"You Remember Jeanie"

In the June 13th piece on John D MacDonald’s 1952 science fiction short story “Game for Blondes” I noted that the situational device of beginning a story with a protagonist lost in an alcoholic rock bottom as the result of the death of his wife was one that the author had used before in his 1947 short story “You’ve Got to Be Cold.” I should have also mentioned “The Tin Suitcase,” where we begin the story after the protagonist has recovered and is trying to regain his life, and “You Remember Jeanie,” a tale that was published in the May 1949 issue of Crack Detective Stories. It is far closer to “Game for Blondes” in describing the depths to which the hero has sunk, the utter depravity and the hopeless attempts at assuaging grief. It is also unflinching in its descriptions of the state of the gutter-drunk, a man who has sunk so low -- emotionally, physically, economically -- that it seems he can never recover.

MacDonald was, of course, no stranger to alcohol. He was a drinker all of his adult life, as was his wife Dorothy, and except for a few dicey patches he seemed to be able to manage it quite well. But booze, specifically the hard stuff, was the drug of choice for his generation, and not everyone he knew handled it as responsibly as he did. Closest to home was the sad case of his sister Dorie and her husband Bill Robinson. Both suffered from alcoholism. In Dorie’s case it destroyed her health and eventually killed her, while Bill lost his job before finally joining AA, and he had to have his wife beg JDM to help him find new employment in Florida. (MacDonald’s description of the problem to pal Dan Rowan in a June 25, 1971 letter is pretty grim.) Virtually all of his protagonists and most of his secondary characters were drinkers, and all took it as a matter of course, a normal thing for an adult to do in postwar America. But the relatively few times he dealt with those particular characters who were unable to drink and maintain a normal life are revealed in prose that is some of the most telling in the author’s canon. Best of these is, of course, his classic 1956 short story “Hangover,” a remarkable bit of writing from the drinker’s point of view as he awakens after a particularly bad bender and tries to put the pieces of his memory back together. The pre-McGee novels are filled with detailed, finely-observed set pieces featuring drinking gone too far, beautifully rendered lost weekends of over-the-top behavior, inhibitions broken down, wild revelries and ultimate regret. They occur mainly in his mainstream efforts such as Cancel All Our Vows, The Deceivers, Clemmie, Please Write for Details, The Crossroads, Slam the Big Door, and even -- briefly but tellingly -- in The Executioners. But as evidenced by “You Remember Jeanie,” he knew the subject matter well as far back as 1949.

The opening paragraph of the story is as beautifully crafted and atmospheric as any MacDonald ever wrote for the pulps, immediately creating a scene, a world and a hopeless, lost quality to everything that would follow.

For many years Bay Street was the place. Bar whisky for eight cents a shot or a double slug for fifteen. Waterfront street. The dirty grey waves slapped at the crusted piles and left an oil scum. A street to forget with. A street which could close in on you, day to day, night to night, until you maybe ran into an old friend who slipped you a five, and somebody saw you get it; there at dawn an interne from city hospital would shove your eyelid up with a clean, pink thumb. "Icebox meat," he'd say. "Morgue bait." And maybe, as he stood up, he'd look down at your hollow grey face and the sharp bones of your wrists and wonder how you'd kept alive so long. So very long.

The story’s protagonist is Frank Bard, a homeless street bum hopelessly addicted to the sauce, living in an abandoned crate in an alley across the street from a bar called Allison’s Grill. In an early encounter with a patrolman we learn that Frank was once a cop, a good one, with a clean record and a list of accomplishments. But that all ended one night when his wife Jeanie, while having a drink at Allison’s, was hit in the head by a drunk and killed. Frank escaped into the bottle and eventually lost his marbles, believing that Jeanie is alive and with him as he stumbles into Allison’s for a semi-frequent spending of his last fifty cents.

On one such occasion Frank and “Jeanie” arrive to enjoy a drink together and the background of the story is explained by Allison’s waiter and bouncer, a man named Jader, to a curious customer at the bar who wonders why this drunk is talking to the thin air beside him.

"Mister, a drunk bashed her head in with a bottle and got clean away. We give the cops a description but they never found the guy." He paused and glanced at Bard, who was talking to Jeanie in a low voice, almost a whisper. He continued, "And this thing used to be a cop. Jeanie was his girl. He's been on the skids for nearly a year, and every time he comes in here he's got that damn imaginary woman with him. I tell you, it's enough to drive me nuts."

Frank Bard may be nuts but he has retained enough of the memory from his past life to recollect that Allison’s Grill is a place where the connected can buy drugs, although, thanks to an ingenious failsafe mechanism, the police have never been able to prove anything. And while bouncer Jader is the excitable type, the grill’s owner Arthur Allison is a "watchful, careful man," small, trim, "with Truman glasses and a grey Colman mustache," always dressed in a spotless white shirt while tending the bar. And while Bard’s frequent visits gives Jader the creeps, Allison tolerates him and even banters good naturedly with this hopeless drunk and his “wife” -- as long as Bard has the money to pay for his drinks.

A few days later Allison takes a rare day off to go to the races, leaving Jader alone and in charge of the grill. He’s feeling good and full of himself. The drawer with the dope is full and several buys are set for the day. But his day is ruined when he looks out the front door and sees Bard approaching. Without Allison around to force him to play nice, he reluctantly allows the drunk and Jeanie to sit in a back booth, away from the action. But when he goes back to wait on him, Jader sees two cigarette butts in the ashtray, and one is stained with lipstick…

The beauty of “You Remember Jeanie” is not in its somewhat obvious plot, or in the characterizations of the secondary characters, but in the creation of the protagonist and the carefully descriptive prose MacDonald employs to bring him to life. In addition, the neighborhood is almost a character in itself, a dirty, displaced and dangerous block in a city that tolerates it only so long as its vices stay confined to its streets. The opening paragraphs are as well written as any in MacDonald’s work for the pulps.

Which brings up an unfortunate point. “You Remember Jeanie” was chosen as one of the 27 pulp tales that were reprinted in the early 1980’s in the anthologies The Good Old Stuff and More Good Old Stuff. MacDonald grudgingly allowed these works to be republished (edited by Francis M Nevins, Martin H Greenberg and Jean and Walter Shine) only on the condition that the author would be permitted to “update” several of the stories, moving the time period from the postwar era to the then-present day. MacDonald’s rationale was that the modern reader would be distracted from the narrative if someone paid a nickel for a phone call or a dime for a loaf of bread. His readers at the time blasted this curious decision, but the author dug in his heels and defended it in the second volume. He claimed that he only updated period references but left the prose alone, stating that changing “patches of florid prose” and substituting “the right word for almost the right word” would have been “cheating, because it would have made me look as if I were a better writer at that time than I was.”

But that is exactly what he did.

As I pointed out in a previous post on another Good Old Stuff selection (“The Tin Suitcase”), a reading of the stories in their original form, alongside the anthologized versions, reveals wholesale changes everywhere in the text, changing just what MacDonald claimed he hadn’t changed. Why he made that assertion is anybody’s guess at this point. Perhaps he felt -- correctly -- that most of the readers at the time had no way to go back and check on him. I found scores of changes in “The Tin Suitcase” and equally as many in “You Remember Jeanie.” Here are the story’s first three paragraphs side by side:

Paragraph One Original:

For many years Bay Street was the place. Bar whisky for eight cents a shot or a double slug for fifteen. Waterfront street. The dirty grey waves slapped at the crusted piles and left an oil scum. A street to forget with. A street which could close in on you, day to day, night to night, until you maybe ran into an old friend who slipped you a five, and somebody saw you get it; there at dawn an interne from city hospital would shove your eyelid up with a clean, pink thumb. "Icebox meat," he'd say. "Morgue bait." And maybe, as he stood up, he'd look down at your hollow grey face and the sharp bones of your wrists and wonder how you'd kept alive so long. So very long.

More Good Old Stuff version:

For many years Bay Street was the place. Bar whiskey for thirty cents a shot, or a double slug for fifty. A waterfront street, where dirty waves slapped at the crushed pilings behind the saloons. A street to forget with. A street which would close in on you, day to day, night to night, until the wrong person saw some pitying old friend slap you a five. They would find you at dawn, and an intern from City General would push your eyelid up with a clean pink thumb and say, “More meat for the morgue.”

Maybe, as he stood up, he would look down at your hollow gray face and the sharp bones of your wrists and wonder how you’d kept alive this long. So very long.

Paragraph Two and Three Originals:

But something happened to Bay Street. It acquired glamor. Reading the trend, the smart boys came down and bought up the property and built long low clubs with blue lights and bright music and expensive drinks. The shining cars lined up along the curb, and the people with the clean clothes gave ragged kids two bits to make certain the tires weren't slashed while they were inside the places with the bright music and the soft women. The doormen at the new places had no time for the men in broken shoes who were living out the last years of addiction.

So the men of Bay Street moved to Dorrity Street -- one block over. Many of the displaced little bars moved over. The red, blue and green neon flickered against the brick flanks of the ancient warehouses, and, in the night, the steaming chant of the juke boxes, the hoarse laughter and the scuff of broken shoes was the same as always.

More Good Old Stuff version:

But something happened to Bay Street. The smart developers saw what was happening elsewhere, and they conned the city, county and federal government into a glamorous redevelopment project. A huge mall. Parking garages. Waterfront restaurants on new piers, out over the water. A marina. Smaller shopping malls with quaint stores selling antiques, paintings, custom jewelry, Irish tweed.

So the old saloons were uprooted, and for a time there was no place at all for the Bay Street bums. Then some of the old places started up again on Dorrity Street, four blocks inland, and soon it was all the same as before, with the stale smell of spilled beer, the steamy chant of the jukes, hoarse laughter, the scuff of broken shoes, the wet sound of fist against flesh.

MacDonald has obviously done much more than simply change time periods. The magic rhythms of the pulp original are almost completely lost in the new version, eliminating the wonderful staccato style that oozed regret and decay. Instead we get MacDonald circa 1980, the outraged knight with a pen, battling the evil developers, a man much more at home in the world of Condominium and Barrier Island than in the dirty, venal world of postwar America. One can certainly argue about what updating did to narrative, but not, I think, what it did to style. How MacDonald couldn’t recognize this is one of the great unsolvable JDM mysteries.

One can certainly read the More Good Old Stuff version and enjoy it -- even appreciate it. I did for many years before acquiring a copy of this issue of Crack Detective Stories. But after reading the original I have no desire to return to the modern version, ever. The same is true of all of the stories collected in these two anthologies, and where I have the opportunity (I don’t own copies of all of the originals) I will go pulp and decline to be “updated”.

More Good Old Stuff is out of print but easily available as a used book. An eBook version is available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever else you get eBooks. Happily, the original version of "You Remember Jeanie" is now available as an eBook from online booksellers (Amazon, at least) in one of those strange digital re-releases that have somehow circumvented copyright. This reprint is not without its problems, including the inevitable typos caused by unproofed optical character recognition, but it's the original story, not the updated one. It is paired with another great JDM story from a few years later in his career, "Elimination Race".