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Authors: Charles Bukowski,David Stephen Calonne

More Notes of a Dirty Old Man (8 page)

BOOK: More Notes of a Dirty Old Man
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15) What are you reading now? What are your reading habits?
I’m not reading anything. Well, I write my own things and I read them. I suppose that’s a habit.
16) If you were suddenly to become wealthy, how would your life change?
I would become wiser, more profound and more lovely.
17) Do you have any children?
I have a girl aged 7. She’s all right.
 
I mailed the questions and answers in and I didn’t expect much but I got, in the return mail, a letter from Jack M—
Dear Buk:
All right! That was good medicine (your response to my questions). I don’t think it’ll be right for the REVIEW, though. That isn’t what I had in mind, and my questions didn’t lead into the sort of literary (prosodic & technical) matters that we like for our Interviews with Poets series. (These would have been questions about your sense of the line, your opinion of other poets—specifically, and other matters that I suspect you might consider pure crap.)
Anyway, I’ve forwarded the interview thing to the editors, and they’ll of course give it the eye. (One other thing: we’re filled up with interviews already, through next year.)
My reason was, as I explained, to get information for my own article on you and your work—something that I can peddle elsewhere. I’ve already written this article, and I think it’s a dandy. When it comes out, wherever that is, it’ll help you somewhat, surely . . . but of course, my motive isn’t altruistic—I simply like your poems a great deal, and think they should be better known than they are.
Enough of that. Now I WOULD like to ask you, specifically and formally, to send us some poems for the ****REVIEW. We pay something like $10.00 to $15.00 a poem.
I’ve ordered HUMMINGBIRD and have read the broadsheet sent out by Black Sparrow Press.
Did I tell you that I enjoyed my brief visit there? I did, and indeed, as you’ll guess when you read the essay that came of it.
Cheers,
Jack M—
 
Dear Jack M—;
Well, & ( ) (therefore) &
(do you understand)?
(your visit was hardly wasted)
(at this end) (either) &
Cheers to you,
Charlie B.
 
 
Pete was 13, a difficult age they say, but any age is, and Pete had parents of German extraction, strict, very. “A child should be seen and not heard,” was one of their dictums, and that was all right with Pete. He disliked his parents immensely. His father beat him regularly with a razor strop for minor infractions of rules while his mother stood by and said, “The father is always right.”
At times, at night, sometimes when his parents were fucking, Pete would be thinking, alone in his bedroom, “These can’t be my parents. I must have been adopted. I must have been kidnapped.”
Actually Pete had been the reason for the marriage. His father had gotten his mother pregnant and the old man had always held the marriage against him, but Pete thought, with some repugnance, that
he
hadn’t stuck that thing in there. And he thought, with further repugnance, can it be that I was once partly jissom in that man’s cock? The thought sickened him.
Pete had to mow the lawn twice a week, front and back, once in one direction and once in another each time. In other words he mowed the lawn over
four
times a week, trimmed the edges and watered. The neighbors remarked what a nice lawn his parents had.
It was after his lawn-mowing sessions that his father would get down on the grass and “inspect for hairs.” His father would put his eye level to the grass and if he found one grassblade standing taller than the others that was the reason for a razor stropping in the bathroom. And his father would always find a hair. “Ah, I see it! A hair!” And his mother would come to the back window and say, “Your father found a hair, you bad boy!” And Pete would walk to the bathroom where his father would be waiting, sitting on the edge of the tub, strop ready, his face working into a red fury.
After the age of 12 Pete no longer screamed when he was whipped; it was an admission of pain and he didn’t want to admit pain to his father, he refused. The beatings became so brutal that he was unable to sit on an ordinary chair for dinner, he had to sit on two pillows and listen to his father recount the day at work, which was always very similar:
“I told that son of a bitch Cranston off today. He let his station go unnoticed while he talked to this blonde. It must have gone on for 20 minutes. I walked over and told him, ‘Listen, Cranston, your job isn’t to talk to blondes, it’s to guard the museum facilities. You straighten out or I’ll report you to Mr. Henderson!’ Then I walked off. That blonde got out of there.
“Cranston kept giving me dirty looks all day. You know, they robbed his area two weeks ago, got right under a glass case while he was there and lifted out all the coins. They dated way back, must have been worth three or four thousand dollars. Why they dug those coins out of there while his ass was turned. He’s asleep on his feet.
“Also I put a suggestion in the suggestion box—that those World War I planes be taken out of the cellar and put on a higher floor. There’s a dampness down there and the dampness causes a mildew that is beginning to eat into the fabric of the planes. They need a drier area . . .”
His father talked for hours about the job, he only talked about his job. He went to bed at 8 p.m. every night so that he would be “fresh and ready for the job.” That meant lights out for everybody else and bed. But his father always talked on about the job and his mother would answer, “Oh, yes. Oh, yes, I think you’re right. Oh, I’m glad you told him! He said
that
? And what did you say?”
The only thing that interrupted them was their once-a-week fuck and Pete would have to listen to the bed squeaking, the walls being thin. Pete would envision his father mounted, going through the motions, and it would sicken him, that he belonged to these people, that there wasn’t any escape . . . wouldn’t be, for years.
It was after this particular night, after a stropping for missing a “hair,” and after listening to their automatic lovemaking that he had a dream. His mother and his father were sitting in the breakfast nook eating their dinner when a huge spider, blackish-brown, with most powerful fangs and two large yellow-green eyes walked into the breakfast nook. The spider was a good three feet in circumference, very hairy and gave off the odor of distant blood. While his father was talking about the job the spider got up on the ceiling, then dropped down on a single thread of its web and began to spin a net about his mother. His father failed to notice. When the spider had his mother completely in his web he moved down and sunk his fangs into her breasts, then lifted her high into his web and left her dangling above the table. Then the spider simply leaped from his web, grabbed his father with his spider legs and sunk his fangs home. The spider then lifted his father from the chair to the table and sat there above him, sucking the blood from his body.
Pete awakened then. He walked down the hall and looked into his parents’ bedroom. They were each asleep in their twin beds. He went back to bed and slept and had no further dreams that he could remember.
The next day was Monday and a day, finally, of no duties. Pete stayed after school and got into a baseball game. He didn’t get much practice but he was a good athlete. He got a homer and a triple and made three great catches in the outfield. Then he went home. When he got there his mother was angry. “Go to your bedroom. Your father will talk to you when he gets home.”
An hour later he heard his mother talking to his father. Then his father entered the bedroom and closed the door.
His father had a different look on his face than he had ever seen before, more furious, more brutal, less understanding. Pete sat on the bed and waited. His father sat on a chair, facing him.
“Peter.”
“Yes?”
“What have you been doing?”
“Playing baseball.”
“What have you
really
been doing, Peter?”
“I don’t understand.”
“
You
understand.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You son of a bitch, I’ll kill you! You ever do that again and I’ll kill you!”
“What? Do what?”
“Here! Your mother showed me
these
! Look! Look!”
His father showed him a pair of pajama pants, the ones Pete had slept in last night. Pete still didn’t understand.
“Look! Look!” His father pointed to a place on the pajamas on the upper front. There was a small and faded spot of blood.
“What have you been doing, Peter?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, if you ever do that again, I’ll kill you!”
His father got up from his chair, walked to the door, slammed it violently and then Pete was alone. He looked down at the blood spot on the pajamas. Then he realized that the pajama pants were an old pair of his father’s. And that the blood spot was an old one that had failed to wash out properly. He sat there slightly amazed. They had conceived the blood spot to be something evil when actually it had been put there by his father or his mother. But what had they thought it had meant? Did they think that one bled during masturbation? It must have been their thought. For the first time he began to believe that his parents were crazy, or if not crazy, then ignorant beyond belief.
He was made to go without dinner that night and the next morning over breakfast they neither spoke to him or looked at him. After his father had gone to work his mother did mention that God might forgive him if he were good and repented for the rest of his life . . .
That night, after dinner, Pete was made to go immediately to his room and to bed. He turned out the lights and listened to his father talking about the job. God. His mother and God. His father and God. They believed in God. Is that what happened to people who believed in God? His mind flattened and turned, drifted. He slept and awakened. He still heard the voices of his parents.
Then Pete spoke: “God, you have given me such parents! How can You give me such parents? What type of God are you? God, I hate you! If You come down here in this room, God, I’ll punch you right in the nose!”
It seemed to Pete that he slept again then. When he awakened there appeared to be a figure looking at him over his knees. Pete’s legs were bent, the knees and blankets forming a small hill over which the figure peered back at him. The figure appeared dressed in black, all black, hooded, with a peaked cap similar to those worn by the Ku Klux Klan.
Pete was frightened, he looked back in disbelief. Could that be God? That hooded figure? Was God evil? The figure remained and remained and remained, looking at him. It must have stayed ten minutes, fifteen minutes, then it vanished.
Pete gathered himself and turned on the light. He kept wondering about the figure. He walked over to his dresser, opened the top drawer and took out the small box his grandmother had given him. She called it The Answer Box. Whenever you wanted to know anything you asked a question to God and He answered through The Answer Box. The box contained little scrolls of paper rolled up and set next to each other. There were many tiny rolls.
Pete asked the question. What happened then... ? He reached in and pulled out one of the rolls, unrolled it and read: “God has forsaken you.” He rolled up the paper, placed in back in the box, put the box back in the drawer and then went to bed.
He could still hear his parents talking in the breakfast nook. Then Pete got up and opened the dresser drawer again. He took The Answer Box out again and unrolled the little slips one by one. He couldn’t find the slip that had said “God has forsaken you.” He put all the slips back, closed the box and returned it to the drawer. He could no longer hear his parents talking. It was unusual.
Pete slowly opened his bedroom door and listened. The light was on in the breakfast nook but there was no sound. He walked down the hall in his pajamas and his bare feet. He walked into the kitchen. Still there was no sound. Then he walked into the breakfast nook.
BOOK: More Notes of a Dirty Old Man
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