The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  A big green trolley-bus whose windshield said CHARTERED came racing its empty seats down the middle of the street. Yet in the very last seat a woman’s face, pale as heroin, looked out; the only one who rode. “Zaza Zazaza, ” she told me. So I knew I was the only one, beside herself, who knew she rode.

  I thought of a spring whose bright returning would bring, in the semi-windup featuring eighty rounds of boxing at the Marigold Gardens, a welterweight from Gary, Indiana, named Zale in the semi-windup. With EXTRA-ADDED ATTRACTION: Ruffy Silverstein wrestling Hans Schmidt, the Prussian Giant. Some spring that smells of egg-bread, plain; but short two eggs per loaf.

  Turning off Ashland onto Cortez I saw one Puerto Rican sitting on top of a Keep-Our-City-Clean box far from Puerto Rico. He wore a red shirt open at the throat, cream-colored trousers fresh from the cleaners, and was combing his hair as if he had just killed somebody on North Clark. When he saw me coming he replaced the comb and began to riffle a deck of cards.

  “Come to me here you,” he ordered as I passed, “couple fast hands black-jack, just me and you.” The riffle sounded heavy like a deck with one extra card. My guess was that it was a queen. The Polish boys who used to deal seconds around here never used a queen. The card you had to watch out for with them was the jack. Don’t ask me why. If I knew why Porkies prefer a queen and Polskies a jack, I’d know about two-headed dogs, too. The whole thing was explained in the Trib; but I missed the issue. I simply have no luck no luck at all.

  “Let me just talk to you, you,” the dealer asked, but I kept passing for I knew now who he was. Just plain old Bill Saroyan still trying to get up his taxes; nobody else.

  I once knew a spring that came on fiercely tootling, red-white-and-blue-whirlabell, a small girl on a Fourth-of-July tricycle with flags tied to the wheels, who left laughter trailing like a confetti-colored pennon down the long block behind her.

  I knew another spring that walked in handsewn jeans, and rain-gray shirt and cap pulled low, below the wrack of a prison noon: whose lips inquired without moving, “Will you hold this for me?” and walked on never glancing back to where, the taped blade plunged five inches in, the paid informer lay.

  I knew a spring that once dealt stud poker all night long, the first card and the last card closed, fifteen dollars on the last card or an open pair, dealing on and on past midnight and toward noon; in a room that smelled of burning punk and dead cigars and booze. And when the last bluff had been called and the last closed card was opened and the burning punk was fading, someone rapped the door: we all looked up.

  And in came Summer in a yellow dress saying “the joint is raided, boys.” And everybody laughed.

  And once I saw a spring of lonesome jacks played by a girl in a pool of light at the end of a third-floor hall where no one comes all day. Crosslegged, ball and jacks, she made up a third-floor spring as she went along, just for girls who live behind numbered doors in halls where no one comes. As if she felt that the bright noontime city behind her might stay at noon, and never slowly darken, if she could find a magic saying to say with ball and jacks. Yet the city behind her was already darkening.

  Near the corner of Chicago Avenue and Wolcott two walls squeezed out an old blown bum, one who had been squeezed between many old walls—barracks, flophouse, barroom, and cell—that are made to squeeze men in. This one had been squeezed between walls where old bricks sweat and slowly drip in a cold, uncaring sweat. He came toward me now with one sleeve slowly squeezing the other and both elbows squeezing his middle. He had to hold his head bent a bit forward because something unseen kept squeezing his neck. His cheekbones were ground in a heavy vise that only a shot of Old Stillborn could loosen. This was the vised man Time and The Goat had caught between them. When Time and The Goat begin to press there is nothing on earth can help a man but Old Stillborn. He held out a card old brown beggary had begotten. I put it to my eyes and let them squeeze themselves to me:

  DONT WORRY

  DONT HURRY

  BETTER TO

  BE LATE TO

  THE GOLDEN

  GATE THAN

  ARRIVE IN

  HELL ON TIME

  He wanted a nickel for his philosophy, although both the philosophy and the card he offered it on were secondhand. I handed him a coin—then realized too late that it was a quarter! My mistake must have been reflected on my face, because he snapped his card back out of my hand, looked me up and down with real derision and asked impatiently—“What are you waiting for—change?” Then turned, laughing lightly, on his heel. And left me standing without a quarter. And no philosophy whatsoever.

  Well, what do you know, he hadn’t been a mere wino after all. I’d been touched by a true Mortimer Adler of the alleys; one who knew how to collect on the philosophy of others, and bank the money for himself. If that fellow had a PhD, I realized, he’d be dangerous.

  Passing the used-car lot again, the new year’s models looked brighter than ever, but last year’s were still drowsing. The cherry-colored pennon that had waved to me had itself gone back on the nod, folded over upon itself above a 1956 Chevy. A Tribune truck sped past and I broke into a run, still clutching my card, because I wanted to be the very first to read what they had thought up in the Tribune Tower the night before.

  I had begun to doubt whether Chicago was really a stallion wild after all. I was sure it’s no damned rose. I doubt it’s even a rose that says “MEOW!” although that seems to be nearer than thinking of it as a cat that smells like a rose.

  What it’s really closer to being is just an endless stretch of crisscrossing streets where men from everywhere have come to see how close they can come to killing one another without losing a customer and still stay out of jail.

  A small girl was sitting on the stand in a new print frock with a green balloon tethered to her hand.

  “Has someone forgotten you, honey?” I asked her. She studied me thoughtfully.

  “Where you been all night?” She wanted to know.

  The way she put that made me think for a moment I might be up against a midget—but what would a midget be doing holding a green balloon?

  “You might pick up the morning papers,’’ she suggested in that tone so near to scorn. “Or am I asking too much?”

  Chicago isn’t the best town in the world to be seen conversing with an unaccompanied child, and there have been so many laws passed against crime in general lately that I might not even have a defense in pleading that my accuser was a fifty-six-year-old midget. There might be something about talking to unaccompanied midgets. I am all for law and order on Sunday morning, so I put the papers beside her without unbinding them, thinking that might be interpreted later as a ruse to gain time.

  Am I asking too much? Of any Sunday-morning balloon-man’s spring in Chicago, that it lift the wishes of all young men in landlocked bars a little, waiting for their lifelong lives to start?

  Or raise the hopes of Sunday-morning sidestreet solitaries all over town, to let them drift slowly and low above St. John Cantius and high, then higher, over St. Bonifacius and St. Columbkille, toward that wonderful garden where all things are possible? To all those now merely waiting for rain or bread or love or peace with a pinch of the salt of magic in it that will last till the big dark falls.

  Allt är möjlig i gården hänger smörgåsbord från ri bröd träden.

  The garden where all things are possible. And all is free.

  All is free to young men in landlocked bars on landlocked streets.

  In a spring inviting every young man with a right hand too fast to follow to be the Unacknowledged Champion of Everything.

  If anyone has been killed on North Clark Street recently, it wasn’t me.

  DIFFERENT CLOWNS FOR DIFFERENT TOWNS

  IT was a bright summer’s morning, in 1931, when I walked into the City News Bureau to receive my first start in Chicago journalism.

  The late Isaac Gershman, then directing the bureau, gave it to me.

  He began by assuring
me that his list of applicants was already so long that there was no point in his even asking my name. Then he asked it anyhow! His newshawk’s intuition had gone to work. And, like the man of action Isaac Gershman was, he acted on that intuition.

  “Add this man’s name to our list of applicants!” he instructed his secretary.

  His secretary happened to be out of the room at the moment. But, like the woman of action she was, she returned.

  Gershman looked up the moment she entered the room.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked me.

  “You were going to put my name on some list.”

  The man reacted swiftly. “Put this man’s name on some list!” he told the young woman.

  I told her what my name was.

  She put it on some list.

  “I’ll phone you as soon as we have an opening,” she promised. To other applicants, I sensed, she merely said “We’ll phone you.”

  When she came back from lunch she told me to go home.

  But what if the opening should materialize while I was on my way home? By the time I got back to the bureau it might have closed again! I decided to play it safe by staying in the area. I went to the Little Paris Burlesk on South State. That was right in the area.

  My relationship to the City News Bureau has remained intensely personal ever since. Much of the credit for this goes to the Little Paris Burlesk.

  Now transpired one of those mystical coincidences which, looking back through the mists of four decades, will baffle science: The Little Paris did not close its doors until 1959, the same year that the White Sox won their first American League pennant in four decades!

  No sooner had the White Sox won the pennant than Emmett Dedmon of the Sun-Times sent for me and Fire Superintendent Quinn set off airraid warnings at midnight. I was to write human interest stuff from the grandstand.

  “Mr. Dedmon,” I responded courteously, “thank you for giving me my second start in Early Chicago Journalism,” saluted briskly and left. I cabbed out to my parents’ home on the Northwest Side to give them the good news. A stranger came to the door. I’d forgotten that my folks had moved in 1936.

  I ought to have remembered as they’d moved the day after I’d run away from home. That’s something else I’ve never been able to figure out.

  The moment each game was finished, I cabbed north to Dedmon’s office, composing my story on the way. Dedmon, wearing a green eye-shade, would be striding up and down shouting things like, “Hit that story! The presses are rolling! Get on the streets before the Trib! Scoop ’em!” To which nobody paid the least attention. It wasn’t until some years later, when I chanced to see a revival of “The Front Page,” that I realized he’d been doing Hildy Johnson.

  Whether Hildy would have sent me to Los Angeles, had the Sox extended the series, is one of those great Ifs of history which scholars will debate into infinity; like whether the Weathermen did, or did not, spring Dr. Leary; or whether he got himself out by failing to realize he was in. In which case I fail to see what difference it makes.

  Considering that my second start in Early Chicago Journalism had lasted three days longer than my first start, I was gathering momentum. How often now I look back, nostagically, wishing that the Little Paris was still open so I could get away from the hurly-burly of the press room. Or did I miss my big chance by not applying at the Northwest Side News?

  I owe my next beginning to the Sun-Times. For it chose a moment, when the world seemed strangely quiet, to express a feeling it had had for some time but hadn’t been able to place before:

  “We have had a feeling which has persisted for some time that squalor is going out of fashion in Chicago. Perhaps this is largely due to the postwar war on slums, our mayor’s efforts in tidying up the streets, the popularity of cheering colors and the wide interest in art and music shown by the public.

  “All these, and more, have added up to a feeling that the good old-fashioned, smelly squalor immortalized by men of literary genius is definitely on the way out.”

  What overpaid idiot wrote that editorial I never troubled to inquire. All I’m sure of is that, if Roman Pucinski can get elected to public office, anybody can be a managing editor.

  As Goldie Hawn once put it: different strokes for different folks.

  Back in the Chicago American press room Dirty Maggie had been thinking, for some time, that I needed a fresh start. When two old-time thieves were curbed, on North Broadway, by a squadrol, and I happened, by some strange chance, to be sitting between them in the front seat, Maggie sprang into action.

  When a stick of marijuana was discovered under the dashboard she became really eager. And when Otto Preminger’s Man with the Golden Arm materialized, in the same week, for a rerun on Otto Preminger’s TV sets, she grew hysterical.

  The proof of my innocence was incontestable: had I been aware that there was a stick of tea under the dashboard, it wouldn’t have been there when we were busted because I would have had it smoked to the final ash by then.

  ‘‘The man who wrote a novel about a narcotics addict himself appeared today in narcotics court,” Maggie put it on the wires coast to coast. Then she phoned the arresting officers to determine whether the car we’d been curbed in hadn’t been stolen.

  What a beauty of a scoop! I can see it now: “Writer trapped in hot-car ring! Claims dope in car was not for sales purposes. Divorced author, once found guilty of typewriter theft in Texas, out on bond pending trial.”

  Unhappily for Dirty Mag, there was a bill of sale for the car. And, as Papa Hemingway might have put it, it was a good bill. Judge Wendt, apparently unimpressed by Mag’s screeching, looked sympathetically at the state’s attorney, asked him “What has the loser got to say?” and dismissed the case in less than five minutes. The driver of the car, however, was fined for going through a yellow light.

  But the Prosecution for the American wasn’t ready to accept dismissal of the case that readily.

  “Congratulations to Nelson Algren on beating the narcotics rap!” she topped her column the following morning.

  Different strokes for different folks.

  “The more we put into welfare the worse the immorality becomes,” was the theme of a column of Jack Mabley’s, which gave me my third or fourth local start—I’m losing count.

  “We are making it profitable to have babies out of wedlock.” The columnist advanced the concept that the higher incidence of immorality on the South Side, as compared to the suburbs, is directly proportional to the incidence of public welfare.

  Not pausing to consider that adulterers who aren’t on welfare aren’t tailed by caseworkers.

  “The soaring rate of illegitimacies,” he warned all homeowners between Chatham Fields and Lake Forest about overdoing generosity, “shows that the more help you give, the more indolent the recipient becomes! Where will the vicious cycle of bastardy end?”

  Somewhere between Winnetka and Glenview would by my guess.

  Yet the ploy worked well enough to lend him momentum toward a managing-editorship.

  So it isn’t surprising that the same columnist pulled one of the weirdest U-turns, transforming himself from a wild bull into a bunny-man, in the history of Early Chicago Journalism.

  In the same crusading tone as he’d warned the suburbs about the vicious cycle of bastardy going on in the ghetto at their expense, he anticipated the purposes of the antiwar demonstrators during Convention Week of 1968. According, I assume, to orders from above.

  But there it was: hippie chicks were going to work as hookers in order to put LSD into delegates’ drinks, beat-up cars were to be abandoned on the thru ways in order to jam traffic. LSD would be dissolved in our drinking water—the whole gamut of fantasies that makes frightened men buy newspapers.

  “The defense is massive manpower,” Mabley warned.

  And saw the consequences of his own irresponsibility.

  Horrifying View of the Police Slate he reported, having witnessed police beating up a cripple in
the course of their rioting. He was so outraged at such useless cruelty that he put down his head and charged the whole police department. He charged so hard that he charged offstage.

  When he next materialized he was wearing a bunny-suit and was organizing a defense fund for policemen indicted on charges of brutality.

  His organization of the fund was so successful that now Chicago police need have no further fear of clubbing anyone, crippled or able-bodied; so long as they take off their badges first.

  “I was involved in the fund,” he explained later, “because after the convention disorders, when there was public speculation on federal indictments of policemen as political balance for the indictments of eight radicals, I thought the idea was so outrageous I said I would start a fund to defend the policemen the day any indictments were returned. I didn’t think the federal government would have the nerve to indict. But... the awesome federal government went into action to try to put these policemen into prison... the cost of proving their innocence, in money and the emotional impact on the men and their families, was terrible.”

  The cost of putting people into prison for protesting the most cowardly military assault in American history, and the emotional impact upon them and their families, however, is just another touch of brightness to lighten the gloom of our subway decor.

  A fighter who’d just been knocked out by Archie Moore, came around to Moore’s dressing room to ask for Moore’s autograph. But he was moved by awe. Mabley just feels that a bunny-suit is more becoming to his personality.

  “I don’t think a newspaper should be like a mean dog,” Mike Royko once commented, “that trots down the street, slashes your leg and keeps on trotting.”

  What Royko didn’t figure was on the mean dog doing a U-turn, coming back to take another slash and then keep trotting.

  A few years ago I was introduced to a fortyish-looking fellow who told me his name was Gershman. As he was a newspaper man, I recalled I’d once met a man of the same name, several decades ago, at the City News Bureau.