Charles Bukowski

he hooked to the body hard took it well and loved to fight had seven in a row and a small fleck over one eye, and then he met a kid from Camden with arms thin as wires— it was a good one, the safe lions roared and threw money; they were both up and down many times, but he lost that one and he lost the rematch in which neither of them fought at all, hanging on to each other like lovers through the boos, and now he’s over at Mike’s changing tires and oil and batteries, the fleck over the eye still young, but you don’t ask him, you don’t ask him anything except maybe you think it’s going to rain? or you think the sun’s gonna come out? to which he’ll usually answer hell no, but you’ll have your important tank of gas and drive off.

the weather is hot on the back of my watch which is down at Finkelstein’s who is gifted with 3 balls but no heart, but you’ve got to understand when the bull goes down on the whore, the heart is laid aside for something else, and let’s not over-rate the obvious decency for in a crap game you may be cutting down some wobbly king of 6 kids and a hemorrhoid butt on his last unemployment check, and who is to say the rose is greater than the thorn? not I, Henry, and when your love gets flabby knees and prefers flat shoes, maybe you should have stuck it into something else like an oil well or a herd of cows. I’m too old to argue, I’ve gone with the poem and been k.o.’d with the old sucker-punch round after round, but sometimes I like to think of the Kaiser or any other fool full of medals and nothing else, or the first time we read Dos or Eliot with his trousers rolled; the weather is hot on the back of my watch which is down at Finkelstein’s, but you know what they say: things are tough all over, and I remember once on the bum in Texas I watched a crow-blast, one hundred farmers with one hundred shotguns jerking off the sky with a giant penis of hate and the crows came down half-dead, half-living, and they clubbed them to death to save their shells but they ran out of shells before they ran out of crows and the crows came back and walked around the pellets and stuck out their tongues and mourned their dead and elected new leaders and then all at once flew home to fuck to fill the gap. you can only kill what shouldn’t be there. and Finkelstein should be there and my watch and maybe myself, and I realize that if the poems are bad they are supposed to be bad and if they are good they are likewise supposed to be—although there is a minor fight to be fought, but still I am sad because I was in this small town somewhere in the badlands, way off course, not even wanting to be there, two dollars in my wallet, and a farmer turned to me and asked me what time it was and I wouldn’t tell him, and later they gathered them up for burning as if they were no better than dung with feathers, feathers and a little gasoline, and from the bottom of one pile a not-quite-dead crow smiled at me. it was 4:35 p.m.

man, he said, sitting on the steps your car sure needs a wash and wax job I can do it for you for 5 bucks, I got the wax, I got the rags, I got everything I need. I gave him the 5 and went upstairs. when I came down 4 hours later he was sitting on the steps drunk and offered me a can of beer. he said he’d get the car the next day. the next day he got drunk again and I loaned him a dollar for a bottle of wine. his name was Mike a world war II veteran. his wife worked as a nurse. the next day I came down and he was sitting on the steps and he said, you know, I been sitting here looking at your car, wondering just how I was gonna do it, I wanna do it real good. the next day Mike said it looked like rain and it sure as hell wouldn’t make any sense to wash and wax a car when it was gonna rain. the next day it looked like rain again. and the next. then I didn’t see him anymore. a week later I saw his wife and she said, they took Mike to the hospital, he’s all swelled-up, they say it’s from the drinking. listen, I told her, he said he was going to wax my car, I gave him 5 dollars to wax my car. he’s in the critical ward, she said, he might die . . . I was sitting in their kitchen drinking with his wife when the phone rang. she handed the phone to me. it was Mike. listen, he said, come down and get me, I can’t stand this place. I drove on down there, walked into the hospital, walked up to his bed and said, let’s go Mike. they wouldn’t give him his clothes so Mike walked to the elevator in his gown. we got on and there was a kid driving the elevator and eating a popsicle. nobody’s allowed to leave here in a gown, he said. you just drive this thing, kid, I said, we’ll worry about the gown. Mike was all puffed-up, triple size but I got him into the car somehow and gave him a cigarette. I stopped at the liquor store for 2 six packs then went on in. I drank with Mike and his wife until 11 p.m. then went upstairs . . . where’s Mike? I asked his wife 3 days later, you know he said he was going to wax my car. Mike died, she said, he’s gone. you mean he died? I asked. yes, he died, she said. I’m sorry, I said, I’m very sorry it rained for a week after that and I figured the only way I’d get the 5 back was to go to bed with his wife but you know she moved out 2 weeks later an old guy with white hair moved in there and he had one blind eye and played the French Horn. there was no way I could make it with him.

there was a frozen tree that I wanted to paint but the shells came down and in Vegas looking across at a green sunshade at 3:30 in the morning, I died without nails, without a copy of the Atlantic Monthly, the windows screamed like doves moaning the bombing of Milan and I went out to live with the rats but the lights were too bright and I thought maybe I'd better go back and sit in a poetry class: a marvelous description of a gazelle is hell; the cross sits like a fly on my window, my mother’s breath stirs small leaves in my mind; and I hitch-hiked back to L.A. through hangover clouds and I pulled a letter from my pocket and read it and the truckdriver said, what’s that? and I said, there's some gal up North who used to sleep with Pound, she's trying to tell me that H.D. was our greatest scribe; well, Hilda gave us a few pink Grecian gods in with the chinaware, but after reading her I still have 140 icicles hanging from my bones. I'm not going all the way to L.A., the truckdriver said. it's all right, I said, the calla lilies nod to our minds and someday we’ll all go home together. in fact, he said, this is as far as we go. so I let him have it; old withered whore of time your breasts taste the sour cream of dreaming . . . he let me out in the middle of the desert; to die is to die is to die, old phonographs in cellars, joe di maggio, magazines in with the onions . . . an old Ford picked me up 45 minutes later and, this time, I kept my mouth shut.

I got in the shower and burned my balls last Wednesday. met this painter called Spain, no, he was a cartoonist, well, I met him at a party and everybody got mad at me because I didn’t know who he was or what he did. he was rather a handsome guy and I guess he was jealous because I was so ugly. they told me his name and he was leaning against the wall looking handsome, and I said: hey, Spain, I like that name: Spain. but I don’t like you. why don’t we step out in the garden and I’ll kick the shit out of your ass? this made the hostess angry and she walked over and rubbed his pecker while I went to the crapper and heaved. but everybody's angry at me. Bukowski, he can’t write, he’s had it. washed-up. look at him drink. he never used to come to parties. now he comes to parties and drinks everything up and insults real talent. I used to admire him when he cut his wrists and when he tried to kill himself with gas. look at him now leering at that 19 year old girl, and you know he can’t get it up. I not only burnt my balls in that shower last Wednesday, I spun around to get out of the burning water and burnt my bunghole too.

of course, I may die in the next ten minutes and I’m ready for that but what I’m really worried about is that my editor-publisher might retire even though he is ten years younger than I. it was just 25 years ago (I was at that ripe old age of 45) when we began our unholy alliance to test the literary waters, neither of us being much known. I think we had some luck and still have some of same yet the odds are pretty fair that he will opt for warm and pleasant afternoons in the garden long before I. writing is its own intoxication while publishing and editing, attempting to collect bills carries its own attrition which also includes dealing with the petty bitchings and demands of many so-called genius darlings who are not. I won’t blame him for getting out and hope he sends me photos of his Rose Lane, his Gardenia Avenue. will I have to seek other promulgators? that fellow in the Russian fur hat? or that beast in the East with all that hair in his ears, with those wet and greasy lips? or will my editor-publisher upon exiting for that world of Trollius and trellis hand over the machinery of his former trade to a cousin, a daughter or some Poundian from Big Sur? or will he just pass the legacy on to the Shipping Clerk who will rise like Lazarus, fingering new-found importance? one can imagine terrible things: “Mr. Chinaski, all your work must now be submitted in Rondo form and typed triple-spaced on rice paper.” power corrupts, life aborts and all you have left is a bunch of warts. “no, no, Mr. Chinaski: Rondo form!” “hey, man,” I’ll ask, “haven’t you heard of the thirties?” “the thirties? what’s that?” my present editor-publisher and I at times did discuss the thirties, the Depression and some of the little tricks it taught us— like how to endure on almost nothing and move forward anyhow. well, John, if it happens enjoy your divertissement to plant husbandry, cultivate and aerate between bushes, water only in the early morning, spread shredding to discourage weed growth and as I do in my writing: use plenty of manure. and thank you for locating me there at 5124 DeLongpre Avenue somewhere between alcoholism and madness. together we laid down the gauntlet and there are takers even at this late date still to be found as the fire sings through the trees.

here they come these guys grey truck radio playing they are in a hurry it’s quite exciting: shirt open bellies hanging out they run out the trash bins roll them out to the fork lift and then the truck grinds it upward with far too much sound . . . they had to fill out application forms to get these jobs they are paying for homes and drive late model cars they get drunk on Saturday night now in the Los Angeles sunshine they run back and forth with their trash bins all that trash goes somewhere and they shout to each other then they are all up in the truck driving west toward the sea none of them know that I am alive REX DISPOSAL CO.

O lord, he said, Japanese women, real women, they have not forgotten, bowing and smiling closing the wounds men have made; but American women will kill you like they tear a lampshade, American women care less than a dime, they’ve gotten derailed, they’re too nervous to make good: always scowling, belly-aching, disillusioned, overwrought; but oh lord, say, the Japanese women: there was this one, I came home and the door was locked and when I broke in she broke out the bread knife and chased me under the bed and her sister came and they kept me under that bed for two days, and when I came out, at last, she didn’t mention attorneys, just said, you will never wrong me again, and I didn’t; but she died on me, and dying, said, you can wrong me now, and I did, but you know, I felt worse then than when she was living; there was no voice, no knife, nothing but little Japanese prints on the wall, all those tiny people sitting by red rivers with flying green birds, and I took them down and put them face down in a drawer with my shirts, and it was the first time I realized that she was dead, even though I buried her; and some day I’ll take them all out again, all the tan-faced little people sitting happily by their bridges and huts and mountains— but not right now, not just yet.

this South American up here on a Gugg walked in with his whore and she sat on the edge of my bed and crossed her fine legs and I kept looking at her legs and he pulled at his stringy necktie and I had a hangover and he asked me WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE AMERICAN POETS? and I told him I didn’t think very much of the American poets and then he went on to ask some other very dull questions (as his whore’s legs layed along the side of my brain) like WELL? YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT ANYTHING BUT IF YOU WERE TEACHING A CLASS AND ONE OF THE STUDENTS ASKED YOU WHICH AMERICAN POETS THEY SHOULD READ WHAT WOULD YOU TELL THEM? she crossed her legs as I watched and I thought I could knock him out with one punch rape her in 4 minutes catch a train for L.A. get off in Arizona and walk off into the desert and I couldn’t tell him that I would never teach a class that along with not liking American poetry that I didn’t like American classes either or the job that they would expect me to do, so I said Whitman, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence’ poems about reptiles and beasts, Auden. and then I realized that Whitman was the only true American, that Eliot was not an American somehow and the others certainly not, and he knew it too he knew that I had fucked up but I made no apologies thought some more about rape I almost loved the woman but I knew that when she walked out that I would never see her again and we shook hands and the Gugg said he’d send me the article when it came out but I knew that he didn’t have an article and he knew it too and then he said I will send you some of my poems translated into English and I said fine and I watched them walk out of the place I watched her highheels clack down the tall green steps and then both of them were gone but I kept remembering her dress sliding all over her like a second skin and I was wild with mourning and love and sadness and being a fool unable to communicate anything and I walked in and finished that beer cracked another put on my ragged king’s coat and walked out into the New Orleans street and that very night I sat with my friends and acted vile and the ass much mouth and villainy and cruelness and they never knew why.

30 dogs, 20 men on 20 horses and one fox and look here, they write, you are a dupe for the state, the church, you are in the ego-dream, read your history, study the monetary system, note that the racial war is 23,000 years old. well, I remember 20 years ago, sitting with an old Jewish tailor, his nose in the lamplight like a cannon sighted on the enemy; and there was an Italian pharmacist who lived in an expensive apartment in the best part of town; we plotted to overthrow a tottering dynasty, the tailor sewing buttons on a vest, the Italian poking his cigar in my eye, lighting me up, a tottering dynasty myself, always drunk as possible, well-read, starving, depressed, but actually a good young piece of ass would have solved all my rancor, but I didn’t know this; I listened to my Italian and my Jew and I went out down dark alleys smoking borrowed cigarettes and watching the backs of houses come down in flames, but somewhere we missed: we were not men enough, large or small enough, or we only wanted to talk or we were bored, so the anarchy fell through, and the Jew died and the Italian grew angry because I stayed with his wife when he went down to the pharmacy; he did not care to have his personal government overthrown, and she overthrew easy, and I had some guilt: the children were asleep in the other bedroom but later I won $200 in a crap game and took a bus to New Orleans and I stood on the corner listening to the music coming from bars and then I went inside to the bars, and I sat there thinking about the dead Jew, how all he did was sew on buttons and talk, and how he gave way although he was stronger than any of us he gave way because his bladder would not go on, and maybe that saved Wall Street and Manhattan and the Church and Central Park West and Rome and the Left Bank, but the pharmacist’s wife, she was nice, she was tired of bombs under the pillow and hissing the Pope, and she had a very nice figure, very good legs, but I guess she felt as I: that the weakness was not Government but Man, one at a time, that men were never as strong as their ideas and that ideas were governments turned into men; and so it began on a couch with a spilled martini and it ended in the bedroom: desire, revolution, nonsense ended, and the shades rattled in the wind, rattled like sabers, cracked like cannon, and 30 dogs, 20 men on 20 horses chased one fox across the fields under the sun, and I got out of bed and yawned and scratched my belly and knew that soon      very soon      I would have to get very drunk      again.