Read Online Algren at Sea by Nelson Algren - Free Book Online Page A

“Haven’t you flown with me before?” she asked, extending her hand for mine to touch—and dream stewardess, dream plane, and dream turned slowly onto its side at a very great height.
    To leave me adrift in those perpetual mists that forever drift: along the banks of The Grand Canal.
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    It rained all night and it rained all day and then Mrs. Montague said, “It’s time to have fun,” and I thought so myself.
    Only, how would a thing like that be done in a rain-sodden black-pudding town?
    On a sea that just might, some night, swallow all down, Ulster and Belfast, the orange and the green, shawlie and culchie each alike, bogman and Fenian both the same, doubting priest and believing doubter, lovers of Jesus and lovers of Joyce, the National Farmers Association along with the Amharciann na Mainistreach? So long as I did not hear them keening from forty fathoms down I would not mourn too long.
    Yet in such a great wash Siobhan McKenna might also be taken, and for that reason alone I stand firm as Bray Head against Ireland being washed into any sea.
    People who find it hard to put up with the Irish should consider, for one moment, the job Brendan Behan has had his whole life with no relief but for a few years in Borstal. And there were Irish there too.
    â€œThe Last Dive of Dublin” was the name of the fun-place we found. A dozen aimless-looking women and girls sat about two jukes, one green and one white; as though all had been waiting for days for someone to come by and drop a dime in the coin box. If this is a dive, it came to me, Ireland already has vanished.
    Or did it ever truly exist outside of the few Days of Easter Week, when it came onstage and then went off; having presented a drama, if not a revolution, to a world that has always loved Irish theatricals?
    Waiting for the fun-things to begin, I danced with Mary, a girl of twenty, who was going to America to work as a domestic “in a place called Pasadena.”
    â€œI’m fed up here,” Mary told me, putting my cap on her head to pretend she was now having fun.
    I might as well tell you right here that, when she did that, we had both had the peak of the evening.

    â€œI hope you don’t get fed up with Pasadena,” I voiced a hope while concealing a doubt.
    â€œI’m already fed up with Pasadena,” she told me; “I hate the very sight of the place.” Under the cap her eyes turned inward to a dark hollow no Pasadena would fill.
    It isn’t hard to see how a young person would feel fed up with a nation unable to offer its young women more than a life between the shafts of old drudgery’s two-wheeled cart forever going uphill and then the snifflers coming around saying, “She’s happier now she’s in Heaven.”
    â€œ. . . for such is the condition of man in this old world (and we better put up with it, such as it is, for I never saw much hurry on the part of priests in getting to the next one, nor parsons nor rabbis, for the matter of that; and as they are all supposed to be experts on the next world, we can take it that they have heard something very unpleasant about it which makes them prefer to stick it out in this one for as long as they can).”
    â€”writes the man who was once forced to a very hard choice between his nation and his faith.
    I was reaching for a drop of wine when the glass was snatched from my hand by the proprietor’s stout wife, seizing all glasses empty or full, out of hands of drinkers thirsty or dry. Under the tables went the lot. Everyone sat up straight as in church with nothing before them but ashtrays.
    Two inspecting officers entered from offstage, where they had been waiting their cue. Now they were seriously bent on discovering evidence of drinking in teetotaling Dublin.
    This isn’t the last dive, I thought; it’s simply the end.
    The officers inspected the ceiling, clothes racks, flowerpots, tabletops and juke boxes without