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Swindles? It obviously didn’t occur to Drew that the ratty old poker table might have fetched a “tidy sum” simply because Algren, at this late stage in his life, wasn’t exactly made of money, and a well-wisher wanted to contribute significantly to his stake. And if this altruistic twist on the bare facts isn’t exactly accurate either, the well-wisher being neither that thoughtful nor that decent, let it be said he was also not a credulous putz. No, think of him as a young man still in that lucky time of a life when even though you have no real money you have more than you know what to do with. Blithely spending $200 (for that’s what it was) to buy a poker table from Nelson Algren was a way to feel really happy.
March 28 was the hundredth anniversary of Algren’s birth. There’s an excerpt from Entrapment and Other Writings, a new Algren anthology, in this week’s Reader, and there’ll be a reading Monday evening Saturday at Steppenwolf with famous names. It’s no more than Algren deserves but it’s more than he might have imagined back in 1975, when his fame in Chicago was at low ebb. The large part of Chicago capable of forgetting one of its most famous writers had already forgotten, an insult that by itself gave Algren all the reason he needed to blow off our city. But the bigger reason, which Algren kept to himself until he was gone, was that he intended to write a book. His subject was Hurricane Carter, a famous middleweight of the day who’d been in prison since 1967 for a triple murder in Paterson Carter maintained he had nothing to do with.
Back in the early 60s there’d been a serious poker game in Algren’s flat. Peltz lost big. Studs Terkel lost big. The big winner was a wannabe mob tough who for reasons I’ll soon explain I’ll call Cantabile. Peltz wrote Cantabile a check, but Algren, having convinced himself that Cantabile had cheated, talked Peltz into stopping payment on it.
For a more honest reading of Algren, I had to turn to Peltz. “I haven’t seen him for a long time,” Peltz said. “He got jealous of my relationship with Bellow. He’s very hot at Bellow being such a success and being so straight and watching all his P’s and Q’s.”
Here’s Studs Terkel’s version of the poker game story.
