Highly praised by such fellow writers as Hemingway and Carl Sandburg, but attacked by some literary critics for romanticizing prostitutes and hustlers, Algren had researched the New York prostitution scene around Times Square for the new novel. “It’s all changed and it’s hardly been touched by writers,” he said excitedly, as wide-eyed as a boy. “Prostitution there is very big money now. The women are high class and cost from fifteen dollars to one hundred dollars and up an hour, and that’s driven out the poor whore except in the back streets. Maybe it’s similar to what’s happened in baseball, where players used to work for one thousand dollars a season and now get a million. Some of these women make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year without taxes …”
He was as fascinated with life as ever, talking as eagerly about New York’s massage parlors and peep shows as about the literary world or the boxing business—not bad for a man who was aware that death was close. But the topic that seemed to excite him more than anything was a love affair of twenty-five years ago. His encounter with Simone de Beauvoir, the French author and long-time companion of Jean-Paul Sartre, became a romantic episode in her novel, The Mandarins. Algren still hadn’t forgiven her.
He told me indignantly, “She gave me a disguise, another name, in The Mandarins, but in a later book, I think it was called The Prime of Life, she tried to make our relationship into a great international literary affair, naming me and quoting from some of my letters. She must have been awfully hard up for something to write about or maybe she thought of herself as another Colette. The publisher asked my permission to quote the letters. I thought about it for a few days and then I reluctantly said okay. Hell, love letters should be private. I’ve been in whorehouses all over the world and the women there always close the door, whether it’s in Korea or India. But this woman flung the door open and called in the public and the press. Other women then began to write to me and even came knocking at my door. God, it was terrible. I don’t have any malice against her, but I think it was an appalling thing to do. That’s a Continental view of how to do things, I suppose.”
Algren had become very excited, and mindful of that “heaviness” in his chest, I tried to get him back to the safer topic of the new novel. So some prostitutes are becoming millionaires, I said. The diversion was a failure. He was too steamed up about de Beauvoir. He confided that in his bare, half-furnished cottage at Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York, was a tin box containing about three hundred love letters from the French writer. As she had published some of his letters, he intended to auction hers. “If one half of a correspondence is made public,” he said, “then the other half should be. They’re no longer of any sentimental value to me. You can’t commercialize half and keep the other half sacrosanct. Let’s make it all public!”
He always seemed to have problems in his relations with women. His two marriages ended in divorce and he had been living alone—“to be by the water”—among cheap memorabilia and with newspaper clippings on the walls for decorations. He was obviously living very poorly, but that didn’t stop him from planning a party for the next day to celebrate his recent election to the prestigious American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters, roughly the American equivalent of the French Academy.
A rebel all his literary life, Algren sounded ambivalent about the honor. “I didn’t know I was running for office until they informed me I was elected,” he commented jocularly. “It puts you in the league of people who are ‘distinguished,’ so I’m told by literary friends. I was a little surprised because I’ve never been ‘distinguished’ from other writers very much. In Chicago, where I spent sixty years, I was certainly never accepted. I spent my time feuding with the city. But it’s always taken time for people to catch up with the scene I write about. The Man with the Golden Arm was a good, solid, journalistic book, but A Walk on the Wild Side got off the ground. It was a sort of happening, a very poetic book. If I had only written one book, I’d want it to be that one.” He paused thoughtfully and then added quickly, “Or maybe this new one, The Devil’s Stocking.”
His excitement seemed dangerously high again as he said intensely, “Writings a serious business, not just digging up old love letters, which should be private anyway. In this new novel, I’ve tried to write about a man’s struggle against injustice—that’s the only story worth telling. I’ve written it from my guts.”
He was a generous man—as generous with his thoughts as with his feelings—but it was getting late and surely time he was resting. But he didn’t seem to want to stop. When I insisted on saying good-by, he went into great detail about how to get to the party at his cottage the next day, even quoting the local taxi rates. “I’ve already bought the liquor,” he said cheerfully. They were his last words to me—and his last words to anyone as far as I know. The first guest to arrive next day found him lying dead in the cottage with the unopened bottles of liquor for the party around him. He had had a massive heart attack. I hoped our conversation hadn’t brought it on. But at least he had lived life to the hilt and “raged against the dying of the light” right up to the end. The man one met on the last day reflected exactly the writer one had read in all the books ranging from The Man with the Golden Arm to The Devil’s Stocking, and that is an exceedingly rare literary achievement. It means that as long as his books are read, the man will never die—that downright, excitable, aggressive, but, deep down, gentle man known as Nelson Algren.
I
First
Trial
“I was nervous in the dressing room before that fight,” Ruby Calhoun’s manager later recalled, “it was our first main event and our first time on TV. Ruby kept reading a comic book. ‘Sit on the rubbing table,’ he tells me, ‘and be still. Riccardo’s first hook is going to be his last.’ What he might do if Riccardo didn’t hook, I didn’t ask. He wouldn’t have told me anyhow. Ruby managed hisself in things like that. I sat on the rubbing table like he told me. Nobody managed Ruby.
“If he didn’t finish that damned comic book by fight time, would he take it into the ring with him and finish it between rounds? When Ruby got his hands on something, book or man, he didn’t let loose until he was finished with it.
“Riccardo was a Puerto Rican Puerto Rican but he had a New York following. When he came down the aisle a gang of his fans held up a sheet on which they had painted, in red:
RICKIE! RICKIE! RICKIE!
GO! GO! GO!
“Ruby didn’t wait for Riccardo to go. He hit him with a right square on the chin. Riccardo got up at four and took the mandatory eight. Ruby hooked a solid left to the jaw and followed with another right. Riccardo landed on the apron of the ring, half in half out, on the ropes. His eyes were open but he couldn’t move. It had took only sixty-seven seconds. First thing Ruby did, back in his dressing room, before he changed back to his street clothes, was to finish that comic book.”
Shortly after that fight Calhoun put his manager aside. The faster he rose in the fight business, the more friends he made and the more trouble he got into. The more trouble he got into, the more friends he needed. Calhoun always made friends when he needed them. Then tossed them aside when they were no longer of immediate use.
He liked people well enough and he enjoyed being liked by them. Later it began to appear that he enjoyed being hated by them even more. He built up friendships, it began to look, in order to shatter them.
Twelve years after the Riccardo fight, when he was in the state penitentiary at Athens, New Jersey, he told a reporter, who’d reminded him of that fight, “When I fought I fought all out. Like life or death. Me or him. Or not fight at all. If I didn’t believe I could knock a man out, I wouldn’t sign to fight him. Nothing in between.”
There never had been anything in between.
When he’d been a kid of twelve, his parents, fearing his street associations, sent him to an elderly aunt who farmed a few acres in Alabama.
Calhoun recalled that southern holiday with pleasure. He worked a couple mules, and h
e worked. Really worked. And loved it.
He’d never been out of his northern city and the rural South had enchanted him. He would have been content, he still felt, to spend the rest of his life there. His aunt assured his father that the boy was getting along fine. She hoped Floyd would let him stay on.
Sunday, in black Alabama, was church day all day long. After church the farmers gathered to sing and picnic in a grove. The only white in sight was a little old man, selling ice cream on the grove’s far edge.
Calhoun wasn’t aware of his father’s arrival until a heavy blow sent his ice cream flying.
Why had his father struck him for simply buying ice cream from a white? The boy didn’t understand. He had never felt fear of whites. But his father contained an inner dread, imbued in him by his Alabama childhood.
“The blow he dealt me didn’t make me fear or hate whites,” Calhoun recalled, “it made me fear and hate my father. He brought his fears to me.”
His father brought him back to Jersey City; he should have left the boy South. He began running the streets with Ed “Red” Haloways, a youth a couple years older.
Red was a wiry, light-skinned rascal who might have passed for white had it not been for his nappy little mop of red-brown hair and his wide white smile. He named the local street gang “The Elegant Gents” and it was with the “Gents” that Ruby first got into trouble with the police.
A local clothing store kept racks of clothing displayed on the sidewalk. The Gents swept past the racks, grabbed as many clothes as they could and escaped. Their object was not so much theft as it was to elude pursuers. The kids would have returned the clothes had that been possible. Ruby’s father came home and found his children all wearing new clothes.
A white woman had given them to him, Ruby explained to his father. “With the price tags still on them? I won’t have a thief for a son!” Floyd had begun belt-lashing the boy until his mother stopped it at last. Then the old man had phoned the police.
“I didn’t know,” Floyd acknowledged, many years later, to his old friend Matt Haloways—Red’s father—“that the police would take such hold.”
“You know it now, old man,” Matt Haloways had assured him.
A thirty-year-old white homosexual assaulted Calhoun when he was fourteen. Calhoun stuck a scout knife into him. “I stuck him everywhere but the soles of his feet. The man survived, I still don’t know how. That’s right: atrocious assault at age fourteen.
“I don’t enjoy hurting people unless they mess with me. Then I enjoy it. If you mess with me I’m going to try to kill you. I don’t fight by rules. I go for all. And I don’t shake hands when it’s done.”
“Ruby Calhoun is an antisocial person,” an early report warned, “if something is not done soon he will become a dangerous man.”
To make certain that that was what he would become, Calhoun was sentenced, for atrocious assault, to the Jamesburg State Home for Boys until he would be twenty-one. When he was sixteen Red Haloways came in, on a mugging conviction, and they locked in the same cottage.
Ruby had been planning escape but he said nothing to Red. Ruby already knew Red’s tendency toward screwing everything up for himself and everyone around him. Red looked like a sure winner but was really a loser, Ruby sensed.
Some simpleminded staff member had had the heel of every shoe worn by the inmates cut with a V. The purpose was supposed to be that, in the event a kid ran off, he would show them the way he’d gone by that V. Ruby simply pulled a pair of winter socks over the shoes, got over a six-foot fence in the wintry dark of early morning, and was off. He eluded police patrols back to Jersey City.
His mother’s guess was that the boy’s best bet would be the army. She shipped him off to relatives in Philadelphia. There, by assuring a recruiting officer that he was a native Philadelphian and of age, he got himself inducted into the IOIST Airborne and was shipped to Germany.
The man who had the strongest impact upon him in Germany was a Sudanese, pulling army time in order to earn American citizenship. He was a man most steadfast in his religious convictions, and his religion was Islam. He imbued Calhoun with pride in being black as Christianity had made him ashamed of his color. Islam awakened a moral sense in Calhoun.
“I knew every apostle from Peter to Paul,” he explained, “but I could never relate to spirits or ghosts—neither the holy ghost of Protestantism or the Virgin Mary bullshit of Catholicism. I found my discovery of Islam to be good.
“We were in Germany at a new post. There was me and another paratrooper and we were drinking three-point-two beer. Remember three-point-two beer? You’d have to drink a gallon to get a buzz on. We didn’t drink a gallon but we did get to feeling good. On the way back to the barracks we took a shortcut through the gym. The boxing team was working out.
“I’d never had a glove on in my life, but that three-point-two kept telling me to volunteer. The coach told me to come back the next day. The next day the three-point-two feeling was gone, but its promise was still in me. I went back and he threw me in with the all-army heavyweight champ. I weighed one-fifty and knocked him cold with a left hook.
“I knew at last what I’d been created for: a fighting man. After that I lived for boxing alone. It became the beginning, the middle and the end of everything in my life.
“When I began fighting I began speaking better. I had had a bad stutter my whole life. Now I went to the Dale Carnegie Institute in Mannheim and they really helped me. I began developing a special feeling for verbal expression. It wasn’t like being unable to talk clearly one day and being able to the next. I fought the words as they came at me, one by one, head-on, every day. I forced them into corners in my head until they came out of my lips. Every word was a hard-fought ten-round fight.”
The Sudanese encouraged Calhoun’s new enthusiasm. Calhoun won fifty-one fights in the army, thirty-five by knockouts, and lost five.
He was honorably discharged, as the army’s light-welterweight champion, in June of 1956. He wasn’t yet twenty.
He went to work in a plastics plant near Jersey City and was arrested there, while at work, for his escape three years before. He was sentenced to nine months at Annanville.
Full-grown men were forced to wear short pants at this reformatory: like kindergarten kids on their way to a class in coloring.
“The purpose was to make them feel like fools by making them look like fools,” Calhoun explained.
He refused to eat and tore the offered pants to shreds. He was sentenced to four months in an empty hollow in a cement wall called “The Graveyard.” When he was let out he refused work on the rockpile or in the grain mill; but he accepted a job handling boxing gear.
“When I got out I didn’t care for anybody or anything. I’d lost my car, my job and my GI bill. I was mad at the world. I wanted to hit out at everybody in it. Who do I run into at exactly that moment but my old Elegant Gent—Jamesburg buddy Red Haloways.
“Red was fighting here and there, at one hundred seventy-two pounds, under the name of Tiger Keller, picking up fifty bucks here, fifty there. Red couldn’t punch the hole out of a doughnut, but he had fast hands and he moved good. His trouble was that he didn’t take himself seriously, either as a fighter or as anything else.
“So we’d get a bottle and put our guns in our pockets the way you’d put your wallet into yours. All we needed then was a whim and we’d do it. It was nothing planned. I couldn’t begin to tell you how many stick-ups and muggings we pulled. If I hadn’t gone to prison I’d be dead. Somebody would have killed me or I would have killed somebody.
“One night we decided to race one another in stolen cars. We stole the cars, Red in a black Chevy and me in a green Ford. We pull into a gas station and I get the idea of robbing one attendant while the other is filling up Red. I backed the kid toward the washroom when a cop steps out, police special in hand: I dropped my own gun. He could have shot me dead but he didn’t.
“Red stepped on the gas and got out. He did the ri
ght thing. He offered, through a lawyer, to perjure himself in court in my behalf. I said no because what good would it have done except to get Red named as an accomplice? I pled guilty to felonious assault and was sentenced to four years.
“Most numbers talk out their fantasies in the joint. They’re going to do this, they’re going to do that. I didn’t talk. I knew what I was going to do and I worked at it.”
Billy Boggs, a black man twenty years older than Calhoun, who was Ruby’s cellmate for a year, supervised fights in the dusty prison yard.
“Calhoun took to fighting with a passion,” Boggs later remembered. “It was never too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry in the yard to keep Ruby from working out. He loved roadwork. He loved to fight. He fought to win.
“We didn’t match weights or anything in there. You found a guy willing to box and you boxed, that was all. If the fight got going good the timekeeper might let a round go six or seven minutes.
“Once a year, on the Fourth of July, we’d put up a ring and have a boxing show. I matched Ruby with a strong dude, over two hundred pounds, and Ruby knocked him cold.”
“Seven managers bid for my services when I got out,” Calhoun recalls, “and I picked the wrong one. I picked Billy Boggs. Well, not exactly. I picked Jennifer Boggs, actually. Boggs’s stepdaughter. I used to see her when she came to visit the old man. No, I didn’t meet her. A tall, lightskinned girl, the quiet kind. She’d bring the old man a package of food and he’d accept it as though she owed it to him. That would spin me.
“Jennifer had been only ten years old when Billy made the joint, and her mother had died while Billy was still locked. She was twenty when I first saw her and looked as though she had never had a boyfriend.
“She came to my first fights after I got out. We’d have drinks together after the fight. I’d have a drink, that is to say. With an old man like Jennifer had, all she’d have would be an orange juice. She was teaching grade school, and having her on his hands sometimes got in the way of Billy’s drinking. When we told him we planned to marry, he was pleased.
The Devil's Stocking Page 2
