Frankie sat on the curb [...] wondering how to get the booze off his breath in a hurry. / ‘You kids got a… — Nelson Algren
Frankie sat on the curb [...] wondering how to get the booze off his breath in a hurry. / ‘You kids got a stick of gum?’ he whispered to two ten-year-old girls studying him placidly, both of them chewing like twin calves side by side. One came up with a single dirty stick, its wrapper long unpeeled, and offered it just out of Frankie's reach. / ‘Joosy Froot. Only cost you a nickel.’ Her accomplice nodded approvingly. ‘That stuff is pretty hard to get these days, mister.’ / Frankie found a lone dime and when the girl had it safely in her hand she advised him further, in lieu of a nickel change, ‘You don't have to worry about that stupid bull, mister. He's as stiff as you are.’ / ‘He can fwisk you but he can't search you,’ the other told him softly, with the softest lisp possible. ‘Don't let him search you without a wawwant.’
Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
The alleys had always been his sanctuary; they had been kinder to him than the streets. He had spent those long-ago days searching the ashcans for the tinfoil in discarded cigarette packs. Though the boulevard gutters had been better for tinfoil prospecting, the alleys had always been safer. / The tinfoil racket had been abandoned for the pursuit of beer corks. A still on Blackhawk Street had paid a dime a hundred for them in those days.
The whites went to school in the mornings and blacks in the afternoons. The sign in the mess-hall library said: / THINK / Read a good book / Which didn't at all mean that a black punk should be caught reading a good book at the same time as a white punk; and didn't say just what book. Each went to think separately, for the thinking of separate thoughts. For the black con's brain, it appeared, was darker than the white con's and therefore required the afternoon sunlight to assist the thinking of certain scheduled thoughts. / Yet, strangely enough, the chair in the basement accepted any color at all.
But any one side of any jailhouse wall is never much different than any other side. There are only the same old threadbare variations on the same age-old warnings against all the well-tried ancestral foes: whisky and women, sin and cigarettes, marijuana and morphine, marked cards and capped cocaine, dirty laughter and easy tears, engineered dice and casual disease, bad luck and adultery, old age and shyster lawyers, quack doctors and ambitious cops, crooked priests and honest burglars, lack of money and hard work.
