Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

‘Do you know that half the men serving time are serving it for somebody else? Shaking somebody else’s jolt for copping somebody else’s plea, playing culprit for a lesser crime than the one they actually done?

‘What a young fellow like you got to think about, if you’re going into crime serious, is what any young business man got to consider before he invests in anything – How can he wire himself so that, if he takes a fall, he falls the least distance instead of the longest? He got to wire himself to the courts, the state’s attorney’s office, the police department. He can’t trust just any old lawyer, you don’t learn the law by going to law school. He got to have someone who can operate behind the bench as well as in front of it, behind the public prosecutor as well as in front of him. Then if he takes a fall he got a choice – Should it be one-to-life for armed robbery or one-to-three for simple robbery?

‘But blow wise to this, buddy, blow wise to this: Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own. Never let nobody talk you into shaking another man’s jolt. And never you cop another man’s plea. I’ve tried ’em all and I know. They don’t work.

‘Life is hard by the yard, son. But you don’t have to do it by the yard. By the inch it’s a cinch. And money can’t buy everything. For example: poverty.

‘Take my own experience with money, for example. I was suppose to be a writer on the coast but all I ever wrote was phone numbers. I’d slip into a party like I was invited, spot some fluff who looked like she’d left her jewel case home, talk her out of her address and phone it to a couple fellas who were just setting around some hotel room talking religion. When she got home the jewel case would be empty. How should I know they were that kind fellas?

‘We made so much I didn’t have time to spend it. Still I felt them fellas were giving me a shellacking. I got out and went on my own. I lined up a most trim little number – you understand I passed for sharp myself them years. Husband had gold. Had her own car. One day she give me the key to it on a ring with her other keys, to drive around while she shopped. I wheeled eighty an hour out to her place, cleaned out every bit of her jewelry and the husband’s too, and was waiting for her when she got through shopping.

‘I was scoring like that every week, stuffing a suitcase for a trip to Chicago. There was a fence I trusted there. What tripped me was I figured it was my turn to give a party.

‘The country had just gone dry. I was living in Catalina and went across to L.A., bought a second-hand suitcase and stuffed it with Canadian rye. I got off the boat with it and carried it up hill to my cottage. I had to go past the nab station. I knew all the nabs. I set the suitcase down and cut up jackpots with them a spell. One of them asked, “What’s in the keister, Kline?”

‘“Just what you’re thinkin’ is in it, MacElheny my boy,” I told him, “booze.” We all had a laugh. I laughed too.

‘I just got into the cottage when somebody knocked. Four nabs I’d never seen in my life before. “What’s in the keister, Kline?” Only this one meant it.

‘“Liquor,” I told him right out, “Want a shot?”

‘“We’ll have to take you to the station, we have a tip you’re bootlegging.”

‘I went along. What else? Some clown of a justice of the peace clapped a hundred-fifty-dollar fine on me. I didn’t have that much on me, so they kept me in the clink. I played cards with the jailer and went to bed. I was still laughing but not so loud.

‘About three in the morning a deputy sheriff came in and shook me awake, took me into the jail office and pointed.

‘It was all spread out on a table. $120,000 in hot ice. They must have tore that cottage apart to find it.

‘My head was spinning like a top the rest of that night, trying to figure how to get rid of the stuff. I’d never been fingered for burglary, if they didn’t have the ice I was clean. In the morning the chief turned me over to a deputy, to take me on the boat to L.A.

‘The deputy was skirt-crazy. As soon as the band started playing he made it to the dance floor, lugging the jewelry in a cardboard shoebox under his arm. Once he threw it to the drummer to keep while he dragged a broad around the floor.

‘I wasn’t handcuffed. Where could I go? Nowhere but overboard and I can’t swim enough to bother. So I sat around gnawing my fingernails twenty-eight miles worth, waiting for a break. When we were almost in it came.

‘The deputy got the shoebox back, and we went up on deck to watch the boat make the pier. I said I was getting seasick and made for the rail. We were in the channel, almost to Wilmington Harbor. The deputy came along with me – to hold my head I guess – and when we reached the rail I started one from the ankle and he took it big.

‘He hit the deck on the back of his neck and I grabbed the shoebox and heaved it. It plopped into the propellor wash and burst like a bomb. It rained jewelry all over the muck in the channel.

‘The nab went for his gun and I held out my hands so he wouldn’t dare mow me down in front of all the passengers. He put the gun back and begun bawling, handcuffing me to the rail and crying like a baby, both at once, simply slobbering all over me. Then he ran for his box, still sobbing. He could have saved his sobs. They kept a gang of divers prowling that channel bottom ten days without bringing up a single piece. By the time we made the pier there were four cars from the bureau of identification. That nab stopped me three times on the way and begged me – begged like a kid for candy – to get out and run for it. “Give me a chance,” was how he put it, “You owe me that much.” I sat awful still.

‘The B. of I. give me the business. For seventy-two hours they kept me in the blue room and the things a bunch of tough coppers can think to do to a guy who won’t talk makes me shaky when I remember it yet. I could tell you things that’d make Uncle Sam’s whiskers turn black.

‘They jumped on my feet. They slapped my ears till I couldn’t hear. They put the glare in my eyes and held the lids open till I thought I was going blind and all the time somebody I couldn’t see kept hollering right into my ear at the top of his lungs. I got a pivot tooth now in place of one some ham-handed law cracked out, but I aced it out. Years later in stir I used to wake up thinking they were starting on me again, but I aced it. I aced it till one of my fluffs heard a radio broadcast ’n sent me a lawyer. That was when my real troubles begun.

‘You should of seen the jobs they hung on me! A finger for every jewel heist pulled in California since the earthquake. I found I was the Hollywood Taxi Bandit, and also some San Diego peterman who’d been out of range over a year. They put me up in front of some goof in pinch-nose glasses squealing I was the guy stuck him up in Pasadena and took his portable typewriter. Now would I fool around like that with all that ice in my kick?

‘Still I wouldn’t widen about the ice. I was framed was all I’d say. I went back and talked to the stir-simple kukes in the clink. They told me the only way to handle my case was to get some broad-lawyer whose daddy was a judge – she’d drag it into his court and get it whitewashed.

‘One old-timer warned me, “Don’t let no lawyer get you to shake another man’s jolt,” but I didn’t heed him. I give the broad-lawyer a large slice and for three months I lay in that lousy jail when I should have been partying in Chicago. Then she told me the best thing I could do was ask for probation. I had no record, it should go through sweet. I listened and pleaded guilty to two of them bum beefs, stuff somebody else had pulled they had to have a culprit for, and threw myself on the mercy of the court as a first-offender. Then up spoke my broad-lawyer right beside me, “Your Honor, this man has had his chance” – Wham! Daddy give me 4½ – 1 CC – two stretches, one for four and a half and the other for a year to be served concurrently.