The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  “May I ask you one question, Mrs. Adams?” he addressed Kathryn politely. “Exactly how old are you?”

  Earl made a sharp move when he left East St. Louis.

  “Mrs. Adams is thirty-nine,” I decided.

  He claims to be fifty-five yet can’t be past forty. Why the reverse Jack Benny gimmick? Just to gain the assurance of strangers that he looks marvelously youthful for a man in his fifties? I’ve seen some cats of curious stripe; but this one’s stripes have stripes. At his present pace he’ll make a nursing home when he’s forty-four just to be the youngest thing in a wheelchair.

  The complaints of these Don’t-Bomb-’Em-Back-to-the-Stone-Age- till-I’ve-Shopped-in-Hong-Kong Americans are continuous. Mrs. Lionel (“Ginger”) Schlepker, of Los Angeles, has beefed to the purser that the girl who set her hair charged her two dollars and fifty cents and didn’t set it right. She emphasizes the necessity of having an ashtray beside her plate, when she conies in to dinner, by waggling her finger under the nose of her waiter, Mr. Koo.

  Mr. Koo says, “Yis, yis, yis.”

  But the ashtray never gets there until Ginger begins using the center-piece. Mr. Koo earns seventy-five dollars a month.

  Mr. Lionel Schlepker, also of Los Angeles, won two bottles of scotch playing bingo last night. “I don’t want Johnny Walker, I want Cutty Sark,” he beefed to Mr. Ho.

  Lionel got Cutty Sark.

  “I don’t want apple turnover, I want ice cream,” Mrs. Schlepker got on Mr. Koo again at lunch; although the menu didn’t mention ice cream.

  “Yis, yis, yis.” Mr. Koo brought ice cream.

  “I don’t want vanilla. I want chocolate.”

  Ginger got chocolate.

  Lionel placed a three-inch plastic cockroach beside the astrology bug’s toast this morning. I let it lay because I appreciate sharp wit. Then she reached for the toast.

  Her face turned the hue of her eye-shadow and she headed for the deck rail. Whether she made it or not I’ll never know. If she did, it might have come as an early-morning surprise to anyone resting, with his face turned toward an open porthole, on A-Deck just below.

  ‘‘I never thought an Aries would do a thing like that,” she reproached me on her return.

  “It wasn’t me.” I refused firmly to take the rap.

  “Then it was—I know who.” She guessed right. “He’s a Leo.”

  “I don’t know if he’s a Leo,” I assured her, “but he’s definitely an XYY.”

  The next time I saw the XYY joker he was watching Johnny Weissmuller on Japanese TV at the bar. A Japanese-speaking baboon was warning Tarzan of the approach of the Blackstone Rangers.

  “What’s he saying for God’s sake?” XYY demanded to know. Why he thinks it the bartender’s job to translate Japanified Baboonese I’m not sure I can’t tell. The bartender just shrugged.

  “Don’t you people have anything more up-to-date than Tarzan?” XYY accused the bartender, who is Chinese, “Switch it!”

  The bartender switched to a taped film of the San Francisco Seals playing the Tokyo Giants.

  “Japs can’t hit,” XYY informed me. “They can field but they can’t hit.”

  You don’t have to have acne to be an XYY.

  The one thing the captain isn’t guessing about is his take on the fifty- cents-a-chance lottery sixty passengers purchased to estimate the ship’s mileage per diem. With his martinis marked up to thirty cents at the bar and Benson & Hedges out of reach of the average buyer at fifteen cents per pack, it’s no wonder he isn’t in any hurry to get to port. But I noticed a clock in the engine room that can be swung to DEAD STOP. All I’d have to do would be to get past the HIGH VOLTAGE warning around midnight and then flash any receipt for an estimate of mileage lower than any other bidder. There must be some way of past-posting the captain.

  As she strains as she creaks as she goes.

  Kathryn Adams doesn’t know what to make of American women.

  “My Lord,” she confided in me after lunch, “they do shovel it in, don’t they? I haven’t heard one word from one of them about anything except their digestive tracts.”

  “Then you missed it,” I told her, “Mr. Schlepker outlined his system of rotating his clothes yesterday in the lounge. I’m sorry you didn’t get in on it.”

  “O, that one,” she recalled the XYY Life of the Party. “I say, I’m not sure he’s stamped on every link, is he?”

  “Stamped on every link?”

  “When a bracelet is pure gold it’s stamped on every link. It means that a person is genuine, that’s all. You know, when one has stature.”

  “I wouldn’t say Mr. Schlepker doesn’t have some stature,” I con-ceded, “but he could still walk under the rung of that deck chair on tiptoe without touching his head.”

  “Fo’cas’ cwoudy weatha,” Mr. Ho announced—and before he’d gone off the air the sea fogs began rolling in. He must have seen one coming.

  But the astrology bug and I are friends again. I’d hardly sat down to dinner before she began giving me the benefit of any previous doubts about my charm as a table companion.

  “Where are you from?” she wanted to know; just as if I hadn’t already answered that one on the deck. Does she think, every time we meet, it’s a Brand New Me?

  “Lake Oswego, Oregon,” I accommodated her by being a Brand New Me.

  “Oregon!” she exclaimed with an elation so sudden I felt that Lake Oswego must be where I really was from. “Isn’t that the one state where they still have good old country family life?”

  “Only during the carp season,”—I tried to see whether there was room for two in her most recent hallucination—“most of the Gypsies have left the reservation.”

  Mr. D’Xavier peeked around the centerpiece.

  “Are you going to stay in Japan?” he inquired.

  “No, I’m going to Saigon,” I answered.

  “O, the Chinese are behind all that,” the astrology bug decided, “we ought to pull our boys out and let the Japanese hold them.”

  A once great mind had snapped.

  “Are you going to write something about it?” she wanted to know.

  “No,” I tried to cut dinner short, “I’m just going there for a rest.”

  I felt her studying me.

  “You have a personal problem,” she concluded.

  I shook my head, yes. I didn’t add that it was one that could be solved if a typhoon hit her side of the ship.

  She wasn’t quite satisfied.

  “You can tell me about it,” she confided quietly, “I don’t talk.”

  “May I ask you one question?”—this was the East St. Louis gardenia doing some sniffing—he was that sort of gardenia. If you didn’t sniff him he sniffed you. Or maybe what I’m thinking of isn’t a gardenia; but I let him come ahead all the same.

  “Don’t you love our country?”

  He really wanted to know.

  “Airy persiflage,” Kathryn Adams put in just then.

  That seemed to cover both the gardenia and the bug.

  My first ocean passage was in 1943, aboard an English luxury liner converted to a troop ship moving in convoy. We never saw the ships behind us nor before. Fogs of the North Atlantic veiled them. One of the sub-chasers guarding us would come rocking through a swell, like a grey dolphin, now and then. That was all we saw, on the ocean sea, for twenty-one days.

  We reached Southampton on the first of November. At thirteen hundred hours First Sergeant Bernard Weintraub, of New York, New York, assembled us for a word of caution about the way the English stevedores were handling the unloading of our engineering equipment.

  “If you have to watch the Limeys work,” he warned us, “wear your helmets. They handle that stuff careless.”

  At eighteen hundred hours Weintraub was lying dead on the deck. He’d been watching the unloading bareheaded.

  Breakfast aboard the S. S. America, traveling first class in 1960, lacked nothing but a good French wine. With kumquats under crea
m, eggs under oath and something moving under the toast, why not? If it moves, fondle it. Why not Pinot? Indeed, why not champagne? So I sent for that. Why travel steerage on the Titanic?

  The catch was that first-class service-people outnumbered first-class passengers and they wouldn’t go downstairs unless the passengers went first. And the passengers couldn’t go downstairs because the escape route to TOURIST, where everyone was having fun, was barred.

  I was tailed up-deck and down by some creep armed with a Butane lighter: I had only to reach for a cigarette and he would come at me in a silent wolf-lope, lighter blazing.

  Sometimes he kept a respectful distance behind me. But once he lapped me by making the deck, counterclockwise, and unbeknownst to me, was waiting with his back flattened against the door of a cabin. Just as I passed the door I drew my handkerchief and he set it afire. Even a survivor of Kim Novak’s elocution-school acting can be immolated.

  He tried to make up for his faux pas by stepping up his personal attention. Every time I left my cabin he’d duck inside and leave me a cornucopia of figs, dates, apples, oranges, apricots, peaches, pomegranates, grapes, and bananas, topped by kumquats; all paid for out of his own pocket.

  When the stuff started rotting I’d heave it down to the second-class rabble and let them scramble for it. But the first-class passengers, at sea or on the beach, have looked like kumquats to me ever since.

  Bound for ancestral Asia aboard the Malaysia Mail in 1962, I was the only passenger. But I couldn’t stand the responsibility. All the Wisdom of the Ancient East which I acquired, I later incorporated as Algren’s Primary Law of The Ocean Deeps; or Never Play Lowball With The Crew of an American Cargo-Liner.

  This startling concept was later expanded by tours of Singapore, Cebu City, Pusan, and Kowloon into two subsidiary principals: Never Sleep With Anyone Whose Troubles Are Worse Than Your Own; and Never Eat at a Place With Sliding Doors Unless You’re Crazy About Raw Fish.

  Through rolling fogs and deepening mists, memories of earlier passages move in perpetual convoy yet.

  One is of a dead soldier’s face so darkened by blood that I failed at first to recognize it as our first sergeant’s.

  Another is of a woman with golden earrings who told me, “Americans think they go to moon. Americans crazy. Moon is not place. Moon is Great Light. ’’

  And all night long in voluptuous gravity she slept.

  I was talking to Kathryn Adams when Mr. Ho’s voice came on.

  “Ladies and gent’men, light on sta’board are light of ship destination.”

  Sure enough, through the rain, the low lights of a great city began shimmering as though tethered in the water.

  “Yokohama,” Kathryn Adams assured me.

  “If it isn’t, Mrs. Adams,” I cautioned her, “we’ve discovered something!”

  “Airy persiflage,” she answered, and tapped my hand lightly, “but you may call me Kitty.”

  I felt honored.

  NO CUMSHAW NO RICKSHAW

  A facility for the decorative is one of the minor satisfactions of being a Japanese person; when he’s made a plate of fried mush appear to be baked Alaska, he feels he’s accomplished something even though he has to eat it himself. He’d rather sell you a dried octopus wrapped to look like a chocolate Easter egg than have you hand him a hundred yen for nothing and walk off leaving him with an unwrapped squid.

  A Parisienne doing up a black lace chemise for Franççoise Sagan isn’t in it with a Japanese counter-girl who’s just sold a box of cashew nuts to a total stranger. Just when she gets to the final tassel and Total Stranger thinks “IT’S MINE! MINE! ALL MINE!” she goes for her little scissors and begins fraying each tassel. After the tassels have been individually frayed, each individual fray must be individually curled. And when she looks up to find Total Stranger has fled, she’ll track him down on the Ginza and present him with his prize publicly—arigato gozaimasu and give my best wishes to your father.

  One consequence being that I’m stuck with—in addition to the dried octopus—a kilo of something resembling candy com. It was purchased during an intermission at the Japanese National Theater, intended as a gift to my companion, Miss Keiko Kanno, and has now begun to give off a faintly bittersweet scent like that of a medicinal herb. I’ll be able to analyze it better after I’ve found a pipe.

  That the Asiatic eye is slanted and the Western eye is round is one delusion which has sustained the East-Is-East-West-Is-West myth. Both are round.

  The variation is in the lid. And while Western cosmeticians are turning a pretty penny making Caucasian birds look like Madame Nu, plastic cosmeticians here are doing a landoffice business touching up eyelids. Japanese chicks are now making the street looking like Bette Davis after Paul Henreid began lighting her cigarettes and blowing the smoke in her face.

  The Asiatic eye has clearer vision; of that I’m convinced. Because Miss Kanno was able to detect, the moment she opened my second gift box, that what I’d presented her with was fish eggs; not candied pineapple. She was gracious enough to accept them, claiming fish eggs have it all over glazed pineapple.

  Another advantage the Oriental eye has is that through it you can see better where you’re going. Look at the Hairy Ainu, blue-eyed, roundeyed and hairy as hell, freezing to death up there on Japan’s bleakest tundra. Common sense tells us that had they been able to see where they were going, they would have stayed in downtown Danzig. A fat lot of good the Caucasian eye did them.

  The reason I keep showering Miss Kanno with delicacies is to reward her for her services as an interpreter. I wanted to find out what Shuji Terayama was talking about all the time. Whatever it was, he kept punctuating it with a right cross. Miss Kanno observed him quietly, from a short distance, then told me that he seemed to be describing some sort of game. By this time Terayama was circling the lobby of the Dai-Ichi Hotel with one shoulder slightly higher than the other.

  “Now he riding horse,” Miss Kanno explained.

  The fact that Miss Kanno knows nothing whatsoever about either fighters or horses didn’t help her interpreting. But she overcame this handicap simply by letting her hands fly to her pretty mouth every time Terayama said something. When she recovered I’d say something and she’d take another spell. I was pleased to see her enjoying herself.

  Terayama, whose novels have been translated into French (but not yet into English) and whose underground theater has made him the voice of Tokyo youth, is the son of a farmer of the North who was killed in World War II. He is thirty-three and owns a mare which—he alleges—has won four times at Nayakama Park.

  There were 80,000 horse degenerates crowding paddock and rail the Sunday he took Miss Kanno and me to see his speedy horse.

  The horses break out of a gate—at Nayakama Park about half the size of the American barrier—onto a course a mile and a half around. But as they run counterclockwise, it seems like two miles.

  As Terayama is a form player and Miss Kanno is a novice, I disdained his hot tips and went on her ESP. Miss Kanno and I had three winners. Terayama lost every race and his own horse ran out. He looked as if it had been claimed. Miss Kanno and I remained cheerful. When we offered to take him to dinner he appeared consoled.

  Japanese horseplayers play to win it all or go broke, and most of them do. Stands selling secondhand goods line Okera Road, where losers and winners alike go milling when the last race has been run. The stands are the last chance for the losers to make subway fare home; raincoats, watches, jewelry, shirts, shoes and even pants, bought cheap off the nabikai—literally, the “weepers”—are on sale here for winners. The only thing you can’t buy is a hat. Japanese men don’t wear them. Not even winners.

  But winners and losers alike seem cheerful. Although Terayama feels that the contentment common to the Japanese face is something of a put-on.

  “Most lives in Tokyo are sad,” Terayama feels.

  “Bored,” Miss Kanno corrected him.

  “Same thing,” Terayama insisted.
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  “Not mutually exclusive,” I decided.

  That the pachinko parlors are crowded, from morning till night, attests to a pervasive boredom. There are thousands of such pinball parlors here, where more men than women, and more young men than old, feed small steel balls into an upright pinball game more complex than the American version. Martial music blares, lights flash off and on, a clatter of small steel balls falls into a cup where a winner has hit—and promptly feeds them back into the machine. He tries to see how long he can play before going broke: spiritual hara-kiri.

  “Pachinko is a monologue,” Terayama observed, feeding small steel balls into a machine to redeem his losses at Nayakama Park.

  Under the heading ABOLISH THE EMPEROR MOVEMENT, the Saigon Daily News of 4 January 1969 reports that a forty-six-year-old Tokyo factory worker had fired a pachinko ball, from a slingshot, towards Emperor Hirohito when the emperor appeared on his palace balcony to receive New Year banzais from thousands of Japanese.

  “The man was arrested and identified as Kenzo Okuzaki, a factory worker who had been sentenced to ten years imprisonment on a murder charge thirteen years ago.

  “Okuzaki’s action marked the first time in postwar years that anyone has attempted to assassinate Hirohito.”

  The police took Mr. Okuzaki’s pachinko ball away from him.

  “When one has no one to talk to,” Miss Kanno observed, “one talks to a machine.”

  I’ve never seen a sumo match and I hope I never see one.

  It was my good fortune, on the evening that Terayama took Miss Kanno and myself to Kuramae Kogukian, the sumo wrestling stadium, that the hall was being used to decide the junior welterweight boxing title of the world. Takishi Paul Fuji, a Japanese out of Hawaii, was defending against an Argentine, Nicolino Locche.

  From the heights of Kuramae Kogukian, portraits of the bellies of the grand champions of sumo look down. Attached to these heroic stomachs are mighty arms and Herculean thighs.

  Which is as it ought to be. Because the sumo champion’s vast pride, his ferocity and implacable honor, his capacity for enduring pain and his dedication to his country are more clearly expressed by his belly than by his features; which are lost in fat.