The Man with the Golden Arm

For it’s all in the wrist with a deck or a cue

And if he crapped out when we thought he was due

It must have been that the dice were rolled,

For he had the touch, and his arm was gold:

Rack up his cue, leave the steerer his hat,

The arm that held up has failed at last.

Yet why does the light down the dealer’s slot

Sift soft as light in a troubled dream?

(A dream, they say, of a golden arm

That belonged to the dealer we called Machine.)

Afterword Glassesby Studs Terkel

Glasses. Once upon a time, they were the mark of the vulnerable. At least to me. Not the pince-nez of Woodrow Wilson; his was the emblem of the Sunday schoolmaster, the wrinkled prune, the bloodless. Nor the pince-nez of FDR, which, in its off-again, on-again behavior, became as insouciant a sign as his tilted cigarette holder. Nor the pince-nez of my mother, which, considering her tough credo, became as antic and outrageous as symbol as Bobby Clark’s painted-on glasses. No.

When Lee Meadows appeared on the pitching mound for the Pittsburgh Pirates, it was, for me, a revolutionary moment. He was the first major leaguer to wear glasses. And then came Carmen Hill. And George Torporcer. And when a slugger, Chick Hafey, decided to wear them, I knew that a corner had been turned. And when, some time later, another bespectacled slugger, Bull Connor, turned the hose on people, I no longer had to worry about the daily fate of ‘four-eyes’. Nor feel inordinately tender.

It was, apparently, not so for Billie Holiday. As recently as 1956, she was soft on those who wore specs. I had gone to see her at the Budland. It was a short-lived jazz club in a South Side Chicago cellar. I was in the process of working on a children’s jazz book. ‘Sure, baby. Come on,’ she said at the other end of the phone. Nelson Algren accompanied me. He was, at the time, wearing glasses.

Billie’s voice was shot, though the gardenia in her hair was as fresh as usual. Ben Webster, for so long big man on tenor, was backing her. He was having it rough, too. Yet they transcended. There were perhaps fifteen, twenty patrons in the house. At most. Awful sad. Still, when Lady sang ‘Fine and Mellow’, you felt that way. And when she went into ‘Willow, Weep for Me’, you wept. You looked about and saw that the few other customers were also crying in their beer and shot glasses. Nor were they that drunk. Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not for long, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own.

After her performance, Algren and I shambled into her dressing room. Dressing room, did I say? It was a storeroom: whiskey cases stacked against the walls, cartons of paper napkins, piles of plastic utensils strewn about, this, that, and the other. It didn’t matter. She was there, with the gardenia in her hair. Lady, in the gracious manner of a lady, bade us be seated. Algren slouched into a chair against the far wall, in the semidarkness. He appeared a character out of one of his works: Bruno or Frankie or Sparrow or Dove.

Patiently, she answered questions that I’m sure had been put to her too many times before. About the white stoops of Baltimore, of the others for whom she scrubbed, about Miss Bessie, about her grandmother, about club owners, the honest and the venal. When there was trouble remembering, her eyes half-shut as in a slow blues, her hands posed in midair. If, by chance, I hit upon the right name, her fingers snapped. That’s it, baby. No words were needed; the gesture said it.

And when the conversation ended, as casually as it had begun, and the waiter had brought her a tumbler of gin – ‘Lemon peel, baby’ – she indicated the man in the shadows, Nelson Algren. She had been aware of his presence from the beginning; there had been mumbled introductions. Now she murmured inquiringly, ‘Who’s that man?’ Algren explained that she and he had the same publisher. The Man with the Golden Arm and Lady Sings the Blues had both been put out by Doubleday.

‘You’re all right,’ she said to him.

‘How do you know?’ he asked.

‘You’re wearin’ glasses.’

He laughed softly. ‘I know some people with glasses who got dollar signs for eyes.’

‘You’re kind.’

‘How can you tell?’ he persisted. How could she tell? He was half-hidden in the shadows.

‘Your glasses.’ She was persistent, too.

Nelson Algren no longer wears glasses, but he’s still a funny man. He may be the funniest man around. Which is another way of saying he may be the most serious. At a time when pimpery, lick-spittlery, and picking the public’s pocket are the order of the day – indeed, officially proclaimed as virtue – the poet must play the madcap to keep his balance. And ours.

Unlike Father William, Algren does not stand on his head. He just shuffles along. His appearance is that of a horse player, who, this moment, got the news: he had bet her across the board and she came in a strong fourth. Yet, strangely, his is not a mournful mien. He’s chuckling to himself. You’d think he was the blue-eyed winner rather than the brown-eyed loser. That’s what’s so funny about him. He has won. A hunch: his writings may be read long after acclaimed works of other Academe’s darlings. To call on a Lillian Hellman phrase, he is not ‘the kid of the moment’. For in the spirit of a Zola or a Dreiser, he has captured a piece of that life behind the billboards. Some comic, that man.

At a time when our values are unprecedentedly upside-down – when Bob Hope, a humorless multimillionaire, is regarded as a funny man and a genuinely funny man (until his bad choice of lock-pickers) was regarded as our President – Algren is something of a Gavroche.

‘The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.’ It was something Algren wrote in 1961, as an added preface to his prose-poem, Chicago: City on the Make. The original work had been composed a decade earlier. It’s a responsibility to which he has been obstinately faithful. He’s openhearted to Molly-O and Steffi and Margo and Aunt Elly’s ‘girl’, who are forever up against it; who are forever in the pokey for turning a five-dollar trick with the wrong guy. (That fee is absurd today. You must remember his heroines subsisted long, long before inflation.) He’s mail- fisted to their judges, the Respectables, who turn a trick for no less than a hundred G’s. So, too, this piece of writing from the same essay:

‘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 I was lucky I done that time,’ the girl philosophized. ‘Chicago still looks pretty strong and American looks mighty mighty.’ Still nobody seems to be laughing.

What Algren observed fifteen years ago applies today in trump. And in that prose-poem put down some twenty-odd years ago – and what odd years they’ve been – the ring of a city’s awful truth is still heard. Only louder. As with all good poets, the guy is a prophet.

It was no accident that he wrote The Man with the Golden Arm so many centuries before posh suburban high schools fretted about junkies in their blue-eyed midst. The fate of Frankie Machine presaged adolescent hells to come.

In Never Come Morning, Algren gave us Bruno, the doomed young jack-roller. How different is he, the desperate city ethnic, from the young black mugger? Law and Order is the cry today, as Algren so eloquently italicized in the old poet’s prophecy: ‘The slums will take their revenge.’ Call it ghetto, if you wish.

Yet, I’m thinking of Nelson Algren, the funny man. The antic sense is there, of course, in Dove Linkhorn, the