Algren at Sea (34 page)

She is not the huntress, but the prey. She does not send for men: they seek her out. And the simple irrefutable fact is that she has been essential to every society, has outlasted every society, is essential to our own and will outlast our own.

So long as the institution of marriage exists she remains essential, for she is not supported by single men, but by married ones.

“Prostitutes everywhere report that their trade is in large measure financed by married men who are weary of the indifference or antagonism of their wives and turn to public women for gratification,” Houghton Hooker reports in
Laws of Sex.

Another thing I intend asking Mother about is whether the papers aren't leaving something out. Every time a girl is made in a raid we get a full description of her: name, age, address, and place of employment. What I can't figure out is: What was she doing in that room that was so awful if there wasn't somebody just as awful helping her to do something awful? If there was a pair of pants on the bedpost, where is the spendthrift who walked into the room inside them? Why isn't
he
entitled to get his name in the paper and a ride downtown? Why doesn't somebody give
him
a chance to stand up in front of a judge and get fined a hundred dollars or fifty days in County? If everybody is born free and equal, as they say, when does
he
get a chance to go to the Chicago Intensive Treatment Hospital for a free checkup? If this is a true democracy, why doesn't he have the same right as any other second-class citizen? It looks like a businessman don't stand a chance in this country anymore.

Crusades from pulpit, court, or column against prostitution can have no effect except to divert it to another part of town or from brothel to escort service, because the basic cause isn't with the women who practice it, but in our own concept of sex. The conviction that sex is basically evil is a perversion out of which prostitution develops. So long as we remain punitive toward sex, we are going to have crimes of sex. Until we recognize sex as a natural urge, pleasant, beautiful, interesting, and useful, to be treated, like any other important faculty, such as work or learning, by welcoming it, enjoying it without reverence, and permitting discussion of it to be as open as that about art or play or science, we will have crimes of sex.

 

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—

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 br
oo
-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 guess it was lucky I done that time,” the girl philosophized later, “Chicago still looks pretty strong and America looks mighty mighty.”

Still, nobody seems to be laughing.

Perhaps the reason our thinking has shifted from the informal attitude of a society that makes allowances, to the “he brought it all on himself ” position, derives from the isolation of so many Americans, bubble-gum snappers and key-club cats alike; for the isolated man is a loveless man. Although his children may call him Papa and go through the gestures of love, they yet can't reach him. An isolation common enough to justify calling it The American Disease; and that is directly related to the lack of creativity in this city that was once America's creative center.

Is it that the fraudulence essential to successful merchandising becomes
pervasive, leaving the class which is economically empowered to become emotionally hollowed?

This would account for the fact that every enduring portrait in American fiction is that of a man or woman outside the upper middle-class. From Ahab to Ethan Frome and Willie Loman, Hawthorne's branded woman to Blanche du Bois, all are people who, living without alternatives, are thus forced to feel life all the way. While the attempts at middle-class portraiture, such as Marjorie Morningstar, fade as fast as last year's best seller.

No use to call out the hook-and-ladders. So long as Jerry Lewis is doing such a good job of handling children's diseases for us, and Sammy Davis, Jr., has integration in hand, I see no reason why our city should not take pride in giving America Hugh Hefner to handle sex.

As I once heard a thoughtful young woman put it during a matinee at the Chicago theater where Sinatra was appearing in person—

“Spit on me, Frankie! I'm in the very front row!”

As the girl was in the second balcony, I thought the idea a little unusual.

 

Mediocrity is never a passive lack: it avenges its deprivation. Like furnishing a toothless man with artificial teeth, it wishes to bite something that won't bite back.

Between the majestic drumroll of Chicago's newspaper presses one hears the tiny intermittent clicking of false teeth.

Banana-Nose Bonura once made three errors on a single play. Tony Weitzel of the
Chicago Daily News
once made six in a single sentence.

“Carlson McCullough,” he wrote, “will appear here next week in his own play, ‘Remember Our Wedding.'” After that it didn't much matter whether he got the name of the theater right or not.

Weitzel's façade is that of a sage who lives in a house by the side of the road, flintlock over the fireplace, being a friend to man. The tone he lends his column is that of a gentle uncle full of years and wisdom. I don't know his age, but years is not what he is full of.

Irv Kupcinet is about the height of Jack Eigen standing on Marty Faye's shoulders, and once startled his readers by adding, after reporting the death of the late Jimmy Dean—“a tough break for the kid.”

Kup handles language with elephantine care, one “celeb” at a time, with the result that his column always is arranged, at the end of a day, in an
orderly heap with the names of the day's favorite people in heavy type so everybody can see them without bothering to read the words between. People compete to see their names there. All in all, there is no more harm done at a game of “pin the tail on the donkey.”

Kup's Saturday-evening TV program,
At Random,
really is at random, yet is of service in showing us who our bright boys are and who are our boobies. The beautiful and terrible thing about the TV screen is that it reveals the inner man like an X-ray when the man doesn't know he's under it. They sit together, the sound and the phoney, equally naked to thousands. Despite Kup's panic when a controversial subject jumps up, it has been the moments of controversy that have kept the program consistently interesting. Kup himself is usually behind his guests, particularly the politically developed men and women from Africa, Cuba, and Europe, who often make generous allowances for Kup's obvious limitations.

Nevertheless, it is to his credit that he does get them, that he is aware of who has something to say, and thus gives a link to the outer world which our press has severed. Moreover, since he has learned to keep his own big beak out of discussions when he himself has nothing to offer, the program has improved immensely.

The Beatnik invasion here now seems as remote as Johnny Ray, the sinking of the
Lusitania
or the early work of Lorraine Hansberry. Three youths appeared, as night was falling fast, who looked to be falling even faster. They bore a banner with a strange device: a pair of shoes rampant on a field of flame, and were billed as “The Holy Barbarians.”

When asked by a puzzled interviewer what they stood for, the leader stepped out and replied, “Death is a letter that was never sent.” The second stepped forth and explained, “Chicago is a rose!” The third stole the show by declaiming:

They then recited poetry to a jazz background. The jazz was all right, but the poetry was just typing.

It became plain that they were neither holy nor barbaric. They were nihilism's organization men giving demonstrations of how to be a non-conformist without risking one's personal security: “Classes in nonconformism every Wednesday at 8:00 P.M. Please be on time.”

It never got to be anything beyond typing because it never asserted itself in terms of an individual, but always in terms of “We” and “Us.” And art can never be asserted except in terms of “I.”

So they passed on to their next booking. I hope that all three have found steady work by now. But surely no investigating committee is ever going to ask anybody, “Were you ever, or are you now, a Beatnik?” And it fell as far short of life artistically as it did politically. As Chicago today falls short in men and women of living vision. To have such men and women there must be believers. We have no great poet here because there is no real belief in poetry. And in this lack of belief our true corruption lies: not in the hearts of heroin pushers or prostitutes, but in a consciencelessness bred by affluence.

Yet we have had prophets, we have had companions. We have had a man to say, “While there is a soul in prison I am not free.” We have had men and women who knew that a city of a hundred tents, owning the voice of single man speaking for the conscience of those hundred tents, is a city more enduring than that which we are now building.

For the only city that endures is the city of the heart.

 

Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright was a saint of architecture. Mr. Wright liked stone buildings, steel buildings, tall buildings and low buildings. He liked round buildings and square buildings. He even liked wet buildings and dry buildings. He liked expensive buildings better than he liked cheap buildings, but if there wasn't any expensive building near at hand to like, Mr. Wright would just go ahead and like any old building. Nobody could stop him from liking buildings. It seemed as if there were some thing about buildings that just
got
Mr. Wright.

What Mr. Wright thought made a city great was its buildings. How the people inside a building were feeling wasn't as important to him as how the building was feeling. He thought that what was most important was how the whole scene looked when you took a sightline on it and saw all the stone buildings and all the steel buildings and all the tall buidings and all the low buildings and all the round buildings and all the square buildings and all the wet buildings and all the dry buildings.

What I always thought was most important was the names on the doorbell in the hall.

Therefore my own name, on the day that Mr. Wright's skyscraper rises a mile hope-high into the air out of a foundation a mile dream-deep in
stone, shall not be among those carved on its cornerstone. On the day that the double-tiered causeway is merged with the expressway that merges with the coast-to-coast thruway making right-hand turns every mile into a hundred solid miles of mile-high skyscrapers, each rising a mile hope-high to the sky out of a mile dream-deep in earth, my own name will not be brought up.