Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

‘Why, that goes without saying – she’s giving you her virginal white body, isn’t she? Don’t throw it up to her that you’re giving her your little pink body, that’s cad’s work – no, son, you’ll never get your daisy back. But you’ll find that appeasing that little white body is a job like any job except that you don’t get three weeks off with pay. If you try, your friends will fill in for you. Why do you think they pay me two dollars for a contraceptive that tickles if it isn’t because they’re afraid that the cat is starting to slip?

‘“Look for the woman” they tell us – but I take it one step farther than that. “Look at them sperms” is what I advise. Son, did you know that under a microscope every sperm looks exactly like his old man when the old man has a jag on? There he is, the old man all over again, with no particular place to go or if he has, he’s forgotten it. Just staggering from pole to pole, up one street and down the next, can hardly tell one door from the next, just hoping somebody he knows will let him in. Really not doing anybody any harm. All of a sudden a lady sperm – looks exactly like the old lady opens a door off the alley ’n whispers – “ in here, Jack .” Pulls him in and latches it. Now you know where all our troubles start?

‘Look out for love, look out for trust, look out for giving . Look out for wine, look out for daisies and people who laugh readily. Be especially wary of friendship, Son, it can only lead to trouble. And it isn’t your enemies who’ll get you deepest into the soup, it’s your friends.

‘You might keep that in mind if you’re ever called upon to point the finger of accusation and say “that’s the very man.” Remember that you have to be absolutely certain , son. If you have the leastest leastest doubt it’s your highest highest duty to say you’re not absolutely absolutely sure. Do you realize that if you sent a man to prison on a wrong identification you’re a criminal yourself, little better than a hardened murderer?’

‘He’s cutting in a little closer now,’ Velma observed.

‘Why,’ for once Gross spoke directly to her, ‘doesn’t an old man have the right to die in his own bed?’

The vulcanized woman made no reply. Her chair was vacant. She had tiptoed out just to make the old man sweat in anxiety – ‘Where’d she go? How long she been gone? Why didn’t you speak up?’

‘I think she’s in the bedroom, mister,’ Dove told him, and waited dutifully for the rest of the speech while Gross went to listen at the bedroom door. Satisfied that she hadn’t yet crossed the frontier, he returned to his rocking chair; but had no more to say that evening.

(In the deep dark and dead time the old man hears the soft scr aaap scr aaap and feels the sudden sinking through the uterus wall and the blood running over his hand again. The uterus wall that, once pierced, bleeds till no blood remains. O, Old Gross remembers a thing or two in the deep dark and dead time.)

Gross lived in an unendurable twilight land, a land of in between, with a woman whom he had married in order to make her his prisoner. Now the prisoner was the jailer, he the captive. Velma not only had enough on him to send him to the pen for keeps, but also those inside-the-walls connections that Gross feared more than the uniformed law. He knew that she could have him disposed of without the bother of having him carried through federal gates. In any one day she had only to pick up a telephone and he wouldn’t see his rocking chair that night.

Dove’s function, he soon saw, was simply to perform errands that Velma would otherwise have had to do. The only ease the old man knew was when she was at work right under his nose. Whatever he had coming, it seemed, he wanted to see it come.

Yet Gross went on little errands of his own that didn’t bother Velma at all. Every morning she wrapped a small package in gift paper, tied it with colored string, put it under the old man’s arm and sent him off with it. He would be back in less than an hour without the package. It was some days before Dove saw that all the paper contained was garbage.

‘He leaves it on a street car or a newsstand for someone to find, thinking they’ve found something of value and hurry home to undo it, and there it is. What else can an old man do for fun?’

It seemed to Dove there must be something else even for an old man.

How she had found him out, here in the lake-palmed suburb where the rise and dying fall of a rollercoaster and bonfires on the beach of Lake Pontchartrain made summer sweet, Gross didn’t want to know. He had married her in a last despairing hope of winning her loyalty legally.

The woman had wanted a home of her own all her life. She knew a good thing when she found it. Marriage had turned out to be no more than a down payment from Gross. Now she had a legal grip on everything he owned and didn’t have to bother arguing with him except to indulge him.

It was his table manners she found most difficult to indulge.

‘I swear I never before did see a man dip oyster crackers in coffee,’ she commented across the table to Dove.

Yet Gross went on dipping placidly. The whole front of his shirt was greased with droppings from his fingers.

‘It could be they never seen a oyster cracker in Arkansas,’ he goaded her a bit by tipping the coffee into the saucer so that most of it spilled onto the cloth. ‘What was it you said you got run out of Arkansas for? I always forget.’

‘The point isn’t who got run out,’ Velma corrected him, ‘the point is who they wouldn’t let in. I swear I never before did see a man dip oyster crackers in coffee.’

‘Talk to my ass,’ Gross told her, ‘my head is hard.’

She went back to the sink to finish washing the dishes that Dove was drying, and Dove saw her dab furtively at her eyes. ‘I’ve taken all the insults I’m going to off that cliff-ape,’ she warned Gross aloud, ‘it’s more than natural flesh can bear.’

Dove patted her gently. ‘He don’t mean harm, ma’am. It’s his way of showing affection is all.’

Velma would have none of such affection. ‘That man would be rode out of town on a rail where I come from.’

‘Look!’ the old man commanded her triumphantly from across the kitchen, ‘Look! I’m sopping up! ’

Velma was a kind of cross between a gadfly and a ferret, but like many people streaked by violence, usually maintained a deep serenity. In which she sang not unpleasantly,

and went serenely on molding skins and painting them, clamping, drying, sorting, glueing, counting, counting days till the old man died. For Dove sensed she preferred that he die in his bed rather than by violence.

She would not give the old man the peace that such knowledge would have afforded him. Perhaps she feared that, once allowed to relax, he might just live on and on. After all, she had had a hard enough time and didn’t have too far to go herself. She could no longer afford pity.

So all night long the old man was up and down in his flannel nightshirt, hiding his money in one place or another. He would unscrew the top of a bedpost, drop a couple twenties down the hollow of it, then forget to screw the top-piece down. He had as many stashes as a squirrel in October and one of his favorites was the water box above the old-fashioned plumbing. He would bind a bankroll into a condom, fasten it tightly and tie it to the waterworks. But when he heard it flushing, and Velma would issue forth, he would race in there to stand on the seat to see if she had found him out. Thus giving himself completely away.