Algren (6 page)

What happened? That was the question on all the thin faces around him, all these native sons. He heard it in everyone's talk, from the boxcars, from the jungles, from the women on back porches yearning for brightly colored coffeepots. I always worked hard, my family worked hard. We're not bums. I fought in the war. I worked on the railroad. I went to college. I had a farm. I saved my money, and the bank lost it. If we worked hard, weren't we
supposed to rise? He heard stories colored in every shade of desperation—of babies dying and wives leaving, of fathers committing suicide and crops that wouldn't grow, of nonunion factory jobs that burned lungs or crushed fingers, of mothers and sisters gone mad.

Hunger breeds larceny, and one of the Luthers landed on a scheme. He had somehow acquired a thousand certificates from a beauty shop, offering a shampoo and a finger wave—the sculpted style popular in the 1930s and tricky to do at home. In small print the certificate would explain that the service cost $3.50, but Nelson and the Luthers would say it was free, and ask for just a quarter for a courtesy charge. Sometimes they would run into some sharp soul, standing with her arms folded at her mosquito-netted back door, wondering if this was not too good to be true. Then she'd be told to just go ahead and call the shop—but there weren't many telephones in the poorer New Orleans neighborhoods. The salesmen would make sure there was no telephone by checking the backyards for a phone connection ahead of time. The lady would be told that if she did not want the certificate, her neighbor would, and then who'd get that marcel wave? It was a lovely con—the mark would go to the parlor and find it was not free, while the salesmen could take the quarters and fill up on po'boys and bananas. Nelson tells the beauty parlor story in several places, and gives the sales job to Dove in
A Walk on the Wild Side
. Nowhere does he express remorse for cheating poor women, though this was certainly a more shameful scam than the Swedish penny con pulled by his grandfather. This shows a bit of coldness in Nelson, but also the desperation of the times, when people were doing all kinds of odd things for money, from hanging upside down to exhausting themselves in dance marathons. He had his own worthless certificate from the University of Illinois tattering in his pocket.

The marcel wave caper ended when somebody made the mistake of trying to sell certificates again on the same block. He was beaten
up by a couple of vengeful husbands—being cheated of a quarter was a big deal in the early 1930s. It was time to leave town.

In August 1932 Nelson took off in a boxcar for East Texas, where he bummed around the booming oil town of Gladewater, still hoping for white-collar work. An oilman named Isidor Achinofsky took time from his derricks to give Nelson a handwritten note of introduction, asking the recipient to give Mr. Nelson Abraham a job on a local newspaper. But nothing came of the note, which Nelson saw as the man's way of getting rid of him. So Nelson kept traveling west to the Rio Grande Valley, where there were oranges and grapefruits to pick at seventy-five cents a day.

Nelson was still traveling with Florida Luther, who was full of ideas and thought they could do better than picking fruit in the tropical Texas sun and hoping for a better job at the packing plant. Luther had found an abandoned Sinclair station near the town of Hondo. A hand-painted sign by the local Lion's Club warned speeding drivers, This Is God's Country Don't Drive Through It Like Hell. The disintegrating station itself did not see much traffic, speeding or otherwise—it was in an overgrown grapefruit grove, hung with mesquite vines, with deer, snakes, and wild hogs going in and out, and swarms of mosquitoes. Nelson and Luther visited a Sinclair agent and suggested fixing it up. The agent agreed, and Luther explained humbly that his handwriting was no good, so Nelson should sign for a hundred gallons of gas, as “this lad here got more knowance 'n I'll
ever
have.” Nelson was proud of his “knowance,” so he signed. He was joined on this adventure by his old Roosevelt High School and Uptown Arrows friend Ben Curtis. Nelson lettered the sign for the station using his high school Spanish: Se Habla Espanol in red paint.

But Luther had another angle besides the gas. The station would be a shelter while they made their fortune selling black-eyed peas, bought cheap from Mexican farmers, then shelled and packed and sold in Mason jars to the Piggly Wiggly. They would be the black-eyed
pea kings of Texas. Dripping sweat, Nelson shelled peas “till I was nearly blind,” a burlap sack of produce on one side, on the other a stack of Mason jars glinting in the South Texas sun. He watched snakes and lizards crawl among the tree stumps, and swarms of white and black butterflies flutter down and then away again. Nelson likely practiced his road stories on Ben, improving the timing, sharpening the descriptions, and rubbing his hand back and forth through his damp hair, which stood up wildly all over. He kept a Spanish-English pocket-sized dictionary on hand, in case of customers. They sold an occasional gallon of gas. But when Mexicans arrived at the station, they wanted liquor, not gas, and laughed at the pea shelling—weren't peas as common as cactus? As grass? What else were these idiotic gringos doing out there in the brush if not running a still?

There was no newspaper, so Ben and Nelson had to wait until Luther came home in the evening from his mysterious pea-dealing excursions in an old Studebaker. Bonnie and Clyde were still free, Luther told them as they ate another meal of black-eyed pea mush or tomatoes. That was good news, but where was the pea money? They hadn't sold a single jar. One night, lying awake in the humid dark, Nelson heard a noise outside, and woke to see Luther and another man with another car messing around with some kind of device by the gas pit. Standing quietly in the shadows, Nelson finally figured out he was being set up—Luther was siphoning off the gas Nelson had signed for, and those peas were never going to get sold. The pea farmers would come looking for the money they were promised, and Nelson would be the one to take whatever punishment they would give. Indignant over being swindled, Nelson poured water, honey, and other detritus into the pump that still had gas in it, to ruin what was left. Feeling like a fugitive, he took off south to El Paso, with a few dollars stuffed into his shoes.

In the West Texas town, he wandered into the public library and had a conversation with the librarian about the French poet Charles
Baudelaire. Nelson thought the librarian was ignorant, so he felt justified in swiping a book—
Mother
, a novel about revolutionary factory workers by Maxim Gorky. Maybe after everything that had happened, he wanted to get something of his own back; it was the start of a long career of pinching books. Nelson wrote long letters to friends in Chicago, complaining about the state of the Confederacy.

Things got worse. After losing money in a craps game, Nelson was locked in an El Paso County Jail cell full of drunks on suspicion of breaking a window, and then fined five dollars for vagrancy. The railroad then took him to La Feria, at the very bottom of the state by the Mexican border. He remembered staying in a hotel full of people with no money. He told an interviewer years later that someone from a traveling carnival staying at the hotel wondered if Nelson, with his look of baby-faced innocence and constant surprise, would want a job as a shill at a carnival roulette wheel. This is one version of the story; in another, told in the short story “The Last Carousel,” he gets the job after first trying his luck at the wheel himself. Since Nelson was a lifelong gambler, this version may be closer to the truth. In the story Nelson saw an older man who seemed to be winning big—the wheel operator was looking worried. The player got Nelson to help him on a double bet, won twelve dollars, and gave Nelson a silver piece to play himself. What a generous old world this was after all! When Nelson won on the spin, the older man urged him on, and Nelson added the damp dollars from his shoe. The wheel spun, the little lights shone on the midway, the merry-go-round music sounded sweet in the thick, warm air, the good old man whispered advice, and Nelson could not stop winning. And then he could not stop losing, and all the money he had won and wagered was gone. What happened?

In the story Nelson played the part of a sucker so well that he was hired on for regular performances. The wheel owner, a tall Texan in a rancher's hat and boots, would spot a “mark” on the
grounds and signal to his partner, a short New Yorker who spun the wheel while Nelson and a few other shills pretended to rejoice as they won money, trying to draw the mark in. Once a mark was taken, the silver dollars would have to be returned, and Nelson's real pay was just enough for hamburgers and coffee. Nelson stayed at the fair long enough to pick up the local slang and a few secrets of the trade—as he told about the adventure in “The Last Carousel,” the “merry-go-round” was called a “razzle-dazzle,” and the half girl could look pretty good when she came whole out of her box. Nelson also learned something about show business: it was not enough for the savage Solomon Islander to sit in a cage in his underwear; he had to give the crowd a
story
!

One night, Nelson spotted a sheriff looking around the midway and slipped away from the wheel while he was six dollars ahead. He hurried to the sheriff's side like his new best friend, walking alongside until he could lose himself in the crowd. He did not risk leaving by the gate. “I felt that one of the carnies—or both—might be wanting to see me about something,” he said later. “So I got through a fence in the darkness and stumbled about till I reached the Santa Fe tracks.”

Nelson was tired of finding holes in fences. “I wasn't an editorial writer. I wasn't a columnist. I wasn't even a police reporter or a desk man writing obituaries: I was a bum.” It was hard just to keep clean. In desperation, he wrote a letter to Dean Murphy complaining about how he could not get any better work than dishwashing in the South and could Murphy help him? Murphy suggested getting him a job at the university, washing dishes. Indignant, Nelson decided not to worry about quick repayment of the University of Illinois loan. It was time to go home. He hopped freights north, arriving on Troy Street thin and ragged, broke and angry, but with an education in sociology that beat anything he could have picked up in graduate school. As he told an interviewer later, “I guess I
did a lot of ‘research' in my time, except at the time I was doing it, I didn't know it was research. Maybe if the cops who have picked me up in my time for vagrancy and such had told me I was doing research I wouldn't have felt so bad about it.”

Nelson remembered the highly colored, holy card pictures of Democracy and Opportunity and Equality he had studied in school. The Depression had lifted the veil on what seemed to him a massive fraud. There was no equity here, no justice. “All these scenes, one after another, piled up into something that made me not just want to write, but to really say it, to find out that this thing was all upside down. Everything I'd been told was wrong.” He could understand why a man would cheat and steal for his family, or just to keep himself alive. His heart and imagination settled in 1931, at the bottom of the wretched twentieth century, among the rags and bones. Years later, critics cut him for this, calling him the “bard of the stumblebum” and wondering why he kept writing about such low people. But the marks of early adulthood, and trauma, sit firmly in the imagination. Herman Melville was on a whaling ship when he was twenty-one, and he talked about its unique horrors long after he'd settled on land. Nelson stayed in the freight cars and dimly lit rented rooms, with the hungry men and their thin soup, for the rest of his creative life. It did not mean he was stuck in the 1930s. It meant he did not forget what the decade taught—that in a winner-take-all capitalist society, the crust of civilization can be terribly fragile. He knew the race was rigged, and not everybody was going to make it. He believed it was the duty of the artist to shine a light on the ones left behind. Kurt Vonnegut saw the atheist Nelson's pessimism about life on Earth as essentially Christian. “Like Christ, as we know Him from the Bible, he was enchanted by the hopeless, could not take his eyes off them.”

These prison wall blues keep rolling across my mind.

—G
US
C
ANNON
, “P
RISON
W
ALL
B
LUES
”

I was in penal servitude, and I saw “desperate” criminals.

I repeat, this was a hard school.

—F
YODOR
D
OSTOYEVSKY
,
T
HE
D
IARY OF A
W
RITER

Back in Chicago, things weren't much better, but at least no one was trying to put him in jail. Looking for something to do, Nelson spotted an ad for a writers' workshop at the Jewish People's Institute at 3500 Douglas Boulevard in Chicago. He spent an hour riding on the Kedzie and Douglas streetcars from his parents' house on Troy to the four-story brick-and-stone building in the Lawndale neighborhood. Tucked among the folk dancing classes and Hebrew choral groups and the old men coming from their
schvit
z, Nelson found the office of Murray Gitlin, who taught a writing workshop and was looking for manuscripts. The amiable Gitlin encouraged him to write up his stories of the road, and let him use the typewriter in a corner of his office.

Writing at the time had taken on a desperate sense of purpose, and the left in general and Communism in particular had a huge attraction for artists, writers, and other intellectuals. Nelson, who turned twenty-four in March of 1933, was not the only young writer in the early 1930s who had looked around and decided that something had gone terribly wrong with the country. In the summer of 1932, more than fifty writers had signed a manifesto supporting the Communist candidates in the coming election, including Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, and John Dos Passos. The year 1932 saw the publication of the first volume of James Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy about a Chicago street kid, and Jack Conroy's proletarian novel
The Disinherited
came out in 1933. Small, leftist magazines had sprung up in the cities, including
New Masses
,
Rebel Poet
,
Left Front
,
American Mercury
,
American Guardian
,
A Year Magazine
,
Blast
, and the
Anvil
, all publishing stories about the struggles of workers and the poor.