Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

Frankie would nod understandingly and call for the Old Fitz himself, television or no television.

‘Why put up with a thing like that?’ Antek with the bottle in his hand would want to know, making Frankie wish he hadn’t said anything in the first place. ‘When I come up to serve a customer I don’t hear nobody yellin’: “Here comes Antek the Owner! Last year he served 5444 beers, 11,220 shots of bar whisky and refilled the pretzel bowl twice a week fer fifty-two weeks! Up to ’n in cludin’ last Sunday’s double-header he got 3317 shots of Old Grand-dad to his credit, 2343 shots of Schenley’s ’n God knows how many fifths of Old Fitz he has drunk by hisself!” What the hell, I got a record too -’ n when they put me on that screen I’ll buy it. Not before.’

‘They got wrestlin’ at the Safari,’ Frankie informed his old friend. ‘The swishes come to drink the joolips ’n see the wrasslers.’

No sawdust carpeted the Safari’s floor and no penny-ante players were tolerated there. If you wanted to gamble you went to the 26-table or the bingo board. You received a receipt for every drink and a floor show was offered five nights a week. The tables had tablecloths, the lights were dim, music murmured from the walls and there were no drinks on the house.

Yet the strange cats of the Safari returned the contempt of the barflies across the way. They called Antek’s boys ‘bummies’ and considered Antek himself simply too common .

Now the old blind noseless bummy called Pig sat at the scarred bar of the Tug & Maul with the fresh sawdust beneath his soles and the old hope in his heart: he wanted a beer. But nobody would come to sit on the stool to his right nor on the stool to his left.

For he gave off an odor of faintly rancid mutton, moldering laundry, long dead perch and formaldehyde. He sat only one stool away from the lavatory, where Antek had long ago assigned him, claiming that the odor of disinfectant from that room somewhat modified the peddler’s special odor. ‘I kill two birds with one stinkin’ stone,’ Antek had explained to Pig, ‘I use a extra half can of Bowlene ’n people can’t hardly smell you at all. Just don’t try movin’ up to the front where the people who wash theirselves sit. When you move up that way keep on movin’ right through the door ’n take it all out onto the street.’

‘Some of them clean guys buy me drinks,’ Pig would point out in protest.

‘When someone buys you somethin’ they don’t mean they want to drink with you. You stay where you are ’n I’ll bring it down to you. I can stand you, I’m used to you, it’s my job. But the customers come here to get numb off Schlitz; not off you.’

Pig was always secretly pleased at such insults, though he might pretend to be a bit offended. ‘That Bowlene ain’t as strong as you think, Owner,’ he would challenge Antek. ‘Gimme six more months ’n you won’t have to use it at all – I’ll just set here ’n the people’ll think the can been disinfected even if it ain’t. Bowlene, that ain’t nothin ’. D.D.T. – that’s the stuff.’

A faded blue merchant mariner’s cap was rolled far down over his brows and his fingers drummed restlessly on the bar. Hearing others drinking all about him, his thirst deepened and his fingers began working like an insect’s feelers sensing an obstacle in their path. Pig’s obstacle was forever Antek. Owner was getting harder to get around every day.

For Owner didn’t like the way Blind Pig’s fingers had of struggling upward and wriggling excitedly against each other: they whispered obscene gossip while pressing each other’s flesh with an incestuous understanding.

‘If I had fifteen cents I’d be all right!’ he called gaily to the hubbub about his ears. But the hubbubers heard only their own gaiety.

Nobody heard but Owner. And Owner, in his clean-shaven, bald and bespectacled indifference, cared not a bartender’s button.

Yet the fingers crept slyly across the bar, slowly reversed and began a crawling descent down the grimy vest into a tobacco pouch suspended from his neck; the string left a line on the nape faintly whiter than the rest of this shapeless, ageless, anonymous, discolored, mindless and eyeless sack of cold cunning and hot greed.

‘I seen some crummy bums in my time on this street,’ Antek called out defensively, ‘but you’re what D.D.T. was invented for – you think ’cause you can’t see people they can’t see you?’

Pig wore a creamy, dreamy smirk to veil a long-standing grudge against everybody. He could smile like a chicken-fed tomcat while wishing everyone bad luck without exception.

‘They don’t have to see me,’ he assured the black bar mirror of his mind with that smug and buttery smile, ‘they could just thmell me.’

‘They can “thmell” you awright,’ Antek mocked him. ‘I’d borrow you the soap myself – only you ain’t got the natural pride to use it.’

Pig agreed, with the downcast eyelids of the man being warmly flattered. ‘I got my kind of pride ’n you got yours – I’m proud of bein’ how I am too.’

To Pig light and cleanliness were inseparable: if he could not have the one he would do without the other. From his eyeless malice he derived a sort of twisted glee in offending men with eyes.

The Eyes were a hostile race. They were those who washed themselves, out of a common pact, because they could see each other. Though he had been excluded from that pact, yet they wished him to be both helpless and clean all the same. They did not wish him to trouble their sight any more than they wished him to see. They asked too much.

Yet before the offense he so deliberately offered their noses and their sight they became a bit helpless too. They had to look at him, they had to feel their stomachs balk a bit at the smell of him as at the reek of spoiled liver.

‘Look, Owner – I got twelve’ – the blackened fingernails were prying at the pouch’s strings and into the greasy little bag. One entered at last, then two, to return bearing a single penny, place it with caution upon the bar and return for a second like two black ants going for a heavy load, following tirelessly until a dozen pennies lay on the bar before him. ‘Look!’ he told the darkness. ‘I got twelve.’ And pressed the fingers cunningly across the pennies, turning one over here and another there, for no reason apparent to Antek at all.

All the filth of West Division Street clung to those fingers and to the frayed ends of the army surplus underwear curling beneath the cuffs. He wore heavy underwear, an army overcoat and the mariner’s rolled cap whether it were roistering August or mid-December. The accumulation of filth on his face and clothing made him appear nearer sixty than the forty-odd he really was. The pouch slipped out of his fingers and somebody stooped and picked it up for him.

‘You dropped somethin’, Piggy-O.’

Nifty Louie, his amber eyes and two-tone shoes, his sea-green tie and soft green fedora with the bright red feather in its band above the pale, asthenic face touched faintly with a violet talc.

‘Oh boy,’ Pig sighed with relief to feel the pouch between his fingers again. ‘What if I had a couple of G’s in there ’n somebody else found it?’ The thought caused the fingers to run so nervously over the pennies the coins themselves seemed to start sweating.

Louie seldom drank in the Tug & Maul and Pig got into the Safari only by the back door; so their little business was done between schooners for Pig.

‘How you doin’, Piggy-O?’

‘I’m doin’ wit’out – how’s Fomorowski doin’? You gonna buy one or be one?’

‘What you drinkin’?’