The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  Kitchen and kingdom, forge and finks, fell in a single night.

  That summer was one of such steady heat that the heroin-heads dried the Dingdong Daddies on the back-porch clothesline.

  “How much cost your little sausages up there?” a neighbor-woman once called up from the alley. The innocence of the question had made it the family joke of Daddyland.

  “How much your little sausages?” the old man now greeted his serfs to ask how they were feeling. “How much your little sausages?” he retorted dryly when Vivi-V tried pumping him about where he hid the heroin with which he paid them.

  And, sometimes, when Vivi-V asked it, it meant, “What difference does anything make?”

  Through a flashflood spring, when pipes backed up, this head—the one who wore specs—threatened the old man with exposure if he didn’t increase her morning fixes: then bickered with the other head over who was to put the feathers on the Ticklish Tessies. Yet she poured the rubber to fit the forms, stretched the latex and brushed it with glue; painted the casings and hung them with care.

  And dreamed of a huge cache of H hidden somewhere in the walls of the old dark-walled flat.

  They hung Barney Googles and Cupid’s Arrows. They worked with rubber and gas and glue. They soldered bright tufts upon Feathered Friends. They painted the casings and burned the culls.

  Yet neither went dancing down below.

  This curious commune, whose Sovereign Lord was the crazed ex-con calling himself Dingdong Daddy—

  I’m a dingdong daddy from Duma

  ’N you oughta see me do my stuff

  —was a single-crop country. The sexless wrecks packaged latex fantasies like cornflakes. While he boxed blue films in his bedroom. And shipped the lot in cartons labelled Educational Matter.

  Don’t-Care girls and Won’t-Care girls, Can’t-Care girls and Why-Care girls; girls so fresh the dew still lay upon them; others so hardened they looked retreaded; girls from small towns looking flattered and girls from the city looking wronged—all, all had been trapped flagrante delicto. To show the world what Dingdong meant when he said: “I know what women do. What they really do.”

  In Daddyland there was no jazz. There was no music cool or hot. No Diners’ Cards nor income-tax hangups. No one spoke of money and no one spoke of love. Its currency was a fine white dust; and the fine white dust was its one love. Nor did it matter, in Daddyland, whether the world went with a bang or a whimper. The sooner the better was how all Dingdong-Daddylanders felt.

  For though Beulah seemed content enough with just enough heroin to keep from getting sick, that Vivi-V was a regular little pig about the stuff. If Beulah let her scrape a couple grains of dust off her own deck, that wasn’t enough for Vivi-V. No, she wanted to cook herself up a soup-ladle fix that could kill a milkman’s horse. (What would kill a horse would never kill Vivi-V.)

  Beulah would have liked to find out, too. But she let Vivi-V do the searching.

  The old man himself had no habit at all. Unless you care to call cartooning an addiction. For, while working with rubber had become his craft, cartooning had become his obsession. A chaplain had given him a child’s drawing-book in which he had worked with crayons. Then he had begun tracing comic-strip characters—Barney Google, Moon Mullins, Captain Katzenjammer, and Little Orphan Annie. He’d stuck to it as if he got something out of his crude imitations.

  The stuff was brought to him by the Mumbling Man, a piece of psychotic refuse dressed in a dark brown suit a size too large. Whoever he was, whatever he was, he never spoke to anyone but Dingdong—and that only in a side-of-the-mouth mumble. Dingdong would take him into the bedroom and shut the door. A few minutes later the Mumbling Man would shuffle out. Then the women knew they’d have enough H to keep them from getting sick another week.

  Once, when Vivi-V had tried to get more out of Dingdong Daddy by getting too sick to work, he had cut her off altogether.

  “No work no stuff,” was how he’d put it; and had let her go blind, throwing her arms about and drooling saliva, before he’d bring her back to the world of the living.

  “That’s the last time she’ll try that, ” he’d assured Beulah, and it had been the last.

  Of these three sixty-year-old juvenile delinquents, the old man alone had had no love life. None at all. Both women had been hookers in their day. But he’d been a virginal youth when he’d become a number; and had come out over the hill.

  Those passions, which in his youth had burned, though now hardened by rubber and made fast by glue, had yet flickered like smudgefires for four iron decades: and had not yet turned to ash when his parole had come through at last.

  He brought out with him a facility for working with rubber, a copy of Playboy; and a terrible deprivation of the heart.

  Moreover, he brought his walls with him: he could not go down to the street. The years behind bars were done; yet unseen bars remained.

  Playboy, to the old man, was the most erotic magazine he’d ever read. No wet sex dream of his adolescence had ever been so sexy nor so wet as the dream this magazine aroused in him. The pages of his ancient copy were warped and stained by the prison hours in which he’d fingered and thumbed them.

  Yet the foldout child in the middle was untouched. His eyeballs glanced off nudes. He’d never finished a Playboy story. But ah—those ads for color TV, those watches in oyster cases carved out of 18-karat gold—“If you were racing here tomorrow you’d wear a Rolex”; “Creative Playthings—something wonderful stays with your child”; “Are you a member of the Jaeger Club?”; “Days of sun, salt-air, sea-nights beneath the Southern Cross”; “The Escape Game as Played Only on a 27-Day Carnival-in-Rio Cruise”; “Waiting for your Footprints in the Sands of Kauai Surf”; “What if someone calls you in the middle of the music?” Pause selectors, automatic turntables, Polaroid cameras, projectors guaranteed against focus-drift with both remote and automatic slide-changing—“Sit anywhere near Zenith’s unique circle of sounds with exciting Fm/Am/Stereo!”

  Oh, to acquire, to get, to accumulate, to have everything—that was it: two-door refrigerators, meerschaum pipes, and watches that told the date as well as the hour—merchandise—that was what aroused lust in a man! Ashen passions, chilled by the lovelessness of his iron years, were rekindled in dreams of commodities.

  For the heart knows its deprivation; and takes its own measures.

  “Not a number in the joint but wasn’t there on some woman’s trickery,” Dingdong now accounted for all convictions, federal, state, or municipal. “I know what women do. I know what they really do.”

  How else could the old man think? If women were, actually, man’s great blessing—but no—it had all been too hard to believe that. It had all been too long.

  Dingdong was one of those extremely rare long-termers capable of making a penitentiary passion come true. His was a latex fantasy of liverish yellow tipped with firehouse red; then tufted by a feather soft as down. In purple, gold, or beige. That sold for a dollar each.

  And had honored himself by naming it the Dingdong Daddy.

  Since the world had done him no honor at all.

  For he himself had devised the mold whereon Earth’s first Dingdong Daddy had been forged. Ticklish Tessies, Feathered Friends, Cupid’s Arrows, and Barney Googles were merely variations on the master’s grand theme: The Condom of Tomorrow.

  * * *

  In air made thick by paint, paint thinner, and turpentine, Beulah perfected the piecework; while Vivi-V had to stir the rubber. Because Beulah had seniority.

  And, since stirring rubber was no more difficult than stirring oatmeal, and no more interesting, Vivi-V watched Beulah’s artistic touch with an envious eye. And Beulah, sensing she was being envied, would take exquisite pains in painting a bulbous nose on a Barney Google.

  She would step back from her work, her finely-tufted brush in hand, cock her head and measure perspectives until Vivi-V could scarcely bear it.

  “A condom’s a condom,” she would comment
, “it don’t matter whose face you paint on it.”

  Beulah wouldn’t so much as glance at her lest she lose perspective.

  “I just don’t know why I’m so creative,” she would marvel aloud, “I suppose it’s because I’m a natural-born specialist. The layman, of course, doesn’t understand these things.”

  “Specialist my careworn ass,” Vivi-V snapped, “as though sticking a feather onto a condom can be considered in the same class as being a vocalist.”

  “I’m sure you sang very well in your day, dear,” Beulah assured her, “you could hardly have been sounding like a baby buffalo with an arrow through its lung all your life.”

  “Let me know when you’re having an exhibition,” Vivi-V asked dryly.

  “There’s a trick to my work,” Beulah bragged.

  “If there’s a trick to it you’re the party to turn it,” Vivi-V observed.

  A faint flush pleasured Beulah’s flesh. Like a touch of pink on broken calcimine.

  “That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me in years,” she thanked Vivi-V without irony.

  Suddenly Vivi-V remembered something: “Once I used to eat bennies like popcorn when you let me hold the bag. Blue-heavens, red-birds, yellow-jackets—I was a barbiturate cat. Nembutal, Luminol, Amytal, Trional, Try-’Em-All. I was a goof-ball cat. Then I hit the real thing.”

  “I could have been a typist,” Beulah assured herself aloud, “but my fingernails were too long.”

  “I thought morphine sulphate was the real thing because it had that big smash—like your head was coming apart.” Vivi-V stopped bobbing her pink bow over the liquid rubber for a moment. “It wasn’t the really real thing. Not at all.”

  “I could of been somebody’s secretary,” Beulah reflected, “but I had all the wrong clothes. I could have been a copper’s old lady one time. But I just can’t bear a nab.”

  “The real thing was nothing but a low, slow glow,” Vivi-V remembered her own bittersweet sorrow, “like little flowers burning and everyone talking whispery, saying something smooth yet frantic. No bang, no smash, just a leveling off of everything. And when everything is leveled everything is God. Junk makes a place in your heart you can’t ever forget. You know you got to give up everything for it. You know you have to be punished in the end. It must be God—How could anyone find his punishment without it?”

  “I could have been an airplane stewardess ’n flown around,” Beulah decided, “except things were geared one way and I was geared another. I could have had a rich, happy life.”

  “What good would that have done you,” Vivi-V wanted to know, “if you were dead the whole while?”

  “I could have been—” Beulah began again, but Vivi-V interrupted her, “When you start hitting toward fifty,” she bobbed her pink bow so rapidly that she didn’t notice Dingdong standing in the door, “you feel like you want to go down to the graveyard and wait for your Maker beside your stone.”

  “Had she gone down there when she was sixty-five,” the old man announced himself by addressing Beulah, “she would have been waiting for her maker for some time now.”

  “Goggly-Eye-Owl you!” Vivi-V welcomed him—“you don’t even have a maker! The warden found you in somebody’s pants after they hung him!”

  “Never should’ve hung him,” the old man reported, “should’ve hung you instead.”

  “Look who’s talkin’,” Vivi-V challenged him directly. “By how far did you miss the rope, Goggly-Eye-Owl?”

  The old man merely inspected the rack. Sure enough, he found a Barney Google on the top-most rack, reserved for nothing save Dingdong Daddies. “Bedbugs won’t bite you!” he accused her—and flung it at Vivi-V, who caught it and swung it within an inch of his nose. Beulah stepped between them, took the casing out of Vivi-V’s hand and placed it on its proper rack.

  “Don’t you be so hard on her, you hear?” she reproached Dingdong quietly yet firmly. Then, turning on Vivi-V, “And don’t you be so hard on him.”

  “Put his mind in a cat,” Vivi-V told herself softly, “and what you got?” And answered herself just as softly, “A crazy cat, that’s what.”

  “Bedbugs don’t bite her,” the old man repeated.

  It was true: Vivi-V had so much heroin in her, bedbugs fled the beds she lay in.

  “You make one more funny move around here,” the old man issued a final warning, “you’re one one-hundred-year-old flapper whose ass is going to be back on the street, ribbon-bow and all!”

  “When my ass goes back on the street, Goggly-Eye-Owl you,” Vivi-V retaliated, “back to the joint your ass goes.”

  “I don’t have to toss you back on the street,” Dingdong changed his mind at the very thought of doing more time, “I can rough you up right here!”

  “You try roughing me up,” Vivi-V challenged him, “you motherless penitentiary toad from Fink Row, you best get your best hold. You’ll never get a second!”

  Beulah urged him to the table; where he sat like a huge unclean child with yesterday’s eggstain on his chin.

  “Wash off the egg,” she ordered him.

  He rose reluctantly and washed at the sink’s single spigot, making the faucet squeal spitefully. Then dried his face on a towel Vivi-V reserved for her own private use. But since neither gesture succeeded in irritating Vivi-V, he began banging his baggedy knees together while crisscrossing his palms on them and croaking—

  Why don’t you do-do-do

  What you done-done-done before.

  Beulah let him finish Charlestoning. Nor did either woman pay him any heed while he clattered his spoon against the rim of his cup.

  Neither paid him the slightest heed. So he crumbled dry bread about the table; then brushed the crumbs, as if accidentally, to the floor.

  Yet provoked no reproach.

  “I am in the happy position,” he announced like a man running for office, “of becoming a living legend in my own time! I have everything I ever wanted! Success in business! Identity as an individual! And the love of many friends.”

  Then he spat high against the wall and left them alone at last.

  “I’ve cried till I couldn’t cry,” Vivi-V remembered, “I’ve cried till I won’t cry again. But when he says that about bedbugs—”

  “He don’t mean everything he says, dear,” Beulah assured her.

  “Oh, he means it alright,” Vivi-V felt certain; then added, “I could kill him in the alley. I could kill him in the House of God. I could kill him under a Christmas tree. I could kill him in the street. I could kill him in his sleep.”

  ‘‘He does have his good side,” Beulah yet defended the old man, “he does give happiness to people. And he’s helping to keep us ahead of the Russians.”

  “He hasn’t done a thing for me,” Vivi-V complained. And Beulah forebore reminding her that, when Dingdong had taken her off the street, she’d jumped three bail bonds in a month and had a fugitive warrant pursuing her.

  As she also forebore reminding the old man that either Vivi-V or herself could put him back in the pen by testifying in court against him.

  What deterred her wasn’t distaste for playing a treacherous part: treachery was Beulah’s trade. “But where would you go then, poor thing?” she’d asked herself more than once. “Where would you score for enough stuff to keep yourself from getting dead-sick on the open street?”

  And as for Vivi-V, she was such a little pig about the stuff that she wouldn’t make it till midnight on the street though she slept all day.

  Were they his prisoners or was he theirs?

  The lives of all three were in the hands of each.

  One dead of winter dawn Vivi-V dreamed she was standing trial in a courtroom in another town.

  “What in God’s name is she on?” His Honor asked someone unseen.

  “Your Honor,” she’d heard Beulah’s voice defending her, “nobody knows what this woman is on.”

  “What are you on, Sis?” the Judge had then asked her gently. That his features were
those of a white teacher whom she’d had, briefly, as a grade-school child, she did not wonder about.

  “I’m not allowed to say in open court, Your Honor,” she’d answered.

  “Come into chambers,” the Judge decided. And now she’d found herself standing in a spacious chamber lit by a great gas-burning chandelier casting a curious blue-green light.

  “Now, young woman,” he had demanded sternly, “what is this stuff? Liquid cocaine?’ ’

  “Greater than cocaine, Your Honor,” she had answered.

  “Morphine sulphate?”

  “Greater than morphine sulphate, Your Honor.”

  “Heroin?”

  “Greater, Your Honor.”

  “Come around here, Sis.” The Judge had instructed her to come around to his side of the desk, and had opened a drawer: she’d seen a hundred different kinds of powders and pills; and a set of sixteen-gauge hypodermic needles.

  “Any of these, Sis?”

  “None of these, Your Honor,” she’d tried to explain. “What I’m on is the Daddy of them All.” Then the blue-green light of the great chandelier went down; and came up again in a dark red glow.

  So she came to her red-lit wakening. The red nightbulb of the narrow hall was casting shadows across her wall.

  After such a dream, Vivi-V would lie talking softly to herself; or would sing very low so as not to waken the house:

  All the good times are past ’n gone

  All the good times are o’er

  Her memory was a spiral stairwell whereon disasters came tumbling like sorrowing clowns. How long had it been since she’d sung—a slender Sixty-third street chick with hair and fingernails dyed platinum blonde—in front of a microphone raised like a chromium cross.

  Good morning heartache

  Here we go again —

  above a soiled bar? How long had it been since she’d been billed as “a girl who was popular when she was here once before—I give you the Inimitable Vivienne Vincent.”