The Man With the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren

That’s theonly time I ever seen him show his teeth – when somebody took his dirty beer away.’
    ‘He got no teet’,’ Sparrow reminded Frankie, ‘they got dissolved in beer bubbles.’
    ‘You better start him the other way round again,’ Frankie suggested.
    But Rumdum had given out, with one final windbreaking roar. He dropped the bottle at Frankie’s feet and stood looking up for a refill, his great bloodshot eyes swimming in the melancholy hope that only chronic alcoholics know.
    ‘He thinks you’re the bartender ’cause you got on a tie,’ Sparrow explained.
    ‘Take him up to the room,’ Frankie ordered, ‘I got to case out of here.’
    Sparrow took off his glasses to see Frankie better. ‘Can’t I case out wit’ you, Frankie? Where you goin’?’ He hadn’t been left out of any fast hustle of Frankie’s since they’d been together. ‘Maybe I could help like before.’
    ‘Do like I said.’ Frankie’s knuckles shown whitely where he pressed them to his temples.
    ‘I don’t get what you’re salty about,’ Sparrow began – then gathered up Rumdum in both arms and shuffled out past Louie and Blind Pig.
    ‘The dealer ain’t hisself, that Zosh is stonin’ him too hard,’ he decided. ‘I’ll have to speak to her.’ Yet Frankie had been stoned up there before, hard and often, and had always been able to forget it in the back booth at Antek’s. ‘He don’t act like the booze helps him no more,’ Sparrow realized.
    He waited in Frankie’s doorway, with the hound whining against his legs, without knowing just what he was waiting for. Frankie had told him what to do, it was up to him to do it.
    As he turned toward the stairs he saw Frankie heading across the street toward the Safari.
    Behind him Blind Pig waited on the curb for someone, anyone, to help him across.
    Inadvertently Sparrow looked around for Fomorowski.
       
    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. For Nifty Louie paid the rent and Frankie knew too well who the landlord was. He had met him before, that certain down-at-heel vet growing stooped from carrying a thirty-five-pound monkey on his back. Frankie remembered that face, ravaged by love of its own suffering as by some endless all-night orgy. A face forged out of his own wound fever in a windy ward tent on the narrow Meuse. He had met Private McGantic before: both had served their country well.
    This was the fellow who looked somehow a little like everyone else in the world and was more real to a junkie than any real man could ever be. The projected image of one’s own pain when that pain has become too great to be borne. The image of one hooked so hopelessly on morphine that there would be no getting the monkey off without another’s help. There are so few ways to help old sad frayed and weary West Side junkies.
    Frankie felt no pity for himself, yet felt compassion for this McGantic. He worried, as the sickness rose in himself, about what in God’s name McGantic would do tomorrow when the money and the morphine both gave out. Where then, in that terrible hour, would Private M. find the strength to carry the monkey through one more endless day?
    By the time Frankie got inside the room he was so weak Louie had to help him onto the army cot beside the oil stove. He lay on his back with one arm flung across his eyes as if in shame; and his lips were blue with cold. The pain had hit him with an icy fist in the groin’s very pit, momentarily tapering off to a single probing finger touching the genitals to get the maximum of pain. He tried twisting to get away from the finger: the finger was worse than the fist. His throat