The Man with the Golden Arm

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 Man with the Golden Arm

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.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

‘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.’

— The Man with the Golden Arm

‘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.’

— The Man with the Golden Arm

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

— The Man with the Golden Arm

‘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.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

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.’

— The Man with the Golden Arm

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.’

— The Man 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.’

— The Man with the Golden Arm

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.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

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.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

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.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

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.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

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.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

‘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 Man with the Golden Arm

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.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

‘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.’

— The Man with the Golden Arm

‘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 Man with the Golden Arm

[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.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

‘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 Man with the Golden Arm

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.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

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.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

‘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.’

— The Man with the Golden Arm

‘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 [...]

— The Man with the Golden Arm

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 Man with the Golden Arm

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.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

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 Man with the Golden Arm

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.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

‘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.’

— The Man with the Golden Arm

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.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

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.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

‘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 Man with the Golden Arm

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

— The Man with the Golden Arm

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.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

‘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.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

‘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.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

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

— The Man with the Golden Arm

‘He was just so afraid he wasn't good enough for me, that's all his braggin' was,’ Violet explained. ‘He didn't think he was good enough for anybody, he was tryin' so hard to show he was somebody. So it was up to me to show him he was somebody all by hisself – that's the first thing a woman got to do for a man. 'N of course there's no sense tryin' to prove somethin' like that standin' up. The least a girl owes to herself is to be comfortable about it.’

— The Man with the Golden Arm

Early morning, everyone from the first floor to the fourth up to do an honest day's hustling and Louie doing the talking for everyone. ‘My business is everybody's business – informin' is a racket like everythin' else. Anythin' that pays ain't nothin' to be ashamed of, one racket's as good as the next. A man who's ashamed of his racket is a man who's ashamed of his mother. The only thing a man got a right to be ashamed of these days is bein' broke.’

— The Man with the Golden Arm

Violet had wheeled Sophie to Mass – [...]. Maybe if he went along some Sunday, suddenly right there by the altar rail Sophie would get up on her feet and tell him, ‘Nobody'll have to wheel me here no more, Frankie. Let's go dancin' by Guyman's Paradise t'night.’ / But Sunday morning was always pretty rugged for anything but sleep. All the miracles were performed on Saturday night, it seemed.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

She raised her arms elegantly, like a real lady in a deodorant ad, high over her head. ‘Anyhow it ain't red, it's just awe-burn. Would you like me wit' red hair all over?’ / ‘I like redheads of any color – [...]’

— The Man with the Golden Arm

‘I'm settin' here three days now waitin' for you, listenin' to s go by, countin' how many cars it sounds like. You don't know how lonely it gets, waitin' for El cars. Frankie, let's both quit stonin' ourselves.’ / He didn't know she was crying till her tears touched his lips.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

In the corner, beneath a frosted bulb, Pig sat looking out upon that dark and wavering shore which only the eyeless may see and only the dead may wander.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

My wife only sleeps with her friends and she don't have a enfs one hell of a time. [...] Girls who would and girls who wouldn't. If they did they were no good and if they didn't what good were they?

— The Man with the Golden Arm

‘What you cuffed for?’ Record Head longed to know. / ‘Took a cab home was all,’ Frankie heard Blood-Spots explain. / ‘That's no crime. Did you pay the driver?’ / ‘I couldn't.’ / ‘Why not?’ / ‘He wasn't in the cab.’ / ‘That's the chances you take. Next man.’

— The Man with the Golden Arm

The junkie wants a bondsman though he doesn't own a dime. His life is down to a tight pin point and the pupils of his eyes drawn even tighter: nothing is reflected in them except a capsule of light the size of a single quarter grain of morphine. He has mounted the walls of all his troubles with no other help than that offered by the snow-white caps in the brown drugstore bottle. A self-made man.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

These were the ones who just wouldn't work. [...] They were the ones who had never learned to want. [...] They didn't even read comic books. They had been bored to death by all that the day before they were born. The whole business between birth and death was a sort of inverted comic strip, too dull to read even if set right.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

The time the clockmakers had locked into the stopped clocks of these corridors was a different kind of time, Frankie felt, than that they had put into the clocks outside. Just as there was a different sort of time for cripples than for junkies, and a different kind of time than either for dealers, there was a special kind of time for convicts too.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

‘Prove I'm nuts I go to the buggy bin – they feed you there, don't they? 'N if I ain't nuts I get the seat – so what? Then I don't have to bother with stinkin' squealas no more. It don't make me no difference. / Naw, I don't feel nuttin' good 'r bad. Good 'n bad is strictly for stinkin' squealas. [...] My old man? His one big trouble is he's always a pallbearer 'n never a corpse.’

— The Man with the Golden Arm

A few more days till summer vacation and out in the prison yard a great crane, straining skyward to see the first sign of summer, caught only a glint of rusted iron sunlight instead. These were days of clouds swollen gray with promise of rain – only to burst emptily and reveal the deepest sort of blue drifting there all the time.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

As the fever lowered Frankie dreamed of someone folding and refolding bundles of newspapers right beside his cot and forced himself awake to see who it was this time. / Only the old woman of the wind, there on the other side of the pane, wrapping the great sheets of the rain.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

Then the trolleys, like mild-tempered elephants, approached each other slowly and paused, with a primitive graciousness, to let each other pass; and went shambling forward once more upon their predestined jungleways as though the pause had lent each a greater understanding of all things. / Frankie came down , where only arc lamps and fire hydrants grow, [...]

— The Man with the Golden Arm

Umbrella Man came in to Schwiefka's every noon with the Times morning line crumpled in his pocket, the daily double checked off and fifty cents in his hand. He never won and never complained. He came in with a bottle on his hip, made his bets like a man paying a bill, and left with the relieved air of one who has settled a long-overdue debt. The only return he seemed to expect was the privilege of climbing the same stairs and trying again another day.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

‘Oh, don't always pertend you don't know what I'm talkin' about,’ she persisted, ‘a woman is the downfall of every man 'n a man is the downfall of every woman. You're my downfall 'n I'm yours. [...] What I mean is there's nuttin' deader'n a dead love,’ she told him sternly, ‘nuttin' deader.’ / ‘Sure there is,’ he assured her lightly, ‘dead people. They're deader'n anybody.’

— The Man with the Golden Arm

Beneath the sink Rumdum slept with one ear alert for the coffeepot's first perk. Vi was trying to wean him off beer with coffee.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

The alleys had always been his sanctuary; they had been kinder to him than the streets. He had spent those long-ago days searching the ashcans for the tinfoil in discarded cigarette packs. Though the boulevard gutters had been better for tinfoil prospecting, the alleys had always been safer. / The tinfoil racket had been abandoned for the pursuit of beer corks. A still on Blackhawk Street had paid a dime a hundred for them in those days.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

His voice began drifting somewhere the other side of the room, the other side of the curtained window, the other side of the street and the other side of the world. ‘There's so many little worries floatin' around 'n floatin' around, why not roll 'em all up into one big worry? Just like goin' by the loan shark 'n gettin' enough to pay off all the little debts with one big one?’

— The Man with the Golden Arm

A light like a mustiness left over from another century filtered through the single window, far above, too high for anyone but a fireman to wash. It had been so long since it had been cleaned that, even on summer noons with the sun like a brass bell across pavement and rooftop and wall, the light sifted down here with a chill autumnal hue. It was always December in the query room.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

‘The dealer's on the needle,’ was the whisper, and overnight he was an outcast of outcasts and a new dealer [...] sat in the slot. If Frankie wanted to take a hand the boys made room for him. Just a bit too much room, he fancied; the way they'd make room for a syphilitic. For the man on the needle, though he be your brother, is a stranger to every human who lives without morphine.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

‘You want to buy a dog?’ Implying that a dog, any dog, was the one certain solution, in an uncertain world, to any cabbie's troubles. / ‘I couldn't buy the lice off a sick cat,’ the cabbie answered from the very depths of self-deprecation. / ‘I wouldn't sell you one with lices,’ Sparrow assured him lightly. ‘I take the lices off 'n sell them sep'rate.’

— The Man with the Golden Arm

He heard a girl's voice crying out a single question, she was being brought in off the street a full floor above him; but in a voice so agonized it seemed she spoke directly to himself: / ‘Ain't anybody on my side?’ [...] But no one, on the long streets above, off which both had been taken, cared one way or another. For up there each was the only one on his own side. Under one moon or another, he knew not one man on the side of men.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

The captain felt impaled. It had been a bit too long since he had laughed. Felt joy or sorrow or simple wonder. [...] / An iron heart, an iron life. Laughter and tears had corroded in his breast. In the whitish light of the query room a tic took a corner of his mouth and his lips worked trying to stop it, like a drunk trying to work off a fly.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

What did it mean that all the guilty felt so certain of their own innocence while he felt so uncertain of his own? It was patently wrong that men locked up by the law should laugh while the man who locked them there no longer felt able even to cry. As if those caged there had learned secretly that all men are innocent in a way no captain might ever understand.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

‘I slugged him.’ The toughness was still in the grin if not in the biceps, the arms making a loose, outswinging gesture which she took to mean he'd first tried shoving that certain guy off. ‘Then his neck made a sort of dead sound 'n I knew that was it. [...] It's all in the wrists,’ he told her thinly, ‘I used to have the touch.’

— The Man with the Golden Arm

Sitting with one arm across the open window while the city rocked along below, he wiped sweat off his forehead with his cap and felt the sweat clear down to his socks. ‘I only hope they don't go too tough on Molly-O,’ and felt the old pang of conscience: something happened to everyone, it seemed, who came too close to the man with the golden arm.

— The Man with the Golden Arm

She looked at them both then, with such seeming trust, that something of pity stirred beneath the white-starched hospital jackets. For they saw a child's face, puffed by some muted suffering she could never tell. The face she had rouged, from the nurse's compact, so it was that of a child painted to look like a clown's. / And the eyes so dark and buttoned so tightly. So pinched by that private, midnight-colored grief.

— The Man with the Golden Arm