The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  The old man had drilled a hole in the floor above the cash register so he could see if I pocketed any. change; but I knew the hole was there. I could also sense when he was watching.

  One night a lone customer bought a 25-cent schooner of beer, laid down a new half-dollar, and said, “Keep the change.” I figured, at first, to keep the whole half. Then my conscience twinged and I told the customer, “Heads it’s mine, tails it’s the old man’s,” and tossed it on the bar. It came up tails but I decided to keep it anyhow and put it in my pocket.

  “Put that in the register, son,” the old man told me through the hole. “I won it fair and square.”

  When old-timers say that someone has gone on the arfy-darfy they don’t mean he’s simply taken it on the lam. They mean he has disappeared himself with a bunch of money; or jewels that once belonged to somebody else.

  Some say “gone on the uffy-duffy.”

  The greatest American underground comedian, other than Lenny Bruce, was Lord Richard Buckley. He had a bar, called Chez Buckley, on Western Avenue just opposite Riverview Park in the early 1940s.

  He would call three people from the audience—male or female—and instruct them merely to move their lips whenever he tapped them on the shoulder. Then we heard the voices of Amos, Andy, and Brother Crawford emanating from the three stooges. It was highly confusing.

  He also had a kid he called Junior who resembled Jackie Vernon. Junior would stand, with a spotlight on him, looking through a toilet seat at the audience with the blankest grin conceivable. Buckley would say, “Register despair, Junior.” Junior’s grin would freeze right there. “Now register happiness, Junior. Now register hate.” Buckley would go through the gamut of human emotions from love to terror. The emptier of all emotion Junior appeared, the funnier the act became.

  Well, I thought it was funny anyhow.

  * * *

  Bankers who’d been losing heavily on the market, in the twenties, sometimes arranged with a professional bank robber to stage a prearranged holdup. They’d tell him where the $25,000 was and set a time.

  When the robber would read, in the papers, that the bank had been robbed of a hundred thousand, he’d know the banker was home free.

  A teller, who wasn’t in on the fix, once watched this thief taking ten thousand dollars. And, for some reason, assumed the man was supposed to be taking it. He didn’t report it. With the result that he was sentenced to five years in Atlanta.

  He’d finished over two years when he was told he was to have a new cellmate: and in walks the man he’d watched stealing the ten thousand.

  There was once a house of prostitution near Willow Springs that had a steel door. Two guards, armed with MG’s, guarded it. There was also a man-killing police dog; kept half-starved and held on a wire.

  It was run by an ex-Rams football player, a big, very big boy. He wore a white football sweater and a referee’s whistle around his neck. No matter how late the women worked, he roused them at 10 a.m. with blasts of his whistle—“time for workout, girls!” Although none of them had had more than three hours sleep, they had to double-time around the house in their pajamas.

  At 5 p.m. he roused them out with the whistle again and they’d have to go into a huddle around him. “Let’s all pitch in and make this evening one that’ll make the boss proud of us all,” he’d try to inspire them. Then he’d review half a dozen ways of accosting a customer, all of which the women had known since they’d been children. He called this “school.”

  “He made us practice everything but passing,” a woman who worked there recalled to me recently.

  Past-posters broke many bookies in the decade of the forties. The past-poster was the party who put down a heavy bet on a horse that had already won.

  There were many ways of getting information before the bookie had it; with time enough left to place the bet.

  One way was to send a radio flash, right from the track, to a partner parked within sight of the bookie. The third partner took a signal from the man in the parked car and made the bet.

  Or the second man could phone the bookie and ask for Mr. Harris. The bookie would holler, “Is there a Mr. Harris here?” Nobody named Harris. But the past-poster standing by had the message: “Harris” was the code name of the winner. Since he’d been hanging around the joint all day, the bookie had no reason to suspect him when he put a couple of hundred dollars on an off-horse.

  Once we outsmarted ourselves. The horse that the flash had given us had been given too soon: the horse had been disqualified for rough riding.

  “I almost did it today, Dave,” I told the bookie, whom I’d very nearly had on the hook for $2,000, that same evening in a restaurant.

  “I don’t know what you did,” he admitted, “but I know you almost did it.”

  There is also a window named IMMEDIATE REFUND.

  At Cahokia Downs a horse named Popcorn Butch threw his rider in the gate, then raced the entire length of the track before he could be reined. Bettors were instructed that those holding tickets on the horse would receive an immediate refund.

  Then here comes a clown, his two-dollar refund in his hand, his face split into the biggest grin of self-satisfaction I’ve ever witnessed.

  “I figured it that way!” he kept telling everyone, waving the two dollars, “I figured it that way!”

  I knew a fellow who had an argument one morning in East St. Louis with a friend, and the friend stabbed him in the stomach. The friend then took him to a hospital where he was sewed up after giving the explanation that he’d fallen on a piece of glass.

  In the afternoon the fool goes bowling! He ripped one of the stitches open and sealed the fresh wound with Mystic Tape. He must have been feeling pretty good because in the evening he visited a whore and bled to death in her bed.

  The girl rolled him into her kitchen and went back to work. Then, about five hours later, she finally reported the incident to the police.

  The police found him in full rigor with the Mystic Tape stuck in his hair. The cops traced him back to the friend who’d stabbed him in the morning. They found the friend in a hospital, sitting at the bedside of his wife; whom he’d shot in the afternoon. “Everything would have been perfect,” he explained to the arresting officers, “if only the Mystic Tape had held.”

  No one has ever seen a cashier’s window, at any racecourse on earth, named PERSONAL INJURY.

  Yet there is such a cashier. And you can collect enough there to keep you in daily-doubles all season; without sustaining so much as a black-and-blue mark. If you have a good lawyer.

  Because every track maintains a fund to meet suits brought by people who fall off stools in the clubhouse bar onto their skulls; who get hot coffee spilled on new dresses in the clubhouse restaurant; who dislocate a knee trying to get to a mutuel window when the flag is up; or are nipped by an embittered mare from whom they are trying to get hot information.

  I used to know a big-bellied blowhard, mockingly nicknamed “The Judge,” who’d sustained numerous black-and-blue marks. He’d carried cards in boilermakers’, ironworkers’, steamfitters’ and carpenters’ locals in his day. But his working day had seldom lasted longer than twenty-four hours.

  Cables had tripped him, rivets had burned him, lighting fixtures had shocked him, falling planks had stunned him; ladders had collapsed themselves beneath him and moving trucks had let him fall out of their cabs into traffic. When he learned that Cahokia Downs had been quietly putting aside a percentage of the profits, against claims of personal injury, The Judge went back to work.

  I was sitting with him in the Cahokia clubhouse, studying the breeding of a seven-year-old mare named Jealous Widow, and had just decided to put two dollars across the board on her, when the chair collapsed.

  Not The Judge’s. Mine.

  The Judge hadn’t tampered with it. Neither had I. It was just a rotten chair, that was all.

  When The Judge looked up from his own studies to tout me onto some-thing, he observed that I wa
sn’t there. This was because I was on my back on the clubhouse floor clutching the Racing Form. Unhurt, I fool-ishly began to get up.

  “Stay down, fool!” The Judge commanded me hoarsely. “You’ve broke your back!’’

  I grasped his concept. As long as I was lying down I had something going for me. Once I got up it would be too late to lie down again. I stayed down.

  Two ushers lifted me into a fireman’s carry and began toting me away.

  Ordinarily, people would have followed. Especially the morbidly curious. But the only thing horse players are morbidly curious about is the next race: they’re so preoccupied they’d step over the dying.

  “What have you got in this one?” one of the ushers asked the other as they carried me.

  “Moon River,” the other youth answered.

  “I’m going on Duke’s Girl,” the other revealed.

  In the infirmary they laid me out on a hospital bed beside a screen.

  “Get me a combination ticket on Jealous Widow,” I asked the only honest-looking one of the two. He took my six dollars as though everyone who fell off a clubhouse chair bought combination tickets.

  A buxom, middle-aged nurse came from behind the screen to give me a buxom middle-aged smile.

  “Lie still till the doctor comes,” she instructed me. She picked up the phone and told the message center to page the doctor.

  “Dr. Karsky, report to the infirmary,” I heard the loudspeaker system pleading.

  I wouldn’t have to go through all that to get him, I reasoned: I’d just go down to the rail and fetch him. But I didn’t think it appropriate, when the doctor came in, to ask him what he had going. What was on my mind was whether that usher was going to get me down on Jealous Widow or book the bet himself.

  “What happened?” Dr. Karsky asked me.

  “I fell.”

  “Down a stair?”

  “No. Off a chair.”

  “Your own chair?”

  I saw what he was getting at. “No. A clubhouse chair.”

  “Lie still and take it easy,” he advised me; and hurried out.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out why he hurried. A plaintiff putting in a claim on the basis of a rotten chair would need the chair as evidence.

  But, unless I underestimated The Judge, that chair was already out of sight. The Judge would salvage it in order to put in a fifty percent claim on whatever I might collect. He would also need it in event the management’s lawyer made him an offer. The Judge would testify for either side.

  “Flag is up!” I heard the loudspeakers announce.

  “They’re off!”

  All I could catch was that Jealous Widow was up there somewhere. So was Moon River. I could tell that Jealous Widow was still contending when they came into the stretch for home. Then the clamor drowned out all other sound. Then silence. A long silence.

  Photo finish. I closed my eyes and composed myself.

  Until a shout came up from both clubhouse and grandstand and then I had to see. I got off the table cautiously, tiptoed to the door and got a glimpse of the tote-board. Number 6. Jealous Widow ! I couldn’t make out the prices yet I was content.

  I was climbing back onto the bed when the nurse walked out from behind the screen.

  “Did you win?” she asked sweetly.

  “Yes,” I had to confess.

  “Then you’d better look up that usher,” she advised me with finality. There was no reason for climbing back on the bed. I’d blown my personal injury suit.

  I found the usher and he was a good kid after all. He’d made the bet and handed me thirty-four dollars and fifty cents. I kept thirty and thanked him.

  The Judge didn’t look pleased to see me.

  “I thought you’d be on your way to the hospital by now,” he told me, sounding terribly disappointed.

  “I decided it wasn’t worth a lawsuit,” I apologized.

  The Judge dragged the broken chair out from under the table, where he’d covered it with my Form. I carried it to a corner so he wouldn’t get the idea of tripping over it.

  When I got back he was gathering his tip-sheets, charts, and program.

  “I can’t stand a man who don’t pay his own way,” he advised me sternly.

  And walked away.

  When somebody says to me “I’m a fan of yours, Mr. Algren,” I get on my guard. Because the moment that declaration is made, your unsolicited admirer expects something in return. It still happens that someone rings my doorbell and calls up the stairs, “I’m a fan of yours!”

  “I’m not running for office,” is my standard reply before shutting the door.

  Holy wonders and carty-givers, leaping grievers and past-posters, jumpers, feelers, and Mystic Tape-hopers, we all keep a bit of the jumper in our hearts.

  Now if I just follow the red neon arrows and go down one flight, I’ll get something back on yesterday’s place ticket.

  EPITAPH

  It’s all in the wrist, with a deck or a cue,

  And Frankie Machine had the touch.

  He had the touch, and a golden arm—

  “Hold up, Arm,” he would plead,

  Kissing his rosary once for help

  With the faders sweating it out and—

  Zing !—there it was—Little Joe or Eighter from Decatur

  Double-trey the hard way, Dice be Nice,

  When you get a hunch bet a bunch

  It don’t mean a thing if it don’t cross that string

  Make me five to keep me alive

  Tell ’em where you got it ’n how easy it was—

  We remember Frankie Machine

  And the arm that always held up.

  We remember in the morning light

  When the cards are boxed and the long cues racked

  Straight up and down like all-night hours

  With the hot rush-hours past.

  For it’s all in the wrist with a deck or a cue

  And if he crapped out when we thought he was due

  It must have been that the dice were rolled,

  For he had the touch and his arm was gold.

  Rack up his cue, leave the steerer his hat:

  The arm that held up has failed at last.

  Yet why does the light down the dealer’s slot

  Sift soft as light in a troubled dream?

  (A dream, they say, of a golden arm

  That belonged to the dealer we called Machine.)

  THE PASSION OF UPSIDE-DOWN-EMIL

  a story from life’s other side

  THE summer that we lived next door to Upside-Down-Emil was a long time ago. Emil was a lithe, wan youth who’d been a tightrope walker in the old country. And was determined to perfect his profession in the new.

  He practiced, every morning of the week, on a cable strung from his back porch to his one-car garage: a free circus, every morning, for every kid on the block.

  Wearing a red turtleneck sweater, long faded to rose, Emil traversed the air from his porch to his garage, glided to earth, then trotted lightly back to walk the air once more. We cheered. Nothing like it had ever happened on Moorman Street before.

  Then, on Friday twilights, he materialized in a belted trenchcoat, cranked his Model-T: and off he went wheeling with his taillight winking mysteriously.

  When Emil left it felt to me like good-bye to summer. When I heard the Monday morning cry—“Emil on wire up!” summer had returned.

  Emil was back. He rode the air and we rode the fence and all the air seemed daring.

  From scenes like these yet greater scenes would come, I sensed.

  They did.

  Emil fitted a pulley to a cable, soldered it onto an ironworker’s helmet, clapped the helmet onto his head, turned himself upside-down and rolled upsy-downsy to his garage.

  A burst of applause—then the youth hit the ground on his face. Bashing his forehead and bending the hell out of the pulley.

  “Emil’s balance is so good upside-down, he can’t stand straight up anymore
,” my mother pointed out—and rapped me one that spun me half across our kitchen—“Let that be a warning to you.”

  Neither straight up nor upside-down, nobody walked that wonderful wire that week. Emil was inside, thinking.

  What he thought of was a double-cable, one drawn from porch to garage and a lower hooked from garage to porch. I saw the problem: How would he make it onto the lower strand?

  He accomplished this by somersaulting, feet first, onto the lower cable; then turned himself upside-down again and glided triumphantly home.

  I stood on my head. My father rapped me. “Why can’t you be a good boy like I was when I was a boy?” he wanted to know.

  Hard times returned to the backyards of home. Emil had to travel farther for less money. His fees, it was said, were going into his gas tank instead of the bank.

  “Emil will think of something,” I promised my mother.

  “May it be to walk on his feet,” she hoped.

  “When I was your age I had a job,” my father remembered.

  Emil jacked up the Model-T and crawled beneath. He was converting it into an oil-burner. My father took alarm.

  “The Stanley Steamer has already been invented!” he called the news to Emil down through the Ford’s open hood. “It didn’t work out!”

  Emil crawled out.

  “For me,” he informed the world, “works out.”

  And he crawled back under. His will was forged of the same stuff as his cables. Yet it wasn’t so flexible. He lay on the freezing November earth with only his canvas sneakers visible. His toes twitched with cold. All our good times were past.

  “Work in your garage,” my father instructed him, “it’s going to snow.”

  “Too dark,” Emil explained from somewhere among the spark plugs.

  “Now he’s saving electricity,” my father reported.

  “If that young man had a mind,” my mother decided, “he’d be dangerous.”

  Her washing was whipping white—when a long, oleaginous, dark and dripageous, gelatinous pall of coal-oil smog, too heavy to clear a clothes-line yet light enough to clear every fence, emerged by the yard from the hood of the Model-T. It enwrapped the sheets till they dragged to the ground, blackened slips, shirts, brassieres, pillow cases, panties and pants, and raised perfect hell with Mrs. Kowalczyk’s front-room curtains. Someone phoned the precinct captain. Someone else called the alderman. Someone else reported the disaster to the Red Cross. Finally two cops drove up. They hauled Emil out from under the Model-T.