Nelson Algren

‘It's been so long since I had a beer I just don't know what kind I like no more.’ / With yesterday's empties crouching behind her chair. / ‘I don't know, Frankie,’ she complained with a distress like a tired child's. ‘How many kinds are there? I don't even know what kinds there are any more.’ / ‘There's Budweiser,’ he told her indulgently, as if enumerating distant relatives, ‘then there's Schlitz, and Blatz, and Pabst and Chevalier [...]

In twenty seconds the abandoned Ashland Avenue midnight was thronging with sprouts who should have been in bed for hours and windows began blazing with light as if everyone had been sitting around in the dark just waiting for an accident to happen and here they came, lurching with age and skipping with youth, the lame, the sick and the lazy, the fearful, the cheerful and the tamed, [...] all those for whom nothing had yet happened in the world shouting that it had happened at last, they'd always known it would happen sooner or later, that corner had always looked so unlucky. / Something had finally happened outside of the movies.

The growing light began making a stairway to nowhere out of the shadows of the bars: a stairwell lit feebly by the reflecting mirror's glow as it competed with the lightening day.

For those nearest our hearts are the ones most likely to tread upon them. What she could not gain through love she sought to possess by mockery. He was too dear to her: into everything he did she must read some secret hatred of herself.

All had gone stale for these disinherited. Their very lives gave off a certain jailhouse odor: it trailed down the streets of Skid Row behind them till the city itself seemed some sort of open-roofed jail with walls for all men and laughter for very few. On Skid Row even the native-born no longer felt they had been born in America. They felt they had merely emerged from the wrong side of its billboards.

Frankie moaned like an animal that cannot understand its own pain. His shirt had soaked through and the pain had frozen so deep in his bones nothing could make him warm again. / ‘Hit me, Fixer. Hit me.’ / A sievelike smile drained through Louie's teeth. This was his hour and this hour didn't come every day. [...] He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-colored walls of [an addict]'s terrible pit.

A roach had leaped, or fallen, from the ceiling into the water bucket, where a soggy slice of pumpernickel and a sodden hunk of sausage now circled slowly, about and about, although there was no current. Belly upward, the roach's legs plied the alien air, trying dreamily to regain a foothold; while Frankie, leaning dreamily on one elbow, knew just how that felt.

Violet had wheeled Sophie to Mass – [...]. Maybe if he went along some Sunday, suddenly right there by the altar rail Sophie would get up on her feet and tell him, ‘Nobody'll have to wheel me here no more, Frankie. Let's go dancin' by Guyman's Paradise t'night.’ / But Sunday morning was always pretty rugged for anything but sleep. All the miracles were performed on Saturday night, it seemed.

‘Lies are just a poor man's pennies,’ Violet told her.

The great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one. Guilt that lay crouched behind every billboard which gave each man his commandments; for each man here had failed the billboards all down the line. No Ford in this one's future nor ever any place all his own.

‘You got somebody's legs you want bust, spigothead? T'ree-fifty fer one 'n two fer five – you save a deuce gettin' 'em both done at once 'n it's easier on the mark, too. He oney got to go to the hospital once, my way.’

‘I'm a businessman,’ the punk explained with dignity. ‘I fulfill my obligations even if I have to rob a warehouse to do it. You think I want my credit to lapse? That's the difference between a businessman like me 'n a cheap hustler like you – you hustlers got no credit.’ / Frankie shuffled the deck slowly, stalling in the hope that the suckers might start knocking to get the night over and done and forgotten. ‘That's the trouble with the whole country, all you businessmen cheatin' the peoples so fast 'n hard there's nothin' left for an honest hustler to steal.’ / ‘I'll tell you what I think for true,’ Sparrow offered seriously, ‘I don't think there's any difference: a businessman is a hustler with the dough to hustle on the legit 'n a hustler is a businessman who's either gone broke or never had it. Back me up with five grand tonight 'n tomorrow mornin' I get a invitation to join the Chamber of Commerce 'n no questions asked.’