Algren at Sea by Nelson Algren

Author:Nelson Algren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2010-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

Sandburg’s Chicago, Dreiser’s Chicago, Farrell’s and Wright’s and my own Chicago, that was somebody else’s Chicago. That was a play with a different plot. Today the curtain rises on—

Act I: Scene One—Annual Meeting of The Chicago Greater Hollerers Association.

On Stage: Chicago’s leaders as selected by Town and Country.

Sitting in an aisle seat, seeing on stage my city’s suntanned elders just back from the Fontainebleau with their armpits tanned from long days under the rye-bread trees, I too applaud the brave flash of their costume jewelry and high credit ratings.

Yet I feel a pang of secret regret that I played the black market in soap and cigarettes in Marseilles instead of staying home and playing it in automobiles in Detroit; to wait until the war was over to volunteer for overseas duty. I realize now that one must begin young to become a leader of one’s city in middle age.

Oh, if there really is a little somebody for every boy in the world, why doesn’t some little somebody phone me? And ask in a voice ever-so-refined, if I would conduct a purple-heart cruise for my city? I too wish to stand at the helm of a water-borne scow and cry “Now, Voyager!” while peeling Eskimo pies for handless vets. I’ll peel anything to get a fringe benefit.

And if I can’t earn a fringe benefit myself, won’t somebody let me be somebody else’s little fringe benefit? Won’t somebody send me a ten-year-old epileptic to froth for me on a TV marathon? Can’t I get to froth on somebody else’s marathon for myself? Why won’t anybody let me find prizes in crackerjack boxes for retarded kids? Is somebody in City Hall afraid I’ll steal the prizes? The only prize I want is a deduction for entertaining the stupid brats—or am I asking too much? All I want is to tie little Fourth-of-July flags in the wheels of paraplegic’s chairs. I’ll tie, I’ll peel, I’ll froth, I’ll wheel, I’ll lope and double-back—but how am I ever to be an old-shoe guy who goes down to the drugstore and brings back milkshakes for his family when nobody will let me get a start in life?

I too wish to defend my city from people who keep saying it is crooked. In what other city can you be so sure a judge will keep his word for five hundred dollars? What’s so crooked about that? I’m tired of hearing detractors of my city say it is broo-tul. In what other city, head held high, sweating, laughing, all of that, can you get homicide reduced to manslaughter and manslaughter to a felony and felony to a misdemeanor? What do you want, for God’s sake—to get your gun back?

“We have to keep Chicago strong and America mighty!” I heard His Honor proclaim before sentencing the girl with a record for addiction, “A year and a day! Take her away!”

Blinking out of the window of an Ogden Avenue trolley at the sunlight she hadn’t seen for almost a year, “I

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