ATDTDA (2): A Poetic Interlude ...

[Tim Strzechowski]

from Algren, Nelson.  _Chicago: City on the Make (50th Anniversary Edition)_.  The U of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2001.  pp. 21 - 23.
 
[...] For always our villians have hearts of gold and all our heroes are slightly tainted.  It always takes somebody like The Hink, in whom avarice and generosity mingled like the hot rum and the cold water in his own Tom-and-Jerries, to run a city wherein warmth of heart and a freezing greed beat, like the blood and the breath, as one.
 
Somebody like The Hink's Bathhouse John calling on the city, in the name of its little children, to ban the sale of the deadly coffin nail from within two hundred yards of every schoolhouse.  Thus earning himself, a buccaneer to his balbriggan underwear, the sanctimonious applause of the Tribune:
 
By this measure he will drive from the school areas the petty peddlers in death who have been inviting the children to ruin.
 
Applause which The Bath acknowledged grandly, bowing first to the left and then to the right, in a wondrous tailcoat of billiard-cloth green, lavender trousers, pink gloves and a cream-colored vest flaring with diamonds -- to the greatest rogues' circus ever pitched under a single tent.
 
For all his strutting piety in Lucy Page Gaston's name didn't stop him for one moment from leading his harlots and hopheads, his coneroos and fancy-men, his dips and hipsters and heavy-hipted madams -- his "willing hands and honest hearts" as he termed them -- to flaunt their soiled banners at the Annual First Ward Ball.
 
Out of their dens and out of their dives, out of their traps and curtained parlors -- most of them carefully masked -- The Bath led his willing hands and honest hearts with his victory over the tobacco trust in his pocket.  And, in the other, plans for a private zoo.  What did his take from the cribs have to do with whose little children anyhow, The Bath would have just liked to know.
 
The fact being that The Hink and The Bath were the first of the big-time operators.  Both living on to see their territory taken over by the business tweeds who put a stop to free lunches as being unbusinesslike.
 
The Hink and The Bath being the first to suspect that appeals to Civic Loyalty were appeals to empty air: that the place had grown up too fast to be conscious of itself as a unified city requiring any loyalty beyond that to the American dollar.  "The cult of money which one encounters here does not spring from avarice or meanness," one European observer put it quaintly, "but making money is the only aim one can set oneself in a city wherein the dollar is the spiritual denominator as well as the financial one."  The Buck alone lending purpose to the lives of the anonymous thousands living in anonymous rows along anonymous streets, under an anonymous moon.
 
And singing the old crossroads hymns of Faith Everlasting can't help any more, for you can't call anonymous souls to the Lord.  He doesn't know who they are.
 
And the Lord Himself couldn't get some of them that far out into the light anyhow.  They'd think Here Comes That Tuesday Night Lineup Again.
 
[...]
 
Yet once you've come to be part of this particular patch, you'll never love another.  Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies.  But never a lovely so real.