Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

He didn’t draw a tear. Everyone knew he got maudlin as regularly as he had a good week and was locked out till he sobered up. Locking him out, after a good week, was the only thing that sobered him. He had a crying need for pity and could never understand why no one sympathized with a man robbed, overnight, of wife, home, family, honor and his lifetime savings.

When Owner wanted to cry, he cried, and anything at all did for an excuse. What really mattered with Owner wasn’t on the tongue but in the heart; since he had no words for his heart, he wept.

‘I’m not cryin’ for my own trouble,’ he confided in Frankie, leaning so heavily across the wheelchair’s arm that Frankie had to brace it with his foot to keep it from being rolled backward, ‘I’m cryin’ for everybody’s.’ He took off his glasses to cry the better for everyone; for the lenses were so splashed with tears they were indistinguishable from the beads of sweat about his round bald brow.

‘You’re cryin’ from the skull now, Owner,’ Frankie informed him. ‘When it starts comin’ out of your ears it’s time to use the handkerchief.’ And assured Sophie from where he stood behind her, ‘He’ll be back behind his bar Monday morning.’

They wandered in from all over the ward, the invited and the uninvited, the wary and the seeking, the strayed, the frayed, the happy and the hapless, the lost, the luckless, the lucky and the doomed. Some, on the assumption that if anyone were getting out of jail it must be the punk again, to congratulate Sparrow; only to find all the more reason for celebration when they learned that, just for this once, it wasn’t the punk at all.

Everyone got congratulated for something or other whether he deserved it or not. Everyone but Old Man, who couldn’t even get congratulated on his new socks. So he tried going about announcing ‘Stash boss by howz’ while clutching a week’s worth of calendar dates; and still no one paid him any mind.

And some came just to celebrate the season with Frankie Machine.

Yes, and one blind peddler so drunk he merely sat in a corner and called out, from time to time, that he, alone of all good hustlers, had come to mourn a hustler.

To mourn for Fomorowski, Blind Pig defied them all.

While the whole long hall rejoiced.

And Violet, finding pity at the bottom of a whisky glass, began making every stewbum, who came up to kiss her, shake hands with Old Husband first and admire his socks. Till the old man, clutching his calendar dates like so many retrieved hours, felt the party must really be for him after all.

Meter Reader kept running back and forth in the center of the floor scooping up an imaginary grounder he’d missed in some long-gone summer’s double header. For Meter Reader didn’t know a meter from an egg beater: it was only that long ago he had come into a meter reader’s cap. It had lost the insignia above the peak, but still served when he coached the Endless Belt & Leather Invincibles. He was still trying to explain Endless Belt’s 19-1 loss to Lefkowicz Fast Freight and the boys were egging him on.

‘I’m proud of my boys,’ Meter Reader insisted, ‘proud of every man of them.’ He still lived over that overwhelming defeat though it had been achieved on the Fourth of July and the year was running out with the hour. He still had to establish that he felt no shame in that defeat. When Meter Reader grew excited he couldn’t see he was being jived a bit.

The phone rang and someone said it was Owner Budzban of Endless Belt wanting to talk to his coach about spring training. Of course it was only Sparrow phoning from across the street, but the hall grew quiet so Meter Reader could hear the message better. Out of the corner of the eye everyone watched him listening so humbly, head sinking slowly in despair while the punk told him he was through at Endless Belt – his check would be mailed to him Monday morning. No, there was nothing wrong with his work at Endless Belt, it was just that the company couldn’t afford to back a losing team any longer. Feeling was running pretty strong, the boys wanted a winner this year so it had been decided to let Coach go with the best of New Year’s wishes.

Meter Reader came out of the booth looking broken-hearted. Losing the job was nothing, he had held onto it only because it had made a coach of him with each returning spring. ‘One hell of a New Year’s resolution they made there , it’s all I got to say,’ he mourned. ‘But I seen it coming since July. Well, I’ll find something else’ – then as if suddenly jolted by the full truth of what had happened to him he seized Frankie by the sleeve and shouted right in his ear, ‘I’m proud of my boys! Every fool man of them!’

‘Meter Reader!’ someone called, ‘there’s a Mexican out here wants you to coach for Vera Cruz next season – can you talk Mex? What should we tell him?’

Meter Reader, to whom all things were possible, waddled out to see what kind of offer Vera Cruz had for him. Before he reached the door the phone rang for him once more and the same voice came on again: ‘Is Owner Budzban. You could have job back but we got to get new coach. Is okay?’

So he smelled the punk at last and came out of the booth this time refusing to talk to anyone. He got a good hold of the bar and wouldn’t let go. It took Meter Reader some time to grow suspicious – but once he became so he overdid it. When the phone rang and he was told his girl was on the line he refused unconditionally to answer. For a week now he wouldn’t be believing the simplest sort of neighborhood gossip.

While Sophie sat so flushed with excitement that she looked ready to get up and start dancing herself any minute. Sparrow wheeled her under the mistletoe and kissed her, and all the boys kissed her, till it hardly felt that she was just somebody in a wheelchair at all.

High atop the Christmas tree a single tinsel star looked down and Old Husband, weaving a little in the middle of the floor, pointed the neck of an empty whisky bottle at it and shouted, ‘ Aj´ Za stary jestem popatrzyc´ na gwiazdyck. ’ He had grown too old to look at stars. And fell back, exhausted, into many waiting arms.

With Blind Pig looking up at the great load of silver icicles and artificial snow borne by the tree just as if he could see it all; and his eyes still red from weeping.

For everyone who really mattered had come by now. Chester from Conveyor, Chester from Viaduct, Oseltski from Post Office, Shudefski from Poolroom, Shudefski from Marines, Szalapski from Dairy, Widow Wieczorek and Umbrella Man’s brother, Kvorka from Saloon Street. And Sophie’s own bright little grandmother with a bottle all her very own. Everybody who counted, a few who just imagined they counted, and a couple dozen more who knew well they never had, never would, never could and had never been intended to count at all.

Now began the midnight uproar to welcome the new year in. In the middle of the Swiateczyna Polka the younger couples began jitter-bugging, and Sophie’s grandmother shook her wise old head to see. She liked all things young people did, so long as it wasn’t something old people did better, like counting their money. She liked it so well that she shook Umbrella Man awake, where he slept a drunken sleep in the chair beside her own, till he sat up and asked, ‘How far are we?’ And promptly returned to sleep.

Violet, pickled to the point of elegance, strolled like a lady in her fancy, fancy gown, dragging cigarette butts in her train, gesturing artistically and asking everyone, ‘I do carry myself nice – don’t you really think?’ Right up to Sparrow to take him dancing around, singing hoarsely into his ear at every turn.

‘Let me tell you, laddy,