Algren: ‘A Bottle of Milk for Mother’

Nelson Algren’s short story “A Bottle of Milk for Mother” is set in a Chicago police station, where the cops are questioning Bruno “Lefty” Bicek.

Lefty is a big kid, about 19, a baseball pitcher and boxer and a member of the Polish Warriors Social & Athletic Club, a gang now called the Baldheads because of their new, distinctive haircuts.

Lefty tells the cops he’s done nothing wrong and was just going to get a bottle of milk for his mother when he was unfairly detained.

It gradually emerges — and the mastery of this story is in the unfolding of it — that Lefty is a jackroller, a guy who strong-arms drunks. One man, a father of five who depended on his check from the Workers Project Administration, fought back. A gun went off in the struggle. The man was hit in the groin. The cops finally break the news to Lefty: The man’s dead.

The remarkable feature of the story is Lefty’s certainty at each step of the way.

He has rehearsed the line about the bottle of milk for mother. He had been told that if the cops picked him up they’d have nothing on him. If someone did get killed, at worst it would be was manslaughter, 1 to 14 years. 

Experienced members of the gang told Lefty this. He believed them, in the same way some people today believe the prophets of the internet.

By the time Lefty had seen a judge, the illusion was over. “I knew I’d never get to be 21 anyhow,” he muttered.

Algren put a lot in this story: how upper-class Polish-Americans, some of whom are senior police officials, viewed lower-class Polish-Americans in Chicago during The Depression; how the Polish viewed the Irish and vice versa; and how neighborhoods that didn’t offer a lot of opportunities were habitats for characters with names like Dropkick, Bibleback, Cowboy and Catfoot.

But Algren really gets to this: how bad information is absorbed in vacuous societies and how people act confidently on it.

After reading Algren's short masterpiece, I kept thinking of a line from Bertrand Russell: "What philosophy should dissipate is certainty."