A Walk On The Wild Side

by Nelson Algren

  ‘Why, that goes without saying – she’s giving you her virginal white body, isn’t she? Don’t throw it up to her that you’re giving her your little pink body, that’s cad’s work – no, son, you’ll never get your daisy back. But you’ll find that appeasing that little white body is a job like any job except that you don’t get three weeks off with pay. If you try, your friends will fill in for you. Why do you think they pay me two dollars for a contraceptive that tickles if it isn’t because they’re afraid that the cat is starting to slip?

  ‘“Look for the woman” they tell us – but I take it one step farther than that. “Look at them sperms” is what I advise. Son, did you know that under a microscope every sperm looks exactly like his old man when the old man has a jag on? There he is, the old man all over again, with no particular place to go or if he has, he’s forgotten it. Just staggering from pole to pole, up one street and down the next, can hardly tell one door from the next, just hoping somebody he knows will let him in. Really not doing anybody any harm. All of a sudden a lady sperm – looks exactly like the old lady opens a door off the alley ’n whispers – “in here, Jack.” Pulls him in and latches it. Now you know where all our troubles start?

  ‘Look out for love, look out for trust, look out for giving. Look out for wine, look out for daisies and people who laugh readily. Be especially wary of friendship, Son, it can only lead to trouble. And it isn’t your enemies who’ll get you deepest into the soup, it’s your friends.

  ‘You might keep that in mind if you’re ever called upon to point the finger of accusation and say “that’s the very man.” Remember that you have to be absolutely certain, son. If you have the leastest leastest doubt it’s your highest highest duty to say you’re not absolutely absolutely sure. Do you realize that if you sent a man to prison on a wrong identification you’re a criminal yourself, little better than a hardened murderer?’

  ‘He’s cutting in a little closer now,’ Velma observed.

  ‘Why,’ for once Gross spoke directly to her, ‘doesn’t an old man have the right to die in his own bed?’

  The vulcanized woman made no reply. Her chair was vacant. She had tiptoed out just to make the old man sweat in anxiety – ‘Where’d she go? How long she been gone? Why didn’t you speak up?’

  ‘I think she’s in the bedroom, mister,’ Dove told him, and waited dutifully for the rest of the speech while Gross went to listen at the bedroom door. Satisfied that she hadn’t yet crossed the frontier, he returned to his rocking chair; but had no more to say that evening.

  (In the deep dark and dead time the old man hears the soft scraaap scraaap and feels the sudden sinking through the uterus wall and the blood running over his hand again. The uterus wall that, once pierced, bleeds till no blood remains. O, Old Gross remembers a thing or two in the deep dark and dead time.)

  Gross lived in an unendurable twilight land, a land of in between, with a woman whom he had married in order to make her his prisoner. Now the prisoner was the jailer, he the captive. Velma not only had enough on him to send him to the pen for keeps, but also those inside-the-walls connections that Gross feared more than the uniformed law. He knew that she could have him disposed of without the bother of having him carried through federal gates. In any one day she had only to pick up a telephone and he wouldn’t see his rocking chair that night.

  Dove’s function, he soon saw, was simply to perform errands that Velma would otherwise have had to do. The only ease the old man knew was when she was at work right under his nose. Whatever he had coming, it seemed, he wanted to see it come.

  Yet Gross went on little errands of his own that didn’t bother Velma at all. Every morning she wrapped a small package in gift paper, tied it with colored string, put it under the old man’s arm and sent him off with it. He would be back in less than an hour without the package. It was some days before Dove saw that all the paper contained was garbage.

  ‘He leaves it on a street car or a newsstand for someone to find, thinking they’ve found something of value and hurry home to undo it, and there it is. What else can an old man do for fun?’

  It seemed to Dove there must be something else even for an old man.

  How she had found him out, here in the lake-palmed suburb where the rise and dying fall of a rollercoaster and bonfires on the beach of Lake Pontchartrain made summer sweet, Gross didn’t want to know. He had married her in a last despairing hope of winning her loyalty legally.

  The woman had wanted a home of her own all her life. She knew a good thing when she found it. Marriage had turned out to be no more than a down payment from Gross. Now she had a legal grip on everything he owned and didn’t have to bother arguing with him except to indulge him.

  It was his table manners she found most difficult to indulge.

  ‘I swear I never before did see a man dip oyster crackers in coffee,’ she commented across the table to Dove.

  Yet Gross went on dipping placidly. The whole front of his shirt was greased with droppings from his fingers.

  ‘It could be they never seen a oyster cracker in Arkansas,’ he goaded her a bit by tipping the coffee into the saucer so that most of it spilled onto the cloth. ‘What was it you said you got run out of Arkansas for? I always forget.’

  ‘The point isn’t who got run out,’ Velma corrected him, ‘the point is who they wouldn’t let in. I swear I never before did see a man dip oyster crackers in coffee.’

  ‘Talk to my ass,’ Gross told her, ‘my head is hard.’

  She went back to the sink to finish washing the dishes that Dove was drying, and Dove saw her dab furtively at her eyes. ‘I’ve taken all the insults I’m going to off that cliff-ape,’ she warned Gross aloud, ‘it’s more than natural flesh can bear.’

  Dove patted her gently. ‘He don’t mean harm, ma’am. It’s his way of showing affection is all.’

  Velma would have none of such affection. ‘That man would be rode out of town on a rail where I come from.’

  ‘Look!’ the old man commanded her triumphantly from across the kitchen, ‘Look! I’m sopping up!’

  Velma was a kind of cross between a gadfly and a ferret, but like many people streaked by violence, usually maintained a deep serenity. In which she sang not unpleasantly,

  It all seems wrong somehow

  That you’re nobody’s baby now

  and went serenely on molding skins and painting them, clamping, drying, sorting, glueing, counting, counting days till the old man died. For Dove sensed she preferred that he die in his bed rather than by violence.

  She would not give the old man the peace that such knowledge would have afforded him. Perhaps she feared that, once allowed to relax, he might just live on and on. After all, she had had a hard enough time and didn’t have too far to go herself. She could no longer afford pity.

  So all night long the old man was up and down in his flannel nightshirt, hiding his money in one place or another. He would unscrew the top of a bedpost, drop a couple twenties down the hollow of it, then forget to screw the top-piece down. He had as many stashes as a squirrel in October and one of his favorites was the water box above the old-fashioned plumbing. He would bind a bankroll into a condom, fasten it tightly and tie it to the waterworks. But when he heard it flushing, and Velma would issue forth, he would race in there to stand on the seat to see if she had found him out. Thus giving himself completely away.

  Actually she had found him out in everything so thoroughly she had no need of following him around. When she needed money she picked his pocket, that was all there was to it. If the pocket was bare she went to his bookshelf and leafed through a few volumes until a bill or two floated out. The old man had no way of banking without betraying his whereabouts.

  Season of heat when skins dry fast below the copper blaze of noon or flashflood spring when pipes back up and colored clothespins clamp the skins in rainbowed rows above the dark gas-range’s flames, they pour the rubber and heat the glue, clean the molds and forge the forms and never go
dancing down below.

  ‘When you start hitting toward sixty,’ Gross complained, ‘you feel some days like you want to take a cab to the graveyard and wait for your maker beside your stone. Yet when you’ve not had an hour’s true contentment out of all those sixty years, you don’t want to lay down till you’ve had your hour. You want something for all your pain.’

  ‘Maybe if you’d give more to others, like our Lord said to do,’ Velma reminded him, ‘you’d of got more. Maybe if you’d change your ways you’d still have your hour.’

  ‘If that advice came from anyone else I might heed it,’ Gross admitted. ‘Coming from you it makes no sense. How do I change old bones for new? It wasn’t give to me to live so I could give to others. With me it was a matter of take or die.’

  ‘You didn’t have to try to take it all to keep from dying,’ Velma pointed out.

  ‘I took all I could, that’s true,’ Gross admitted, ‘now you take all from me. Here.’ He crooked his little finger toward her. ‘Pull.’

  One night Dove woke to hear the old man shouting, ‘Old-time shoplifter! Stealing all her life!’ He was at the bathroom door in his nightshirt and pounding the wood with both fists. ‘Give me a hand, boy! We got her trapped in the act!’ Between his shouts the plumbing kept flushing – the moment the waters had rushed once and risen, down they rushed like a thundering falls again. A light shown from under the door. It sounded like Velma might be drowning in the waterworks.

  But when they yanked the door open, the place was empty. How she had contrived to start the fixture flushing automatically Dove never discovered. Yet there she lay, feigning sleep in her own virgin-white bed all the while, her country-grocer shoes at the foot of it and her cotton stockings hung neatly over a chair.

  Dove got the plumbing quieted first, then quieted the old man. When he heard him fall back into a restless sleep he rose softly and dressed. He had had enough of rubber.

  He stood at the old man’s bedside until he was sure it was safe, then carefully unscrewed one of the bedposts. He had the top of it in his hand when he heard Velma’s voice so close behind him he stiffened right where he stood.

  ‘That one is empty, son,’ he heard her say, ‘look under the hallway rug.’

  From under the hall rug he pulled out a flattened parcel of bills and a minute later was losing himself in the shadows of that wide-palmed street.

  And when he thought, later, of that strange-lit stair and the rubberish nights and days he had spent there he remembered it like a dream dreamt by somebody else.

  Once he went back, out of curiosity, but could no longer find it. And began to wonder whether there ever really had been a place where O-Daddies hung on a wire line above a low-burning flame.

  And a reddish dust hung over everything.

  That was no town for the aged or the aging. There was love behind the curtains and love behind the doors. Love in the squares and circles and love along the curbs.

  Particularly along those curbs west of the Southern Railway Station. Where every window framed some love bird lamed in flight. Where every screen door was a cage. What had been Storyville was now an aviary.

  ‘Come on in, daddy, we don’t bite,’ they invited the strolling voyeur, or pretended to vie with one another as he passed on. ‘I’ll take him.’

  From wheatland and tenement, hotel and harbor, girls and women of a hundred feathers had come to nest both sides of South Basin. Girls downy as chicks who have just lost their mammas and chorus-line dolls who had long lost their down. Girls who came scolding like winter jays, ruffing their tail feathers and ready for battle. But some like little wrens of summer, seeking hollows to hide in forever.

  At evening they watched the stricken street from their windows like sea-birds seeing a sunless sea darken and recede.

  ‘Daddy, if you don’t come ’n get me I’ll just throw myself away!’

  ‘Daddy, come in, we’ll have great fun’ – but it wasn’t great fun for a woman accustomed to Northern comforts to wake up on Perdido Street with the kerosene lamp burned out in the night, feeling drained and doomed in a stall whose floor looked as if customers might start coming up through the planks. The bedbugs that clung in grape-like clusters to the springs, the cracked enamel basin, the old-fashioned bureau, the greasy portiere that served as a door; the drawling in the hallway and the mosquitoes wanting out, all agreed – ‘Baby, you’ve been had. Baby, you’ve been had.’

  Droning all night long.

  You’ve been had, you’ve been paid for, you’ve been rented by the minute. Now anything goes no matter how wild so long as it keeps off the Storyville Blues. It was cocaine, it was whiskey – who wouldn’t get the blues? It was brawling in the alleys, it was falling on the floor. It was everything to give and not a thing to lose. It was men, it was gin, it was all night long. It was have a ball and spend it all – ‘Daddy, buy me one more drink and do just what you want with me.’ That was what they called fun on old Perdido Street.

  Who wouldn’t get the blues?

  Big-town girls found the anything-goes life of the cribs tougher going than the girls from orchards and barns. Farm girls could come on rough as cobs. But the coaltown and cotton-mill kids took to it easiest of all. Hard times didn’t mean a thing to them – they had never known another kind. They weren’t afraid of law, jail or even, seemingly, of infection. The anthractite had entered their hearts.

  Every time an operator padlocked a mine or a mill in West Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, Pennsylvania or Southern Illinois, a fresh flock of chicks would hit town and start turning tricks for the price of a poor-boy sandwich and a bottle of Dr Pepper’s.

  They were thin, big-boned girls, and when they fought they didn’t go for the hair or eyes. They went for belly or jaw, with fists. They fought like men. Out-fought, out-drank and out-hollered the farm and city chicks. To name only a few things they did with the greater will.

  ‘Give us your money – you’re drunk,’ with last night’s gin still crippling their tongues they taunted the teetotaling boys in tortoise-shell specs from Loyola and Tulane. Boys working on sociological theses who’d been told there was fun down on Perdido Street.

  ‘Professor! Let me talk to you! Did you come down for what I think you come? You just came to look? Girls! Specs came just to look! Okay Professor – look at what brought you here! Same thing that’ll take you away!’ – the women’s shrieks would deride the looking-man down the street and into the winding avenues of all his voyeur’s dreams: curious streets where he walked as the last of earth’s bachelors, hearing window-women snicker as he passed. In those dreams it was always the women’s turn to stare.

  Hard lines, hard times, when soft girls grew hard and hard girls grew soft. Wise hands at the trade would invite with a whisper, ‘Daddy, you name it, I’m on my last legs.’ For men sometimes came down there looking for someone to push over the brink or someone to save – it was all the same. Play Christ or play Devil but pay your damned dollar. For two you could play both. For the lion that roars loudest at the bleat of the sheep there was lots of fun on Perdido Street. The sibilant hiss from the narrow dark was for a specialized clientele.

  Not-Yet-Twenties bold or humble. Lost or captured, luckless or loose. The dark and the fair from everywhere who would have been safely married in Minneapolis or Seattle, Kennebunkport or San Francisco had Old Guard economics not demanded more Coca Cola love and less housekeeping.

  Minnesota girls with hair heaped like ripe wheat: a Northern sun shone yet in hair like that. In the eyes of the girls from San Francisco big slow soundless ocean fogs rolled to their final shore.

  Behind the eyes of the Oregon girls it was raining again in Portland. Somehow it was always raining behind the eyes of Oregon girls.

  Girls with Western turnings in their talk and girls with the midland twanging. Who wore their hair long like Anna Q. Nillson or braided like Ann Harding’s. Bobbed or banged or flowing to the shoulders, rose-red girls or sallow, they wore their hair in all the styles
, they softened their mouths in all the wiles that good girls did.

  Sick or silly, maimed or strayed, fresh-fallen leaf or sear, the Storyville hustler chattered as cheerfully about husbands and wives, washday and landlords, lost chances and chances left as the good girls did. And kept souvenirs of their luckier hours, lockets and albums, letters and rings, exactly as good girls did. If she had married a ponce now doing a stretch, the girls who had married legitimate men felt a twist of envy toward her – but isn’t that what good girls often did?

  She borrowed from one boyfriend to give to another, betrayed those who had helped her in order to do a stranger a gratuitous favor, let some pander debauch her as though she were something that ran on all fours and all the while had some mark completely convinced that she wouldn’t go to bed with a man to whom she wasn’t legally wed though he hung jellybeans on pineapple trees. Now wasn’t that just how good girls occasionally did?

  Good girls and bad carried on so much alike, in the cheery old summer of 1931, a Yankee might well have been deceived.

  The Southern boy was a bit harder to fool. The moment he saw a girl behind a door screen naked to her navel and lifting her breasts, he sensed something was up. When she did a slow spread-legged grind and threw in a blinding bump for good measure, he suspected it wasn’t free. When she opened the door and said, ‘Step in, I don’t bite,’ he went in, of course, out of simple courtesy. But he wasn’t fooled: she was after his money, that was all. No, it wasn’t easy to fool a Southern boy any summer.