The Man with the Golden Arm

"The man with the golden arm."

"The captain never drank. Yet, toward nightfall in that smoke-colored season between Indian summer and December's first true snow, he would sometimes feel half drunken. He would hang his coat neatly over the back of his chair in the leaden station-house twilight, say he was beat from lack of sleep and lay his head across his arms upon the query-room desk."

"The city had filled him with the guilt of others; he was numbed by his charge sheet's accusations. For twenty years, upon the same scarred desk, he had been recording larceny and arson, sodomy and simony, boosting, hijacking and shootings in sudden affray: blackmail and terrorism, incest and pauperism, embezzlement and horse theft, tampering and procuring, abduction and quackery, adultery and mackery."

"‘I got nuttin' against Kvork. It's just him don't like me,’ the chinless wonder protested. ‘Fact is I respect Cousin for doin' his legal duty – every time he picks me up I get more respect. After all, everybody got to get arrested now 'n then, I'm no better'n anybody else. Only that one overdoes it, Captain. He can't get it t'rough his big muttonhead I'm unincapable, that's all.’"

"‘Any time you want me, Captain, just phone by Antek, he'll come 'n tell me I got to come down 'n get arrested. I like gettin' locked up now 'n then, it's how a guy stays out of trouble. I'll grab a cab if you're in a real big hurry to pinch me sometime – I don't like bein' late when I got a chance of doin' thirty days for somethin' I never done.’"

"‘He ain't no moron,’ the veteran confided to Record Head, ‘he's a moroff. You know; more off than on.’"

"‘It's all in the wrist 'n I got the touch,’ Frankie was fond of boasting of his nerveless hands and steady eye. ‘I never get nowheres but I pay my own fare all the way.’ Frankie was regular."

"That was the way things were because that was how things had always been. Which was why they could never be any different. Neither God, war, nor the ward super work any deep change on West . For here God and the ward super work hand in hand and neither moves without the other's assent. [...] For the super's God is a hustler's God; and as wise, in his way, as the God of the priests and the businessmen. / The hustlers' Lord, too, protects His own: the super has been in office fourteen years without having a single bookie door nailed shut in his territory without his personal consent. No man can manage that without the help of heaven and the city's finest precinct captains."

"The little petit-larceny punk from Damen and and the dealer still got along like a couple playful pups. ‘He's like me,’ Frankie explained, ‘never drinks. Unless he's alone or with somebody.’"

"Frankie studied the shivering punk. ‘Don't shake,’ he commanded. ‘When you get the shakes in my business you're through. Steady hand 'n steady eye is what does it. [...] Frankie Machine. That's me – the kid with the golden arm.’"

"‘I can get in more trouble in two days of not tryin' than most people can get into in a lifetime of tryin' real hard – [...] It's 'cause I really like trouble, Frankie, that's my trouble. If it wasn't for trouble I'd be dead of the dirty monotony around this crummy neighborhood. When you're as ugly as I am you got to keep things movin' so's people don't get the time to make fun of you. That's how you keep from feelin' bad.’"

"That night, while the little twenty-watt bulbs burned on in a single unwinking fury down the whitewashed tier, Frankie Machine was touched by an old wound fever and dreamed, for the second time in his life, of the man with the thirty-five-pound monkey on his back."

"Frankie Machine had seen some bad ones in his twenty-nine years. But any one of these looked as though all the others had beaten him all night with barrel staves. Faces bloody as raw pork ground slowly in the great city's grinder; faces like burst white bags, one with eyes like some dying hen's and one as bold as a cornered bulldog's; eyes with the small bright gleam of hysteria and eyes curtained by the dull half glaze of grief. These glanced, and spoke, and vaguely heard and vaguely made reply; yet looked all day within upon some ceaseless horror there: the twisted ruins of their own tortured, useless, lightless and loveless lives."

"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."

"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."

"These were the luckless living soon to become the luckless dead. [...] / Then, only one day too late, they became VIPs at last. Front and profile photographs and a brass tag looped about the neck to await none other than the deputy coroner himself, a police hold order and a genuine pauper's writ."

"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."

"‘I'm no good but my wife's a hundred per cent,’ somebody down the tier confided aloud to everyone in hearing distance. / ‘Mine stinks,’ Frankie Machine thought softly; immediately his conscience kicked him in the shin. ‘I got a good one too,’ he answered loudly to make up for everything. / And his conscience kicked him in the other shin for lying."

"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."

"‘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.’"

"‘We're layin' low a couple days,’ Schwiefka evaded the accusation, ‘till I get the tables moved back to the alley joint. We ought to get a loose crowd up there Saturday night. What time you be around?’ / ‘Not early enough to move no tables, that's a lead-pipe cinch,’ and turned away. / Schwiefka was long used to the turned back. He had brought news of salvation to men before."

"[The turnkey] watched the pair mounting the narrow steps toward a narrower freedom. On the street they waited for a northbound car. / A car that came on slowly, but not too slowly for Frankie Machine. If it would just sort of keep on coming forever, like streetcars sometimes did for him in dreams, without ever really arriving, he wouldn't have to go anywhere any more. The dealer didn't want to go home. Sophie did all the dealing there."

"He was simply a man who didn't know what to do with himself, for he didn't yet know who he was. It's sometimes easier to find a job than to find oneself and John hadn't yet gotten around to doing the first. How could he know who he was? Some find themselves through joy, some through suffering and some through toil. Johnny had till now tried nothing but whisky. A process which left him feeling like somebody new every day. / [...] He was many men and no man at all. He was a hysterical little bundle of possibilities that could never come true."

"‘She got too big a heart, that girl,’ Antek explained of Molly when John had left. ‘A guy can walk into her heart with army boots on.’"

"The old-timers, like the dealer and his wife, battled, like respectable people should, behind closed doors. Schwabatski's ears had long ago tuned out the sort of roarer that the dealer and his Sophie sometimes put on. To a stranger it would have sounded like one word short of murder; but the Jailer would shuffle past, explaining it to himself: ‘They want to love each other – but they don't know how.’ And shrug upon his way."

"Behind the curtain of loneliness which had sheltered her childhood a sick dread had grown. Of being left, some final evening, alone in a room like this small room with no one of her own near at all. / A dread she sometimes evaded by reaching for an outsized album labeled, in her own childish and belabored hand, My Scrapbook of Fatal Accidence. [...] / She had begun the book with the Times photo of her own ‘fatal accident’ and had gone on to add to it all manner of lurid cries from the depths: of unwed mothers who plunged newborn infants down dumbwaiters in an oatmeal box or tossed them into a furnace in a cornflake carton because ‘God told me to.’ To announce, when a visitor remarked that the house seemed rather warm: ‘I know. I just put the baby in the stove.’ / [...] Best of all was the yellowing photo from the Times that proved to him, each day anew, that it had all been his fault. So much his fault that he could never leave her alone again."

"When he wakened he would see her in the corner where the light and darkness met, half her face in the fading shadows of Saturday night and half in Sunday morning's rain-washed light."

"‘There's only fifty cards in your deck tonight, honey,’ Frankie reproached her gently. ‘I think you got a little repercussion again today.’ / ‘You mean a concussion, dummy.’ For once she had him. / ‘No, I mean a repercussion. Like you been bounced on your head twice.’"

"‘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 [...]"

"Again it had been all his fault, she realized: even the dog on the landing below began yapping up at him. And on top of everything else calling her dirty names – nothing could make up for a man calling his wife dirty names any more than broken china could be mended to look like new."

"The sign above the cash register of the Tug & Maul Bar indicated Antek the Owner's general attitude toward West : I'VE BEEN PUNCHED, KICKED, SCREWED, DEFRAUDED, KNOCKED DOWN, HELD UP, HELD DOWN, LIED ABOUT, CHEATED, DECEIVED, CONNED, LAUGHED AT, INSULTED, HIT ON THE HEAD AND MARRIED. SO GO AHEAD AND ASK FOR CREDIT I DON'T MIND SAYING NO."

"Pig wore a creamy, dreamy smirk to veil a long-standing grudge against everybody. He could smile like a chicken-fed tomcat while wishing everyone bad luck without exception."

"The clock in the room above the Safari told only Junkie Time. For every hour here was Old Junkie's Hour and the walls were the color of all old junkies' dreams: the hue of diluted morphine in the moment before the needle draws the suffering blood. / Walls that went up and up like walls in a troubled dream. Walls like water where no legend could be written and no hand grasp metal or wood."

"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."

"‘Man, their eyes when that big drive hits 'n goes tinglin' down to the toes. They retch, they sweat, they itch – then the big drive hits 'n here they come out of it cryin' like a baby 'r laughin' like a loon. Sure I like to watch. Sure I like to see it hit. Heroin got the drive awright – but there's not a tingle to a ton – you got to get M to get that tingle-tingle.’"

"‘Man, I wasn't hooked, I was crucified. The monkey got so big he was carryin' me. 'Cause the way it starts is like this, students: you let the habit feed you first 'n one mornin' you wake up 'n you're feedin' the habit. / [...] Then I got forty grains 'n went up to the room 'n went from monkey to nothin' in twenny-eight days 'n that's nine-ten years ago 'n the monkey's dead.’ / ‘The monkey's never dead, Fixer,’ Frankie told him knowingly."

"She remembered the years of their courtship like remembering an alien land. [...] Together she and Frankie had carried Easter lamb to Old St. Stephen's for Father Simon's blessing – could it really be so long? How had they both forgotten God so soon? Or had God forgotten them? Certainly God had gone somewhere far away at just the time when she'd needed Him most. Perhaps He too had volunteered and just hadn't gotten His discharge yet. Perhaps He had been a full colonel and still felt the need of keeping His distance. If He had been only a private, then He must have re-enlisted. Or else the world had gone wrong all by itself."

"‘I never run for streetcars,’ he'd had the brassbound nerve to tell her the year she was seventeen, after standing her up for half an hour in front of the Pulaski. ‘What's the use? There's always another big red rollin' along right behind. Just like you dames – soon as a guy misses with one all he has to do is look back over his shoulder 'n here comes another down the block pullin' up for a fast pickup.’ / ‘I just won't stand for that kind of talk,’ she'd told him flatly, stamping with rage. ‘I want you to be where you're supposed to be when you're supposed to be 'n dressed like you're goin' to the Aragon, not to shoot six-no-count pool by Wieczorek – that's what I want.’ / ‘There's people in hell want ice water too,’ he'd grinned at her."

"If only he would have hit her so that they would have been able to make it all up in bed later. ‘If Jesus Christ treated me like you do I'd drive in the nails myself,’ she told him in her mind as, in a passion of frustration, she watched him dealing, eternally dealing."

"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."

"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.’"

"[Zygmunt the Prospector] had attended so many night schools in his early manhood that now, in his bustling middle age, he retained the pallor of his Kent College nights: the look of the downtown pavements after the rush-hour window-shoppers are doing all their window-shopping through the bright interiors of dreams. The light on his glasses seemed a reflection of the light of law-school chandeliers in those desperate days when he felt that if he didn't pass the bar he'd be tending one the rest of his life. He looked like a man who had never seen a cloud."

"For the reception desks regarded ambulance chasing as some sort of felony or other and Zygmunt himself, at certain moments, wasn't altogether too sure it might not turn out to be denounced as such on Judgment Day. Therefore he played it safe by hustling both sides of the street, the churches as well as the hospitals, and had more novenas to his credit than defrauded cripples. He kept the ledger balanced slightly in Heaven's favor."

"‘You must of been readin' about that couple in the paper, their car caught fire.’ / ‘What happened to them?’ Her breath felt cut off. [...] / ‘They were trapped, that's all.’ / ‘Oh.’ With relief. Things that happened out of town never seemed to have happened to real people somehow."

"The analyst at the people's clinic was young, pure in heart, and dressed in theories as spotless as his own chaste white jacket."

"[...] old Doc Dominoes, as they called him, wasn't Doc Dominowski at all. The original Doc Dominowski had had a license. But after his passing his daughter had rented his office to this blood-reversing impostor who'd left the deceased doc's shingle up. A ruse as simple as that. Though in print he had never claimed to be anything but a wandering masseur. / [...] He boasted that he was the most popular spine manipulator and ray caster on the Northwest Side. He still looked like the business end of a fugitive warrant to Frankie."

"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."

"‘I've had trouble with my eyes lately,’ Vi would hint till Sophie would ask why she didn't get glasses. / ‘It's not that kind of trouble. It's from flirtin', that kind of trouble. Me 'n my bedroom eyes.’ / That was Violet's idea of high humor and Sophie's idea of nothing at all."

"‘I've seen a thing or two in my time,’ he still liked to boast, ‘that was how I found out the best place for wolfin' ain't the taverns. It ain't in dance halls 'r on North Clark on Saturday night. It's in the front row in Sunday school on Sunday mornin'. Oh yeh, I know a thing or two, I been around.’ / The punk knew a thing or two all right. He knew almost everything except how to stay out of jail. For jail was the one place he'd been most around."

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