Free Algren by Mary Wisniewski

remembered it as a Royal—was the first in a string of typewriter loves. He was having a hard time saying good-bye.
    Nelson showed throughout life both long periods of melancholy and times of perverse recklessness, a drive to walk on the edge of things, like a boy baiting a mad dog with a stick just to see what would happen. He liked to gamble with high odds, and despite his intelligence sometimes did not think things through. He also could have a dangerous level of arrogance—as he had complained to his friends at home, he did not think much of the mental powers ofsoutherners. Some combination of these traits—the recklessness, the snobbery, the typewriter fetish, and perhaps a long-festering sense of deprivation—led him to a curious action. On January 25, 1934, he put the cover on the typewriter, opened the drawer to put it in the desk where it belonged, and then nervously, impulsively, gathered it in his arms like a bulky sweetheart and carried it out of Sul Ross onto Alpine’s wide Main Street. He stopped at a hardware store to buy a big wooden box, planning to send the typewriter to his parents’ house in Chicago, while he would follow later on a train. He said his good-byes to Mrs. Nettleton, who ran the boardinghouse, and the eternally hungry Widow James, and hopped an eastbound freight.
    Alpine was not a big town—about three thousand people at the time—and a tall, interesting Yankee stranger walking down Main Street with a typewriter and a big packing box on a clear, mild weekday evening was bound to attract attention. Nelson said later that something like thirty-seven people had noticed his march, and another dozen had seen him entering the freight depot with the box the next morning. He had billed it to his parents’ address. He rode a freight about eighty miles away to Sanderson, and then the train stopped. He was enjoying the midday sun, suavely rolling a cigarette one-handed and waiting for the train to start again, when a sheriff walked up and asked his name. Nelson told him and learned he was in trouble. It was something about a typewriter, which had been plainly labeled “Property of Sul Ross College” and had never left Alpine. It turned out he hadn’t committed the perfect crime after all.
    Nelson joked often about his arrest later, but it’s clear from the statement he made to the sheriff that he was badly frightened and, like Homer in “So Help Me,” he wanted to justify himself. “I wanted a typewriter very bad because I am a writer by profession…. A typewriter is the only means I had to complete a book whichmeans either a few dollars or utter destitution. There is nothing more vital to my mere existence as a typewriter, it is the only means I have to earn a living.” He added that he did not feel like he was stealing from an individual—just from the school. But he could not tell that story to the judge—not yet. It was a circuit-riding court, and he would have to wait for the judge to come back around again. Nelson was stuck in the Brewster County Jail for a month. Later he remembered he was there for five months—which showed how the days must have dragged. As Nelson put it in
Somebody in Boots
, in prison, “Before a month is out you feel that you’ve done a year.” It was a critical experience for Nelson’s work—a crucible and a wound and a lifelong grudge. It was similar in effect to Charles Dickens’s four-month stint as a child in a blacking warehouse while his father was in debtors’ prison. The injustice of this was played and replayed in Dickens’s fiction on a series of overworked children. A variation of Nelson’s county jail imprisons characters in all his novels and in many of his stories—it catches Cass McKay in El Paso and Chicago, Bruno Bicek and Frankie Machine in Chicago, Dove Linkhorn in New Orleans, and Ruby Calhoun in New Jersey. The cell walls never