Algren at Sea by Nelson Algren Read Free Book Online

cheek. I got a better grip on my fork in case he tried to close in. I thought he was after my salad. When you’re a victim of overprivilege you have to be ready for anything.
    (The way you know you are traveling first class, really first class, is by the way the olive looks up at you when the glass is gone dry, with its own special appeal, saying, “Please eat me.” Another way you know is by the way the waves back off bowing. Across a strictly first-class sea. It may look a bit rough and wild for the brutes two decks below, and if it isn’t, the crew is entitled to knock them about a bit. Otherwise, what am I paying for?)
    Mrs. Di Santos, a dazzling blonde from the headwaters of the Amazon, sat at the officer’s right. She never showed up till evening, and by that hour was so zonked she had to be strapped into her chair. Everyone, for that matter, had to be strapped, with a view to prevention of personal-injury suits should the tub take a sudden dip, but Mrs. Di Santos would have had to be strapped in a bowling alley.
    By the time she came to dinner she had just sense enough left to put stuff in her mouth—if it ran down the inside of her neck, she swallowed it. If it didn’t run she chewed it. She was a healthy young sot who liked the stuff that ran down the inside of her neck better than the stuff she was forced to chew. I think she had real class when sober but I never saw her asleep.
    On Fatty’s other side sat The Connecticut Child, a twenty-year-old of six foot one and a half, poor child, for I took her walking around the deck and she wasn’t wearing high heels. My private guess was that someone had sent her in hope she might gain spirit and elegance. God knows she needed a touch of both. But I couldn’t see how she was going to pick up either by sitting at our table. There was nobody there to pick up from. All she could learn was how to pass ginger that wasn’t that tangy.
    Beside The Connecticut Child sat the Rear-Echelon Liberal, one of the best kinds that there are. A real boy-barrister, a Fearless Philip of that vigilant breed who are forever breathing down the necks of others to see that others are as fair-minded as themselves. They have to keep you from joining the dark forces gathering against Mankind.
    These dark forces are forever trying to put Shylock on TV or Fagin in a movie, while the forces of light realize that Fagin was a cockney all along. After all, the cockneys never suffered a pogrom like us—poor us—and to tell the truth neither did we. But we had relatives in Warsaw (a city we never saw) and are thus entitled to practice cold-caulking shysterism with
immunity. Behind the legal barriers of the law and the moral barriers of liberalism.
    This was the line Fearless Philip got on right off, conveniently dividing humanity into forces of darkness and light with no doubt whatsoever about what side he was on. Actually, he didn’t give a hang for “The Human Condition,” as he was fond of putting it, his only real concern being the condition of certain loans he had made at 12 per cent out of bank funds borrowed at 4. But this type of operation requires a moral tone with which to protect itself, and that’s the tone of your Fair-Minded Liberal. (First Class, I ought to have told you before, was. purely loaded with fair-minded persons, all of whom had paid their first-class passage out of the proceeds of usury, blackmail, fraud, double-loyalties, decorous finkery, and the whole pervasive entanglement of Rapietta-Greenspongism.) I was elated to discover that I couldn’t have found a better table at which to observe the judicial mind at first hand.
    This was demonstrated by Fearless Philip himself, making a decision on whether he wanted filet avec champignon medium, on the rare side, rare on the medium side, or just five-eighths between rarefied-medium and mediumed-rare. As every cut had a toothpick stuck through its hide I couldn’t