The Last Carousel Read online

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  One of the most neglected American writers and also one of the best loved, Nelson Algren wrote once that “literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.” His writings always lived up to that definition. He was born March 28,1909 in Detroit and lived mostly in Chicago. His first short fiction was published in Story magazine in 1933. In 1935 he published his first novel, Somebody in Boots. In early 1942, Algren put the finishing touches on a second novel and joined the war as an enlisted man. By 1945, he still had not made the grade of Private first class, but the novel Never Come Morning was widely praised and eventually sold over a million copies. Jean-Paul Sartre translated the French-language edition. In 1947 came The Neon Wilderness, his famous short story collection which would permanently establish his place in American letters. The Man with the Golden Arm, winner of the first National Book Award, appeared in 1949. Then came Chicago: City on the Make (1951), a prose poem and A Walk on the Wild Side (1956), possibly his greatest novel. Algren also published two travel books, Who Lost an American? and Notes from a Sea Voyage. The Last Carousel, a collection of short fiction and nonfiction, appeared in 1973. He died on May 9, 1981, within days of his appointment as a fellow of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His last novel, The Devil’s Stocking, based on the life of Hurricane Carter, and Nonconformity: Writing on Writing, a 1952 essay on the art of writing, were published posthumously in 1983 and 1996 respectively.

  THE LAST

  CAROUSEL

  NELSON ALGREN

  SEVEN STORIES PRESS

  new york / oakland / london

  All names appearing in this novel are fictitious; no character or situation depicted is drawn from

  life. If any name used happens to be that of an actual person, it is a coincidence of which the

  author has no present knowledge.

  Copyright© 1973 by Nelson Algren

  All rights reserved.

  First Seven Stories Press edition, 1997

  Seven Stories Press

  140 Watts Street

  New York, N.Y. 10013

  www.sevenstories.com

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form,

  by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the

  prior written permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Algren, Nelson, 1909-1981

  The last carousel/Nelson Algren-lst Seven Stories Press edition

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-888363-45-6 (pb) 978-1-60980-247-9 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  [PS350 l.L4625L3 1997]

  813'.52-dc21 9648583

  CIP

  For Kay Boyle

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Somebody in Boots

  Never Come Morning

  The Neon Wilderness

  The Man with the Golden Arm

  Chicago: City on the Make

  A Walk on the Wild Side

  Who Lost an American?

  The Book of Lonesome Monsters (EDITED BY NELSON ALGREN)

  Conversations with Nelson Algren: (WITH H. E. F. DONOGHUE)

  Notes from a Sea Diary

  The Last Carousel

  Nonconformity: Writing on Writing

  The Devil's Stocking

  Algren at Sea

  Entrapment

  CONTENTS

  Dark Came Early in That Country

  Could World War I Have Been a Mistake?

  Otto Preminger's Strange Suspenjers

  I Never Hollered Cheezit the Cops

  The Mad Laundress of Dingdong-Daddyland

  The Leak That Defied the Books

  Tinkle Hinkle and the Footnote King

  Hand in Hand Through the Greenery with the grabstand clowns of arts and letters

  Come In If You Love Money

  Brave Bulls of Sidi Yahya

  I Know They'll Like Me in Saigon

  Airy Persiflage on the Heaving Deep

  No Cumshaw No Rickshaw

  Letter from Saigon

  What Country Do You Think You're In?

  Police and Mama-sans Get It All

  Poor Girls of Kowloon

  After the Buffalo

  The Cortez Gang

  The House of the Hundred Grass fires

  Previous Days

  Epitaph: The Man with the Golden Arm

  The Passion of Upside-Down-Emil: A Story from Life's Other Side

  Merry Christmas Mr. Mark

  I Guess You Fellows just Don't Want Me

  Everything Inside Is a Penny

  The Ryebread Trees of Spring

  Different Clowns for Different Towns

  Go! Go! Go! Forty Years Ago

  Ballet for Opening Day: The Swede Was a Hard Guy

  A Ticket on Skoronski

  Ode to an Absconding Bookie

  Bullring of the Summer Night

  Moon of the Arfy Darfy

  Watch Out for Daddy

  The Last Carousel

  Tricks Out of Times Long Gone

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Dark Came Early in That Country” was first published in Atlantic, August, 1968, under the title “Home to Shawneetown.” Revised.

  “Could World War I Have Been a Mistake” was first published in Audience, Vol. I, No. 1, under the title “Swan Lake Re-swum.” Revised.

  “Otto Preminger’s Strange Suspenjers” was first published in Focus/media, 1972.

  “I Never Hollered Cheezit the Cops” was first published in Atlantic, October, 1972. Revised.

  “The Mad Laundress of Dingdong-Daddyland” was first published in Commentary, September, 1969, under the title “Decline and Fall of Ding-Dong Daddyland.”

  “The Leak That Defied the Books” was first published in The Dude, 1961, under the title “God Bless the Lonesome Gas Man.” Revised.

  “Tinkle Hinkle and the Footnote King” was first published in Dial, fall 1959, under the title “Ding-Ding, Tinkle Hinkle, the Finkified Lasagna and the Footnote King.” Revised.

  “Brave Bulls of Sidi Yahya” was first published in Playboy, December, 1972, under the title “The Way to Medenine.”

  “I Know They’ll Like Me in Saigon” was first published in The Critic, February-March, 1969. Revised.

  “Airy Persiflage on the Heaving Deep, or Sam, You Made the Ship too Short” first appeared in Works in Progress, No. 1 (issued by the Literary Guild of America).

  “No Cumshaw No Rickshaw” was first published in Holiday, November, 1971.

  “Letter from Saigon” was first published in two parts in the March-April and April-May, 1969, issues of The Critic under the title “That Was No Albatross.”

  “Police and Mama-sans Get It All” was first published in Rolling Stone, May 27, 1971, under the title “White Mice and Mama-sans Get It All.”

  “Poor Girls of Kowloon” was first published in The Critic, November-December, 1969, under the title “They Don’t Belong to Us.”

  “After the Buffalo” first appeared as the introduction to The True Story of Bonnie and Clyde, New American Library, 1968.

  “The House of the Hundred Grassfires” constitutes the material deleted before publication from A Walk on the Wild Side and first appeared in the anthology Nelson Algren’s Book of Lonesome Monsters, Lancer Books, 1962. Reissued by Bernard Geis Associates, 1963.

  “Previous Days” was first published in the Chicago Sunday Tribune, April 30, 1972, under the title “Blanche Sweet Under the Tapioca.”

  “Merry Christmas Mr. Mark” was first published in the Chicago Sunday Tribune, December 4,
1949.

  “I Guess You Fellas Just Don’t Want Me” was first published in Audience, November-December, 1971, under the title “Ipso Facto.”

  “Everything Inside Is a Penny” was first published in Playboy, July, 1962 under the title “The Father & Son Cigar.”

  “Go! Go! Go! Forty Years Ago,” a reminiscence of the Chicago White Sox of 1919, was written for the Chicago Sun-Times during the 1959 World Series.

  “A Ticket on Skoronski” was first published in the Saturday Evening Post, November 5, 1966. Revised.

  “Ode to an Absconding Bookie” was first published in the Chicago Sunday Tribune, October 9, 1972.

  “Bullring of the Summer Night” was first published in Playboy, June, 1970, under the title “Get All the Money.” Revised.

  “Moon of the Arfy Darfy” was first published in the Saturday Evening Post, May 7, 1964. Revised.

  “Watch Out for Daddy,” the middle section of this piece was first published in Playboy, April, 1957, under the title “All Through the Night.”

  “The Last Carousel” was first published in Playboy, February, 1972. Revised.

  “Epitaph: The Man with the Golden Arm” was first published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, August, 1947.

  THE LAST CAROUSEL

  DARK CAME EARLY IN THAT COUNTRY

  “WE’LL fight you on condition you don’t knock Reno out in the first two rounds,” DeLillo’s manager told me, “after two it’s every man for hisself.”

  “Honor Word?” I asked him.

  “A hundred dollars and you pay your own expenses to Chicago, Honor Word,” he told me.

  “Do we take it?” I asked Beth.

  “We take it,” she told me.

  “I don’t have the expenses,” I told her.

  Beth gave me the expenses.

  We were the semi-windup. A place called Marigold.

  During instructions I asked DeLillo where was he from. He didn’t answer. I didn’t expect him to. I just wanted him to think about where he was from while I was working the lace of my left glove loose.

  I caught him light with the lace across the eye early in the round. He stepped back and complained to the ref. The ref tightened the lace and waggled his finger at me: naughty Roger. By the middle of the round DeLillo’s eyelid had begun to swell. By the end of the round he couldn’t see on that side. I could have reached over and belted him out but I didn’t. I’d give my Honor Word.

  In the second I got on his blindy side and clipped him under the ear. He sagged. I could have finished him off but I didn’t. I danced him up and down till his ear stopped ringing. You see I’d give my Honor Word.

  When we came out for the third I extended my gloves to him.

  “It ain’t the last round,” DeLillo told me.

  “It is for you,” I told him, and reached over and knocked him cold. I always did have color.

  I sent the hundred to Beth by money order. It got back to Shawneetown before I did. When I got there I still had some expenses.

  “It shows I can fight a little, don’t it?” I asked Beth.

  “A little; but not much,” Beth told me.

  “Well, I know the moves, anyhow.”

  “You know the moves alright,” Beth told me, “but you can’t fight much.”

  Friday, that week, we caught the Fight of the Week. The room would have been warm enough without a fire, but Beth has to keep one going all year round because of my Pa. The old man was sitting in his overcoat, like he does all year round, helping us watch Pete Mathias, the middleweight titleholder. Being a fighter is a step up from the mines, to Pa.

  Mathias was having trouble against an opponent no smarter than Reno DeLillo.

  “He wouldn’t be taking chances like that against you, Roger,” Pa told me, “he wouldn’t let hisself open against you.”

  We let the old man say what he wants so long as he don’t complain. Pa don’t have the right to complain anymore.

  Around the eighth round I got the feeling I could whip Mathias. I got the feeling so strong I switched the fight off. Beth smiled just as if she understood.

  Beth always smiles like she understands everything about everything. Maybe she does. The idea of my quitting the ring and opening a diner was hers. She found one for sale, too. Two thousand dollars. In Carriers Mills. But we were no nearer buying it than we were four years ago when we first got engaged. Maybe she don’t really understand anything.

  My hundred-dollar kayo at the Marigold wasn’t featured by Ring Magazine and I greatly doubt it will be listed in Boxing Year Book under Great Battles of All Time. When I got into San Antonio I had forty dollars left and I had to fight some fellow Sweetmouth Jenkins at the Army Post there. He got a white manager.

  A couple hours before fight time there was a polite rap at my hotel door. The door wasn’t locked. I didn’t bother getting off the bed.

  “I’m Jenkins’ manager,” a little man in white seersucker, holding his hat in his hand, told me. I still didn’t get off the bed. I’d never seen a fight manager holding his hat before. It was my first time.

  “My boy is a nice boy with a wife and family,” this Polite Manager let me know. “Ah hope you don’t bust him up unnecessarily, Roger. I’m not asking you not to beat him. Just don’t bust him up. His wife is hardly more than a girl, Roger.”

  “Am I fighting Jenkins or his family?” I asked this Polite Manager.

  “His wife will be down front, Roger. She’s expecting.”

  I got off the bed.

  “My name isn’t ‘Roger,’ ” I told the man, “it’s ‘Holly.’ Now what is this anyhow? Would your boy take it easy on me if I had a wife expecting?”

  “Ah purely regret having brought the matter up, Mr. Holly,” he told me; and left just as if I were letting him down. “ ‘Holly’ is my last name!” I hollered after him.

  But he kept on walking like he didn’t hear.

  Mr. Sweetmouth Jenkins, sitting across the ring from me, had a mouth like a tribal drum. And here he comes at me with his piano-key teeth sticking out too far. I can feint him with my shoulders. I can feint him with my feet. I can feint him with my eyes or hands. But Mr. Sweet-mouth is so busy doing everything wrong he don’t even know I’m feinting him. How can I take a man out I can’t set up? He got away from me six times in the first two rounds and in the third he begun looking good. I could almost hear Mrs. Jenkins saying, “Daddy, you looked wonderful the first three rounds.” Daddy wouldn’t be able to answer because his jaw would be wired. I decided that. I went out for the fourth to nail that tribal drum.

  I couldn’t nail it. He was too strong. He kept grabbing my arms in the clinches and squeezing the muscle. He made me ache all over with his chopping and butting and scratching my face and chest with his head full of wire bristles. Nigger fighters know how to use that patch against you. I made up my mind: “I got to start outthinking this cat.”

  I outthought him from the sixth round straight through to the final bell. And all the while I was outthinking him he was chopping me from one side of the ring to the other till my arms were paralyzed and I was swallowing blood.

  “By unanimous decision, Sweetmouth Jenkins!” the announcer made it, “over Roger Holly!”

  I got a scattering of applause for having two front names.

  But Sweetmouth Jenkins hadn’t beat me. His manager had. It’s what you get for not making yourself hostile right from the go. I can still beat Mr. Sweetmouth Jenkins.

  But when you’re thirty-two and have been at this trade thirteen years you’ve pretty well used up your hostility. I caught a midnight bus to Galveston. I had to fight somebody there I didn’t even know his name.

  After the bus lights dimmed and the other riders were sleeping, I tried to get to sleep by remembering the names of men I’d fought. I couldn’t remember more than two or three. I remembered the fights. It was just the names I couldn’t remember.

  So I remembered the names of the places I’d fought in. I did better on those. I remembere
d the Camden Convention Hall in South Jersey and the Grotto Auditorium in San Antonio and the Moose Temple in Detroit and the Marigold in Chicago and the New Broadway in Philly and the Norristown Auditorium and the Arcadia Ballroom in Providence.

  And that week at Presque Isle near the St. John River, with potato pickers being trucked in from all over the country, and Evergreen Shows put up a canvas with a sixteen foot ring, on a platform two feet high in the center, and billed me as The Penobscot Strongboy—“Don’t be afraid, folks, he is only a little man and his hands are gloved.”

  They were gloved alright. Right after supper the merry-go-round electrician bandaged my hands and I soaked them in a bucket of salt brine to toughen the bandages till they were like rocks. I had to keep my hands in my pockets when I strolled the midway with the early evening crowd.

  Dark came early in that country. We used old carbon lights to light up the banner, strung between two poles in front of the tent, showing two boxers squaring off. It would already be dark, and the carbon lights flaring, when the electrician would bang on an iron ring, the barker would get up on the bally with a big horn and holler “Ladies and gentlemen! We are bringing you here tonight and every night this week, meeting all corners, the Penobscot Strongboy, undefeated in the State of Maine! This show will pay twenty silver dollars to any man who will last three rounds with him! Mind you, gentlemen—you don’t have to win! Just stay three rounds! He is only a little man and his hands are gloved.”

  That was when I’d step up on the bally wearing a bathrobe over my fighting trunks. I was eighteen then and weighed 142 pounds.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the best carnival fighter ever seen in this part of the country, The Penobscot Strongboy!”

  He’d keep talking until he’d get some smalltown fighter, only half-willing yet ashamed to back down in front of friends, to step up. Even if he could fight a little, I could do a little more. But he’d always tell the fellow, in front of the crowd, that he couldn’t hold the show liable if he got hurt in the ring.

  On the third night we ran out of heel-walkers. I had to slip the electrician ten dollars to fake three rounds with me just to get a crowd watching. It worked. For the second show gave a big hand to a rough-looking redhead around 175 pounds. The crowd knew him and liked him. I began smelling money. The show manager came in and told me, “Roger, we got a full house out there and four nights to go. You know what to do.”