A Walk On The Wild Side

by Nelson Algren

  ‘He hit the deck on the back of his neck and I grabbed the shoebox and heaved it. It plopped into the propellor wash and burst like a bomb. It rained jewelry all over the muck in the channel.

  ‘The nab went for his gun and I held out my hands so he wouldn’t dare mow me down in front of all the passengers. He put the gun back and begun bawling, handcuffing me to the rail and crying like a baby, both at once, simply slobbering all over me. Then he ran for his box, still sobbing. He could have saved his sobs. They kept a gang of divers prowling that channel bottom ten days without bringing up a single piece. By the time we made the pier there were four cars from the bureau of identification. That nab stopped me three times on the way and begged me – begged like a kid for candy – to get out and run for it. “Give me a chance,” was how he put it, “You owe me that much.” I sat awful still.

  ‘The B. of I. give me the business. For seventy-two hours they kept me in the blue room and the things a bunch of tough coppers can think to do to a guy who won’t talk makes me shaky when I remember it yet. I could tell you things that’d make Uncle Sam’s whiskers turn black.

  ‘They jumped on my feet. They slapped my ears till I couldn’t hear. They put the glare in my eyes and held the lids open till I thought I was going blind and all the time somebody I couldn’t see kept hollering right into my ear at the top of his lungs. I got a pivot tooth now in place of one some ham-handed law cracked out, but I aced it out. Years later in stir I used to wake up thinking they were starting on me again, but I aced it. I aced it till one of my fluffs heard a radio broadcast ’n sent me a lawyer. That was when my real troubles begun.

  ‘You should of seen the jobs they hung on me! A finger for every jewel heist pulled in California since the earthquake. I found I was the Hollywood Taxi Bandit, and also some San Diego peterman who’d been out of range over a year. They put me up in front of some goof in pinch-nose glasses squealing I was the guy stuck him up in Pasadena and took his portable typewriter. Now would I fool around like that with all that ice in my kick?

  ‘Still I wouldn’t widen about the ice. I was framed was all I’d say. I went back and talked to the stir-simple kukes in the clink. They told me the only way to handle my case was to get some broad-lawyer whose daddy was a judge – she’d drag it into his court and get it whitewashed.

  ‘One old-timer warned me, “Don’t let no lawyer get you to shake another man’s jolt,” but I didn’t heed him. I give the broad-lawyer a large slice and for three months I lay in that lousy jail when I should have been partying in Chicago. Then she told me the best thing I could do was ask for probation. I had no record, it should go through sweet. I listened and pleaded guilty to two of them bum beefs, stuff somebody else had pulled they had to have a culprit for, and threw myself on the mercy of the court as a first-offender. Then up spoke my broad-lawyer right beside me, “Your Honor, this man has had his chance” – Wham! Daddy give me 4½ – 1 CC – two stretches, one for four and a half and the other for a year to be served concurrently.

  ‘There I was with my ice in Wilmington Harbor, clean of my own jobs but tagged for two other guys’ and on my way to San Q.

  ‘I was still laughing. But for some reason I kept gagging.

  ‘I don’t mind getting roughed up, everybody gets roughed up. Everybody, in jail or out, is shaking somebody else’s jolt. The thorn that sticks my side to this day is the one time in my life I was innocent was the one time that I got it. You through with them funnies, buddy? Let’s see ’em here. Maybe some of ’em’s in trouble ’n I’ll have to help ’em out.’

  Country Kline claimed it was because of his good behavior but it must have been bad bookkeeping – he had been released from Leavenworth nine days before his last sentence had expired officially. When he’d learned of the error, he was in the South and had raced all over Louisiana and Mississippi trying to get some local official to lock him up for nine days in a county jail, give him a receipt and thus square him away with Federal law. He was uneasy about surrendering directly to Leavenworth lest he have to go to bat again against the same judge who’d already sentenced him once. ‘He might just get mad and give me a year for contempt or something,’ was what Country still feared.

  He’d driven for days, asking gas station attendants whether they thought he was a fugitive, but no local official would lock him up. ‘You don’t owe us nothing down here, son,’ sheriffs and constables alike had told him. ‘You owe it to Broomface, not to us. Go on back to Kansas, son, we don’t want you. They got to take you.’

  Now he waited for the feds with a mixture of hope and fear he could never clearly divide, his cap tilted cockily on the side of his head and a plug of Red Seal in his cheek. Dove studied that philosophical mug creased like a first-baseman’s mitt and concluded he couldn’t possibly have done better for a cell mate.

  Whatever happened, it was Country’s consolation, he had Broomface where it pinched. He owed so much time here and there that even were he to serve it concurrently, he was sure to die owing at least fifty years. They’d never be able to collect.

  He saw new ways and means of beating the law even in devices invented by madmen. One day Natural Bug came up with a brand new one. When told by a turnkey, ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ Bug replied quickly, ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ When the doctor poked his head into his cell to ask ‘How you feeling?’ Bug answered as fast, ‘How you feeling?’ Every attempt at conversation with him whether about the weather, death or parole withered on the vine.

  ‘One conversation with you is its own cure,’ his own cell mate abandoned him in disgust, and sure enough – ‘One conversation with you is its own cure,’ Natural Bug replied.

  ‘He’s no more bug than you or I,’ Country felt certain, ‘all he wants is privacy and I can’t blame him. I don’t even want to think of the trouble I could have saved myself if I’d thought of a thing as simple as that years ago.’

  All of the inmates of Tank Ten were white. At night they heard laughter from the Negro tier one flight above, and most of the trusties were short-term Negroes. Murphy insisted it was his influence that kept the tank lily white, but Dove suspected privately that the authorities had something to do with it.

  These were neither the great gray wolves of the snowplain wilderness nor fanged cats treed and spitting; but only those small toothless foxes of summer someone had chased and someone had chained, barking at changes in the weather.

  The tricked, the maimed, the tortured and the sly, doers of small deeds from the nation of furnished rooms, they came off streets half as old as time to buy a little and sell a little and take their adventure in penny arcades. Their lives had been bounded by those windows SAYING ROOM FOR TRANSIENT. SLEEPING ROOM. LIGHT HKSP., where across a book of a thousand names the clerk who proffers the pen suggests, ‘Give me a phony, mister. We’re both safer off that way.’

  Everybody is safer off that way.

  They emerged from between those long green walls and those long spook-halls that are shadowed by fixtures of another day. That damp dull green the very hue of distrust; where every bed you rent makes you accessory to somebody else’s shady past.

  They were the ones who’d rather play a pinball machine than put in a claim to a desk in an ad agency. Above gutters that run with a dark life all their own or down cat-and-ashcan alleys too narrow for a Chrysler, they hid out in that littered hinterland behind the billboards’ promises, evading the rat-race for fortune and fame. Their names were ‘Unemployed Talent Scout’ and ‘Part-Time Fry Cook,’ ‘Part-Time Beautician’ and ‘Self-Styled Heiress,’ ‘Water-Ski Instructor’ and ‘Dance-Instructress.’ And they strolled as matter-of-factly through their part-time nightmares into a self-styled daylight no less terrible than all their dreams. Their names were the names of certain night-blue notions and they seldom lay down to rest.

  Their crimes were sickness, idleness, high spirits, boredom and hard luck. They were those who had failed to wire themselves to courts, state attorney�
�s office or police. Hardly a stone so small but was big enough to trip them up and when they fell they fell all the way.

  Fell all the way and never got up. If life was a cinch by the inch, they did it by the yard. They always found someone named Doc to play cards with. They went out of their way to eat in a place called Mom’s. They slept only with women whose troubles were worse than their own. In jail or out, they were forever shaking somebody else’s jolt, copping somebody else’s plea, serving somebody else’s time. They were unwired to anything.

  Lovers, sec-fiends, bugs in flight, the tricked, the maimed, the tortured, the terribly fallen and the sly. All those who are wired to nobody, and for whom nobody prays.

  That the public defender defends by saying, ‘Your Honor, this man has had his chance.’

  Country Kline rolled a cigarette one-handed, drew the string of the sack with his teeth and lit it with a flint device cupped carefully in his palm, as though fearing Dove might divine its magic and patent it; it looked like Dove would see freedom first. ‘My glin-wheel,’ he explained cryptically, and handed Dove a cigarette already lit.

  Dove took a deep drag. ‘I made a small errow myself,’ he admitted, ‘I figured it would work better the second time than the first, being as I’d already a bit of practice at it.’

  And he waited for Country to ask ‘Practice at what?’

  ‘Practice at what?’ Country at last obliged him.

  ‘Practice at playin’ dead. It seemed to me that was the coward’s way out so I took it. I held my breath ’n stared straight up ’n never moved a muscle. All I fergot was not to talk. So whenever they didn’t have anything else to do that week, they’d put me on a stretcher n’ carry me in the police wagon over to another station ’n set me down ’n tell the other policemen, “He’s dead, you don’t have to feed him,”’n then they’d leave me there. When it came meal time all the other guys got bologna except me. “Lay down, ghost,” they’d tell me. I wasn’t suppose to get no bologna because I was dead, you see.’

  ‘I see,’ Country assured him, ‘go on.’

  ‘Well, all the other criminals caught on and they’d holler, “How you feeling today, ghost?” “I feel like hell is a mile away ’n the fences is all down” is what I’d tell them. Because I felt like hell was a mile away ’n all the fences was down.’

  ‘How long did that keep on?’

  ‘Why them fellows acted like they now thought nothing could kill me. I was in five stations last week. Finally I told them if I didn’t get something to eat pretty soon I really would die ’n then the joke would be on them. So they finally give me something but I still don’t know what it was. I guess the joke begun to wear. You know another funny thing – not eating like that loosed up every one of my choppers but except the very one I could best have spore?’

  Dove waggled that chopper that would never come quite all the way loose.

  On the wall above his blanket someone who’d checked out long ago had scratched: Poor John Mendoza. He went East. He went West. He went the way he thought was best. He loved his girl but nobody believed him.

  In the weighted hours of the blue-moon night Dove thought about Poor John Mendoza and wished that his girl had believed in him.

  He learned how to get an extra drag out of a cigarette by wetting his lips when the snipe was too small to be held in the fingers. He learned how to split a match four ways. And every night, before turning in, pursued lice across his blanket with burning matches. When a louse was caught he crackled once, and died.

  One morning Make-Believe Murphy suddenly appointed himself meal distributor. Although all the tins were practically identical, he began a pretense that each had been designated for a particular prisoner. For some reason everyone submitted to this nonsense, while Murphy identified each with an eye for minute differences in the way the cornbread had been sliced.

  ‘Yo tengo hambre, Campañero,’ Gonzales complained when he felt himself shorted.

  ‘We’re all hungry, buddy,’ Murphy assured him but keeping his left palm closed, ‘nobody’s getting shorted.’

  ‘Then you can open your hand,’ Dove told Murphy, ‘so we can see for sure nobody is getting shorted.’

  ‘I don’t have to open my hand to nobody,’ Murphy clenched his fingers so fast cornbread crumbs pinched out of his fist, ‘Or do you figure you’re big enough to make me?’

  ‘I don’t have to make you,’ Dove conceded, ‘if you don’t it’ll just go to prove you are shortin’ the man.’

  Murphy opened his fist slowly, as though hoping enough of the bread had pinched out to make it look like a fair distribution after all. But at least half of Vicente’s slice lay there pleading guilty to everything. Dove picked it out of his palm and tossed it to Vicente.

  Murphy reddened but said nothing more.

  ‘I wouldn’t of done that if I were you,’ Country warned Dove, ‘that was the Mexican’s quarrel, not yours. What did I tell you about shaking another man’s jolt?’

  ‘We’re all shaking somebody else’s jolt anyhow, Country,’ Dove decided.

  Kline was the only one of the prisoners who didn’t care whether he got cornbread or not. ‘Eat mine,’ he sometimes told Dove, extending his plate, and while Dove ate would wail a cheerful dirge—

  Like to go home but it aint no use

  Jailer-Man won’t turn me loose.

  Great itching lumps formed below Dove’s skin, and traveled so fast he could see them move. If he touched the cluster above his knee and then touched his ankle, in a minute his ankle was swollen and itching too. He waited till the turnkey passed, then threw open his shirt – ‘These whelps give me a terrible eetch, mister.’ The turnkey saw the nauseous lumps and returned with a spray-gun filled with insecticide.

  ‘All you got is the nettle hives,’ he told Dove, ‘this’ll burn your hide but it’ll cure it.’

  Dove declined. ‘I’d ruther have my hide scrofuloed than scalded,’ he voted to stick with the nettle hives.

  That night he saw himself lying asleep in a bed two stories over a murmurous street. Lights like fireflies went on and off, a piano played in an unseen court. And under the music as he slept and saw himself asleep, Dove heard a metal whirring as of tiny wheels on stone.

  And sidewise, hand over stump and stump over hand, heard the hard ascent of the legless man up a gaslit stair begin.

  Coming on as he’d been coming for years, by bar light, by star light, by mist light by stair, breathing heavier with each step, yet sure in his final hour to claim his own at last. There was time, just barely time, to lock the door against him. The key was in the lock but he lacked the strength to give it a full turn. Dove saw the rubber point of the short-hand crutch, that the cripple used to help him up stairwells, come through the wood of the door like the door was dust and wakened wishing he had never dreamt.

  Bad air and boils – yet sometimes there came a day so blue it caught at the heart like a sense of loss – all these days too blue, all lost. Rainy days were melancholy but sunny ones were worse. When it was raining out there he could sink into a sullen half-dream where nothing could touch him. But blue days recalled his every folly and he’d think, ‘So much time gone! So little time left! Scarcely time left for a boy to rise!’

  Murphy sat in his own cell, bent above a small digest called Guidance, which revealed, for one dollar a year, how to grow rich through prayer.

  ‘It don’t do no good for a man to rise these days, son,’ was Country Kline’s curious philosophy, ‘for that can’t be done any longer except on the necks of others. And when you make it that way, all the satisfaction is taken out of it. Son, I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but you got pimp wrote large all over you – but that’s the sorriest way of all to rise, and the reason I’ll tell you why – if God ever made anything better than a hustling girl He’s kept it to Himself. There’s no trick in not going down the drain if you don’t live in the sink. But you take a woman who makes her living where the water is sucking the weaker bugs down a
nd she don’t go down, she’s twice the woman that one who never had to fight for her soul is.’

  One day the tank grew strangely still. Murphy came to lean too casually against his door. He and Dove hadn’t been on speaking terms for a week.

  ‘What’s the extent of your education,’ he suddenly demanded of Dove.

  ‘It don’t extend nowheres, account I got none,’ Dove acknowledged.

  ‘What’s your excuse for being in here?’ Murphy persisted.

  ‘I was drinkin’ heavy,’ Dove told him.

  ‘Most you Injuns do.’

  Apparently Murphy had given some thought to this.

  ‘I aint even part Injun, mister,’ Dove went along.

  ‘If you aint, what you squattin’ like one for?’

  Dove, on his haunches with a blanket about his head, let smoke trail through his nostrils before he answered, knowing any answer had to be wrong.

  ‘My folks always set this way, mister. I notice sometimes you do yourself.’ And flicked his cigarette through the bars.

  That was it.

  ‘Get up ’n put that snipe out,’ Murphy commanded. ‘You trying to burn the place down with all us white folks inside?’

  ‘I wouldn’t go throwin’ fire around, mister. That snipe is put out.’

  ‘Put it out again.’

  ‘Mister,’ Dove called to the African-violet fiend lounging in the run-around pretending he had been promoted to trusty, ‘Would you mind puttin’ out that put-out snipe for me?’

  ‘I didn’t give him the order,’ Murphy interrupted, ‘I give it to you.’

  ‘Then put it out yourself, mister.’

  ‘Deputy!’ Murphy called parties unseen, ‘bring in the prisoner of the court!’

  Somebody spun Dove about, shoved him through the open door and down the run-around into a cell full of prisoners. He had never seen all the tenants of Tank Ten assembled, and now he wished he hadn’t till he felt stronger.