More Notes of a Dirty Old Man (5 page)
Read More Notes of a Dirty Old Man Online
Authors: Charles Bukowski,David Stephen Calonne
“Jackie,” she said, “he beat everybody. But the champs wouldn’t get into the ring with him. He was too good. And he never trained. All he did was drink. That was his training. But they locked him out. The championship went from one man to another. He blew all his purses. Bought drinks all up and down the bar, all up and down the street. He loaned money and they never paid him back. He died one night fast, just died in bed. He just let out this loud moan and died. Everybody was at his funeral, everybody. He was such a great man.”
The tears were rolling.
I was finally quite drunk. “What the hell,” I said, “he can’t do you any good in the grave! He can’t fuck you from the grave. I can lay it to you. I’m right here! I can shove you ten inches!”
Then she really started to cry.
I lifted my drink: “Ten inches. Solid.”
Everybody started acting rather peculiar, so I took my bottle and went to the place they said was going to be my bedroom, stripped down to my shorts, and sat there drinking from my pint.
“Hey,” I screamed, “you sons of bitches rolled me! Which one of you rolled me?”
I kept screaming for my money until I found I had hidden it under the pillow. Then I had another drink, crawled into bed and went to sleep. Shirley was frightened of me and didn’t want to let me stay but the great editor said I was all right—long train ride, too much to drink. When they told me the scene the next day I didn’t remember any of it. Shirley owned an eating place in the French Quarter. When she went to work I went out and bought two dozen red roses and put them on the kitchen table. She kept those roses until they fell to pieces. And she kept the card. And pressed one rose in a book.
Meanwhile, the old man had me signing pages. 3500 pages to make sure that we got 3000 good ones. I had to sign them with a silver pen, mostly, and various different colored pens, a kind of thick ink paint. It was slow. It took each page 8 minutes to dry. I had pages spread all over the bed and on chairs and dressers. When Shirley got in from work, there I’d be, all covered with pages and drunk on beer. I got tired of straight signings. I’d sign my name, then say something, and then draw a picture, any kind of picture. This slowed up the process but it took the dullness out of it. Shirley wasn’t frightened of me anymore. On the beer, I was just mellow. She’d cook me a good dinner and then tell me about the store, the café.
“Jesus, I burned two pots of strawberries today, two whole pots! It was awful.”
“No shit.”
“Yeah. I was in the other room talking to a friend a mine and she said, ‘I smell something burning!’ and I ran into the kitchen and there were burned strawberries boiled over everywhere! God!”
“You oughta keep your mind on your business.”
“I like you Buke. You remind me of Jackie.”
“I can’t fight a lick.”
“No, I mean you don’t come on with a lot of phony talk the way most people do.”
After dinner I go back to the bedroom and sign more pages. Then around ten I’d take my beer into the kitchen and Shirley and I would watch television together until midnight, sometimes one or two a.m. All the time she was making these little dolls which she sold at her place. She was very good at it. And she made hats. The hats were good too. Very unusual.
“Business ain’t what it used to be. People don’t even carry money anymore. Everything is credit and travelers checks. I can barely make it. Want a little nip of whiskey?”
“O.K. Shirley, thanks.”
It was the same every night. I could lay around and play poet. I’d never have to leave. All I had to do was lay it into her. But she was so fat. So fat. I didn’t have the desire.
“Have another little nip.”
“O.K., Shirley, thanks.”
“Do you ever hear them people next door?”
“No.”
“Oh, that’s right, they’re on vacation. Wait until they get back. The minute he gets home he starts hollering at her, calling her a whore, all sorts of things. Then he beats her. Then he fucks the shit outa her. You can hear the whole walls shake.”
“Jesus.”
“Every night, the same thing.”
“Ummm, ummm. Well, Shirley, I have to go to bed now. See you tomorrow.”
“Sure, baby.”
Then I’d go to bed. Alone. About noon I’d go over and take the editor the pages I’d signed. When I finally got finished the stack of pages was 7 feet high. But I didn’t finish until my last night in town. Sometimes I’d drink over at the editors and tell them some bullshit stories. They liked them. The roaches ran up and down the walls and Bukowski was everywhere.
I met their fiction editor in a bar one night in the Quarter. They introduced me. He was deaf and dumb. We wrote messages on paper napkins all night. He came on good. We wrote messages on those napkins until I drank him under, then I made my way back to Shirley’s place. Another night, I am sitting in a bar with a guy at the piano playing and clowning, then he grabbed the mike and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have with us tonight, the poet, Charles Bukowski.”
I waved and the bastards applauded. I’m sure they never heard of me. Later, back in the crapper while taking a leak, some guy walked up to me.
“Are you the Charles Bukowski they announced up front?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, would you mind telling me where you have been published and when?”
“Fuck you, buddy!” I zipped up, washed my hands and walked out.
I never stuck it into Shirley. Night after night, I never. It looked like back to Los Angeles for me. At least in the Quarter I was a half-celebrity. Back in L.A. I was just another guy without money. Louise stood on a corner trying to sell paintings while the great editor rolled Bukowski off the press. And the roaches lazed in the sun. It was a quiet and easy time. I signed the last of the pages while drinking at their place and when I was done, we had a stack seven feet tall. 3500 Bukowski signatures and drawings. I had done it. The book was going to go for $7.50. CRUCIFIX IN A DEATHHAND. And how.
I said goodbye to Shirley the next day in her shop. She looked genuinely sad. The long t.v. nights of drinking while she made the dolls and hats in the kitchen were over. The good dinners were over. The easy New Orleans life was shot for me. I couldn’t stick it in. “I’ll never forget the roses and you,” she said. “I’ll write about you some day, Shirley,” I threatened her. I squeezed her hand and left her there with her boiling strawberries and some rich bitch trying on one of her 25 dollar hats that cost her a dollar to make. The rich bitch looked good, but she was for somebody else.
The great editor and his wife took me down to the train station. In the baggage room they had this long wooden partition. It looked like a bar. I hit the wood and hollered, “I wanna buy drinks for everybody in the house!”
Two young girls there started laughing.
“That was really funny,” one of them said.
Balls.
I packed into the train and the great editor and his wife waved to me through the window. I blew a kiss and the train pulled out. I broke the cellophane on the pint and had the first one. I’d find the barcar later. So here we were. Louisiana. And thinking of the long ride through Texas that broke your back. I found the barcar anyhow. I didn’t like trains, trapped in there with the people. It was sometime next day, sitting in the barcar, I seemed to hear a porter hollering “Charles Bukowski! Charles Bukowski!” Maybe I was going mad at last. He walked up to my table. “You must be Charles Bukowski,” he said.
“Yes. Poet, and lover,” I answered.
“Telegram, Mr. Bukowski.”
I gave him a quarter, opened the telegram.
“Dear Buke. We miss you terribly. Our world is not the same without you. Please be careful and take care of yourself.
love,
Jon and Lou Webb.”
I ordered a drink and looked out the picture window. “California here I come, right back where I started from . . .” The trainride was just one long drunk. Days later, dead and torn, I opened the cab door and got out. There was the old front court, my little girl saw me. “Hank! Hank!” I was hooked. I carried her inside. There was the woman.
“Well, how was it?”
“Hard to describe. I’m tired.”
“You go to bed, Hank,” said the little girl, “you go to bed.”
“First I gotta peepee.”
“O.K., you peepee, then you go to bed. When you wake up, we’ll play.”
“O.K.”
The woman made a bacon and egg sandwich. I laid in bed and read the L.A. Times and then I knew I was back. There were ten or fifteen letters. I read them. Everybody was lonely. Everybody was in agony. I threw the letters on the floor and in ten minutes I was asleep at 2 in the afternoon. Outside the cats played, the butterflies flew, the sun kept working. The party was over. Charles Bukowski was Hank again. Rent was needed. Food. Gasoline. Luck. CRUCIFIX IN A DEATHHAND. Finished.
It’s a world, it’s a world of potential suicides, well, I speak mostly of the United States, I don’t know the rest, but it’s a place of potential and actual suicides and hundreds and thousands of lonely women, women just aching for companionship, and then there are the men, going mad, masturbating, dreaming, hundreds and thousands of men going mad for sex or love or anything, and meanwhile, all these people, the love-lost, the sex-lost, the suicide-driven, they’re all working these dull soul-sucking jobs that twist their faces like rotten lemons and pinch their spirits, out, out, out . . . Somewhere in the structure of our society it is impossible for these people to contact each other. Churches, dances, parties only seem to push them further apart, and the dating clubs, the Computer Love Machines only destroy more and more a naturalness that should have been; a naturalness that has somehow been crushed and seems to remain crushed forever in our present method of living (dying). See them put on their bright clothes and get into their new cars and roar off to NOWHERE. It’s all an outside maneuver and the contact is missed.
The other night—at somebody else’s suggestion—we drove down Hollywood Boulevard. I have lived in Los Angeles, off and on, since 1922 and I don’t believe I have driven down Hollywood Boulevard more than half a dozen times (I am eaten by my own kind of madness). It was a Friday night and here they drove slowly, the street was jammed. The people in the cars were watching the people on the sidewalks and the people on the sidewalks were walking along looking in the closed store windows. Here and there was a movie house showing movies of people supposedly living. Further on were a few clubs and bars but nobody went in. Nobody was spending any money. Nobody was doing anything. They just watched and drove and walked. I suppose there was action enough somewhere, but hardly there and hardly for the masses. Here they worked all week on jobs they hated, and now given the slightest bit of leisure time they wasted it, they murdered it. It was more than I cared to have a lengthy view of. I turned off the boulevard, found Fountain Ave. and drove back toward Los Angeles.
I sit here playing writer each day and my typer faces the street. I live in a front court, and I don’t consciously work. Wait, that’s a mistake—I
do
consciously work—but I don’t consciously
watch
, but toward evening I see them coming in—walking and driving—most of them are young ladies who live alone in all these high rise apartments which surround me. Some of them are fairly attractive and most of them are well-dressed, but something has been beaten out of them. That 8-hour job of doing an obnoxious thing for their own survival and for somebody else’s profit had worked them over well.
do
consciously work—but I don’t consciously
watch
, but toward evening I see them coming in—walking and driving—most of them are young ladies who live alone in all these high rise apartments which surround me. Some of them are fairly attractive and most of them are well-dressed, but something has been beaten out of them. That 8-hour job of doing an obnoxious thing for their own survival and for somebody else’s profit had worked them over well.
These ladies immediately disappear into the high-rise walls, close the apartment door and vanish forever. From the cubicle of the job to the cubicle of resting and waiting to return to the job. The job is the center. The job is the sun. The job is the mother’s breast. To be jobless is the sin; to be lifeless doesn’t matter. Of course, one must consider their side—a job is money and to be moneyless is not comfortable. I know enough about this. And every person can’t be an artist; that is, a painter, a musician, a composer, a writer, whatever. Many lack the talent, many lack the courage; most lack both. Even artists can’t remain artists forever, especially good artists who can earn enough to survive within their craft. The talent goes, the courage goes, something goes. What’s left for the average person but an occupation that must, finally, kill the spirit? I am very sorry, for instance, for my own doctor. Now certainly here is a person who could afford a training that might put him into a profession more enlightening than a punch press operator. But I sit in his packed waiting room and see that he too is caught. He hustles his patients in and out, barely asking them what is wrong with them. He weighs them, gives them a pill and now and then sticks a snake up their ass. If something further goes wrong he might suggest a hospital, an operation. He must pay office rent, receptionist rent, and have a wife in his home, an acceptable doctor’s wife in an acceptable doctor’s home. His life is simply a durable hell. His children, too, might become doctors if he can educate them.
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