Algren at Sea by Nelson Algren Page A

over the mantel.
    â€œI painted that,” I assured her. Anytime I can’t paint as good as an Irishman, you let me know.
    She threw me a look.
    â€œWhat I mean is that I have the same painting and once drew one of my own by tracing it.”
    â€œJohn is on his way down,” she pointed out.
    â€œI’m the one who told you,” I reminded her.
    She sat on the bed and began drawing on a pair of black woolen stockings that didn’t go with her hairdo. The stockings looked like she was going skiing. Was that how John was coming down from the roof?
    â€œI asked John if he had ever been buried alive,” I reported.
    â€œWhy in the name of Heaven did you ask him that?”
    â€œJust to make conversation,” I explained, “but I knew some people who actually were when I was here in 1944. A girl named Sandy.”
    â€œOh, you were a soldier,” she announced as though I had been elected to that position by a runoff in the House of Representatives. “It was all a bit before my time, of course.”
    â€œI was close to Patton,” I referred to an occasion when he had been driven out to where we were pinned down and told us that the way to
clear a minefield was to go through it, then went home and went to bed. We were grateful to him for not having slapped us. Some Patton.
    The Marylebone Road Brute stood up and drew a babushka about her face.
    â€œI know,” I told her, “John is on his way down. May I knock on your door tomorrow?”
    â€œYou may knock on every door in the hotel if you wish, and the day after as well,” she gave me an opening.
    Whoever said the English aren’t friendly?
    Down these antiseptic English halls every chambermaid looked like a mother cop.
    A lanky old geezer stood beside the lift, smiling as though he’d been expecting me.
    â€œWould you mind tieing my shoelace, old boy?” he asked.
    Would you mind if I hit you a clean shot in the teeth despite your age? was the answer that went through my mind. I didn’t express it. I didn’t express anything. I’d just never been up against a polite request to tie a stranger’s shoelace before. I know there is a first time for everything, but why it had to begin with keeping somebody else’s shoe from falling off I couldn’t see.
    â€œI have an arthritic hip,” he explained with self-satisfaction.
    So there I stood with both hips in place while he stood with one hip out of the game. I tied the lace with care, making a knot that would spring his good hip when he tried to undo it. I must hand it to the old gent for not kicking me in the teeth when I was in position for it. He could have gotten every tooth in my head but restrained himself out of lifelong habit.
    â€œOne good turn deserves another,” he strangely thanked me.
    â€œAbsence makes the heart grow fonder for somebody else,” I assured him.
    That’s what it’s like in Inner London, Men. That’s what it’s really like.
    One side of the placard on 916 said DO NOT DISTURB and the other read MAKE UP BED. I could never decide which was the greater thrill. Now, when I returned, somebody had turned the MAKE UP BED sign around to read DO NOT DISTURB. That disturbed me. Especially when I found I’d locked myself out.
    A chambermaid who looked like another soft-clothesman threw me a glance of an ill-concealed lust to pinch me before she’d let me back in.
    I drew the shade to shut out the gloom, but it did no good: the stuff wasn’t pushing in from outside, it was seeping up through the floor. Either the management manufactures the stuff in the basement and distributes it
to all the hotels in Piccadilly or it was fallout. I stretched out on the bed, and in no time at all was asleep in a litter of peanut husks and broken possibilities.
    In sleep I saw the guardian lions and the guardian lions remembered me. Under neon like a doom they turned to a fire-fed red. Something