Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

One evening an actor stumbled in. ‘I’ve had too much to drink,’ he told the women as though otherwise they’d never catch on.

‘Sweetie, I seen your picture in the paper but why don’t you just go home?’ Reba asked. The next morning the actor had his picture in the paper again, having been picked up for drunk and disorderly down the street. ‘I had too much to drink’ he had repeated his explanation to reporters once more. Reba’s patience gave out.

‘“I had too much to drink.” “I had too much to drink.” What did I tell him when he was here? “Sweetie, you’ve had too much to drink” is just what I told him. Honest to God , when a man knows he’s had too much and goes on drinking more all the same, that’s just too much. I refuse to adjust to peasants of a environment like this, that’s all.’

The excuse of the dunce who drowned his infant daughter because his wife had run off with another man didn’t get him off the hook with Reba. ‘Something snapped in my head’ he had told the police, ‘I didn’t know what I was doing.’

‘“I had too much to drink,”’ she mocked all erring mankind. ‘“Something snapped in my head,” “I didn’t know what I was doing” – of all the bum excuses. Give me animals, at least they know what they’re doing.’

Especially elephants. Elephants always knew what they were doing.

‘Do you know about elephants, how they come on?’ she asked anxiously of some sport adjusting a black wool tie in a cracked mirror while she was preoccupied with the ritual of the douche, shaking the bottle madly to make it foam.

‘If you’d stop sizzling maybe I could hear what you’re saying,’ the wool-tie sport suggested.

‘Well,’ the girl explained, ‘I read about how the old man elephant whips up a big pit in the ground with his trunk ’n then whips the old lady into it. Otherwise they could never make it and there wouldn’t be no elephants.’

‘So what?’

‘Well, it just goes to show you, animals do know what they’re doing.’

‘I’m in theatrical work,’ the girl called Frenchy explained to a date. ‘See—’ she stretched her pale hands before his eyes – ‘I’m double-jointed too. Double-jointed hips, but I lost my partner.’

‘Can’t you find another?’ the date asked.

‘You don’t understand. I probably couldn’t find another partner in the entire country. Not everyone’s double-jointed you know.’ She was a high-cheekboned girl with consumptive coloring. ‘We’d swing down the coast and come back west – Philly, Cleveland, Cincinatti, Chattanooga – that’s where my folks are, they spent thousands on my education.’

Out on the walk, up and down in the rain, the man with a cap that shaded his eyes carried a sign that said BEWARE THE WRATH TO COME.

If the pale lost blonde wasn’t down the stairs by the time that street lamps came on, somebody went up and fetched her down. Should lamps be lit or no lamp burn, all was one to the pale lost blonde.

Nobody had counted, for nobody cared, how many lamps had come up and gone down since the night she had stood where Loew’s marquee lights flickered in an uncertain rain, when a cabbie had held a door wide for her and she’d told him, as though she were awake and not in deep dream, ‘Lake Pontchartrain.’

Nobody was home at Lake Pontchartrain. She had spoken a name overheard, nothing more, and offered him a pressed flower out of her purse for her fare. He preferred coming into the back seat with her to collect instead. Then had turned her over to Finnerty to satisfy the meter.

‘I’d rather not be whupped,’ she’d told Oliver – ‘ if I got my rathers.’

‘I’d rather not whup you,’ Finnerty reasoned with her, ‘all I’m asking is that you let me take care of you in the big things so that you can take care of me in the little ones. Or am I asking too much?’

‘Little ones, big ones,’ the girl repeated, offering him a smile itself a pressed flower.

‘Do you remember your name, little baby?’ he asked her.

‘Floralee’ – and that was all she remembered.

First he had made her his pleasure, then he had made her his trade. But the ease with which he’d accomplished this troubled him. He had Mama spy on her. Mama reported back.

‘Haven’t you any pride at all ?’ he asked Floralee in his injured tone, ‘coming on with a trick like it was love, love, love? Do you realize you spent the better part of an hour with that bum for a lousy four dollars?’

‘Daddy, I lost track of the time,’ the demented girl replied.

‘ I’m here to take care of your needs,’ he reminded her. ‘Try to remember that.’

But a few days later he heard a great thump and crash overhead while she was entertaining.

‘What was that?’ he asked her half an hour after.

‘Why, daddy, we fell off the bed and kept right on going, that was all,’ she told him so innocently he hardly had the heart to give her the beating she now so richly deserved. But it had to be done to protect the fool from herself. He hung his coat over the back of a chair.

‘If you’d just as soon,’ she had seen what was coming, ‘I’d as soon not be whupped – if I got my sooners.’

‘I’d sooner not,’ Oliver told her, but put on his mittens, lifted her ponytail off the back of her head to get at the nape where bruises don’t show: A few rabbit-punches, enough to make her head spin, and that satisfied him.

‘But next time when you chippy with a date daddy won’t put his mittens on,’ he promised her.

She never committed the sin of chippying again.

Although Oliver’s other two faithfuls, Reba and Frenchy, were at needle’s points day and night, somehow neither was jealous of the wandering blonde. ‘Nobody home at Lake Pontchartrain is right,’ was all Frenchy had to remark. For Floralee’s life was too remote for envy. She lived enwrapped in some private cloud through which the light of the outer world filtered sometimes dimly and sometimes bright; but never like the light of the world in which the other women lived and bargained.

The girl had days when she seemed so sensible no one could have guessed there was anything amiss. But before night she would be ecstatic, singing upstairs or down—

And the next morning would be utterly cast down. Once Oliver went to fetch her and found her lying naked on her side, eyes shut tight, knees drawn to her chin and the sheet over her head. There was no sound in the hot little room save the incessant hum of an electric fan.

‘There are little people a-prayin’ and a-singin’ in there,’ she told him and he understood she was hearing the voices of her people at their old spirituals in the hypnotic hum of the fan. He shut it off, returned with a small radio and tuned in a Sunday morning choir—

Floralee opened her eyes to see her little daddy standing on a chair, pretending to lead a congregation—

Who best can drink his cup of woe triumphant over pain? ‘—it takes your little daddy to get them real good programs,’ he told her, and jumped down. She listened closer, growing proud of the way her little daddy made them real good programs come in. By noon she was downstairs singing with faith restored—

‘That just won’t get it, honey,’ Mama finally had to put a stop to it – ‘I’m a church-going woman bound to die blessed, but there’s a time and a place for everything and that song just isn’t right for a place like this. If you just have to sing when men are around, try something like “Mademoiselle from Armentieres” – something to put them in the mood, not take them out of it.’