They aren’t drinking, as did Faulkner’s folk, out of a deep sense of personal loss, because they never had anything of their own to lose. They aren’t getting drunk, like Hemingway’s losers, out of disillusionment, because they never had any. They grew up in the ruins and they know the caves of their own country better than you or me or Fulton Sheen.46 Or Fulton Lewis or Fulton Oursler or any of the other purveyors of prefabricated miracles.
The caves of a country where there are no longer universal truths, though you seek them in all the caves. All those who would have us live morally out of fear, rather than from a sense of inner freedom.
From the penthouse suspended silently forty straight-down stories into the long, low night-blue bars, they’ve put the line about God and Country on the same shelf as the one about “What is good for General Motors is good for the country.” Or “be loyal to the company, son, and you’ll be managing a branch office before you’re forty.” They aren’t having heart-to-heart talks with the minister anymore. Look at the minister and you’ll see why.
If you want to go for that dead-end about the branch office yourself, goodbye, good luck and God bless you—but don’t try dragging this cat along.
“There is no more universal idea,” Dostoevsky complained, being a plaintive sort anyhow. “Everything is flabby, vapid! We all, we all are empty!”
That, of course, was in another country. And besides, God is dead.
Part-time bartender; part-time philosopher; part-time recording artist. Self-styled record mimic, self-styled song-stylist. Part-time madam, full-time madman.
In the full light of the taverns or the half-light of the lounges.
… Sitting with N. A. [Nelson Algren] in a quiet little bar I missed half what he was saying, and I felt that his difficulties were not less than mine. He hesitated about what to show me in Chicago. There were no worthwhile bands to listen to, the middle-class nightclubs were no more interesting than those of New York, and the idea of a musical show did not appeal to me. If I liked, he could take me to places where probably I should not have the occasion to venture; he could give me a glimpse of the lowest districts in Chicago, for he knew them well. I accepted.
He took me to West Madison Avenue, which is also called the Bowery of Chicago; here are the lodging-houses for men only, flophouses, squalid bars. It was very cold, the street was almost deserted; and yet there were a few men with shipwrecked faces who hid themselves in the shadows of the doorways or wandered up and down the frozen sidewalks. We entered a bar that reminded me of Sammy’s Follies: but there was neither show nor spectators, and no tourist other than myself. N. A. was not a tourist, for he often came here and knew all the people, hoboes, drunks and faded beauties: no one would turn round even if the Mad Woman of Chaillot came in. At the end of the room there was a little negro band; one read on a placard: “It is forbidden to dance”; but people were dancing. There was a lame man who waddled about like a duck: suddenly he started to dance and his legs obeyed him: he spun round, jumped and capered about with a maniacal smile; it seemed he spent his time here and danced all night. Sitting at the bar was a woman with long, fine hair adorned with a red ribbon; sometimes her hair was blond, and her doll’s face was that of a little girl; sometimes her head seemed covered with white tow; she was a siren well over sixty; she drank one beer after another out of the bottle while talking to herself and shouting defiantly; sometimes she got up and danced, lifting her skirts very high. A drunk asleep at a table woke up and seized a fat floozy in his arms; they capered around and danced deliriously. There was something of madness and ecstasy; so old, so ugly, so miserable, they were lost for a moment and they were happy. I felt bewildered, stared and said: “It’s beautiful.” N. A. was astounded; it seemed to him very French. “With us,” he said, “ugliness and beauty, the grotesque and the tragic, and even good and evil, go their separate ways: Americans do not like to think that such extremes can mingle.”
—Simone de Beauvoir,
from American Day by Day
February 21st, 194747
VII.
“HOW DID YOU GET ON STUFF IN THE first place?” the judge would like to know. “There was so many little troubles floatin’ around,” the girl not yet twenty explains, “I figured why not roll them all up into one big trouble?”
“Why a young girl like you should want to live like this I simply fail to understand,” his honor simply fails to understand.
“Don’t bother me with why I got to live any way at all,” not-yet-twenty begs off, “Just tell me how for God’s sake.”
“Don’t you care what happens to you?”
“Why should I?” she warns the courtroom quietly, “All I have to do is shove a paper of strychnine into my next hype, then you’ll all die.”
Next case.
“What do you do all day?” the judge wants to know of a sixteen-year-old boy who was, until six months ago, a high-school sophomore.
“I just lean,” the kid from Cloudland, still adrift, answers dreamily, “I just find a hallway or washroom ’n’ take a shot. Then I lean. Just lean ’n’ dream.”
“Don’t you care what happens to you?”
“It don’t matter what happens to me. Because all the time it’s really happening to someone else.”
Somebody else’s somebody else who doesn’t matter at all.
Watching a jackal from Dallas having a breakfast consisting of five bennies, five Nembutals and two and a half grains of morphine—“How can you walk with all that stuff in you?” is what I’d like to know.
“How can I walk without it?” is what Dallas would like to know.
“I don’t believe in them squares,” a woman heroin peddler warns me just for my own good, “I’m scared to death of the way they live. I don’t even know what they’re laughin’ at. ’Specially when they laugh at Johnny Ray.48 He makes me cry. I don’t mean real tears of course. People on Stuff are too dry-eyed to cry like squares. But I cry when they laugh at him all the same.”
The twisted anguish of the singer, too lonesome for real tears—“He may not be a cat hisself, but he know how us cats got to suffer.”
Blame it on the comic books, blame it on the Communists. Blame it on Costello or Lucky Luciano.49Blame it on the people who peddle if that makes you feel easier. Blame it on the police or the passing of the old-fashioned Sunday School.
But these are all results and not causes at all: only names we employ to exculpate ourselves. We are willing, in our right-mindedness, to lend money or compassion—but never so right-minded as to permit ourselves to be personally involved in anything so ugly. We’ll pay somebody generously to haul garbage away but we cannot afford to admit that it belongs to us. We have deported the high-school sprout to Cloudland by right-mindedness.
“You think The Nab don’t want the traffic to go on as it is?” another pusher challenges me, “with the loot that’s in it for them? They never had it so good. If the squares didn’t want people to be on stuff nobody would be on it. Who do you think The Nab is working for—them or us?
“It’s the squares make the laws that make it so hard on us cats—but all them laws do is to make it that much harder on their own fool selves in the end. When they bear down they make our risk bigger, so the payoff goes higher. It costs just that much more to stay in business. So the junkie got to come up with more gold than ever, and there’s only one place he can get it. Off the square. Why shouldn’t we get to them?
“We do without family or friends, we give up everything. When The Nab catches us broke, the only lawyer we can get is one who’s on the other side. Ain’t nobody on the junkie’s side. Not even other junkies.
“Them squares, they walk around free. But us cats got to suffer.”
“How’d you get on stuff in the first place, pusher?”
“Too much vitality, cat. Vitality was runnin’ away with me. I’d go three days without sleep ’n’ knock off two hours ’n’ be ready to take off again. Got into all sorts of hell for no reason
but just to make something happen. Now I go two hours ’n’ I’m ready to knock off for three days. It’s how to stay out of trouble.”
“I didn’t get on because of too much pep,” a contrary cat has a different tale. “I got on it because everybody I knew was making sixty-seventy a week and I couldn’t make more’n thirty-five. Some days I couldn’t lay by a dime. Now some days I make more than that before noon. It makes a real little go-getter out of you.”
“When one is peacefully at home,” Chekhov observes, “life seems ordinary. But as soon as one walks into the streets and begins to observe and to talk to women, then life becomes truly terrible.”
And when one walks into a courtroom where women are being tried, it begins to seem that they are the innocent ones. That it is His Honor, the arresting officers and that little man who stands beside His Honor whispering, “She was up before you on the same charge last week, Your Honor,” as well as the indifferent spectator, who are the guilty parties.
Guilty of indifference. Guilty of self-righteousness. Guilty of complacency.
And what did he mean, the little leaning dreamer, in saying, as he teetered, that whatever happens to him really happens to somebody else? Did he mean something like that other cat meant when she said, “I remember that particular day so well, because I felt like myself for a little while. But I don’t feel like myself anymore.”
They get to feeling so lonesome for their lost nameless selves, down there in the night-blue bars. “You’re dragging along and you know it’s the end of the end—then a strange kick hits you and nothing seems like it used to be,” is how one cat puts it. “Strange kicks hook you, and the bad times are forgot.” Meaning perhaps that he wants to know his own name, but that there is no one to tell him.
Strange things still happen from time to time, maybe something will happen to you that never happened to any cat before. Down in the caves of the wilderness, where the loot is large, The Nab greases easy, and they call all peddlers “Jack-the-Rabbit.”
Where they know when to use bennies and when to use suckies, when to square up and when to goof. A time for M and a time for H and a time for tapering off. An evening country where ten a.m. always looks a little like five in the afternoon.
Between seven and eleven it is quiet on the street, for the cats are sleeping the strange light sleep. They have an hour now of neither fever-dreams nor fear.
Till the sleeping blood begins to stir, they wake up sneezing with watering eyes and know: Jack-the-Rabbit is on his way.
The rhythms of the junkie night are the cycle of the block, for the peddler moves as the blood cries out. “And you know it ain’t habit-forming, cat,” Jack-the-Rabbit assures you with a nudge. “It just makes you want to try it again.”
They know what M is and what H is and what weed is better than the judges. The Nab knows, but the judges who try them in Chicago are beside themselves with ignorance. “I can tell you what a man on H will do,” Judge Gibson Gorman of the local narcotics court tells an audience, “but I can’t predict what he’ll do on marijuana—he may commit murder and he may not.”
They know when to plaster a ten-spot onto the skin, under a band-aid, to keep The Nab from getting it all.
They recognize popular songs at the juke’s first summer-colored note, and ask one another solemnly, “How do you think Coleman Hawkins felt when Lester Young came along?”50
They know what squares never do—that every man is guilty unless, by some ruse, he can prove his innocence. They know that, in Chicago courts, it isn’t a matter of discovering who is innocent, but only who is the least guilty. All this they know that no square knows. All this, and much besides.
Some, the very wisest cats of all, even know how to go to the Bridewell51 and come out with a bigger habit than they had going in.
How do you think the Mills Brothers felt when Billy Williams came along?
These are not the disinherited. For they have disinherited their selves. And don’t know where to find them.
Down here where they’ve found one another, in lieu of themselves, to form a loose federation of the lost. Whether God, or Christ, will ever redeem them doesn’t matter any longer; because Man never will. Great things still happen from time to time so maybe something’ll happen to you. How do you think Vaughn Monroe felt when Frankie Laine came along?
Unbereaved or unbereft, scoffing or debauched, the geared and the ungeared, they live out their lives like ghosts of some winter twilight when winter is nearly done.
Knowing their own faces, strong or weak. Their own poor faces, gay or bleak. Knowing the phonies as well as the true sporty-ones who are just putting it on. Knowing their own hat size, cap or tam, each being loyal to a particular brand of cigarette or bar, yet knowing there is no difference worth mentioning between any. They need to be loyal to something, having lost all loyalty to their true selves. But that’s too big a job. They’ve lost their selves out there somewhere where Christ lost his shoes. How can anyone be loyal to someone you never got to know, for God’s sake?
Strolling the broken stones beyond the ruins of the City of God, out where the rutted roads begin, it is rumored vaguely, here and there, that certain unnamed sub-dividers plan the City of Man. So between the old town and the new they go, inventing new gods along the way.
“Junk is like God,” not-yet-twenty explains, “it makes a place in your heart you’ll never forget. You got to be punished for believing in it, but you go on believing all the same. It’s like being a martyr sort of.”
Some people say that junkies lie. But it seems to me that some people who aren’t even on Stuff don’t tell the truth all the time either.
How do you think Gene Krupa felt when Jackie Cooper came along?
H. E. F. Donohue: I asked you to think about American literature. What did you decide? Algren: Well, you asked me what’s the matter with American literature and I think the trouble with American literature is it doesn’t know who it is. It thinks it’s Henry Miller writing to Lawrence Durrell, and then again it thinks it’s James Baldwin telephoning Norman Mailer, and then it thinks it’s Jack Kerouac, subsisting on Coca-Colas on a cross-country ride to nowhere—
Donohue: What is it?
Algren: Actually, American literature isn’t anybody phoning to anybody or anybody writing about anybody. American literature is the woman in the courtroom who, finding herself undefended on a charge, asked, “Isn’t anybody on my side?” It’s also the phrase I used that was once used in court of a kid who, on being sentenced to death, said, “I knew I’d never get to be twenty-one anyhow.” More recently I think American literature is also the fifteen-year-old who, after he had stabbed somebody, said, “Put me in the electric chair—my mother can watch me burn.” Even more recently, American literature is a seventeen-year-old kid picked up on a double murder charge, two killings in a boat, in a ship off Miami, who said he was very glad it happened, he had absolutely no regrets, his only fear was that he might not get the electric chair. He had no vindictiveness toward those two people he killed. He said they were pretty good about it. They didn’t know, they had no idea, that he was going to come up with a knife. He had, in fact, a little bit of admiration for their coolness. One of them, finding himself stabbed, said, “Why?” He wanted to know. He said, “I can’t tell them why.” But I know he’s been trying to get out of it since he’s six years old. This is an honors student, you understand, this is a bright boy from a respectable home. He never remembers a time when he wasn’t fully convinced that death was better than life. And now he was very contented, his only worry being that he might not get the electric chair. He’s afraid of that. That’s the only fear he has, that he might have to continue to live. I think that’s American literature.
—Algren and H. E. F. Donohue,
from Conversations with Nelson Algren
196352
VIII.
EVEN IF DREYFUS IS GUILTY,” CHEKHOV wrote to Suvorin, “Zola nevertheless is right, because the business of writers is
not to accuse, not to persecute, but to side even with the guilty, once they are condemned and suffer punishment.… Even without them there are plenty of accusers, prosecutors and gendarmes, and in any event the role of Paul suits them better than that of Saul.”53
The function of the writer in the States as well is to champion the accused. There are already so many Junior G-men competing for posse duty that they’re paying their own expenses. “If you’re so innocent, what were you doing where the trouble was going on?” is the new Peglerism.54 “If you’re not guilty, what are you doing in jail? You admit you don’t know the law—how can you claim to be innocent?”
When Joseph K., in Kafka’s The Trial, charged by unidentified informants with a crime unnamed, is led at last out of the city by two strangers in top hats and propped against a boulder, one top hat draws a butcher’s knife and passes it, ceremonially, across K. to the second executioner—who ceremonially passes it back in an Alphonse-and-Gaston act. “K. now perceived clearly that he was supposed to seize the knife himself, as it traveled from hand to hand above him, and plunge it into his own breast.”55
“It may be no more than a coincidence,” Representative Busbey of Illinois comments on the suicide of a State Department employee, “that he worked in a government agency where Communists, Communist sympathizers and poor loyalty risks have plagued our security.… In view of the fact that Montgomery brought his own life to an end, we should not assume that he was innocent of such associations.”
For so deeply now do we presume the accused to be guilty by the act of having been accused, that it seems to us no more than an act of atonement to turn the knife on himself. The accused who stubbornly declines this form of confession is now advised that either the answers he would have given would have incriminated him or else he would not have declined. Refusal to reply thus becomes an automatic confession of guilt. You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. Leaving us with the implication that the men who devised the Fifth Amendment had in mind not the protection of the innocent, but of the guilty. How sick can you get?