Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

It had seen all things that had passed in this room since she and Frankie had first slept in it together, she saw now. It had watched her every time she had taunted him, it alone had known that she had wished him to be as crippled as herself.

Mad, of course, quite mad. The Christ above her eyes, she saw, was no less mad for seeming so gentle: and knew she shared that madness. That she had become wiser and more gentle than anyone in the world for sharing it.

With no light in the long cold hall, nor down the steep and treacherous stair.

Only the flowering neon glare of streets where nothing grows save a far-off glimmer of track or girder, crosslight or carbarn or rail.

All the way down to the streets where the dark people live and Frankie Machine drank alone.

Two monkeys were caged above the bar, huddling and blinking together, with ancestral wisdom, down upon the barflies shrieking insults at them from below: ‘Bingo bongo bongo – how’d you like it in the Congo?’

Across the tables, above the piano and over the tiny stage there hung some sort of pungent pall, a bit like the autumnal odor of stale blood dried on a leaf-strewn walk the day after a sudden death between the curbing and the wall. A little, too, like the wet yellow smell of insanity when the white ward wakes in the midwinter Monday morning. A little something, too, of the flowered scent of a young girl’s armpits in first love. Something of death in autumn, something of early summer love, and something as flowered as the last day of April – touched by something as cold as a surgeon’s glove.

And something as bittersweet as the slow irresistible seep of marijuana in a darkened, curtained, locked and windowless room.

Out on the narrow Negro streets the wind blew the rain and the snow down from the Saloon Street Station, searching together in every alley and dim-lit rooming-house hall between Record Head Bednar’s desk and the monkeys who yearned for the Congo.

Frankie Machine sat among the strange cats of the Kitten Klub, drinking the dark people’s beer.

He’d been sitting here all afternoon and the five-spot that had been plastered to his arm was remembered there now only by a single end of a bandage still clinging to the skin.

The high-yellow M.C., whose sole wage was in the nickels and dimes tossed at his feet, was doing his first stint of the night, with a sort of merriment part strut and part convulsion.

‘This show’ll kill you, folks,’ he threatened everyone in the place, ‘them it don’t kill it’ll cripple.’

Nobody laughed.

‘It’s the cocktail houah, cats,’ the high-yellow urged them all, ‘get drunk ’n be somebody.’

‘It’s better to be yourself, friend,’ Frankie thought mechanically, he’d been through that particular hope before. A pair of deadpan amber strippers waiting for a live one at the table beside his own purred softly in agreement.

The M.C. began a mock strip himself, down to a pair of lacy orange silk shorts, till some paid-by-the-shot-glass shill shouted, ‘Take ’em off, Mr Floor Show!’ And Mr Floor Show picked up the paid-in-full challenge by retorting, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t dare! ’ And began an idiotic crooning with a wild backflinging of his head and a demented weaving of his arms. ‘Bless your little G strings,’ he called familiarly to the deadpan brass ankles waiting so quietly in the shadows, ‘you’re so sweet! And now we’ll have a little song entitled “Honey, If This Isn’t Love You’ll Have to Wait Till I Get More Sleep” – that’s right, we’re giving you the best show in the country. I don’t know about the city. And it’s all for youah benefit – most of you look like you need a benefit.’ And laughed with the lightest, most silvery sort of laugh to veil the whole wide gray world’s despair. ‘Get off youah hands! What youah want? Blood? ’

Frankie got off his hands. ‘You tell ’em, Mr Floor Show,’ he applauded weakly; and drank on in the hope of somehow postponing the sickness. ‘Can’t afford to get sick now,’ he mourned the long-gone fiver.

‘I knew there was somebody out there,’ Mr Floor Show observed, squinting far over the little line of red-white-and-blue footlights, ‘I heard breathing’ – and resumed his fluttering about in the orange shorts for want of anything better to do, like a crazed burlesque queen, pausing only to stamp his foot with a girlish petulance and assert, ‘I’ll have you know I’m every inch a man!’ Then, seeming suddenly to tire of everything, began torturing himself in a voice full of a hoarse glee at its own pain: ‘Boop-de-oop-doop ’n razz-muh-tazz, kizz muh feet ’n kizz muh azz – interdoosin’ to you ouah supah-sulphous walkin’-talkin’ seeeepia doll, ouah tiny mite of dynamite – Miss Dinah Mite! Meet her ’n greet her! Come out , honey! Mello as a cello ’n merry as a berry – Boys! The strain from hernia!’ The three-piece band began beating it out while Miss Mite took over.

‘I wonder who’s boogin’ my woogie now.’

Yet the strange brown cats of the Kitten Klub all sat wanly smiling, like copper cats that never bled, whose blood was formed of others’ tears.

Copper cats out of some plastic jungle wherein only the neon kitten above the bar felt pain, only the Budweiser bottles sweated tears of joy, and only the monkeys overhead knew better.

FEED THE KITTY

the legend below the neon kitten commanded. Off and on, off and on, with a sort of metallic beggary unmatchable by any human panhandler.

GET UP A PARTY

FEED THE KITTY

GET UP A PARTY

FEED THE KITTY

An outsized octoroon venus began galloping about on spindle legs just to make her belly shake – it was distended as if with some malignant growth; her absurd finery flew behind her, she paused only to beg breathlessly:

‘Daddy, I want a diamond ring

’N everything-’

Her G string was upheld by court plaster and a gilded cardboard crescent swung for some reason from her navel while she went into a convulsive series of bumps; like some dark Diamond Lil just fed on Spanish fly.

‘You got to get the best for me-’

with the G string bounce-bounce-bouncing.

Frankie Machine squeezed his temples, to keep the panic down till it ebbed back down his nape. Leaving him a reasonless desire to go hurrying out through the snow to the nearest station, whatever the cost, in the hope of getting some sort of charge at County. ‘They got to give it to you when you’re really sick,’ he assured himself, ‘they can tell when a guy got to have it, doctors can tell, they ain’t like cops, they help a guy get to sleep.’

– and the ram-bam of the drums going into ‘Song of the Islands.’

Above the empty iron-banging din a waitress dropped a trayful of drinks. The shattering of the glass tinkled, in the sudden silence that followed, like an echo of soiled laughter along any soiled bar and Frankie applauded clumsily, numb with bar whisky and an utter weariness.

‘Tough it out, kid, tough it out,’ he tried to urge himself, feeling the first line of sweat forming along his forehead. But the whole business of escape seemed so hard, so useless, so endless and so long, a voice like another’s voice answered his anguished blood: ‘Tough it out for what? What for? What’s it all for anyhow?’

A brownskin buck feigning drunkenness bumped the edge of his table, upsetting his beer, then pretended to apologize by wiping it all into Frankie’s lap with a blue silk handkerchief. Frankie stood up weaving. ‘What you up to, cousin?’

‘I wasn’t lookin’, man,’ the buck apologized, ‘I’m tryin’ to get my bearin’s, where the people are.’ He went off waving the silk handkerchief as if trying to dry it on the drifting smoke.