Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

Chicago justice was in a bad way all right. One could see that at a glance: not a single finger of scorn was pointed at the judge for his own nakedness.

Indeed the Irony of It All had inspired another amateur to scratch a second portrait: a beat-out, tattered, crooked-limbed wreck, groping in two directions at once and captioned Chicago Justice Deaf Dumb Blind and Falling Apart .

In for a bum rap, one hand explained, I never rolled a drunk in my life.

While another commented knowingly: In for a bum rap too I never rolled a sober one.

That’s how it is, another had confided, when you hit some lousy bum the dough falls out of his pocket and you get the blame.

By the yellow night light’s glow Frankie saw how the four walls, as well as the floor – and by some frenzied acrobatics the very ceiling – recorded with equal fame the damned and the saved: those who would surely ascend the golden escalator reserved for good guys and their true-blue pals, the real sports and square johns capable of breaking any Kolkowski’s back; while upon the rusty freight elevator clanking miserably downward forever would go all copper johns, double clockers, lush workers and mush workers, deadpickers and turncoats, rats, pigeons, stooges, short faders and crap catchers, deadheads and deadbeats who had ever stood drinks for Kolkowski, loaned him a dollar or applauded that big flannel mouth.

Frankie could smell the walls. They were closer now than they had ever been; they bent together above him till the door seemed a part of the walls.

Walls which revealed that, by and large, the young men preferred the simple, straight-from-the-shoulder take-it-or-leave-it sort of warning:

All cops are stooges

Never rat on a pal

Get a steady job and stay home nights and keep off

N. Clark.

While at the very bottom of the cell some latter-day Moses had written off all preceding commandments: Everybody shut up. If you were any good you wouldn’t be in here.

In the growing light the wall legends continued like the continuation of a dream begun in another place: the legends that follow upon each other in all the tongues of man, from cell to cell and jail to jail, linking seas to cities and cities to plains, down the streets of all the world wherever a thief stands waiting behind steel bars and a turnkey waits by the wall.

In one corner some repentant bravo had inscribed a prayer for the salvation of all such sinners as himself, recommending them to John 3:7, and adding piously that he’d leave his body to the Board of Health and his ivory-tipped cue, locked in the middle rack at Spongy Kaplan’s Snooker Palace and Pool Parlor, to Hines Memorial Hospital, providing such sacrifice would bring just a bit more sunshine into the lives of his fellow men.

Have Doc Bunson call for my body personlly , this soldier of the Lord had directed in a testament above the water bucket, He is a personl friend of mine and no autotopsy is necessry.

While dated in the same week some revived will to live and still to do great deeds had come into the same wavering hand. Couched there in formidable obscenities the repentant bravo promised that same Lord he’d burn his old man’s house to the ground within the hour he made the street and found the matches; adding an invitation to all rogue males within the city limits to enjoy his wife’s favors on their first night out of the clink.

My wife only sleeps with her friends and she don’t have a enmy in the world. Call her at Madison 1-6971 and have yourselfs one hell of a time. The tramp married me for my alotment and my old man and her played the horses on my cash 19 months while I got scabies for my country overseas. Now I’m headed for almoney row my old man & that tramp still playing them on my dough I cant even get a winner off her she just gives them to the old man I can go scratch my dirty scabies and she says thats my todays hot tip for you soldier – How you like them onions?

Whether anyone like them onions or not, there they were, all ready for peeling.

Frankie rolled over onto his side to examine the opposite wall in a sluggish hope that there might be some drawings of women there.

But any one side of any jailhouse wall is never much different than any other side. There are only the same old threadbare variations on the same age-old warnings against all the well-tried ancestral foes: whisky and women, sin and cigarettes, marijuana and morphine, marked cards and capped cocaine, dirty laughter and easy tears, engineered dice and casual disease, bad luck and adultery, old age and shyster lawyers, quack doctors and ambitious cops, crooked priests and honest burglars, lack of money and hard work.

Girls who would and girls who wouldn’t. If they did they were no good and if they didn’t what good were they? One biographer wanted to know and another replied smugly:

All women are deseased

Yet went on to offer consolation for this blow:

We’re all victims of circumstance

And for further consolation to all of Circumstances’ victims:

Drink Dr Jesse Blue’s bay rum and get six months

While another hand countermanded all preceding instructions by commanding everyone, simply and to the point:

DRINK DERAIL

I’m just a jailbird , one bird of passage mourned, Give me wings ’n I’ll fly out.

The only bird that flies out of here is a pigeon , another pointed out.

Held Fri. 9 pm to Tuesday showup 96 hours , some green youth protested.

This place gives me the baloney blues , yet another complained.

America the Anti-Christ Nation , one announced obscurely.

Never again , one promised forever.

Frankie examined the myriad dates, initials, and hearts pierced by a hundred unkept vows. Melancholy memories of men who had since gone down the city’s thousand ways like sparks off a State Street trolley, leaving only these few poor scribblings to prove it had not been, after all, but a nightmare within a nightmare.

Frankie searched carefully, hoping to find the name or initials of someone he knew or fancied he once had known. But the single arresting detail he discovered was a woman’s scratching, accomplished with a hairpin or barrette and almost obliterated with time, from years when the tier had been used for women.

A whore’s life is always hell

She’s always living in a cell

Signed, one could see through the grime, painstakingly; certain that this inscription was all she would ever have to bequeath to all good hustlers who were to follow:

Lucille just a hard-luck bitch

What had become of sweet Lucille? Frankie wondered wistfully. And what was to become of Frankie Machine? Had unbearable bad luck taken her, as it seemed by way of taking him, for a long slow walk down a short and downhill pier? Or had it changed strangely, as his own was bound soon to change, just in the nick of time, on the night she’d met the Salvation Army drummer whose old man owned a Florida dog track? Had they truly reformed each other then? Had they, too, found, like Mr and Mrs Francis Majcinek would someday find, that everything turns out right after all? As everything always does? Had the dream man found his dream woman hadn’t, somehow, been soiled by a thousand and one nights on North Clark Street after all? Did they find that a million dollars really made a difference in the end? Had it really ended like all good double features ought?

Good luck or bad, faithless or true, Lucille was gone with the Pulaski’s tenderest close-ups, accompanied only by last night’s slenderest shadows. And the dead-cold fog of North Clark Street through which she tapped on through the mists of nights no man remembered.