A Walk on the Wild Side (1956) by Nelson Algren

Author:Nelson Algren
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: prose_classic
ISBN: 9781847676498
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2005-06-02T05:00:00+00:00

Out in the lake-palmed suburbs, far from the dong and the glare, in a house that had once been human, Dove climbed a soundless stair.

The stilly stair to O-Daddyland in a pale hygienic glow. Feeling some sign he could not read must say ZONE OF QUIET. For the weather in the streets, and the seasons there, are no more permitted in O-Daddyland than in a surgeon’s washroom. Rainwinds washing children’s voices have nothing to do with O-Daddies. Step up in an airless quarantine, go down a passionless hall. Stand before a door without knocker or bell.

Till an anesthetic odor, as of gas or seeping ether, trails from below; as though abortions might be performed here.

Stranger on a strange-lit stair, you have come to a strange frontier.

The frontier of a principality whose only law is Rhino Gross and Gross’s many moods. A totalitarian state whose single industry is a curious craft in Goodrich rubber, worked out in forms sufficiently fanciful. Rhino Gross is his state’s sole industrial designer and Gross is a fanciful man. Indeed, abortions are aborted here.

(At night in the deep and dead time, old Gross hears again the soft scraaap of his curette against the uterus wall in a room that holds no other sound. Scraaap scraaap scraaap.)

Now the daylight man, ex-physician, ex-abortionist, ex-quack, ex-con, ex-man, ex-everything, enfolded and armored by layer across layer of swart encrusted fat, clasping his distended gut to keep it from slipping down over his rusted truss, is an aging animal come to the jungle’s rim whose hearing is excellent but whose sight is waterish, ready to turn at a tiny twig’s crack and lumber back to his forest’s protecting gloom. Yet stands one moment snout upturned and quivering, to sniff the dangerous air: now he is wondering whether it would be perfectly safe to try a little mock-charge on whoever that was across the room.

Dove caught a good strong whiff of the sniffer at the jungle’s rim without knowing that what he whiffed was actually burning rubber. When you work with guano you live with guano till you smell of guano. Gross’s hide was impregnated with it clear down to his money that stank of it.

(Who else but a disbarred gynecologist could have devised that technicolor fantasy so long before technicolor, of liverish yellow dipped at its obscene head in firehouse red and tipped by a delicate rainbow silken as baby’s first down? An improvement in style, function and line worthy of its proud name O-Daddy, The Condom of Tomorrow.)

‘First you learn your craft,’ Gross told Dove. ‘How else do I tell what you’re worth?’ Then deciding to show Whoever-It-Was that he really was a furious charger at heart, lowered his snout and trumpeted terribly – ‘Welma! Welma!’

A swift light step and there materialized a woman whose life had been consumed. She may have been thirty-five or sixty but wasn’t quite through burning yet. She was wearing a rubber apron over a gum-colored dress and pigtails bound by a big pink bow that bounced as if the very hair were rubberized.

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