Algren (5 page)

The Depression had exploded over the United States like a bomb, eradicating life savings, turning homemakers into beggars and prostitutes, and factory workers into thieves. It took everything promised by the American Dream and made it a mockery. “Idle, depressed, hungry, defeated, withdrawn, brooding people began to feel that somehow they were to blame for everything, that somehow, somewhere, they had failed,” wrote historian Edward Robb Ellis.

Back at the Albany Park two-flat, Goldie and Gerson were struggling, borrowing money on the house through the summer of 1931. Their usual squabbling must have been unbearable in the brutal heat—it was the second-warmest year in Chicago history, with the temperature hitting one hundred degrees Fahrenheit before the Fourth of July, and the humidity lifting the paper off the walls. Wasn't it bad enough that Gerson had never made foreman, and
now they're going to lose their house? Wasn't it bad enough that Gerson never got what he was owed from the tire shop—why did he have to make a sucker's investment in Florida real estate? Nelson hid like a kid in his old bedroom, trying to read and gasping for air. He took refuge in air-cooled movie theaters, where he could dream about Sylvia Sidney in
An American Tragedy
. He joked later that the film about the factory worker who tries to rise in society by drowning his pregnant girlfriend would determine “the entire course of my life.” He also could escape the heat at the cottage in the Indiana Dunes that Bernice had bought with her schoolteacher friends, where he could look at the stiff, green and yellow sand grasses and blue sparkling waves on Lake Michigan and pretend that none of this was happening. Bernice's friends sat on the sands and complained about how they had gotten cheated—Chicago public school teachers were owed $20 million in back pay. Some teachers hadn't been paid for six months; one lost a child because she could not pay for a doctor. No job was safe.

Nelson wanted to write. He had experimented with tales of the underworld at university: a criminal pimp, a woman about to get out of prison trapped by a jealous inmate who planted a gun on her, a farm boy corrupted by the city. Nelson's ideas of the underworld were vague—what did he know of corrupted farm boys other than the ones in Carl Sandburg's poem, being lured by painted women under the gas lamps? The only farm boy Nelson knew was Gerson, drearily uncorrupted, crawling under cars at the stifling Kedzie Avenue garage. Nelson tried to talk to him about what he had learned in college. Surely the nation's economic collapse was all a sign that capitalism was not working. What about people sharing in the profits they had created—why was the Hoover administration doing so little to help? Nelson had read British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald's
The Socialist Movement
and probably thought he was just talking to himself, but Gerson surprised him.

“Oh, the old man,” Gerson responded, recalling Nelson's idolized grandfather, “he used to talk about the Social—how do you say it in German—the
Socialisme
” (pronouncing it in French).

Nelson did not understand either. He was just twenty-two, and had hope. As Calvin Coolidge had helpfully advised, “The final solution of unemployment is work.” So he tried for newspaper jobs for most of the rest of that year. He came up empty at the Chicago papers, which were struggling—two went under in that decade. He went to the City News Bureau of Chicago, the wire service that was the training ground of
Front Page
playwright Charles MacArthur and later, Nelson's friend Kurt Vonnegut.
Anyone
could work for City News—it was considered a stepping-stone into the city's newspapers. But in 1931 even City News was cutting expenses. On the wall of the copy room was a discouraging cartoon: a diploma-clutching youth is confronted by an editor who snarls, “And what, may I ask, is a school of journalism?” Nelson was told that the list of applicants was already so long there was no point in even taking his name, but they would take it anyway. The young woman who wrote it down promised, “
I'll
phone you as soon as we have an opening.”

“To other applicants, I sensed, she merely said, ‘
We'll
phone you,'” Nelson joked later about his false sense of optimism. He waited around, and when the young woman came back from lunch, she told him to go home. He recalled spending the rest of the sunny summer afternoon at the Little Paris burlesque on South State Street, where the girls would shimmy with beaded feathers barely covering their breasts.

He thought he had found something up north—an editor at the
Minneapolis Journal
put him to work writing headlines for a week, to fill in for someone who was out of town. “Well, sit down and try your hand,” the editor said. Nelson worked for a week or so, boarding on credit. He did what he was taught at the University of Illinois, writing all the headlines in capital letters; this made him
look like an amateur. Dean Murphy hadn't known everything, after all. When Nelson asked for his check, he learned there wouldn't be any. The editor told him. “I just wanted you to get some experience.” This was not that uncommon in those days—a reporter could work at a paper for a month before getting on the payroll. But Nelson was running out of patience. That University of Illinois genuine certificate of editorial competence was starting to look like a gimmick, proof that he had gotten something out of his four debt-ridden years. Nelson's less loved sister, Irene, now working for a music publisher in New York City, sent him the money to pay off his YMCA bill and come home.

Still wearing his dark college graduation suit with a tie and a high-collared white shirt that made him look like a minister, Nelson started hitching rides in the autumn of 1931 along Route 66, the long highway that ran from Chicago to Los Angeles. Dust was blowing up from stubble cornfields—the yellow earth was cracked from two dry years. Some of it was traveling dust, brought in from the ecological disaster gathering speed in Kansas and Oklahoma. He hitched through the Ozark countryside of Little Egypt in southern Illinois, waiting at roadsides, squinting at the sun through the spreading branches of magnolia and pecan trees. Nelson tried a few downstate newspapers, with no luck. There were eight million unemployed; in another year, there would be twelve million. “I would have been very happy to have a little desk, with a newspaper or a magazine, any sort of a job,” Nelson said later. “Unfortunately, there were no jobs in journalism. I never went voluntarily into the world of pimps and thieves and wandering people—I was pushed into it.” Like other Depression refugees, he kept moving south and west, by highway and freight car, away from the coming northern winter.

The idea of hoboing and riding the rails was romantic in the 1950s and 1960s, when Jack Kerouac wrote about it. It was a path
to adventure in 1891, when a teenage Jack London swung onto his first car. There had long been a hobo culture in the United States, starting with cowboys and other seasonal workers who harvested grain and picked apples. It used to be almost entirely male—a hard life, prone to terrible injuries, freezing winters, scorching summers, subject to railroad bulls with clubs and tramps who preyed on working hoboes. But there was also a sense of fellowship—hobo jungles were community centers, where meals and stories could be shared. Hoboes left signs for each other on fence posts and barns along the trail—a drawing of a comb, for example, meant a dog with teeth. But by the 1930s that culture was disintegrating from the sheer weight of numbers. In 1932 up to two million Americans were on the move, hitchhiking and jumping freights. Route 66 was so full of hitchhikers that there was competition—one traveler boosted his appeal with a sign that said Give Me a Ride or I'll Vote for Hoover. The boxcars were packed with economic refugees. “There were whole families riding together, mother, father, couple of kids in their rags, laying in the car, with runny noses, crying,” remembered hobo Bill Quirke. “There was nothing for them at home so they left.” At least two hundred thousand of the transients were teenagers—fleeing from homes where there was not enough food for everyone.

There were also more women on the road than ever, rising to one in twenty in the Depression, up from one in two hundred before the 1930s. They wore overalls and flannel shirts to ride the trains, and many kept one good dress protected from the coal dust in a bundle, to get work in towns as typists or file clerks. In Nelson's novel
A Walk on the Wild Side
, Kitty Twist is rescued from being crushed under the wheels by Dove grabbing her overall strap with his teeth. As with black versus white vagabonds, the police and the courts were tougher on girls than on boys. Sexual pressure was used on girls—sex with the brakeman could be used for a ride on the
train, or with a policeman to avoid jail. Or sex was taken without payment. In Nelson's
Somebody in Boots
, a hobo brags about having the unexpected good luck of finding a drunken woman in an empty cattle car. There were also good manners in odd places—Nelson remembered how a policeman once came onto a train, cursing the hoboes, and was surprised to find a woman. He apologized with southern gallantry for his rough words. “We never use language like that in front of women down here,” he told her.

With all their genteel pretenses, the southern states were the hardest on wanderers. Southern towns were prominent in hobo warnings about which places to avoid. “Beware Beaumont, Greensboro … look out for one-armed Mike Bingo's Hole … steer shy of old Seth Healey, dressed like a Bo but carrying a gun and hoselength in Greenville; but the worst place of all is anywhere in Georgia.”

Blacks huddled in the same cars as whites, who harassed them. Irony was thick in the boxcars. Black and white refugees from a common enemy fought each other for a space in the straw. In
Somebody in Boots
, the vagrant Cass keeps reminding his police captors that “Ah'm not no nigger,” as if that made the quality of his wretchedness more refined.

Nelson found that boxcars were the easiest to ride—the hard part was getting on, because you had to board while the train was moving, and then grab on to a metal side rail, feeling the motion pull savagely at your arms and knowing how badly it could end. Sometimes they'd go too fast; sometimes a traveler's grip failed him. The carnage was astounding. On just the Missouri Pacific railroad in 1931, 114 riders were killed and 221 injured on trains traveling between Illinois, Texas, and Louisiana. The other hard part was getting off—to get water, or food, or work—out of the reach of the railroad bulls. Far worse than riding inside boxcars was clinging to the rods underneath cars, where one slip could leave a rider crushed under the wheels. Also terrible were the open gondolas carrying
coal, and the refrigerator cars, or “reefers,” carrying meat or produce. In one of Nelson's grim early stories, “Lest the Trap Door Click,” a cocky youth is warned by an old hobo to beware of riding the reefer, since he might get locked inside and freeze or suffocate. The kid, who like Nelson has a bachelor of science degree from a state university, scoffs, figuring the reefer is no worse than other cars and certainly no colder than the Texas desert at night. So he takes a reefer, the door clicks shut softly above him, and he spends hours in torment, clinging to a frozen steel grating while holding a delusional dialogue with the oranges rolling out of his reach. “It is so cold in the reefer, so dark and cold.”

Climbing off the train outside of town, Nelson walked into the French Quarter of New Orleans in the early morning, with the sunrise lighting the pastel pinks, blues, and yellows of the houses, with their lacy wrought-iron balconies. The benches in Lafayette Park were filled with homeless men—he would need to get there earlier if he wanted a place to lie down. It took hard work and planning to be poor. Exhausted and grubby, he bought a po'boy sandwich for a nickel in the market, and watched a muscular black man cutting the heads off turtles and stacking them in a pile, an image he used in
A Walk on the Wild Side
. A store advertised Coke for a nickel, so Nelson went in. A pretty girl emerged, topless, and said Coke was ten cents. Nelson did not question the markup and drank his pop, standing rigidly, eyes fixed straight ahead.

This look of wide-eyed innocence wouldn't go unnoticed in New Orleans, and up came a Dixie Fagin. A long, lopsided man from Florida, wearing a straw hat of dingy yellow, he was eager to know this college boy, still in his frayed and grubby graduation suit. Wouldn't Nelson like to make some money? Of course he would—Cokes cost more than expected. The man said his name was Luther, though Nelson doubted it. Aliases were common on the road—call me Tex, call me Swede. Florida Luther introduced Nelson to
another Luther, from Texas, who had a steel plate in his head from a war injury, and the trio agreed to share a seven-dollar-a-week room on Camp Street.

Nelson took odd jobs, washing dishes, mowing lawns, setting bowling pins, and selling door-to-door. One job involved selling subscription orders for the Standard Coffee Company; the lady of the house would be offered a pretty red tin coffeepot as an incentive. But there was more to it than that, explains a hustler in
A Walk on the Wild Side
. “Heed the housewife's woes, boy. Give heed to her trials and little cares. Make her joys your joys, her tears your tears.” This would ensure she did not understand how much coffee she would have to buy to finally own the pot. One lonely housewife talked so long that Nelson blacked out in the sticky, southern heat. Nelson doesn't talk about it in memoirs and interviews, but he was a handsome youth known through life for a strong sex drive, so it is possible he offered a few New Orleans women more than a willing ear. In
A Walk on the Wild Side
, Dove's attempt to retrieve a coffeepot turns into farcical sex on a rocking chair.

Another door-to-door route selling skin lighteners and hair straighteners did not bring in much. One night in New Orleans, Nelson remembered sitting around a dim electric bulb like a campfire, sharing thin soup enlivened with a single piece of ham. Everyone knew the man serving the soup would keep the ham for himself. But he slipped somehow, and the meat landed in an old visitor's bowl. Nelson remembered the terrible sense of loss.