Dove shut his eyes at the soft solid whooosh as her fist broke Smiley’s breath and his legs flew up and he landed even harder than had Dove.

  As an empty rocker went clickety-click.

  ‘I love a fool,’ Dove heard the girl tell, ‘but you two suits me too well.’

  ‘One of them must be me,’ Dove guessed, though she was looking down at Smiley with the pot in her hand. ‘Get out of here, cawfee fool,’ she added, and Dove hopped to it, kangarooing right across Smiley – in mid-air a fat hand clasped his ankle – down he came once again.

  ‘Miscegenation!’ Smiley sat up roaring, hauling Dove in like he was something on a line. ‘Miscegenation ’n pot theft! Dirt-eatin’ bugger! Wheah’s my pot?’

  ‘Heah’s my pot!’ – Minnie-Mae proved whose it was once and for all by clanging it like a bell against his skull. Dove heard the tinny wanning, felt his ankle freed, sprawled across a chest and was out the window. He landed running, gripping his belt and pursued by an illusion that Smiley was right behind him with a screen around his neck, Minnie-Mae right behind Smiley with a dented pot and the law behind all waving a billy three feet long.

  Dove didn’t stop for breath till he’d rounded four corners and saw no one was following after all.

  ‘Reckon I do take things a mite hard,’ he thought, getting his buckle fastened at last. ‘Still, it do seem a great curiosity, how some boys rise so easy while others got to struggle so and lose their shoes in the struggle. Sometimes I almost think it’d be money in my pocket if I’d never been born.’

  Back on the corner of Calhoun and Magnolia he rested on the curb and sat looking at the day. It was a mighty nice day and people looked friendly.

  ‘I reckon I ought to start lookin’ for work,’ he thought.

  ‘Don’t run, goodbuddy,’ a towering shadow advised him. Craning his neck about, Dove saw the long Floridan and the half-pint Georgian.

  ‘Don’t need to run, goodbuddy,’ the Georgian assured him, ‘we on your side now.’

  ‘Been on your side from the very start as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Too plumb beat to run anyhow,’ Dove abandoned hope. Then saw that each bore a yellow shoe. He eyed both shoes with distaste. ‘Them durn things have nigh to destroy me,’ he decided, ‘and they squeak like a new saddle besides.’

  ‘Man owns shoes as proud as these might one day try socks,’ the long Floridan commented as he shod Dove’s outsized left foot – ‘soap ’n water wouldn’t hurt none either,’ he reflected, handing the right shoe to the Georgian.

  ‘Caint even tell how many toes on this one,’ the smaller man marveled as he shod the right, ‘but it looks like it left six tracks in the barnyard. What part of the graveyard you sleep in last night?’

  ‘Tried a hotel but the air was so close I just roamed till sun-up, like a bug on a hot night.’

  ‘Plenty room at our place,’ the big man offered his hand while his voice rumbled like a bumblebee in a dry gourd. ‘My name is Luther but call me Fort, account Fort Myers is my home town.’

  ‘Mah name’s Luther too,’ the little one offered a firmer grip, ‘jest call me Luke.’

  ‘Like the bullet said to the trigger,’ Dove introduced himself, ‘Just tell me where to go.’

  ‘Did you have a little trouble back there with our friend?’ Fort asked while they crossed Canal at Tchoupitoulas.

  ‘If folks hadn’t pulled me off I’d have whupped him before he could of got word to God. I was just preparen to feather into him.’

  ‘That would have served him right, too,’ Fort agreed, ‘he’s the kind whose pappy made his way by driving his niggers and now he’s trying to make his by driving whites. He’s picked up a bit of Yankee philosophy – you don’t work you don’t eat. No true Southern man would never put a choice like that to a fellow human, black or white.’

  Up a rickety backstair Fort pulled the string on a sixty-watt bulb. A room filled with a watery light, and mosquitoes buzzed in from the river. Dove saw a sink full of dirty dishes and a high brass bed precisely like another he had seen in his lost long-ago.

  ‘I’ll make out on the floor,’ he offered.

  ‘Aint needful,’ the Georgian pulled a curtain aside to disclose a cot in a sloping alcove. An empty gin-fifth rested there, uncorked, unlabeled and unclaimed: a bottle without a name. Luke tossed it at the screen, which parted politely to let it through, then closed quietly again. The bottle crashed below.

  ‘Who’s throwing things?’ Fort, in the other room, sounded startled.

  ‘Some nigger drunk pitchin’ glassware,’ Luke replied lightly.

  ‘Ought to be lawed,’ Fort decided firmly.

  ‘In my part of the country we don’t law them,’ Luke boasted.

  ‘We aint in your part of the country,’ Fort pointed out. ‘Got the rent up?’

  ‘It’s three-thirty a week for the set of us,’ Luke explained as if the question had been asked of Dove.

  ‘That comes to one-ten a week,’ Fort broke the figure down for everybody present.

  ‘Agreeable to me,’ Dove accepted the alcove and went to try out his cot. ‘I don’t suppose you fellows got a yaller yam to spare?’

  ‘Nary a yam, son.’

  ‘Wall, I just had a hankerin’.’

  He heard Fort and Luke bickering about the last week’s rent, but listened only absent-mindedly. His right buttock still burned where the mosquito had gotten him. He rubbed the spot while waggling his tooth, till sleep stopped waggle, rub and hankerin’.

  Fort looked like an ice-house horse mistakenly entered in a claiming race, then insulted publicly for not winning.

  All his life he had been lapped by competition too fast for an ice horse. All his life he had been outclassed. Therefore no failure had been his own. How could a man who had never had a proper start be
blamed for anything?

  Worse, nobody would listen to Fort’s side of the story. How all the good times had passed Fort by, the love and the high living. ‘Watch out for yourselves after this,’ he warned all men, ‘I’m takin’ care of Number One.’

  Yet moments of melancholy touched him when he realized that, somewhere, some deserving girl with a steady job was being deprived of him every day. He had tried, through lonely hearts columns, to help her to find him. But the columns had turned out to be taken up mostly by spongers advertising for somebody to support them.

  What was the use of a world that failed to reward the deserving while heaping all manner of goodies on people who ought simply be given a kick in the teeth and sent flying? Someone just hadn’t been paying attention was how things looked to Fort.

  He had ruined himself over and over for the sake of others and not one yet had said, ‘Thank you, goodbuddy.’ Forty years of selfless devotion to humanity had brought him no more than the faded cotton on his back.

  Actually, those thin and rubbery lips had begun taking care of Number One with the first tug of his pinewood mother’s teat. And had lactated every available nipple since. ‘That was a real smart woman,’ Dove heard him talking in his sleep – ‘she gave me twenty dollars.’

  That was how Fort had gone about making others happy. That was why, when teats ran dry and orange groves froze and shoe-soles flapped he could feel himself so terribly wronged.

  And could bear his cross so mournfully, a sort of Kiwanis Christ in a Bing Crosby shirt, resigned to insult and injury, without a shred of larceny and incapable of imposing his woes on others. In fact, he told Dove so: ‘I’m not the kind to burden others with my troubles. Nobody will know from these sufferin’ lips through what Old Fort have went.’

  Then play by play revealed through just what Old Fort had went.

  However self-deluded, he wasn’t much deluded about New Orleans. ‘It’s just scratchin’ a pore man’s ass to try to make a living in this town,’ he informed Dove right off. ‘This town’ll starve you to death. I’m a mechanic, a cook, I can drive a truck or cab, I play the gee-tar and I can keep books for anybody. I made twenty cents yesterday and a nickel the day before and that’s doing better than a good many. A man can live on a dollar a day like Hoover tells him he got to – but where’s he to get the dollar?’

  ‘It’s a hard git-by,’ Little Luke cut in, ‘but what have a man got to lose by leading a Christian life? What if he don’t get rich but just poor-hogs it all his days? He still got a high place in the Kingdom comin’, aint he? Rich or poor don’t matter – Heaven apportion its awards accordin’ each man to his merit as I look at it.’

  ‘I guess everyone get exactly what he got comin’,’ Dove agreed, ‘but I aint old enough to vote myself and don’t think I will till I am.’

  Fort had come out of the ’gator backlands to Coral Gables just as the beaches were being prepared for the boomer and the shark. Boomers and shark already lolled the palmetto sands. ‘Makin’ any money?’ they asked instead of ‘good morning.’

  Fort had wandered among them looking for another Southern boy, but every face he saw wore the same obscene ‘N.Y.’

  ‘Makin’ any money?’

  He had stood bent and sweating over oven and stove, plying the frycook’s fearsome trade, while New Yorkers got suntanned with girls half their ages a hundred yards away.

  Soiled and baked by grease and sweat, still bent but beyond sweating, when waiters swung through the kitchen door, he glimpsed boomer and shark once more. Now they had changed to evening clothes and their girls to sleeveless satin. On the damask white as snow, dark wine or light looked equally cool.

  One night an order had come back – ‘Not done enough,’ and had then been returned once again – ‘now it’s too well done.’ He had heard the metallic ring of laughter right out of downtown Gomorrah.

  Between the dark wine and the light on damask white as snow.

  Fort had that pinewood prurience that made him feel that going half-naked into the sea, even in the summer night’s sheltering dark, was ‘lewdling.’ So when he went wading into the midnight waters he wore long winter underwear. He felt safer, somehow, that way. Fort was afraid of all open waters.

  He only went in far enough to let it spill through his palms and was careful not to splash. High overhead the bright windows paid for in Yonkers and the Bronx were filed one above the other. Oh, he knew what they were up to behind the shades all right.

  O you smiling, treacherous girls, blouses unbuttoned and skirts unzipped, lolling up there in your bed lamps’ joy, saying ‘Maxie, play with me just right,’ while some king of the garment trade undressed her garment by garment. Hotel Sodom – that was what it ought to be called. To think of Christian girls, good Southern girls, daughters of families who remembered Shiloh and Atlanta naked up there in the arms of hairy brown thieves from Babylon. The giraffe-like man in the sea spilled Southern waters from palm to palm. In his heart burned all Atlanta.

  Back in the windowless frycook’s quarters he froze one minute and sweated the next. He saw himself wheeling a Stutz – it was always a Stutz. And the wind that went by lifted the skirt of the slender blonde girl beside him so high he reached his big hand out – ‘Makin’ any money?’ she taunted him, and then there was no one at all on the seat beside him. Indeed, there was no seat beside him. Only a soiled pillow too hot to touch and the morning light seeping in from the hall that led one-way to the kitchen.

  ‘Makin’ any money?’ the chef had asked as soon as Fort had tied his apron that morning.

  ‘Makin’ any money?’ was the last thing Fort had heard that night.

  He had learned to command the easy credit of that day and rushed, with other thousands there, to lay hand on anything of earth or steel or stone whose value would be enhanced as soon as a city would be built up about it. Though not a street had yet been cut from swamp, everyone knew the metropolis would soon rise and held stubbornly onto their pieces of earth or stone though offered fifty times their worth. Why give fortunes to strangers? Land that had sold for two dollars an acre went for three hundred. Business lots worth two thousand came to be worth a hundred thousand. Lots remote from any business district were reckoned business lots. Farmlands worth fifty dollars an acre became ‘subdivisions’ and were held for ten thousand per acre – ‘in a couple years this will be downtown.’

  On the morning he made his first timid hundred dollar killing, Fort left the chops for other cooks to fry. Five hundred, eight-hundred – twelve-hundred dollars! He had never in his life been worth so much.

  He developed cunning. Four thousand, eight thousand – the wind was behind him now but he was afraid to move out of his small furnished room for fear of breaking the magic. Twelve-thousand – fifteen-thousand – at eighteen he thought of actually buying a Stutz. When he’d run up eighteen thousand he resolved to pull out at twenty-five. The bottom had to fall out, he sensed. He wouldn’t be caught trying to make a million.

  He made his limit in a single operation – then realized that stopping now would only be to throw away another twenty-five grand. At fifty he would surely stick. Every day he thought of that Stutz.

  At forty-two thousand he bought himself the loudest swimming trunks in Coral Gables and showed himself in the sun at last, feeling suddenly half kindly toward other dollar daddies. Why hold it against a man because he was born in New York? A New Yorker could be a good American too.

  He spent three days haggling over the price of a Model-T that he drove proudly back to his furnished room at last, and proudly mounted the hot dim stair for the final time. On the table a letter reported that his forty-two thousand was unnegotiable dust.

  The sleeping till noon and the sherry, the port and the Stutz and the linen, all had been in his hands and all had slipped through. Now he would never give any waiter orders. Now he would never once sleep past seven.

  Fort walked through the curious ruins of a future that never would be, through old never
-was cities. The great million-girded metropolises fallen to decay before anybody had laid a brick. The grand hotels, the gleaming lobbies, the fountained parks, where now there was nothing but grass and cinders along the Southern Railway’s right of way.

  Walked the little midnight towns, remembering the dark wine and the light; hearing his own heels ring. Thinking still how it might have been to walk at morning in a garden of his own.

  And find her lying on her side in a striped hammock, in a dress so sheer the softest breeze rippled it and half-pretending sleep. He would rock her gently, there would be no need of words. Only her waking smile and her drowsy hands lazily slipping the buttons of her blouse to please him.

  At midnight in the never-was towns hearing his own heels ring.

  Or in the steaming New Orleans night, heard laughter faint yet still undying – dark men and fair women going at it again in the heart of downtown Gomorrah.

  Then block after block the big freckled man, so stooped, spavined and drooping, wandered the lovely New Orleans night till he found an ice-cart. Then would sniff the ice in the cart’s single flickering flare, holding two pennies tightly as a child, this financial counsellor nearly six and a half feet high. Was the chocolate syrup really fresh? No syrup but chocolate could assuage his self-pity. Had it been made that very morning? At last he would venture one slow suspicious lick before finally letting his pennies go. He just wasn’t taking chances any more.

  One warm night Dove went along to help him find an ice-cart with proper chocolate, and that night the first lick convinced him. He turned and beamed down on Dove – ‘Lend me two more cents, goodbuddy’ – and held out the ice to the vendor – ‘Make her a double, goodbuddy!’

  That night the chocolate must have been just right.

  Though himself without manners enough to carry grits to a bear, Fort was ashamed of shabby companions. Above a cup of chicory coffee he would study Dove so steadily that the boy would begin to wonder what he could have done wrong so soon in the day with the sun scarcely up over Melpomene Street.