Algren at Sea

by Nelson Algren

  These clubs are flourishing in London for the same reason that the key clubs are doing so well in the States: They remove the responsibility of passion. And a responsibility is what, to these utterly demoralized men of distinction, in whom life has been reduced to protecting oneself at all times, passion has become. The clubs offer them the appearance of being playboys, sports, and regular fellows without the risk of love.

  Take this sensible-looking, well-dressed, pleasant chap: he has that infirmity. Should he dream of a woman’s arms around him in a naked embrace demanding physical fulfillment, he’d have his afternoon appointment with his analyst moved up to the morning hours, for he would feel life closing in. He pays the analyst to keep life away.

  The analyst, of course, has his own troubles. Last night he dreamed he went into a washroom in Madrid and saw the sign on the door had not read Señores, but Señoras.

  So much for World War III.

  The men who own these clubs, like those in the States, are businessmen, not hoodlums. They are the same investors from the suburbs who, behind the front of a banking, insurance, or investment-counseling firm, use a go-between to buy a piece of a crap game or a whorehouse. These are the same parties who own broken-down but well-paying tenements by proxy.

  They are not members of “The Mafia,” “The Brotherhood of Evil,” or “The Syndicate.” They are members of no syndicate save the international one of Make-a-Buck-and-Shut-Your Face. And what is a businessman, anyhow, but a hood who cuts corners when splitting a score? After all, isn’t the end product of General Motors not electric appliances, but price fixing? And isn’t the end product of the square who gets squarer and squarer, a fascist? Isn’t it always the man who goes about neighbors’ homes, on Sunday mornings, with a petition banning unescorted women from drinking in the local tavern, always the same bird the girls have so much trouble getting to leave on Saturday night?

  I kept on my way along the little lonesome street, plainly an American waiting to be accosted; until accosted I was.

  She handed me one of those thin, ladylike pencils usually attached to a note pad beside a phone—this was attached by a cord of some sort around the young woman’s neck. She was very young even for a young woman—no more than seventeen—who dipped into her coat pocket and put a note pad under the pencil as I held it suspended.

  Her finger jabbed the pad: a mute girl wearing black gloves.

  A deaf mute at that. For, when I spoke, she shook her head quickly and showed me a smile that meant that did not matter. The finger jabbed my breastbone, then pointed to herself.

  You and me.

  I wrote on the pad:

  “How much?”

  She glanced at the pad, took the pencil, crossed out the question, and wrote:

  “Name please.”

  I wrote:

  “John. How much?”

  She took the pad back and wrote:

  “You can trust me. John.”

  I was pleased that John trusted her. I certainly didn’t. I’ll trust an unattractive girl in an expensive coat or a beautiful girl who is badly dressed. But this combination of a deaf-and-dumb beauty wrapped in a mink that would have paid my fare by jet back to Chicago was a little too good to be true. I took her arm, a cab wheeled to the curb as though it had been waiting down the block, and we were off to Ipswitch-on-Bagel-and-Hop-in-the-saddle come what may.

  We drove toward the south of England, my sense of direction told me, and disembarked at a bar that had no sign, but seemed well lit. My friend, who had written her name as “Emma” and was no more an Emma than I was a John, permitted me to pay her cab fare. But I let her enter her hangout first. I’d trust a bushman ahead of an Englishman and a bushwoman before both. In fact, I just wasn’t too damned sure Emma was deaf and dumb.

  We were in a cocktail lounge with an American décor, two bartenders and a dozen couples sitting around without making a sound. The couples were jabbing their fingers at each other, tapping themselves and making small circles to dot their “i”s. I caught the bartender’s eye, and he asked, “What’s yours?”

  That was a relief.

  It was a relief, but it wasn’t right. The other bartender was a deaf mute too.

  “Give me a dummy on the rocks,” I told the bartender who had all his senses. If I stuck around here I was going to lose mine. Which was why I had been brought, my instinct told me.

  If the bartender with his senses had smiled when I made a funny I might have stayed. But he frowned, so I made him ask again before I told him I’d take Scotch—”And give my friend Guinness.” I saw a way out. She grabbed her pad and scribbled:

  “Whiskey, please.”

  I grabbed the pencil, and wrote:

  “Thank you for an interesting ride,” finished the Scotch while she read my farewell, and got the hell out of there. No, it just didn’t feel right.

  Yet here and there, beside a juke in an all-night restaurant, the honest British whore still survives.

  The barrage balloons are long down, but she still makes it here and there, forever on the dodge.

  Like the woman who called herself Chantelle—perhaps because the café had a French name. She came up in a first-person war and will do first-person time on a penal farm if caught peddling her goods on the streets.

  Little ferns, in rusty pots, were caught between the double-panes of the café. It was the only café on this street permitted to stay open all night.

  “Were you ever buried in the time of the V-l’s?” I asked.

  The small ferns are neither outside nor in; their life is lived out between panes and they don’t look at all well.

  “It begins to seem so now,” was her answer.

  The press of the throng between the Regent Palace and the Hotel Piccadilly, the ceaseless hurry-hurry of MR. BRANDYWINE, and the urgent demands to resink the Bismarck later began to confuse me. I bought two bags of peanuts—I let the oranges go this time—from a huckster near the Regent and returned to Room 916.

  When I got inside, my telephone was ringing madly. Although I knew not a soul in that whole vast city, anticipation leaped in me like a sailfish in the sun—England had been expecting me! I was ready for dinner in Hampstead or Kent or to fly back to Dublin if the party were already starting.

  “918?” a male voice asked.

  “916.”

  “So sorry. Would you mind jumping the small bell up and down there’s a good chap?”

  I jumped the small bell up and down like a good chap to recall the operator, but she paid me no heed. I could hear the other good chap breathing into the phone. He wasn’t as young as he used to be anymore either, the other good chap. Time and The Goat will get you breathing harder over the prospect of a light date than you once did in handling a heavy one.

  “Have you ever been buried alive?” I asked him.

  “What’s that, Old Chap?”

  “I say have you ever been buried alive? A lot of people have, you know.”

  He seemed to be thinking about something else.

  “Would you mind stepping down the hall and telling the lady in there John is on his way down?”

  At any rate I’d gotten him off the “Old Chap.”

  Down? On his way down? We were on the top floor as it was. But if Old John liked living on a hotel roof it was alright with me. I hurried down the hall, as I wanted to be back in time to see him scaling that wall. It was pretty wet out there.

  At the door of 918 I noticed I was still carrying one bag of peanuts. I smoothed out the wrinkles in it before knocking as I wished to make a powerful first impression. The woman who opened the door wasn’t Simone Signoret.

  But she wasn’t a brute either. Just one of those five-foot-eleven Marylebone Road blondes with a pile of hair that made her look six-three.

  “John is on his way down,” I told her, feeling short.

  How I happened to know so much about her affairs she didn’t bother to get being astonished about. Lazy girl. Too lazy to ask me inside for a drink. I
actually had to filter in, by explaining that I had been in London in 1944. This entitled me to a passkey to any room in the hotel.

  “You’ll excuse me,” my new-found friend asked. This kid needed someone like me to restore her confidence.

  “I came over on the SS Meyer Davis.” I sprung the surprise I’d been holding out. She stayed unstartled. She had good control.

  Her apartment had a continental, I might almost say apartmental air, and was four times the size of the broom closet in which I had been cowering. A cheerful lived-in air. Taking off my tie, I started to live in it. A nice water color by somebody named Duffy hung over the mantel.

  “I painted that,” I assured her. Anytime I can’t paint as good as an Irishman, you let me know.

  She threw me a look.

  “What I mean is that I have the same painting and once drew one of my own by tracing it.”

  “John is on his way down,” she pointed out.

  “I’m the one who told you,” I reminded her.

  She sat on the bed and began drawing on a pair of black woolen stockings that didn’t go with her hairdo. The stockings looked like she was going skiing. Was that how John was coming down from the roof?

  “I asked John if he had ever been buried alive,” I reported.

  “Why in the name of Heaven did you ask him that?”

  “Just to make conversation,” I explained, “but I knew some people who actually were when I was here in 1944. A girl named Sandy.”

  “Oh, you were a soldier,” she announced as though I had been elected to that position by a runoff in the House of Representatives. “It was all a bit before my time, of course.”

  “I was close to Patton,” I referred to an occasion when he had been driven out to where we were pinned down and told us that the way to clear a minefield was to go through it, then went home and went to bed. We were grateful to him for not having slapped us. Some Patton.

  The Marylebone Road Brute stood up and drew a babushka about her face.

  “I know,” I told her, “John is on his way down. May I knock on your door tomorrow?”

  “You may knock on every door in the hotel if you wish, and the day after as well,” she gave me an opening.

  Whoever said the English aren’t friendly?

  Down these antiseptic English halls every chambermaid looked like a mother cop.

  A lanky old geezer stood beside the lift, smiling as though he’d been expecting me.

  “Would you mind tieing my shoelace, old boy?” he asked.

  Would you mind if I hit you a clean shot in the teeth despite your age? was the answer that went through my mind. I didn’t express it. I didn’t express anything. I’d just never been up against a polite request to tie a stranger’s shoelace before. I know there is a first time for everything, but why it had to begin with keeping somebody else’s shoe from falling off I couldn’t see.

  “I have an arthritic hip,” he explained with self-satisfaction.

  So there I stood with both hips in place while he stood with one hip out of the game. I tied the lace with care, making a knot that would spring his good hip when he tried to undo it. I must hand it to the old gent for not kicking me in the teeth when I was in position for it. He could have gotten every tooth in my head but restrained himself out of lifelong habit.

  “One good turn deserves another,” he strangely thanked me.

  “Absence makes the heart grow fonder for somebody else,” I assured him.

  That’s what it’s like in Inner London, Men. That’s what it’s really like.

  One side of the placard on 916 said DO NOT DISTURB and the other read MAKE UP BED. I could never decide which was the greater thrill. Now, when I returned, somebody had turned the MAKE UP BED sign around to read DO NOT DISTURB. That disturbed me. Especially when I found I’d locked myself out.

  A chambermaid who looked like another soft-clothesman threw me a glance of an ill-concealed lust to pinch me before she’d let me back in.

  I drew the shade to shut out the gloom, but it did no good: the stuff wasn’t pushing in from outside, it was seeping up through the floor. Either the management manufactures the stuff in the basement and distributes it to all the hotels in Piccadilly or it was fallout. I stretched out on the bed, and in no time at all was asleep in a litter of peanut husks and broken possibilities.

  In sleep I saw the guardian lions and the guardian lions remembered me. Under neon like a doom they turned to a fire-fed red. Something stirred their hearts.

  A line of small black hearses circled endlessly, and the driver of each had a peanut face. Down Regent Street I saw a throng, an international multitude of peanut faces. All Earth’s peanut-faced people came thronging, begging me, pleading with me—

  “Sink the Bismarck! Sink the Bismarck!”

  It was up to me.

  Beside me on the bed the number on my key read “918.” I was in the wrong room. Someone tapped the pane.

  John was on his way down.

  I got up and switched on the light. Someone had placed the room card against the mirror: DO NOT DISTURB. I turned it about: STEP INSIDE. SEE THE MAN WHO LOST HIS WEIGHT, it said. Again the warning tap against the pane.

  Someone was trying to tell me that, unless I came awake, I would never get my weight back. I woke up waving my arms as if trying to push off an oncoming sea.

  It was raining in Piccadilly. It was raining in Soho. It was raining in Wales. It was all new and green in Ireland, I felt sure—it was all green, all sun and white-blue clouds in Dublin.

  My watch began ticking as if trying to get my attention: 11:00 p.m. They would be bringing dustbins down from joyless rooms above a neon sign reading:Casino de Paris

  “The Captain will let you know when to fasten your seat belts by lighting up the sign ‘Fasten Seat Belts,’” read the pamphlet I picked up off the BEA seat the following morning just before taking off. I was willing enough to fasten my own seat belt, but I had hoped the Captain would come down and ask me himself. I covered my disappointment bravely.

  “In the event of an emergency landing, the Captain will first of all announce ‘Prepare for an emergency landing.’ In this event please keep calm and carry out the following instructions: Loosen neckwear, remove glasses, dentures, and high-heeled shoes, and empty pockets of sharp objects. When you hear a whistle blast lean forward, cradling your head in folded arms. Be prepared for more than one impact.” If it was the stewardess’s arms that were going to cradle my head I was ready for several impacts.

  I loosened my tie but decided to wait for the first whistle blast before removing the bridge with the two powerful molars attached lest it frighten her off.

  Somehow the old boy who had asked me to tie his shoe returned to my mind. It came to me that the reason the English think so little of asking kindness of total strangers is that they think so little of granting such kindness themselves. If I am to believe my own sightline, these are the only people on the face of the earth who actually believe in kindness.

  Not believing, as we do in the States, that we believe in it by attending a movie about Kindness certain to gross a million dollars. The English legislate it into their daily lives.

  The spectacle of a great country, such as our own, demonstrating greater concern for the profits attached to the illegal drug traffic than for its victims is abhorrent to the English. Yet it is sufficiently plain that, if our concern for human beings was as large as that for investments in heroin, we surely would not assign its solution to men whose only qualification is a capacity to carry out orders. While the English use their medical men to rehabilitate addicts, we hand them over to policemen whose duty, as they conceive it, is to drive all offenders into the underworld.

  What was that the sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican told the arresting officers? “Put me in the electric chair; my mother can watch me burn.”

  The plane’s doors locked, the big zoom lifted me. I felt myself losing weight and began to smell oranges. After struggling since the twenty
-eighth day of March, nineteen hundred and nine, to get a semblance of dignity into my existence, all my good work was undone.

  At 60,000 feet I struggled against the seat belt, resolved not to be a Zero-G Gravity man. “My weight is my own!” I cried out in my mind, clenching my fists against this final outrage. “I forbid you to take my weight! This must not happen again! Never!”

  But my voice slipped out with the slipstream.

  Into the vasty silence of Zero-G.

  PARIS

  THEY’RE HIDING THE HAM ON THE PINBALL KING or SOME CAME STUMBLING

  There are sad little sights of Paris

  After Metro lights go dim

  There are strange flowers woven of rain

  That scatter like petals on the Rue Tiquetonne.

  Great trucks haul peaches all night from Rouen

  All night workers are stacking crates

  And the odor of peaches, rain and perfume

  Mix with drivers’ cries on the Rue Tiquetonne.

  Café chairs were stacked to the bricks

  Peach crates were stacked to the wall

  Sacha Distel sang Ah Quell Nuit

  The Dracula Cha-cha kept banging away—

  It was very late on that curious street

  And later than that in the juke café.

  Peaches that year were rather high

  Yet girls came strangely cheap

  An excellent year for Champagne ‘pernay

  But a tough one on old tarts.

  I saw the girl with the black coiffure

  Against a wall of the Rue Tiquetonne

  Turning a parasol under her arm

  And how the grass between the stone

  Grows a brighter green on the Rue Tiquetonne.

  For she stood less tall than the piled crates