Never a Lovely So Real

by Colin Asher

  Nelson realized he was out of his depth when Bays went temporarily blind. She is “either going to die or go mad,” he thought, so he left the apartment and went to find her dealer.

  Nelson reached West Madison Street around four in the morning. It was raining and the sidewalks were empty, but he noticed women soliciting work from doorways, so he approached one and mentioned Bays’s name.

  I’m a friend, he said, “and she needs help.” The woman turned away. The next woman he spoke to ignored him as well, so he tried another, and another. Some pretended not to hear. Others fled.

  There was a White Tower hamburger shop on the corner of West Madison and Aberdeen, and its lights were still on. Nelson went inside to escape the rain, found a seat facing a window, and sat down and stared into the night. He was looking for someone who looked like a dealer, but he had no idea what a dealer looked like.

  Eventually, a short man walking with a limp entered the restaurant and sat at the counter. Nelson checked him out. The man was wearing glasses with thick lenses, and a cap tilted down so it would cast a shadow over his face. He looked off somehow, suspicious, so Nelson sat next to him and tried to get his attention by staring into the mirror behind the grill.

  The man ordered coffee, and ignored Nelson studiously. He lifted his cup to take a sip, and just before it touched his lips, Nelson whispered: I’m a friend of Paula’s, “and she needs help.”

  The man clacked the cup against his teeth. He kept his head down for a moment, maybe trying to decide whether he was in danger. Then he lifted his gaze toward the mirror, saw Nelson, and relaxed.

  “She ought to know better than to send a square down here,” he said. He was Bays’s dealer.

  Nelson brought the man back to Wabansia Avenue and let him in. They climbed the stairs, and when they reached the second floor, they heard Bays’s voice. She was crying for help, and her pleas were just loud enough to escape into the hallway. When they opened the door, they found her lying on the floor in a puddle of sweat. She looked like warm death.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” the dealer scolded. He reached down to lift Bays, and the moment his skin made contact with hers, she regained some of the color in her cheeks and smiled faintly, anticipating the needle.

  Nelson was still revising his manuscript when he watched Bays go through withdrawal, and afterward he realized that reimagining his protagonist as an addict would solve most of his compositional problems. The perpetual need to find drugs would be an effective plot device. The burden of maintaining a habit and the desire to break free of it would add conflict to the story, and the danger associated with prolonged use could explain Frankie Machine’s death.

  Nelson was reluctant to pursue the idea, though, because he was running low on time, and researching morphine abuse would be labor-intensive. Doubleday was scheduled to send its last advance check in a few months, and Beauvoir was supposed to return to the States in the spring. Nelson was planning to travel through the American South and Latin America with her, and he wanted to send his manuscript to Ken McCormick before they left.

  There was risk involved as well. No American author had written a novel about opiate addiction yet, and the subject was likely to turn readers off. Censorship could also be a concern, so Nelson contacted his agent, Elizabeth Ingersoll, and asked for her advice. “You think that, uh—do you think it’s too sensational?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “Use it.”

  Nelson committed to the idea then, and began researching morphine addiction. He started visiting the weekly show-ups at the detective division again, and learned that users were sometimes arrested for internal possession—having opiates in their bloodstream. Heroin was selling for three dollars a hit that year, and the police believed a line of track marks running along the length of a vein created enough suspicion to justify detention. He visited the courts as well, and on one occasion he had the good fortune to overhear a judge asking a boy facing criminal charges how he spent his days. “Well,” the boy said, “I find myself a doorway to lean against, and I take a fix, and then I lean. I just lean and dream.”

  But Nelson’s friends were his best source of material. He asked one of them why he got high, and the man said, “You gotta belong to somebody.” And on another occasion, he attached himself to the drummer from Arkansas and followed him through the city as he bounced between bars and cafés, looking for a dealer. The drummer’s quest stretched on into the small hours of the morning, and eventually Nelson became tired and irritable. I want to go home, he said. “Well, you don’t know what it’s like to have a monkey on your back,” the drummer snapped.§

  Then someone agreed to inject himself while Nelson observed and took notes. “The morphine was heated in a little bottle with a match going underneath till it melted,” Nelson wrote. “Then the hypo was pressed down into the cotton.”

  The man then tied a tourniquet around his arm just below the elbow, and started searching for a spot that was likely to accept a needle. His veins were thick with scar tissue, though, so it took a few tries. “I was on this arm for five years—this is where I started—I tapped that one out and went down here,” the man explained. “Now I’m back on the original arm, tapping the very veins in search of joy, and finding, if lucky, an hour’s surcease from pain.”

  “Up north he hit,” Nelson wrote, “—the blood came up in the hypo, and then he was scratching his head furiously: that was a good wan whan owhan. A pink color came to the pasty skin, he looked the picture of good health.”

  Nelson soon realized that morphine addiction could add more to this book than he anticipated. The metaphoric language his friends used to describe their habits gave his book a surreal quality and diverted attention from the miserable conditions his characters live in. Addiction added emphasis to the divide between the novel’s protagonist and mainstream society, but it also made him vulnerable in a way the violent children in Never Come Morning had not been.

  Those were welcome developments—but they were complicated by events outside Nelson’s control. The country was undergoing a political transformation that year, and while Nelson was distracted by his work, the culture took a conservative turn that made his new subject both more poignant than anticipated, and more controversial.

  The wave of relief that washed over the country after the armistice had spent itself by then, and paranoia had replaced it. There was serious talk about guarding against left-wing ideas and “purging” “reds” from positions of influence that year, and the word loyalty was being redefined to mean submission to the status quo. Lists of suspected Communists were being circulated in Hollywood, and Congress was investigating the accused and broadcasting their interrogations.

  The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) ordered hundreds of prominent figures from the film industry to appear before them in Washington, DC, and newsreels reported on their hearings breathlessly. “[T]he committee is seeking to determine if red party members have reached the screen with subversive propaganda,” they announced.

  Almost everyone who received a subpoena complied. Walt Disney was one, and he played to the country’s fears by claiming “reds” had temporarily taken over his studio. Gary Cooper went the other way, and made the threat of communism seem like a joke. “I could never take any of this pinko mouthing very seriously, because I didn’t feel it was on the level,” he told the committee.

  But a handful of directors and screenwriters refused to cooperate. They claimed that the First Amendment allowed them to associate freely and believe anything they chose to believe. The House charged each of them with contempt of Congress, and as a result they lost their jobs. The group became known as the Hollywood Ten, and after fighting their contempt charges and losing, they were each sentenced to a year in prison. They appealed their convictions and made bold statements about defending free speech, and for a while it was possible to think of them as patriots standing up for the Bill of Rights.

  Then it wasn’t. In February 1948
, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia staged a coup and took control of that country’s government. They turned it into a satellite state of the Soviet Union, like its neighbors, and thereafter, anyone with the audacity to argue that communism wasn’t a threat to America was either a fool or a traitor.

  Military spending rose sharply after the coup, and the hunt for Communist influence in society became a national preoccupation. A rabbi named Schultz wrote a series of columns urging the devout to “root the Russia-first network out of all faiths!” And the US Chamber of Commerce published a handbook entitled A Program for Community Anti-Communist Action that advised people to organize themselves into committees, make lists of suspected subversives, and ostracize them. “We should not tolerate teachers who poison the minds of the young with Communist propaganda,” it warned. “Librarians are likewise not beyond public scrutiny.”

  Morphine abuse would have been a scandalous subject no matter how it was handled in that environment, but Nelson’s treatment made it seem seditious. He wrote his protagonist, Frankie Machine, as a flawed but redeemable character who received his first dose of opiates from an army medic after being injured in the war. Frankie is a charming man, and philosophical about his circumstances—“I’m gettin’ farther away from myself all the time,” he says. His friends and associates are equally complex and articulate, and their confidence reads like an implicit critique of the status quo. They know they’ve “failed the billboards all down the line,” but they aren’t convinced they have anything to be ashamed of. “What I’d do for a quarter you’d do for a dime,” one man tells a police captain, and a lay preacher announces, proudly, that he was defrocked for believing “we are all members of one another.” That line is an allusion to Paul the Apostle’s instruction that “we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others,” but in 1948 it sounded like Marxist propaganda.

  Nelson finished revising his manuscript in April, and sent it to Ken McCormick in New York with the title Hustler’s Heart. He didn’t think it was ready to be published, but he was no longer in a rush to finish because his money problems had been solved. The Newberry Library in Chicago had awarded him a $1,600 grant, and Avon had agreed to release a revised version of Never Come Morning as a pulp paperback. Nelson wasn’t pleased that they cut forty thousand words from the text, but he was happy with the thousand dollars they advanced him.

  Nelson spotted Beauvoir from his window. It was after midnight in the early morning hours of May 8, and she was walking down his alley, looking lost, so he went downstairs to greet her. She had been nervous about their reunion before leaving Paris, but her worries disappeared when he stepped into the street. At a glance, she could tell how excited he was to see her.

  They spent their first morning in seclusion. They couldn’t leave Chicago until they had procured their visas and received their inoculations, but they set those responsibilities aside and spent time catching up. They decided to keep a shared journal during their visit, and Nelson found a cheap notebook and made an entry: “Happened upon a strange creature, apparently of foreign extraction, running aimlessly down Wabansia—took her upstairs with intention of phoning police.”

  Nelson brought Beauvoir to West Madison Street to meet Jack and his roommates that afternoon, and they sat around eating barbecue chicken and listening to junkie ramble for two hours. They visited the wife of a thief who was in hiding from the police the following day, and then they began settling their affairs. “. . . bank, traveler’s checks, laundries,” Beauvoir wrote in their journal, “busy day—Fucking—and so on.”

  On their fifth morning together, they boarded a train bound for Cincinnati and rode it east and south—around the tip of Lake Michigan, and then across flat pastoral plains. They reached their destination the same day, found a diner, and gorged themselves while watching television—a first for both of them.

  They boarded a steamboat the following night, and stayed up long enough to watch the shore recede and the paddle wheels on either side of the hull begin churning the Ohio River into a mist. They lounged on the deck and drank Scotch the next day, and every time their boat dropped anchor over the course of the following week, they went onshore just long enough to create a memory. Louisville was a sad warm rain on a Sunday morning. Kentucky was drunken farmers in a decrepit bar. Memphis was cotton bales wrapped in jute, and Natchez was a white man in a suit who explained that the local “Negroes led an extremely easy life.”

  They spent two days in New Orleans after their cruise ended, and then they boarded a plane bound for the Yucatán Peninsula. When they landed, they fell into the same rhythm they had adopted in New York the year before. She led and narrated, and he followed and stared credulously—first through Mérida’s cobblestone streets, and then to the base of the pyramid at Chichen Itza, and the ruins of Uxmal. “Didn’t even take time to have a cup of coffee” this morning, Nelson wrote in the journal, “our time was too limited for that.”

  They flew to Mexico City on June 12 and moved into the Hotel de Cortés on Avenida Hidalgo—a regal building clad in stone, and adorned by a crucifix—and each day afterward they ventured out to explore. They drank tequila in a dive bar, visited the Mayan ruins at Teotihuacán, and visited one of the city’s great arenas. “Went out to the bull park to watch the local athletes do up a couple of steers,” Nelson wrote to Jack Conroy. “Can’t quite see the sport: you know who’s going to win before the game begins. It’s always a shutout for the bull.”

  The trip felt like the fulfillment of a promise to Nelson, proof that he and Beauvoir had a future. He had been entertaining doubts. They spent a few wonderful weeks together the year before, but after she returned to Paris, her affection seemed distant and abstract. He had begun to suspect the whole affair was a sort of fantasy, but he dropped his guard and lost himself in its promise when they began traveling together.

  Beauvoir, on the other hand, was tense. She and Nelson had planned their vacation together and agreed to remain on the road for four months, but her situation changed just before she left Europe. Sartre had arranged for one of his lovers to stay with him in Paris for the duration of Beauvoir’s absence, but that woman broke off their relationship days before she was supposed to arrive. Beauvoir didn’t want to leave Sartre alone for so long, so she promised to cut her trip with Nelson in half. She didn’t have the heart to put her choice into writing, though, so she told herself she would give Nelson the news in person.

  But the proper moment never presented itself in Chicago. Then she couldn’t tolerate the thought of upsetting Nelson while they were on the Mississippi, and the idea of spoiling their trip seemed obscene when they were lazing beneath a ceiling fan in New Orleans. The plane that carried them to the Yucatán was no place for a disappointment, and neither was their room in Mexico City—but eventually time forced her hand.

  Nelson and Beauvoir boarded a bus headed east toward a city called Morelia one day. It was a four-hour trip, maybe more, and Beauvoir delivered her news while they were on the road. She had no choice. They had been traveling for almost two months and she had to leave for Europe soon.

  I have to return to Paris in July, she said. She knew the news was devastating, but she delivered it casually, a fact that embarrassed her later.

  “Oh, all right,” Nelson replied flatly. He knew Sartre was the reason for the change in plans without being told.

  Beauvoir was relieved. She believed his reaction was sincere, and later, that fact embarrassed her as well.

  They checked into a hotel when they reached Morelia, and Nelson said he’d prefer to stay in their room by himself for the day. Beauvoir had already put their earlier conversation out of her mind, so she went out into the city alone. The weight she had been carrying for the last two months had lifted, so she strolled through the streets and the town square cheerfully.

  They traveled fifty miles west the next day, and Nelson joined Beauvoir on a boat ride to a small island named Janitzio that was covered with white-wall
ed houses with red roofs. They found an open-air market when they arrived, and saw fishermen casting nets into a lake. Beauvoir bought herself an embroidered blouse, and when they turned back toward the shore, she began making plans for the following day.

  Nelson cut her off. I’m sick of Mexico and I’m sick of traveling, he said. He had been stewing over Beauvoir’s announcement for two days, and disappointment had turned his mood dark. They crossed the water in silence, and when they reached land, he walked ahead of her and refused to answer when she called after him.

  Beauvoir confronted Nelson in their hotel room. She still thought the news of her early departure was behind them. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “Everything was going so well; why are you spoiling everything?”

  Nelson stormed out instead of responding, and returned late the same evening. They reconciled without speaking about their fight, and the next day, they resumed their vacation as if nothing had happened. They visited a few more Mexican cities and made their way to the States together, but the connection Nelson felt at the beginning of their trip never returned. He stopped speaking to Beauvoir in the unguarded way he had before, and sometimes he fell silent for long stretches of time. “I began to pay for my cowardice,” she wrote later, “and my thoughtlessness.”

  It was hot and humid in New York City when they arrived, and the time they spent there was disappointing and painful. They ate black raspberry ice cream in the East Village to cool off, and wandered about in silence. They shared meals because they felt obliged to, but they rarely had anything to discuss, and tension built between them.

  One night, while they were having dinner at Tavern on the Green in Manhattan, Beauvoir ran out of patience with Nelson’s surly attitude. “I can leave tomorrow,” she said brusquely.