Read More Notes of a Dirty Old Man Online
Authors: Charles Bukowski,David Stephen Calonne
More Notes of a Dirty Old Man (23 page)
“You mean drink?”
“Yes.”
“That’s no answer! You’re copping out!”
She was right, of course.
I remember reading in the papers about this guy they found in the park. He’d been living in a cave there and coming out at night and living off the picnic scraps. They caught him. And took him off. And when I read that I thought, there but for the grace of the typewriter goes me. The keys are my solitude, my luck, my picnic scraps. Hate me but buy my books. And read the old philosophers on Solitude. And don’t write me, phone me, or write like me. And if you ever see me anywhere it isn’t me. Forget it.
People who call other people assholes generally are.
2When you’ve considered everything, you’ve considered too much.
3Human relationships do not work.
4Brilliant men are created out of desperate circumstances; fools are also.
5When you marry the woman you also marry her entire family.
6Most men who sleep late in the morning are a superior breed.
7Women are braver in situations they have to face alone; men tend to get braver in and before crowds.
8I have never met a nonimmaculate cat.
9The poets do the least to become known.
10Fame is too often the result of bad public taste; Immortality too often a matter of poor critical judgment.
11I’m often delighted when something terrible happens to me. It’s not so much a matter of masochism, it’s more a feeling of a balance come due; it has to happen, and since it does happen, one greets it with an oblique delight—feeling that after that better things are sure to follow???
12Keep your sunny-side up. Nobody wants to hear about the night your mother kicked your ass in the deli takeout parlor . . .
13All the women in my life have become the Reoccuring Woman: their complaints have been just as similar and just as realistic. So I judge them, in comparison, only upon the artistry of their head-jobs and their kitchen work, faithfulness and so forth. And when I line them up in this fashion I can’t come up with a winner. Just a loser: me.
14Whenever one of my women goes to another man in preference to me, I am thoroughly astonished, especially when I meet him in person. But all things are illusionary, including those dull, drab sons of bitches, so it’s all right, I suppose.
15Dostoevski was precisely passionate, but when he ended up with Christ in his lap I wrote him off as going the long way around to find what most idiots accepted in the beginning. Not that I didn’t find his journey vibrant. For this, I almost forgave him his final Error. Tolstoy, who ended up the same way, was simply dull throughout. Which I can’t forgive.
16Religion is not the Opium of the People. It’s a peanut-butter sandwich. On white bread.
17A whore is a woman who takes more than she gives. A man who takes more than he gives is called a businessman.
18When the agony of all the people is heard, nothing will be done.
19I am only a realist in certain areas. For instance, it discourages me that people have upper and lower intestines. As I watch people, I am conscious of these (and other) parts. I’m hexed. For instance, when a man says to me, “She’s really a beautiful woman,” I feel like answering, “I won’t know until I examine the healthiness of her excreta.”
20The best people are the ones you never meet.
21I much prefer it when a woman discards me. Then I am sure that the error is hers.
22I have met both the rich and the poor and have found them to be equally unnatural in their positions.
23There is a certain actress who must be nearing 70, at least, for I saw her in movies when I was a boy and I’m now 62. But she is photographed again and again as looking 32. It has gone on for decades. Marvelous, I think, young forever! And she is often photographed with her sisters, and they’ve all held on well. They are all photographed smiling together, heads always held upward to hide the neck lines. Marvelous, I think, we all need the dream.
24One of the most depressing places to be upon the earth is to be sitting in some Los Angeles café at 9:35 A.M. and having the waitress hand you the menu of various egg delicacies as her ankles are thin and her buttocks resigned, she has been used and abandoned by her men and she just wants the rent and a way to go, and then you look up and in a mellifluous voice full of victory and hope and understanding you order item #3, the cut-rate special.
25A criminal might be defined as one outnumbered by those who generally don’t do what he does except in secret or different ways.
26Check your ass for the shining candle.
27Of all the women who have claimed they have hated me I have believed all of them.
28It’s exactly as good as it’s ever going to get.
29Will Rogers once said, “I never met a man I didn’t like.” I never liked Will Rogers. But I liked his statement. I liked some men, temporarily. But somehow I didn’t like him. But he was probably luckier than I was and most probably a better man to be around. If you liked pussycats.
30One night Babe Ruth, who was one hell of a drinker, held Rabbit Maranville, the shortstop, out of the window of their 12th-floor hotel room by his heels.
“Go on, you fucker, drop me!” the Rabbit screamed in this story I read.
I like that story. It would have been a much better one if he had dropped him.
31One of the great things is when a Suicide meets a Suicide (it helps more when one is a man and the other a woman) over drinks and they talk about all the times they’ve botched their tries and they begin to laugh about that, and it’s really very funny because you really meant to do it. Now the radio is on, there’s a pack of cigarettes on the coffee table and the rug is upon the floor, and life is almost delightful, for a moment . . .
32That’s enough. See you in Dresden.
I was past midnight. The drinks had come, I never knew quite from where, and some cigarettes too. And the juke just blazed away. Hours of stale cigarette smoke had turned the air blue gray, and the flies and roaches were dulled and sickened and drunk, and the patrons too. It was a place no sensible being would ever want to be in, but not being a sensible being, there I was.
The urinal was impossible, walking in there you were hit by a deadly waft of a century of piss and puke. And nobody ever used the toilet, it was dark and caked and dry and there wasn’t any water in the tank. And the lid had long been gone, the tank lid, the toilet lid, and the whiskey and beer spiders had taken over, threading their webs in there, waiting for something.
I refocused on myself and found myself sitting next to this guy I had never seen before. He was in his mid-30s, wore this leather jacket. Maybe he had been buying me drinks. I didn’t know. Nobody else sat near us.
He had a pack of cigarettes near his drink. Pall Malls. I reached for his pack, got it, pulled a smoke out and lit up.
“Did I tell you you could have a cigarette?” he asked me.
“No.”
“Don’t go touching my cigarettes again!”
He pulled the Pall Malls back in front of him.
Everything was so weary. There was always somebody flexing up against you. They couldn’t bear up with the slightest joke, the tiniest confrontation. Everything was a challenge to them. They awakened angry every morning and they stayed that way. They didn’t want to lose and they didn’t know how to win. Constipated lives full of shit.
I reached over, pulled the Pall Malls back, took a cigarette out, broke it in half, threw it back into the ashtray.
He just sat there.
He sat there a long time.
He looked straight forward.
Then he spoke.
“Listen, I just got out of jail for aggravated assault! I don’t want to go back there again!”
“Don’t fuck with me then.” I told him.
We both sat there. It was a hot stupid night. We breathed in the gray blue smoke as the rich were out on their sailing ships or drugged to sleep. The trouble with life was that there were only tiny periods of action between all the vast spaces and the people just waited as Death sat on his red hot laughing ass.
“Just don’t fuck with me!” he repeated.
“Get yourself a hobbyhorse with a wooden asshole and you’ll feel better,” I said.
I could feel the anger ripping through him. I wasn’t lucky enough to have anger. With anger you could react, wrong or right. I just had a pale and tired disgust. He was drinking whiskey. I was at the bottom of a stale bottle of beer.
“Buy me a drink,” I said, “a whiskey.”
He motioned Tommy down.
“Two whiskeys.”
They arrived and I drained mine down. He drained his.
“Two more whiskeys,” he said to Tommy.
“It’s all right,” I told the guy, “I don’t want to overbum.”
“Drink up,” he said. “I’m getting ready to kick your ass.”
The whiskeys were before us.
“You mean if I drink this, you’re going to kick my ass?”
“Right.”
“You know I can’t turn down a drink?”
“I know.”
“It’s not fair,” I said. then reached down and got the whiskey, drained it.
He drained his.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Wait,” I said.
“What is it?”
“One more,” I said, “to dull the pain.”
“Two whiskeys,” he said to Tommy.
Other books
Stripped by H.M. Ward
Ask Eva by Judi Curtin
Effigy by Alissa York
Hearts Are Wild by Patrice Michelle, Cheyenne McCray, Nelissa Donovan
Tempt the Devil (The Devil of Ponong series #3) by Jill Braden
Cigar Bar by Dion Perkins
The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 by Antony Beevor
Kindling Flames: Flying Sparks (The Ancient Fire Series Book 2) by Julie Wetzel
Con Law by Mark Gimenez
A Promise to Cherish by Lavyrle Spencer
