Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

‘Oh boy, what do I want , you mean? I want all I can get’ – he waved the white cane, shouted into the beery air, shifted the cane swiftly under the armpit to get his drinking hand free and the cane stuck there as if caught by sheer grime.

‘Service! A little service here!’ Blind Pig demanded.

‘Fomorowski, that’s the name,’ Amber Eyes boasted of himself quietly, ‘Nifty Louie hisself from Downtown on Clark Street. Owner, give my fat friend here a beer.’ He rolled a new dime, with proper disdain, along the littered bar. Then nudged Pig and whispered obscenely: ‘What’s your habit, Jack the Rabbit?’

For some reason this meaningless query amused the blind man. He tittered, leered and flushed to the temples. Antek came up with an eight-ouncer in a ten-cent glass and scooped up the dime.

‘Here’s a schooner, Piggy’ – Antek winked at Nifty Louie – ‘here’s that big sixteen-ouncer, fifteen cents to everybody else but only a dime to you.’

Pig’s lower lip loosened, he licked a string of reddish spittle off it, from where his gums bled constantly, licked at the beer with the weak half grin of a drugged lecher and said ‘aaaaaah’ as if he were tickling himself with his tongue. Then felt the glass with those lewd feelers at last and cried out as painfully as though cut: ‘In yer mother-law’s icebox it’s a schooner! Yer mother-law’s icebox! Yer mother-law’s snatch!’

Yet quickly pointed that lascivious tongue so as to lose no more time, into the foam like a cat into cream, dipped swiftly and deliciously with its narrow pink point, lapped the foam loosely and aimlessly about for the sheer joy of knowing he could feel it in his throat any moment he wished now, then emptied the glass so swiftly it left his face smudged whitely about the lips like those of a dog trying to vomit. Felt the beer back up in his throat, half rose over the bar, clutching his throat to choke the precious stuff back; and sank back with utter relief.

This debauched, blunt-snouted, abject, obscene lush sloshed beer about his mouth in a way that made Antek want to hit him every single time. It made anyone want to hit him, there was that deliberately offensive manner about it. He sat there in all his veiled malice and secretly mocked them all. Knowing it made everyone want to hit him, knowing not one would dare.

And smiled, to reveal his gums. They were gray and lined by a livid margin of rawest red, where the teeth bled at the rotting roots; as he sloshed the beer around them it became infected with the pinkish spittle. Antek saw and backed off from that awesome breath, wishing he hadn’t quit school so early.

Pig turned the glass to his lips till a stream of beer ran down both sides of his mouth and dripped in tiny rivulets down the grease of his clothes and formed a glistening boutonniere of rosy spittle on his lapel. Gasped, choked, sighed, grunted, put the glass down at last and every barfly in the place sighed with relief.

‘Boy! Can I drink beer!’ N smoke too! All I can get!’ he told the shrouded bar mirror he saw forever in his mind. ‘I’d like to get somebody’s gir-rul in the back boot’ – a guy’s wife got drunkie once ’n mmmm – oh boy you in that back boot’ – I can do that too, I take all I can get.’ His lips worked loosely at the memory. ‘Oh boy, oh man , if I just had more of that.’

‘You like girls, Piggy-O?’

‘And how!’

‘You like potatoes ’n gravy, Piggy-O?’

‘Oh boy – them mashed potatoes ’n unyunz in the gray -vy!’ Pig was drooling. ‘Gir-ruls too – you thed it. Your mother-law’s big beer belly, you thed it!’

‘Broke again, Piggy-O?’

‘You thed it!’

He whistled slyly to himself, seeing, over Nifty Louie’s shoulder, a slow and stiff burlesque moving down the curtained runway of his mind: and endless all-night carnival playing for blind Piggy-O alone. As it had played, off and on, since he had last had eyes.

His sight had first clouded watching the runway of a true burlesque, and for months after that final curtain had come his own inner stage had remained curtained; till the shock of blindness had worn off. Since then, clearly and more clearly with the months, he could see once more that last burlesque, peopled with clowns that had not been there before and with women more beautiful and more obscene than ever had danced before his lost sight. He never told men with sight of this private burlesque. And did not even wonder why the figures behind his shuttered eyes moved so stiffly, as if on strings. Though they looked as real as life.

Swaying on the stool like a pianist in the throes of a stormy concerto, the fingers pointed, retreated, advanced, curled, straightened tensely, wilted slowly and slid along the scarred bar leaving a damp little sticky track, like an insect’s track, around and between the pennies.

‘Do a small errint for me, Piggy?’

‘I’ll take all I can get.’

‘I’ll fix you with a little honey -’ n no back-boot’ drunkie neither. Clark Street ho tel stuff.’

‘Oh boy, that ho tel stuff – lead me to it, Fomorowski.’ Then felt Nifty Louie’s quiet nudge, knew someone had entered both knew too well and buttoned his trap in an old understanding.

Frankie Machine, looking beat to the ground, brushed past the pair of them without a word or a nod to either.

‘Lookin’ for someone, Dealer?’ Louie asked, not so much to get a reply as to let Pig know that Dealer was out of the clink again.

But Frankie went on toward the back of the tavern, where a single drunk sat tilted perilously against a green 7-Up sign. There, crouched at the feet of the drunk while others watched in mild unconcern, Solly Saltskin was preparing a prairie bonfire.

Methodically he had piled papers, scratch sheets and emptied cigarette packs below the tilted chair and was filtering fresh sawdust around. ‘I’m givin’ Shooie a hotfoots,’ he explained gravely to Frankie, like a man being paid by the hour.

‘Looks to me more like arsony,’ Frankie commented, kicking paper and sawdust aside, ‘ain’t we got enough troubles without you burnin’ people down? C’mon, I’ll buy you a beer just to keep you out of the cooler tomorrow.’

The drunk raised his head and tilted forward as if he too had been invited: but the head returned heavily to the laboring chest and the mind returned to an argument with some bartender of his dreams. ‘Tell him Shooie’s a regular guy! Tell him! What Shudefski promises Shudefski does! Keep me straight. Shake – here’s the best pal you ever had. You know Shudefski? C’mere! I want you to meet the best pal a Polak ever had.’

‘I want you to get a dog,’ Frankie told Sparrow in the back booth, ‘’n I don’t care where you steal him. Not one of your alley wolves though. Somethin’ that’s housebroke ’n won’t be much trouble ’n don’t have lices. Somethin’ playful-like, to give Soph somethin’ to do to get her off my neck. But no bitch that’s gonna litter next week. You get it?’

Sparrow was happy to have a mission. He twirled his cap about till the peak pointed backward, started going somewhere and returned. ‘What’s the matter with Rumdum?’ he asked. ‘Rummy needs a home. Hey! Rummy!’ And something moved in the shadows.

There, as his eyes became accustomed to the dark, Frankie discerned Antek’s deaf-and-dumb cat nibbling affectionately at Rumdum’s ear in an attempt to rouse him. But Rumdum only barked dreamily, pursuing some deaf dream cat. While above them the tilted drunk with the sawdust scattered across his shoes began humming softly to himself; then tilted forward again to ask loudly and clearly, ‘Who always lets the air out of these seats?’ And tilted right back again.