The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  When they got him up, without a word they both began punching him, while his mother slapped him with the broad of her hand. Johnny ducked into a running crouch and all three followed, punching and slapping; the old woman carrying the soured milk in her left hand while she slapped at his ears with her right.

  The battle went across South Park Avenue, with Ethel and me following, drawn by horror and joy, through a narrow way between the building and up the alley between South Park and Vernon Avenue, when Ethel’s mother and mine both hollered us back into our own yards. I don’t remember whether the terrier ever got buried.

  I know the great hole remained there until my father filled it with the shovel Johnny had left, and Ethel and I had to return the shovel as some sort of punishment. Nobody knew what we had to be punished for, but my punishment was always the same: I was excommunicated from the Catholic Church. I don’t see how my father was qualified to excommunicate anybody; but he did it all the same.

  This time it was my mother who thought the action was comical and my father who went around growling that somebody ought to have that milk-delivery kid locked up before he started thinking about girls.

  So far as I know, Johnny never got any ideas about girls that were any funnier than anyone else’s.

  In the late sunflowered summer of 1918 I took my fiancée to John the Greek’s confectionery on the corner of Vernon Avenue and 71st Street. She ordered a strawberry sundae and I ordered chocolate and John put his favorite record on his mechanical piano and sang along with the song for us—

  If you don’t like your Uncle Sammy

  If you don’t like the red, white and blue

  Go back from whence you came

  Whatever land its name

  Don’t bite the hand that’s feeding you—

  In the corn-stalked autumn of 1918 I built a new pushmobile out of an orange crate and fitted it with a candle holder. When my father got off the 71st Street trolley he could see me flickering toward him in the dark. And held my hand all the way home.

  That was the last autumn my mother took me to see my grandmother and grandfather.

  We walked together below the Lake Street el, and a grandfatherly light came down through the Lake Street ties.

  All the way to the West Side House.

  The West Side House was where my grandfather sat sealing cigars of his own making with a lick of his tongue. The band he wrapped each cigar in said it was a Father & Son Cigar.

  And he had promised to tell me a secret he had not told any of his other grandchildren.

  And the secret that I was never to tell was that he, himself, personally, my own grandfather, had thought up the name of the Father & Son Cigar! That he was therefore the inventor of the Father & Son Cigar! And that he had applied for a patent on the name: FATHER & SON CIGAR.

  And that it was a good cigar.

  I was proud to have the man who had invented the Father & Son Cigar for a grandfather.

  Then he made the wooden half-figure of a clown on his worktable blow real smoke at me and we went upstairs to dinner.

  Behind my grandfather’s West Side House stood the Sommerhaus, a little old-world cottage with blinds.

  It was always summer in the Sommerhaus.

  The old man sat at dinner with his wife at his right hand and all his married daughters, and all his married sons, and his grandchildren running in and out of the Sommerhaus. He was proud that all of his grandchildren had been bom in the States.

  But I was the only one in the whole tribe for whom he made a wooden clown that blew real smoke.

  I was the only one the old man ever told who thought up the name of the Father & Son Cigar.

  And that it was a good cigar.

  After dinner Uncle Bill sat at the player piano and played The Faded Coat of Blue and Aunt Toby sang the words. Aunt Toby didn’t look exactly faint and hungry the way it said in the song—

  He sank faint and hungry

  Among the vanquished brave

  And they laid him sad and lonely

  In a grave unknown

  O no more the bugle

  Calls the lonely one

  Rest, noble spirit

  In thy grave unknown—

  but I figured it must be because she had just had dinner.

  Then in no time at all it was time to go home and I walked back with my mother below the Lake Street el.

  A grandfatherly light drifted like yellow cigar smoke between the ties and my mother hummed cheerfully—

  Take me for a joy-ride

  A girl-ride,

  a boy-ride I’m as reckless as I can be

  I don’t care what becomes of me—

  all the way home.

  Halloween night Ethel and I put on false faces and went up and down 71st Street chalking windows of laundry, undertaker, delicatessen and butcher shop. Dotty as ever, Ethel chalked a cross on John the Greek’s and I wrote below the cross—EVERYTHING INSIDE IS A PENNY! and we both ran off screaming. On my way home from the Park Manor School the next noon, all the store windows had been washed clean except John the Greek’s.

  John’s window stayed chalked. On Sunday morning police broke the lock and found John hanging by his belt above the candy tins. I don’t know how it had happened but I now knew there was something terrible padding the world; and began to skip the sidewalk cracks just to make sure it wouldn’t get me.

  I skipped the cracks with particular care when passing the Hanged Man’s Place. Frost froze the cracks over and the Hanged Man’s windows went white.

  I rubbed off the frost with my mitten and peered in: dust and cold had laid a gray hand across the bottles of Green River and Coca-Cola. The great jar of fresh strawberry syrup had fermented, then split the bowl, bubbled over the counter. It hung in a long frozen drip like a string of raw meat.

  The magic of strawberry was gone. The magic of its smells and the magic of its color all hung in a freezing dust.

  That night I said the German prayer my mother had taught me out of her own childhood:

  Ich bin klein

  Mein Herz ist rein

  Darf niemand’ drin wohnen

  Bloss Gott und die Engel allein.

  * * *

  Yet somewhere between that St. Valentine’s Day and the Store Where Ice Cream Came True I had realized that where God’s colors raged behind a lifted cross was no business of mine: that these were for people who lived upstairs and not for people who lived down.

  * * *

  My father was a working man in a day when the working hour was from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. He left the house before daylight six days a week and returned home after dark six days a week, year in and year out.

  He worked for McCormick Reaper and Otis Elevator and Packard and the Yellow Cab Company in a time when there was no sick leave, no vacations, no seniority and no social security. There was nothing for him to do but to get a hold as a machinist and to hold as hard as he could as long as he could.

  He was a good holder but he was unable to keep any one job for more than four or five years because he couldn’t handle other men. He could handle any piece of machinery; if left alone. But he was as unable to give orders as he was to take them. He was a tenacious holder; but after four or five years he would hit a foreman. This would happen so blindly that he would be as stunned by it as the man he had hit.

  When he walked into the kitchen at noon with his tool chest under his arm my mother knew it had happened again. The first time this happened I was frightened, because I had never seen him, during the week, in the middle of the day. I had the feeling my mother was going to go for him like never before.

  That was one time she didn’t go at him at all.

  Then for days we lived under an oppression of which only the tool chest in the corner of the kitchen spoke. On the morning I rose to find the tool chest and the old man gone to work together, the sense of ominousness lifted; and life began once more.

  He was a fixer of machinery in basements and garages who had seen the
Electrified Fountain in Lincoln Park.

  My father was a farm youth who had come to the city to see Little Egypt dance, and had stayed on to work for many great plants: for they offered him twice the wages that others were getting for doing the same work.

  He liked earning twice as much as anybody else and would stay on the job loyally until some picket would take him aside and ask him how he would like to have his head blown off his shoulders.

  My father would say that he would like to wait until after lunch if that wasn’t asking too much.

  He had witnessed the fight between police and anarchists on the Black Road near the McCormick works. He had heard Samuel Fielden speak on the Lake Front; yet his most vivid memory was of Honey-Throat Regan singing If He Can Fight Like He Can Love/Goodby/Germany.

  My father avoided being killed in situations simmering with violence simply because he didn’t hear anything simmering.

  * * *

  The day falls with a colder light today, between the Lake Street ties, than once fell between the blinds of the Sommerhaus.

  It was always summer in the Sommerhaus, the old-world house lit by a grandfatherly light; where grandchildren ran in and out before dinner.

  When I was the only one, of all those children, to whom the old man told the name of the inventor of the Father & Son Cigar.

  And the farm boy from Black Oak who worked for McCormick Reaper and Otis Elevator and Packard and Yellow Cab became an old man on a West Side bed. An old man who lay without knowing that his wife and son stood looking down at him.

  They saw his right hand take the fingers of his left as though something had gone wrong with the fingers; and saw he was trying to fix the machinery of his left hand with the machinery of his right.

  They saw him pass from life into death still trying to fix machinery.

  His old woman saw him go; yet she did not weep.

  So the son knew that, for all his fixing, the old man hadn’t fixed anything that mattered.

  Now a winter of a single wind drives snow against the blue-and-white legend that once said LAKE STREET. But the ads that once bragged and pigeons that made summer strut, drunkard and lover both alike, have passed into neon mists adrift above the town.

  Captain and crewman, all alike, are down with all hands on the proud ship Chicora; lost without trace in the ice of South Haven.

  Sunken without sign on the unshaken waters.

  THE RYEBREAD TREES OF SPRING

  OTHER springs have come on strong before. That one where David walked, I’ve heard, was something quite new in the field. It turned the fields a greener green and flecked the figs of old Gilboa with gold. Yet here in Chicago in the big green middle of a brand-new all-American beginning to everything, I think no spring before was geared this high.

  At the Sunday morning newsstand the papers hadn’t been tossed in yet by the news truck. The newsy hadn’t showed up yet. My mind was filled with that Russian dog that had two heads.

  That was the reason I was up so early. I knew the Tribune could explain everything. I walked on.

  Into a spring strutting like Marilyn Monroe defying traffic lights. That seemed to stand for a moment to one side as if listening to someone like June Christy singing about how it’s really spring that hangs her up the most, and you think: that must be as fine as any girl can sound. Till spring herself comes on with lyrics of her own, making the lyrics up as she goes along. A spring that tops the very best, then tops herself and, breaking off, announces to all young men from everywhere, that there is a garden where smorgasbord grows from ryebread trees, the Garden Where All Things Are Possible. And all young men are invited to help themselves and all is free: Allt är möjlig i gården hänger smörgåsbord från ri bröd träden.

  A spring, that is to say, telling all young men all things are possible. That if you are a young man from Stockholm with a right hand too fast to follow, and the reason you do not use it against sparring partners is that it has such awful power it will take a man’s head off five inches below his shoulders and snap it like a twig and all of that, then somewhere in the room is a reporter who, for one fleeting moment thinks—allt är möjlig—all is possible—and you’ve sown a seed in the climate of belief. All that then remains to be done is to write a round-robin letter to sports editors and sign yourself: The Unacknowledged Champion of Everything. Leave the rest to spring.

  “All right, but what about the dog?” I thought I heard someone call, but when I looked around there was nothing but a used-car lot with this year’s models already awake and last year’s still drowsing about. A cherry-colored pennon above them waved me a cherry-colored good morning.

  A morning to bring poets running to see which one can sound the most like Mr. Thomas used to sound.

  Between the sidewalk and the street a narrow streak of city grass grew so green one breath would breathe it into fire. Would Joseph Rostenkowski, Ward Committeeman, approve a spring that left things growing in the street? I wondered. Yet it really wasn’t so much a Ward Committeeman’s spring as it was a State’s Attorney’s, an Ed Hanrahan spring, and that’s the dandiest kind because it knows where spring is legally entitled to grow and where it is not.

  “It is my proud privilege and special pleasure to announce that the State’s Attorney’s Office has arranged for spring to arrive four days early to both sides of West Division Street. Eastbound traffic will be rerouted past students crossing at St. John’s High School. So will westbound traffic as students must not be run down from either direction. Courtesy fees in payment of violation of traffic regulations are not payable on the street; but officers will carry even change just in case. It’s the proud privilege and special pleasure of this office to announce that tickets to Riverview Park are now available on a bipartisan basis to well-behaved children under twelve at Wieboldt’s well-behaved department store.”

  Sometimes I think a streak of common grass burning between sidewalk and street is as hard a thing to understand as a dog with another dog’s head growing out of its neck.

  Once a candidate for local office offered a hundred dollars as first prize for a poem about Chicago. A hundred dollars was a lot of money then as now, so I sent in a poem about Chicago being freight-handler and hog-butcher to the world and how freight-cars roll in here on little cat feet. And signed it “Edward St. Vincent Millay” in order to make a strong impression.

  I should have signed it “Edward St. Vincent Hanrahan” because I didn’t win. The poem that took the hundred began

  Chicago is a stallion wild

  Windstretched and untame

  I know that doesn’t seem real great on paper, but just you try saying it out loud in a whiskey-tavern. You’ll find, as we of the Poetry Trade like to put it, that it “gains momentum.”

  We of the Poetry Trade know how to say a thing to keep the layman in his place. You have to keep the layman in place in any line. “Give a layman a hand,” we say, “and he’ll take a whole knuckle.”

  “It’s true as Proust” is still another—but this one has to be sort of dropped with an indifferent air. I dropped it like that in front of a bartender once—“this Schlitz is true as Proust”—just like that—and before I knew it he had drawn me two Pabsts.

  I tried the bit about Chicago being a stallion wild on him; but he didn’t even draw a Pabst. He just stood there. So I pressed him about did he think Chicago really was a stallion wild? But all he did was keep standing. So I said, “It’s big as Whitman.” Then he started that just standing there again. He was all layman.

  Another time someone asked Allen Ginsberg what he thought about Chicago and the way Mr. Ginsberg put it was: “Death is a message that was never sent.” A friend of Mr. Ginsberg’s stepped up and said what he thought about Chicago. And that was, simply, “MEOW!” He said this “MEOW!” in such a wonderful lifelike way that everyone understood what he had in mind: He thought he was a cat.

  “Do you know what you’d have if you put Mr. Ginsberg’s brains in a cat?” I asked him an
d he didn’t know. So I told him—“a crazy cat.”

  But another friend of Mr. Ginsberg’s knew that he had the real solution:

  “Chicago is a rose,” he said before anyone could stop him. The fellow had thrown the whole game away on one bad pitch.

  For myself I simply couldn’t stop thinking about that Russian dog. Had the Russians beaten us to it again? How could anyone be absolutely sure that Morris Fishbein might not have relatives in Russia? How, in fact, could anyone be sure of anything? What was there to stop the Russians from teaching the dog to sing, “I Ain’t Got No Body” and thus turn a purely scientific experiment into a grisly prank? To come down to it, I realized I myself didn’t even know which head I was thinking about. I needed a Tribune badly.

  The Augusta Bakery was still closed, but it was giving away free smells. You have to go around the alley where they load the morning delivery trucks to get one; but you can have all you want so long as you don’t get in the way of the man carrying bread trays. I picked old-country-rye with seeds to smell first, even though I hadn’t yet had orange juice. This is a very heavy whiff to hit a person’s stomach with no warning, but I was hungry. Next I tried egg-bread plain, but they hadn’t used enough eggs. After that I had a French do-nut, the light kind without frosting. I didn’t hang around for pineapple cheese rolls because something began to get me in my middle like that June Christy coming on about it being spring that hangs her up the most again, and that is exactly what was doing it: spring was coming on again. Like spring. I walked on.

  Into a spring of old-time church-chimes, old clocks ticking remembrances of things people used to say and sing they don’t say or sing any more. I remembered a fellow used to come on between strip acts at the old Rialto. He weighed in around ninety pounds and wore a bright orange tie that hung past his knees and his face was so little and so pale behind it that it made the business of being a man something very comical in itself. The song he sang best was Oh Why Did I Pick a Lemon in the Garden of Love Where Only Peaches Grow ? His name was Kenny Brenna and if it wasn’t for me both his name and the song would be lost to posterity.