Three shots of corn likker and the whole stuffed zoo – Moose, Elks, Woodmen, Lions, Thirty-Third Degree Owls… — Nelson Algren
Three shots of corn likker and the whole stuffed zoo – Moose, Elks, Woodmen, Lions, Thirty-Third Degree Owls and Forty-Fourth Degree Field Mice begin to conspire against the very laws they themselves have written. / It was all right to take a slug of whiskey from your own flask in a taxi, but forbidden on a trolley-car. That didn't help those who rode trolley-cars. You couldn't carry liquor down the street, but if you owned a car you just bypassed that. For every statute they had a little loophole – that by coincidence fitted their own figures as if measured for them. Those who had no hand in writing statutes – panders and madams and such as that – had a harder time squeezing through. / It was an ancestral treachery that all do-righters practice.
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More from this book
There, in Dockery's Dollhouse [...] a straight-haired flat-chested hard-of-eye hustler called Tough Kitty was trying to get credit for just one little beer. / But the bartender, acting as oddly as , didn't seem to hear. / [...] / So she drew from the pocket of her faded blue jeans a small change-purse and emptied it on the bar: twelve pennies and one nickel. / ‘I got enough for a beer,’ she took count, ‘but not enough to get drunk on.’ And looked left-out of everything.
‘I feel like I been everywhere God got land,’ Dove thought, ‘yet all I found was people with hard ways to go. All I found was troubles 'n degradation. All I found was that those with the hardest ways of all to go were quicker to help others than those with the easiest ways. All I found was two kinds of people. Them that would rather live on the loser's side of the street with the other losers than to win off by theirselves; and them who want to be one of the winners even though the only way left for them to win was over them who have already been whipped. / ‘All I found was men and women, and all the women were fallen. Sports of the world, poor bummies, poor tarts, all they were good for was to draw flies I was told. You could always treat one too good, it was said, but you never could treat one too bad. Yet I wouldn't trade off the worst of the lot for the best of the other kind. I think they were the real salt of the earth.’
Another was an old sad lonesome lecher with a face that had never been up from the cellar, who had nobody's sympathy at all; not even his own. The turnkey had nicknamed him ‘Raincoat’ – which was kinder than what the prisoners had named him. / This ancient simple satyr's offense had been nothing more dreadful than the devising of a time-and-money-saving operation. [...] Here and there, passing some woman who appeared deserving, he would fling the raincoat wide for her amazement and delight, then modestly button himself and modestly hurry on. / Talent can spring up anywhere.
