The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  He tottered on the step of the wagon, and would have fallen, had not one of the cops caught him.

  Thirty days in the psyche ward did for that pale youth. He went to work for a factory that made endless belting; and some magic that had been in the world was gone.

  The house he had lived in went empty. The wind broke the windows that nobody had boarded. A storm blew down the cable he’d walked on. It dangled loosely, rattling against the porch or the fence as the winds took it; until my father cut it down so we could get some sleep.

  Emil worked on an endless belt, endlessly making endless belting, until a machine was devised for his job. So Emil went to the bars. He never tried anything again except whiskey. He became a kind of crippled fly of the tavern corners. If you’d promise him a drink he’d stand on his head for you and drink the shot in that position; letting the whiskey run down into his eyes.

  Once a bartender, in an idle hour, made Emil get down on all fours and rode him around the bar, shouting, “One more lap! One more lap! Get all the money! One more lap!”

  Emil begged for drinks. When a customer wouldn’t buy him a whiskey he’d beg for a beer. If he were refused again, he would stand beside the customer until a cockroach ran across the bar. He never had to wait long. Emil would scoop up the roach, throw it into his mouth and pretend to be choking.

  “Give this man something to drink!” the customer would shout to the bartender, and the bartender would bring a beer and a shot. Then Emil would spit the roach out, and drink the shot and the beer while the customer watched.

  “How can you do anything so disgusting?” one customer asked Emil after paying for the drinks.

  “That’s show biz,” Emil replied.

  People don’t have fun like they used to have, do they?

  MERRY CHRISTMAS MR. MARK

  OUT around 71st and Cottage Grove around this time of year, just before Mr. Volstead took over, we used to sell something called the Saturday Evening Blade. In front of the saloon on the southwest corner of that intersection that was, right across the street from the north gate of Wood-land cemetery. We’d worked up any number of swindles there.

  When a customer handed over a nickel for a copy and would wait for his change, with one palm extended while his eyes were preoccupied with the Blade’s screaming headlines, the swindle would be to lay a penny in the palm, click a second penny on top of that—and then to click the third without letting it loose at all. The mark would shove his pennies in his pocket and never even know he’d been hyped.

  Sometimes, if the chump didn’t have anything smaller than a two-bit piece we’d duck into the saloon for change—and duck out the Ladies’ Entrance. Merry Christmas, Mr. Mark.

  We called the old red-and-yellow wooden four-wheeler that came to the end of the line there the Toonerville Trolley. There was almost always some fool on the rear platform waiting for the Blade to see who’d gotten killed today. We’d time it so as to hand him those blood-red headlines just as the trolley began its creaking jaunt west toward Halsted—the hustle then was to stumble alongside the car trying to reach the fool’s change hand but never quite reaching it. That was no small stunt, the shape that trolley was in, even for a 10-year-old. Sometimes you’d have to have a coughing spell to slow you up.

  Once one kid pulled that coughing routine and the mark got off the car and came back for his change, cough or no cough. He didn’t care if the kid had TB. Some mark.

  Around Christmastime the big paper guys had cards printed and sold them to us little paper guys for a nickel apiece. They read something like this:

  Christmas comes but once a year

  When it comes it brings good cheer

  So open your heart without a tear

  And remember the newsie standing here.

  That got them, every time. Especially if there was a light fall of snow. And the swindle in the card routine was this: After he’d paid for the verse and would be thinking he owned it, you’d have to tell him no, it was your only card, you just wanted him to see the sentiment on it, it had cost you a nickel, so please mister could you have it back?

  That was thirty Chicago Christmases and Lord-Knows-How-Many-Swindles ago. That saloon is long gone, whole populations have been buried in that cemetery, and the Toonerville Trolley is now a street-car bus. But that big mark of a Santa still keeps coming around, year after year.

  It begins to look to me like he must be in on some fast hustle himself. Maybe it’s a kickback on those toys he pushes. Maybe he got something on somebody.

  Maybe he knows something we don’t know.

  I GUESS YOU FELLOWS JUST DON’T WANT ME

  I once knew a here-and-there sort of fellow who was so here-then-there that the police would always pick him up before he could get somewhere.

  The officers would never admit—no, not in a hundred years—that they kept picking this fellow up just for being around. “We’re forced to pick him up,” one told me, “because he’s so suspicious.”

  “It’s not so simple a matter as mere suspicion,” the desk sergeant tried to explain, “it’s because he’s suspicious of himself. If a man is suspicious of himself, why shouldn’t we be?”

  If the police had just said straight out that they picked him up because his neck was on crooked they would have been on solid ground. You could hardly fault the law for a man’s neck being on one side. The law didn’t put it on that way.

  But, as though crookedneckedness wasn’t enough to get him picked up, this fellow would stand around with his cap pulled down far enough over his eyes as to constitute intent to commit a misdemeanor if not a felony, on street corners where buses never stopped. If he’d just pulled that cap off his eyes and gone up to the bus-stop, crooked neck or no crooked neck, it wouldn’t have made the least difference. He would have been picked up all the same. Because by that hour the buses are all back in the bams and every corner is a wrong corner. This fellow seemed bright enough in other ways. His trouble was he had an IQ beyond psychology.

  Another affliction this fellow had was having a record over five inches long. The way he’d gotten it was by getting himself picked up only a block away from a bar where a pearl-handled .22 caliber pistol and ninety-eight dollars and sixty cents had just been stolen. Sure enough, this fellow was found to be carrying a pearl-handled .22 caliber pistol. The officers accused him of having robbed it.

  “Why should I rob another man’s weapon,” he demanded to know, “when I’ve got ninety-eight dollars in my wallet?”

  “How much you got in your pocket?” one of the shrewder officers asked immediately.

  “Sixty cents,” this fellow answered proudly. But when they took an account it was found he had a total of a hundred and four dollars in the wallet and twenty-six cents in his pockets. He was sentenced to six months for failing to account for the $5.66 discrepancy. He had to give the pistol back, too.

  As soon as he got out he began doing everything he knew how to do to keep from getting a record a full half-foot long. And what he knew how to do better than anything was moving electric typewriters, computing machines, lamps, swivel chairs, and cherrywood desks out of the back doors of Milwaukee Avenue office-furniture stores while a couple of cops were guarding the front to see that no one walked down the alley. The fellow called this “helping out” because he did it unarmed.

  When the cops handed him five or ten dollars he would accept it. But he would never take an adding machine, or a carton of fountain pens or a shipment of typewriter ribbons off the law. Which goes to show that even though his neck was on crooked his thinking was pretty straight.

  Whether this fellow’s affliction was hereditary or had been acquired by looking back over his shoulder I never did find out. And if I gave you another hundred years to guess what we nicknamed this fellow, you’d never hit it. Right off you’d say “Crooked-neck” or “Dizzy” or “Dodger” or “Rabbit” or something like that. But it wasn’t anything like that. What we called this fellow was Ipso. Which was short for
Ipso Facto.

  Because you’d be talking to him here and, when you looked around, he was over there. So you’d ask him where he was going and he’d say, “I’m on my way—ipso facto.” Or, when the cops thought he was starting to look suspicious of himself again, they’d stop him and ask, “Who are you going to rob tonight, Ipso? Who are you waiting around here to kill? How much did you make picking pockets at Wrigley Field yesterday?”

  “I wasn’t at Cubs Park yesterday,” Ipso would answer.

  “Where were you?”

  “Sox Park,” Ipso would say; because he was ashamed to tell them he’d spent the whole day riding the roller-coaster at Riverview.

  “The Sox are out of town,” the cops would say, “get in, Ipso Facto.”

  Now what Ipso Facto meant by Ipso Facto was “I’ll see you around.”

  But what the cops thought “Ipso Facto” meant was “Be damned quick about it.” Ipso would accept the cops’ interpretation.

  Then, of course, in the query room it would come down to a matter of being booked on suspicion or of helping the boys out.

  The first time Ipso was picked up he asked the officers, “What for?”

  “You look suspicious,” one explained; and held the car-mirror so Ipso would see himself in it.

  “You’re right,” Ipso had to agree, “I really do look suspicious.”

  But when they wanted to take his prints that time, Ipso asked them, “What for? I haven’t robbed nobody.”

  “But if you should change your mind we’d need them.” the fingerprint man explained in a kindly manner.

  “I see your point of view,” Ipso had agreed; and put his hands on the pad.

  He felt relieved after they’s gotten his prints.

  “When they told me I could go home it was better than confession,” Ipso admitted to me, “that was why I didn’t go straight home.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Nowheres. I just sat down in the cops’ waiting room and read a copy of St. Jude’s Magazine. When they asked me what I was hanging around for I told them I thought maybe they wanted me for a Lie Detector Test.”

  Ipso’s draftboard was a bit startled when he materialized at the induction center. Being three inches over six feet, weighing only 129 pounds, and the manner in which his head was set on his shoulders wouldn’t have attracted special attention had it not been for the tiny American flag waving from the left lens of Ipso’s tortoise-shell specs. The pin hold-ing the frame had been lost; so Ipso had inserted the stem of the tiny flag to keep the glasses from falling off. Removing the flag from its stem would not only have been unpatriotic, Ipso explained, but would also constitute a felony.

  All the inducting officer could think to ask was, “Are you going to be on our side?”

  “I’d like to die for my country,” Ipso announced, “but I have bad teeth.”

  “That’s all right,” the officer decided, having recovered from his first surprise, “we don’t want you to bite the enemy.”

  It was only his neck which deprived Ipso of becoming a force for law and order in Chicago. Had they ever let him ask the questions in the query room, he would have asked all the right questions:

  “If you weren’t planning to mug some drunk, when you were hanging around that bar, why don’t you let us have your prints in event you should change your mind?”

  “If you’re not guilty of something, why are you trying to make fools of us by having us stand around asking you questions?”

  “If you’re so innocent what are you bleeding about?”

  “If you’re not guilty of something, you must be innocent of some-thing—and that’s even more serious.”

  Ipso hated work. He hated work so much that he not only hated people who went to work but he hated unemployed people who had friends who were working. All he did, himself, besides moving office furniture, was to drive a cab a couple nights a week.

  He drove sitting in the middle of the seat. Had he sat under the wheel his flag, projecting out of the window, would have caused the driver behind to think he was about to make a U-turn.

  When a passenger would ask why he drove in this position, Ipso would answer, “I was a pursuit pilot, sir.” Why a stupid answer like that worked I never understood. Wouldn’t you think somebody would have said, “Get the hell under that wheel where you belong?” Yet nobody ever did.

  We were playing the Kosciusko Arrows, for five dollars a man, on a hot, dry, dusty Sunday morning, on the lot bounded by Ashland Avenue and Bosworth Street. We were two runs behind with one out in the ninth when Ipso came to bat with a man on second. The manager flashed the bunt sign to the third-base coach; who flashed it to Ipso.

  Ipso stepped back out of the box, because he didn’t get the signal. The coach flashed it again but it was no use. Ipso had forgotten it.

  “Bunt you meathead!” the manager shouted at the top of his lungs from the bench. “B-U-N-T—BUNT!”

  The pitcher gave Ipso a fast ball and he laid down a perfect sacrifice bunt—and slid into first base.

  He waited there, while the right fielder and the first baseman hunted for the ball, long enough to adjust his flag. Then he took off and slid into second base. The pitcher went over to help the right fielder help the first baseman and right fielder find the ball. Ipso dusted himself off again. Then he adjusted his flag.

  “I guess you fellows just don’t want me,” he finally told the second baseman; and took off for third. This time he used a hook slide.

  The Kosciusko second basemen went over to help the pitcher help the right fielder help the first baseman to find the ball. Ipso dusted himself off again. His flag was still in place.

  “I guess you don’t want me neither,” he told the third baseman. And took off for home.

  Ten feet from the plate he took the ball out of his pocket and tossed it to the catcher; who tagged him out so hard he knocked Ipso down.

  Ipso didn’t get up right away. He just lay there, turning his lopsided head one way and another and saying to himself, “I had it coming! I had it coming!” Miraculously, the flag was still waving.

  All Ipso would answer for some days after that, when asked for an explanation, was “ipso facto.” But, about a month after, sitting in a bar, I asked him why he’d given up that ball.

  ‘‘If I’d scored a tying run on a stolen ball I wouldn’t be a good guy,” he told me. ‘‘I deserved to be tagged out.”

  “That is highly honorable of you, Ipso,” I had to admit, “but how come your conscience didn’t bother you, the night before, when you were hauling two thousand dollars’ worth of somebody else’s furniture down the alley? How could you get conscience-stricken about a sixty-nine-cent baseball the next morning?”

  “What does costs have to do with it?” Ipso asked me. “Sports is one thing and robbin’ is another. Everybody stands a pinch now and then—but nobody steals first base.”

  “Then it was stealing first base, and not stealing the ball, that made you get yourself tagged out?”

  “Of course. Lots of good guys go robbin’. But no good guy slides into first.”

  “Frank Frisch did it at the Polo Grounds,” I had to remind Ipso, “and started a riot.”

  “I wish you would’ve told me that before the game,” Ipso reflected wistfully, “we’d all be five bucks richer today.”

  And adjusted his little flag.

  EVERYTHING INSIDE IS A PENNY

  A winter of a single wind has driven snow against the ads that once offered baby talcum and Log Cabin Syrup. But no el stops here anymore. Rains have ripped the ad that promised dancing lessons at the Merry Gardens; its tatters are less merry now. Waltz king and waltzers alike are gone. The 12th Street beau with cap tipped for love in Garfield Park, the Monday-morning salesgirl with lashes still Maybellined by Sunday night, the Mogen David wino with Happy New Year snow on his shoulders, none get off here anymore. Only a rail of rounded iron guards a peanut machine whose glass is cracked and its peanuts long vended. Snow-sh
adows race like children in the blood-red glow cast by two railroad lamps; up the drift of snow against the rail and then tobogganing down. They stop to rock the platform, lamps and all, when the midnight B train passes; and the lamps dip and tip like flares left burning on a raft abandoned at sea. The B train’s echo trails the B train. Then a fog shot with neon closes down; the coldest that ever fell. Yet riders of late winter locals sometimes hear a piano playing faintly somewhere below the ties, like a piano out of times long gone: on a night when tavern doors were opened to the street for the first night of the year.

  Oh! Gee! say gee, you ought to see my Gee Gee

  From the Fiji Isle

  Gosh Gee, say Gee, you ought to be with Gee Gee

  She does a twister much better than her sister —

  The long car leans to the land where old els wait for winter to pass. The walker on the midnight platform, adrift above the town, is left like a walker adrift in a dream. A dream dreamt by any old el rider.

  For the blue-and-white legend that once named this station, its ads that once bragged and its pigeons that made summer strut, all have passed in the wash of this sea of blue snows.

  Leaving two railroad lamps arock in the echo and ebb of the B train’s final passing.

  * * *

  My father was a fixer of tools, a fixer of machinery; a fixer of tables gone wobbly and windows that had stuck; doors that had warped and furnaces that had clogged. His labor was fixing, eternally fixing: the plas-ter that had cracked, the wallpaper that had splintered and the lathe that had broken. Other men wished secretly to be forever drunken. He wished secretly to be forever fixing: