Nelson Algren

When Owner wanted to cry, he cried, and anything at all did for an excuse. What really mattered with Owner wasn't on the tongue but in the heart; since he had no words for his heart, he wept. / ‘I'm not cryin' for my own trouble, [...] I'm cryin' for everybody's.’ He took off his glasses to cry the better for everyone; for the lenses were so splashed with tears they were indistinguishable from the beads of sweat about his round bald brow. / ‘You're cryin' from the skull now, Owner,’ Frankie informed him. ‘When it starts comin' out of your ears it's time to use the handkerchief.’

This freshly blooded race bred by the better advertising agencies looked down upon the barflies of the Tug & Maul, trying to understand how it was that these battered wrecks could look as though not one of them had ever seen a land of night-blue lakes with poolroom cues for trees. Nor any man's private library at all. They appeared not even to have discovered the public ones. / There were only boys with bad teeth, wives with faces still dented from last night's blows and girls whose hair was set so stiffly it looked metallic. There were only old drooling lushbums with faces like emptied goboons. There was only a long line of faces that had passed straight from the noseless embryo into the running nose of senility.

Sitting with one arm across the open window while the city rocked along below, he wiped sweat off his forehead with his cap and felt the sweat clear down to his socks. ‘I only hope they don't go too tough on Molly-O,’ and felt the old pang of conscience: something happened to everyone, it seemed, who came too close to the man with the golden arm.

She looked at them both then, with such seeming trust, that something of pity stirred beneath the white-starched hospital jackets. For they saw a child's face, puffed by some muted suffering she could never tell. The face she had rouged, from the nurse's compact, so it was that of a child painted to look like a clown's. / And the eyes so dark and buttoned so tightly. So pinched by that private, midnight-colored grief.

‘The dealer's on the needle,’ was the whisper, and overnight he was an outcast of outcasts and a new dealer [...] sat in the slot. If Frankie wanted to take a hand the boys made room for him. Just a bit too much room, he fancied; the way they'd make room for a syphilitic. For the man on the needle, though he be your brother, is a stranger to every human who lives without morphine.

She raised her arms elegantly, like a real lady in a deodorant ad, high over her head. ‘Anyhow it ain't red, it's just awe-burn. Would you like me wit' red hair all over?’ / ‘I like redheads of any color – [...]’

‘Oh, don't always pertend you don't know what I'm talkin' about,’ she persisted, ‘a woman is the downfall of every man 'n a man is the downfall of every woman. You're my downfall 'n I'm yours. [...] What I mean is there's nuttin' deader'n a dead love,’ she told him sternly, ‘nuttin' deader.’ / ‘Sure there is,’ he assured her lightly, ‘dead people. They're deader'n anybody.’

He was only days from the chair if his last appeal were denied, yet slept and ate much as Frankie slept and ate. Therein lay a horror and a marvel for Frankie. [...] Little Lester's last appeal had been denied. [...] Such calmness seemed somehow more terrible to Frankie than if they'd said Lester was lying on his bunk in a dead-cold nightmare sweating out the hours. Instead he was sitting there killing the hours with cards just as Frankie had killed so many; while a clock had ticked away below a luminous crucifix. / There were no luminous Christs for Lester. Neither Christs nor clocks nor calendars.

The naked bulb that burned overhead, by night, by noon, by twilit hours, hung like a little bald yellow skull on a chain like a twisted rope. Below it she had a candle burning, a candle red as wine. Its tiny flame pointed, upon the yellow wall, to the skull burning overhead: it glinted a bit on the bottle of cheap cologne and in the depths of dark-haired Molly's eyes. On the other side of the window a prairie snow fell across backstreet and tenement, looking for dry leaves upon which to rest and finding only concrete and steel.

In the corner, beneath a frosted bulb, Pig sat looking out upon that dark and wavering shore which only the eyeless may see and only the dead may wander.

[About Illinois's electric chair:] There was still one fugitive on Illinois's books that would die by the rope when he was caught. Down in the sheriff's basement [...] stood the gallows that waited, year in and year out, for Terrible Tommy O'Connor's return. [...] Though the building about it had long been demolished, the little brick room waited, in the middle of a parking lot, for Tommy to come back. The law forbade the room, as it forbade the gallows, to be demolished until O'Connor was hanged. It looked like a long wait. / For it well might be that the little room would be the great city's most immemorial monument, more lasting than the Art Institute lions on the boulevard, Bushman in his cage near the Lincoln Park Lagoon or Colonel McCormick in his bomb shelter below the river.

A girl in plaid slacks was being urged forward by a police matron. Casting her eyes downward, the black arrows of the girl's lashes became dipped in two great tears. / ‘Save it for the jury, Betty Lou,’ the captain counseled her and turned to the listeners. ‘This is the slickest little knockout broad in seventeen states. How come you always pick on married men, Betty Lou?’ / Betty Lou lifted the long damp lashes: the eyes held a wry and mocking light. / ‘They're the ones who don't sign complaints,’ she explained softly. And gave the audience a hard profile.