The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  If I got the Wallace Reid plate and Sis had the Viola Dana, we’d trade no matter what covered the faces. The trouble was that my mother forbade dipping plates to see who was under the noodles and she made an awful lot of soup. By the time you’d knocked off the gravy on the mashed potatoes it would be too late to trade. We didn’t eat up, we ate toward. And while I was drying the dishes, and Sis was washing them, she’d sing:

  Charlie Chaplin with his feet

  Stepped all over poor Blanche Sweet.

  That one broke me up. My father thought Sis should be on the stage.

  I was five and in love with a girl of six. Her name was Ethel, she lived upstairs, she was Catholic; and she liked me too. She could read and write, and as soon as I could read and write, too, we’d be married at St. Columbanus.

  The wide stone steps and the high stone cross of St. Columbanus rose directly across from our windows at 7139 South Park. I could even see the rabbit warren, where one of the fathers bred Belgian hares, in a patch of greenery.

  Every morning I watched Ethel climb those steps and disappear into the shadowed, still, and holy mystery where one learned to write and read. Love and marriage, priests and hares, the cross that hung pendant from her throat and the cross that guarded her high overhead, merged into a hope of salvation: I would be saved when I learned to read and write. I prayed for the day, a year away, when Ethel would lead me by the hand up those holy stairs.

  For reasons I didn’t understand I wasn’t permitted to go inside St. Columbanus. But Ethel took me to look at the hares.

  “They’re Jesus’ bunnies,” she explained.

  When a ragged white cloud drifted across a summer morning’s sky, Ethel made me look up to see: “That’s the beard of Jesus in the sky.”

  Once, toward evening, we looked up from our play to see the church was raising its cross, like a command, against a sky pouring an orange-red light across the last of day.

  Ethel genuflected, pulled me down beside her and whispered terrifyingly: “Gawd’s blood is burning! Pray!”

  “Why?” I whispered back.

  “So you’ll see the face of Gawd!”

  “Is that the same as ‘God’?”

  “Don’t say ‘God.’ Say ‘Gawd.’ Or you'll never see sweet Jesus’ face!”

  That girl was purely gone on Jesus.

  Anything either of us owned belonged to the other, and one day we found a nickel together. Ethel led me to the school store at 71st and Rhodes, opposite the Park Manor School, and I thought we were going for candy. We weren’t. She exchanged the nickel for five pennies, made me put my eye to a stereopticon while she turned the crank; that flipped a series of bright postcards depicting the stations of the cross. I saw Christ make Calvary four times; then asked her if she’d like to look.

  “I’ve already seen it,” she assured me; and played our last penny so I could see it a fifth time.

  My report on the recent crucifixion to my family received a mixed reaction.

  “That girl is a Holy Wonder, isn’t she?” my father inquired mildly.

  “That was better than candy,” my mother decided, “at least you learned something.”

  “I would have bought candy,” Sis boasted smugly; “I’m an atheist.” She was going to be a schoolteacher.

  On the first day of school—September, 1915—she took me down 71st Street to Rhodes Avenue. I tried to pull away, protesting that we were going the wrong direction. She marched me into the kindergarten of the Park Manor School and turned me over to a Miss Burke.

  I took one look around: No fathers, no rabbits, no Jesus, no Ethel.

  And set up a howl that wouldn’t quit until Miss Burke shoved me into her portable clothes closet and locked the door.

  I stood in the dark, among coats and umbrellas, until the door opened and another howler was shoved inside. We stood silently confronting one another in the dark. I couldn’t see his face and he couldn’t see mine.

  “What do you want to do?” he asked me at last.

  “Fight!” I decided at the same moment he did, and we went for one another.

  The closet trembled and tilted, umbrellas fell, a box of hats fell and covered the floor but we fought on. Miss Burke flung open the door and made us stand, each in opposite corners of the room, while she read Little Black Sambo to the well-behaved kids encircling her around the floor. She reported my action to my sister and my sister reported home.

  “I don’t want to go to that school,” I explained, “I want to go to Ethel’s school.”

  “You can’t go to Ethel’s school,” my mother explained firmly, “you’re not Catholic.”

  I raced upstairs to give Ethel the bad news. She took it well yet seemed bemused.

  “If you’re not Catholic what are you?” she wondered.

  “I’ll go downstairs and find out,” I offered, wondering what was left. But Ethel kept me. She took my hand and led me to her dressing table. There were so many rosaries, crucifixes, bleeding hearts, and chromos of John the Baptist adoring the infant Jesus, I wasn’t taken at all by surprise when she splashed me with holy water and issued a Papal Bull:

  “Now you’re Catholic.”

  I raced downstairs to find my mother, father, and sister already at the supper table.

  “Ethel just baptized me! I’m a Catholic!” I announced breathlessly.

  “That’s a real smart girl,” my father commented, “one of these days she’ll have her own convent.”

  “You’re not going to St. Columbanus,” my mother spoke with finality, “you’re going to Park Manor. Now eat your soup.”

  “I’m an atheist,” my sister reminded us.

  “Be whatever you want,” my mother gave her full rein, “just finish your carrots before you start on the tapioca.”

  When my tapioca was half-finished, I tilted the dish—and the lovely face of Blanche Sweet, with a braid like a halo above it, smiled at me with understanding.

  “I want to see the face of Gawd!” I demanded, and poured the rest of the tapioca onto the floor. My mother cracked me a solid slap and I wept into the empty plate, pressing my face against Blanche Sweet’s waiting lips.

  I used to pal around with an old-time Form player, Jesse Blue, who didn’t like sharing hard-won information with total strangers.

  We were in the clubhouse at Hialeah, where the tables were close together, and J.B. began talking louder and bigger than ordinarily. The reason was a woman who kept leaning an ear toward us, under her parasol, to see if she could pick up a hot one. I caught the play and began talking in terms of a hundred on the nose and hundred to place. She leaned closer to hear what the Big Shots’ plans were.

  “Get me five hundred on the nose on Number 7,” Jesse whispered hoarsely, but loudly enough for that parasoled ear to hear. She got up and hurried to the window. After she’d gone J.B. and I put up three dollars each for a combination ticket on the Number 2.

  Our horse placed. Number 7 ran dead last.

  J.B. came back from the cashier’s window with the fifteen dollars we’d won and said to me, “Here’s your seven-fifty.”

  Then he sat down and grinned right at the woman.

  She cracked him flat across the head with the handle of the parasol; then went back to her chair and never looked our way again.

  If I haven’t learned much, I’ve learned this much: faced with a seemingly impossible task but with no alternative but to do it, you’ll do it.

  Shortly after I got out of the Army, in 1945, I fell in love with a West Madison Street hooker. She was twenty-two, a country girl who’d become street-wise, cynical, comical, and vulnerable. I didn’t know she was on heroin. I’d never met a user. All I knew about drug addiction was what I’d read in the Sunday supplements.

  And I was too square, when I did find out, to grasp what that meant. No habit on earth but could not be broken by simple willpower: I really believed that! And became absolutely determined to break hers.

  I was living in a two-room $10-a-month
rear-lot flat on Wabansia and Bosworth. I cut off her connection and put her to bed there. “I don’t want you to see what I look like when I’m kicking,” was her only protest. But she was already too sick to protest further.

  Did I say sick? For what began hitting that child toward evening, “sick” is no word. And that was only the beginning. By midnight she’d gone blind. I was really into something now: the girl was either going to die or go mad, that was plain. I had to leave her to find help.

  I had never seen her connection. All I had to go on was that his name was Max. Try locating a heroin pusher named Max on West Madison between midnight and 4 A.M. some rainy morning. Can you imagine a square, still in his Army jacket and fatigue cap, stopping every doorway hooker with the curious approach, “I’m a friend of Margo’s and she needs help.” They fled into the shadows, they fled into halls; they vanished in silence or just turned away.

  Finally I went into a White Tower hamburger stand, on the northwest corner of Aberdeen and Madison, that had a full view of the street. And sat there watching the night-people pass in hope of spotting someone who looked like a pusher. Even though I had no idea what a pusher looked like.

  A little lame man, wearing double-lensed glasses and a cap shadowing his eyes, came in and sat at the counter. He looked so wrong he had to be somebody. I sat beside him looking into the mirror trying to catch his eye. He wasn’t trying to catch mine. I didn’t speak until he had a cup of coffee almost to his lips.

  “I’m a friend of Margo’s,” I told him softly, “she needs help.”

  The cup clattered against his teeth. He had to put it down to keep from spilling it. It took him a minute to get up his nerve to look at me in the mirror. Then he looked relieved.

  “She ought to know better than to send a square down here,” he told me irritably.

  He was Max.

  We heard her calling feebly for help before we opened my door. She had thrown herself out of the bed and, having no strength to get back in, was lying blindly, face down, in a pool of her own perspiration.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Max began scolding her before he touched her—and a kind of miracle happened. A faint pink flush touched her cheeks at the sound of his voice, a faint smile came to her mouth; and, by the time we had her back on the bed, she’d begun getting well before the needle had touched her.

  “Did you see that?” the lame pusher asked me.

  I saw it all right. And I still bless that small begoggled outcast. And when I read one of those scapegoat pieces about the “viciousness” of drug pushers, and extolling the basic humanitarianism of the nark-squad hero, I’m saddened. Because it isn’t Margo and it isn’t Max who keeps the traffic moving: it’s that same nark-squad hero with a small, brown paper bag that hustlers and pushers alike have to keep filled if they want to stay on the street.

  I remember a kid called Specs who was punchy about guns. He had a habit of sticking a finger in your face and saying “Stick ’em up!” Nobody paid him any heed. Not even when he started doing it with a toy gun. I was walking with an ex-fighter one night when Specs stepped out of a doorway, said “Stick ’em up!” and pointed the toy gun.

  “Let him go, Vince,” I told my friend, “I know him.”

  Another time Specs went into a bar where he was known and pointed the gun at the bartender: “Stick ’em up!” The bartender put his hands up. Then Specs saw a cop at the end of the bar and changed his mind: “Put ’em down!” The bartender put his hands down on a bottle, reached over the bar and knocked Specs cold. He woke up in the Stockyards Station.

  After that Specs never touched anything that looked like a gun, and never said “Stick ’em up!” to anyone. But he began drinking. Hard. He drank so hard that his hands began to tremble whenever he lifted a shot-glass. Finally his mother took him to a psychoanalyst. “Tell the doctor everything,” she instructed Specs.

  “What did the doctor ask you?” she asked Specs later.

  “He asked me if I drank.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Very little.”

  Specs’ mother could hardly believe it.

  “Why did you tell a lie like that?”

  “It isn’t a lie, mother,” Specs defended his answer—“Most of it spills.”

  I once knew an interesting clothes-store thief. He was arrested at the wheel of a car in which a couple thousand dollars worth of men’s suits had been piled and he didn’t have a bill of sale for one of them. The clothes-store owner, to exploit the publicity attending the robbery, ran a large ad in a St. Louis paper: people will do anything to get our clothes —and signed it with the thief’s name. The thief beat the rap and sued the store owner for invasion of privacy.

  This was the same thief with whom I once went to a dance in East St. Louis. He asked a young woman to dance with him but she declined. So he took one step back and said—so loudly that everyone on the floor could hear—“WHY SHOULD I GIVE YOU 25 CENTS?”

  When I asked him, later, why he’d deliberately embarrassed the poor girl that way, he answered, “They can’t take a knockout back, can they?” And that was all the explanation he’d give me.

  I heard a fellow, accused in court of passing counterfeit hundred-dollar bills, make the simplest justification possible: “I got them for fifteen dollars, so I thought it was a pretty good deal.”

  “I can tell a feeler the moment he comes in,” the cop who guards the monkey house at Lincoln Park once assured me. “He gets right into the crowd, starts working his way up to the cage but he ain’t interested in monkeys. I can tell a feeler by the way he walks.”

  “I can usually spot a jumper,” the desk clerk at a North LaSalle Street hotel informed me. “It’s usually a woman asking for a room with a view. If it’s a man, he’ll want to know what the checking-out hour is, whether he can have a room near the bar, will he be able to get telephone messages without coming down to the desk—he’ll have you filling him in on every possible detail; yet he’ll forget to ask you the rate.

  “When times are good we get as many as two a month. When times are hard we get them oftener. But very, very few jumpers actually jump. All I mean by a ‘jumper’ is someone who has it in mind. Carrying through is altogether another matter. The man will wait until a bellboy is in the room with him to stop him. The woman will phone the desk to tell you what she has in mind and give you time to get to her.

  “In the five years I’ve been here only two made it. One a young girl and one a middle-aged woman who really made it. The girl just broke her back. But we all have a bit of the jumper in us. If not in the back of the head then in the heart.”

  There was a St. Louis businessman who was so intense about the Cardinals that he bet $10,000 on his mortgaged home and the Cardinals lost in the tenth inning, 3-2.

  “Our house just took a bad hop over Red Schoendienst’s head,” his wife was heard to tell someone over the phone.

  The businessman died a few months later. His wife found him in bed, the sheet over his head and his ear still pressed to a transistor set that was still humming the final score: Mets 6. Cardinals 4.

  “It wasn’t the Mets that killed him,” his wife decided, “it was the Cardinals.”

  I once got into a poker game in the rear of a North Broadway barber shop which was this kind of poker game: If the cops didn’t pinch it somebody would heist it.

  This night a player—call him Ziggy—went broke and went away mad. Half an hour later there was a knock, “It’s me, Ziggy.”

  “Ziggy got some fresh bread,” somebody said. “Let him in.” The barber opened the door and two strangers came in. All they said was, “Leave the money on the board, boys.”

  I folded the twenty I had in my hand and dropped it discreetly behind a refrigerator.

  One of the strangers showed the barber a paper. “Federal warrant,” he explained.

  “How do I know it’s a federal warrant?” the barber tried to argue.

  “Because he says it is,” the o
ther stranger assured everybody, “and we need this for evidence,” he added; and started picking up the hundred-odd dollars in the pot.

  I went over to the refrigerator and recovered my twenty.

  “What are you doing behind the icebox?” one of the strangers wanted to know.

  “I threw a twenty there when you came in because I thought it was a heist,” I explained.

  “Okay,” he said, “put ten on the table and keep the change.”

  After they left the barber congratulated me on my presence of mind in throwing the twenty behind the refrigerator. But the others derided me for being in too much of a hurry to get my twenty back.

  “How did I know they were cops?” I asked them.

  “What makes you think they were?” they asked me.

  Whether I saved $10 or lost $10 by making that behind-the-icebox move I don’t know to this day.

  Any more than I know whether that game was heisted or pinched.

  But we never let Ziggy take a chair again.

  I was drinking with a couple miners, in the kitchen of a whorehouse on Wyoming Street in Butte, Montana, when one of the women, a good-looking, dark-haired girl no more than nineteen, walked in, smiled sweetly and sat down at the table. The madame handed her a menu, spotted by many soups de jour, from the Hotel Finlen.

  “Jo-Ann likes to pick out,” the madame explained.

  “Where are you from, honey?” I asked the girl.

  “Ten dollars,” she replied.

  I decided to think that over. Then one of the miners decided to have a try.

  “How much to say hello, sweetheart?” he asked her.

  “Columbus, Ohio,” Jo-Ann answered.

  I looked at the miner. The miner looked at me.

  “Jo-Ann don’t have her hearing,” the madame finally explained, “she reads lips.”

  “She sure don’t read them very damn good,” the miner complained.

  “Go fuck yourself,” Jo-Ann assured him quickly.

  And went back to picking out.

  I once tended bar for an old bachelor who lived above his bar. That was on Wabansia a few doors east of the CB & Q tracks. It was a two-story frame building, long unpainted, and every time a train roared past the whole building shook.