Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

After Finnerty had given the buzzer three quick shots, he waited a moment and added a fourth; then both stood in silence before a silent door.

‘Maybe aint nobody home,’ Dove ventured.

‘He’s squirrel-eyeing us this minute from behind the curtain,’ Finnerty confided without glancing at the window, ‘to see if we’re the type that demands service. If we buzz him again, we don’t get in. Doc just won’t be bossed.’

At last the door opened enough to let a white bug of a nose materialize before them. ‘Password?’ the nose demanded.

‘Respect is the key,’ Finnerty replied, and got past the old man. So Dove said it too and both were inside.

Where along the back bar’s thousand bottles, Old Doc Dockery’s hundred dolls remembered the twisted twenties.

Dark-eyed, dressy little town dolls and dutch-bobbed blondies from windmilled countrysides, redhaired colleens and gypsy dolls, a cowgirl cutie in a fringed buckskin and a Broadway baby in a fur boa, a geisha whose eyes were quarter-moons and another who had bobbed her hair and gone all out in Babylon; for her eyes were dollar-signs.

A penny-eyed doll and a button-eyed doll whose buttons said ‘Vote for Cox’; a cross-eyed doll no longer comical, and a doll wearing a bird of paradise. And one little down-and-out bum of a Raggedy Ann with patches on her skirt and wrinkles in her neck; right in the middle where the bar lights could make a small halo about her.

Yet birds of paradise or Raggedy Anns, though one pretended to be Dutch, one Irish and one Japanese, all had seen the headlines on St Valentine’s Day and had dated Harry Greb. Some had had good luck and some had had bad, but all had been born to the twenties and had died when the twenties were done.

Some of broken hearts when Wallace Reid had died. Some had gone on the nod waiting for Dempsey to fight Harry Wills. Others had grown weary after Starr Faithful had passed. One by one they had nodded off, taking their good luck and taking their bad.

(Raggedy Ann’s, of course, had been worse than the others, that was plain enough by her patches. And perhaps was the reason she had the place of honor right in the middle.)

‘There’s no price on them,’ Dockery warned everyone, ‘They’re not for sale and neither am I. Respect gets you in here and disrespect gets you out. Respect, respect is the key.’ No one was allowed to dicker for his dolls, no hand but his own could touch them.

Respect for the dead of a dead decade – that was the key.

The old man preferred the kind of drinker who asked that his glass be washed after every drink. As some men wish to be always drunken, as some women wish to be always in love, Doc Dockery wished to be always clean. To be clean and cleaning.

People, of course, could not be made clean. What kind of filth the old man had waded in neck-deep, of which he still fought to free himself in his lonely white-haired age, or what deep disease was concealed by this passion for hygiene was not clear. Yet it was plain that it had at last turned all his women to dolls.

Respect, that was the key. Respect for his women, and for his music too. His music that was Stardust, Stormy Weather, Bye Bye Blackbird, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, My Bill, Paper Doll, Red Sails in the Sunset and Tie Me To Your Apron Strings Again .

To this lopsided shambles owned by this unlicensed ghost, this speakeasy spook who had been alive once but had died in the crash and was now only haunting the thirties, came trudging, some uphill and some down, all those who could not admit that the money was spent, the dream was over; the magic done. They still wore the clothes they wore before 1929 and no one knew when they might buy clothes again.

By and large they were theater people who had lost their theater: ingénues, leading men, stagehands, ticket brokers, managers of road shows, starlets and prima donnas. Albeit that, just for the time being of course, they were ‘hostesses,’ con artists, sneak thieves, con-men, procurers, cardsharps, pennymatchers; and a few honest just plain bums.

The first thing Dove saw when he entered the cave was the lion-headed amputee they had left at the brothel. By what alley-route he had beat them here only someone who lived on ball-bearings could know.

Finnerty drank with his back to the half-man, indicating to Dove that was the wisest way. So Dove felt somehow relieved when he heard the skated platform wheel down the floor, out the door and onto the open street.

Then, ready to let the murmuring hours spin, he put a nickel in the juke to help them begin.

the machine began

‘Now I’ll come to the point,’ Finnerty informed Dove when the bubbles all were blown, ‘I need the help of a healthy boy. I take it your health is as good as it appears.’

‘A might better, mister,’ Dove made a conservative guess, ‘and I’m always ready to make an honest dollar.’

‘You can call me Oliver, for that’s my name.’

‘You can call me Tex. For that’s where I’m from.’

‘My line of work, as you may have guessed, Tex, is women. Do you know anything about them?’

‘I know that if God made anything better I aint come across it yet, but that’s as far as my knowledge goes.’

‘In that case it don’t go far,’ Oliver decided, ‘but the question is whether you’re interested in going to bed with a young woman who has never been to bed with a man before.’

‘Mister, I’m a Southern boy and wouldn’t disadvantage no young girl that way.’

‘Southern don’t enter into this, Tex,’ Finnerty assured him, ‘The young woman is bound and determined to hustle. It’s all settled but the bother and inconvenience of breaking her in.’

‘Your field being women,’ Dove pointed out, ‘I reckon that’s your job, mister.’

‘Why, that’s precisely the reason I can’t , don’t you see?’ Finnerty tried patience. ‘If I did it she could come back a year from now and law me on the white slave act, for I’ve a record in that line I don’t mind admitting. I’ve already been busted on that charge once, and I don’t cherish being busted again. But someone like yourself that she’ll never see again – Oh, don’t be afraid of having to use force, for you shant. You won’t even have to undress this child.’

‘That don’t sound like no virgin girl to me,’ Dove told the pander.

‘That’s her claim, so I take her at her word,’ Finnerty told Dove. ‘The point is that, if you did me this one small favor, she couldn’t make that claim in the future. Do you follow me?’

‘I follow you to a certain point,’ Dove decided, ‘after that it’s a mite unclear.’

‘Maybe this will clear things up.’

Dove put his hands stiffly behind his back. ‘Mister, I can’t read my own name if it was writ on the side of a barn, but I know a hundred dollar bill when I see one. And I think you’d best put that one away.’

Finnerty tucked it into Dove’s breast pocket.

‘Mister, I can’t take that,’ Dove told him firmly without making a move to give it back.

‘Don’t worry,’ Finnerty promised, ‘You’re not taking it, country boy. You’re carrying it for me, that’s all. You’re carrying it across the street and up the stairs to a room where this young lady is waiting for you. When you come in the room you’ll hand it to her without a word – if I know her greedy little heart she’ll put it in her slipper and you take it from there.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘She’ll tell you that herself, country boy.’

They were at the back entrance of the house which they’d entered by the front before Dove hesitated.