Free Algren at Sea by Nelson Algren Page B

The-Man-Who-Could-Throw-Harder-Than-Anybody—one Boom-Boom Beck—an athlete who pitched for the Chicago Cubs in Hack Wilson’s day.
    â€œBoom-Boom could throw so hard,” I told the company around me, “that if he hit you on a fingertip you’d go down. He could throw so hard that his catcher never had to use signals. There was nothing to signal for.
Boom-Boom had no drop, he had no slider. He didn’t even have a nothing-ball. He just threw harder than anyone else on earth.
    â€œSometimes he threw so hard the ball got past the batter, and when that happened the backstop would be pulled onto his hunkers by the impact.
    â€œFortunately for the Cubs’ catching staff, this seldom happened. The bat itself, it seemed, was what Boom-Boom was aiming at. Boom-Boom’s throw would streak back like a falling meteor into the right-field stands. In event of a direct hit, it would zonk against the big white E that topped the center-field scoreboard. If a batter ever caught the pitch square it was almost as sure as mortar fire to kill five or six workmen tarring a roof two miles away. Well, that was why they called him Boom-Boom.”
    The company remained unimpressed.
    Another thing Mr. Beck had in common with Mr. Behan, that I did not mention, was that if he wanted to have a drink, he was going to have a drink. And if he wanted to have two drinks, he was going to have two drinks. And the more drinks he had, the more stubborn he would get; the more stubborn he would get, the more drinks he would have. And the more drinks he would have, the harder he would throw the next day for being that mad at himself for having been so stubborn the day before.
    And, of course, the harder he would throw, the harder he would get hit, and the harder he got hit, the more he wanted a drink, and if Boom-Boom wanted a drink he was going to have a drink and if Boom-Boom wanted two drinks—his manager summed the matter up in one phrase —“He looks like a twenty-game winner between line drives.”
    Yet nobody managed Boom-Boom, least of all himself.
    No one, least of all himself, manages Brendan Behan. “The first duty of a writer,” he has expressed the conviction, “is to let his country down. He knows his own people best. He has a special responsibility to let them down.”
    â€œI once had occasion to drink with Dylan Thomas about the time God got him by the short hairs,” I recalled. “I asked him why he hit the stuff so hard and he said he didn’t know. But I’m still sure that the world at the bottom of a whiskey glass is a different world than that at the bottom of a cup of tea.”
    The Dublin house painter with the fighter’s mug leaned across the table and touched my tie tentatively, with a faintly incredulous smile. I pressed the bulb in my pocket and it lit up fine.

    He lifted his glass, holding nothing but water, and clinked it against the Guinness in mine.
    â€œFugh the bedgrudgers,” was Behan’s toast.
    The Irish have a very good rugby team.
    That was soundly thrashed by Wales.
    Â 
    The following morning I walked up the ramp of an Aer Lingus plane and was pleased to see, smiling good morning down at me from the top of the ramp, an Irish stewardess waiting there expecting just me.
    â€œHaven’t you flown with me before?” she wished to know.
    â€œNo, Baby,” I told her, “but I’m ready to fly with you now.”
    Farewell, picturesque Dublin, quaint metropolis of Old Erin, where the poor contrasts with the very poor and the old contrasts with the prehistoric. And the fairly sober contrasts with the stinking drunk.
    Adieu and farewell, bustling capital where the world at the bottom of a glass of tea contrasts with that at the bottom of a glass of Guinness.
    Goodbye, County Mayo, goodbye.

THE SOUTH OF ENGLAND
    THEY WALKED LIKE CATS THAT CIRCLE AND COME BACK
    Now, I had once been most comfortably stationed on the