Read What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire Online
Authors: Charles Bukowski
my father caught the baby mice
they were still alive and he
flung them into the flaming
incinerator
one by one.
the flames leaped out
and I wanted to throw my father
in there
but my being 10 years old
made that
impossible.
“o.k., they're dead,” he told me,
“I killed the bastards!”
“you didn't have to do that,”
I said.
“do you want them running
all over the house?
they leave droppings, they
bring disease!
what would you do with
them?”
“I'd make pets out of
them.”
“pets!
what the hell's wrong with
you anyhow?”
the flame in the incinerator
was dying down.
it was all too late.
it was over.
my father had won
again.
in the sun and in the rain
and in the day and in the night
pain is a flower
pain is flowers
blooming all the time.
the 3 of us were somewhere
between 9 and 10 years old
and we would gather in the bushes
alongside the driveway about 9:30
p.m. and look under the shade
and through the curtains at Mrs. Curson's
crossed legsâalways
one foot wiggling, such a fine
thin ankle!
and she usually had her skirt
above the knee
(actually above the knee!)
and then above the garter that
held the hose sometimes we could see
a glimpse of her white thigh.
how we looked and breathed and
dreamed about those perfect
white thighs!
suddenly Mr. Curson would
get up from his chair to
let the dog out and
we'd start running through strange yards
climbing 5 foot lattice fences,
falling, getting up, running for
blocks
finally getting brave again and
stopping at some hamburger stand
for a coke.
I'm sure that Mrs. Curson never
realized what her legs and white
thighs did for us
then.
if you gotta have wars
I suppose World War One was the best.
really, you know, both sides were much more enthusiastic,
they really had something to fight for,
they really thought they had something to fight for,
it was bloody and wrong but it was Romantic,
those dirty Germans with babies stuck on the ends of their
bayonets, and so forth, and
there were lots of patriotic songs, and the women loved
both
 the soldiers
and their money.
the Mexican war and those other wars hardly ever happened.
and the Civil War, that was just a movie.
the wars come too fast now
even the pro-war boys grow weary,
World War Two did them in,
and then Korea, that Korea,
that was dirty, nobody won
except the black marketeers,
and BAM!âthen came Vietnam,
I suppose the historians will have a name and a meaning for it,
but the young wised-up first
and now the old are getting wise,
almost everybody's anti-war,
no use having a war you can't win,
right or wrong.
hell, I remember when I was a kid it
was ten or 15 years after World War One was over,
we built model planes of Spads and Fokkers,
we bought
Flying Aces
magazine at the newsstand
we knew about Baron Manfred von Richtofen
and Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker
and we fought in dream trenches with our dream rifles
and had dream
bayonet fights with the dirty
Hunâ¦
and those movies, full of drama and excitement,
about good old World War One, where
we almost got the Kaiser, we almost kidnapped him
once,
and in the end
we finished off all those spike-helmeted bastards
forever.
the young kids now, they don't build model warplanes
nor do they dream fight in dream rice paddies,
they know it's all useless, ordinary,
just a job like
sweeping the streets or picking up the garbage,
they'd rather go watch a Western or hang out at the
mall or go to the zoo or a football game, they're
already thinking of college and automobiles and wives
and homes and barbecues, they're already trapped
in another kind of dream, another kind of war,
and I guess it won't kill them as fast, at least not
physically.
it was wrong but World War One was fun for us
it gave us Jean Harlow and James Cagney
and “Mademoiselle from Armentières, Parley-Voo?”
it gave us
long afternoons and evenings of play
(we didn't realize that many of us were soon to die in another war)
yes, they fooled us nicely but we were young and loved itâ
the lies of our eldersâ
and see how it has changedâ
they can't bullshit
even a kid anymore,
not about all that.
I came home from grammar school
one day
and my mother was sitting,
crying
there was a woman there with a large nose
and my father was there.
my mother said, “come here.”
I walked over and she said,
“do you love me?”
I wasn't quite sure but I told her,
“yes.”
then my father said to me,
“get the hell out of here.” and my mother
said, “no, Henry, stay.”
“I'll kill you,” I told my father.
“oh, christ,” said the woman with the big nose,
“I'm getting out of here!”
“who do you love?” my mother asked my father.
my father began crying,
“I love you both,”
he said.
“I'll kill you,”
I told him again.
the woman with the big nose grabbed her
purse and ran from the house.
“Edna! wait!” screamed my father.
he ran out of the house after her.
I ran out too.
Edna got into my father's car and
began to drive it down the
street. she had the
keys. my father ran after the
car. he managed to reach in and
grab Edna's purse. but Edna
drove off
anyhow.
back in the house
my mother said to me:
“he says he loves her. did you see her
nose, Henry?”
“yes, I saw it.”
“christ,” said my father, “get that kid
out
of
here!”
“I'll kill you!” I told him.
he rushed toward me.
I didn't see the blow.
my ear and face burned, I was on the
floorâ
and inside my head
a flash of red
and a ringing sound.
it cleared. I got up and rushed at him,
swinging. I couldn't
kill him.
a month later
somebody broke his arm in a fight
and it made me
very happy.
my mother, father and I
walked to the market
once a week
for our government relief food:
cans of beans, cans of
weenies, cans of hash,
some potatoes, some
eggs.
we carried the supplies
in large shopping
bags.
and as we left the market
we always stopped
outside
where there was a large
window
where we could see the
bakers
kneading
the flour into the
dough.
there were 5 bakers,
large young men
and they stood at
5 large wooden tables
working very hard,
not looking up.
they flipped the dough in
the air
and all the sizes and
designs were
different.
we were always hungry
and the sight of the men
working the dough,
flipping it in the
air was a wondrous
sight, indeed.
but then, it would come time
to leave
and we would walk away
carrying our heavy
shopping bags.
“those men have jobs,”
my father would say.
he said it each time.
every time we watched
the bakers he would say
that.
“I think I've found a new way
to make the hash,”
my mother would say
each time.
or sometimes it was
the weenies.
we ate the eggs all
different ways:
fried, poached, boiled.
one of our favorites was
poached eggs on hash.
but that favorite finally
became almost impossible
to eat.
and the potatoes, we fried
them, baked them, boiled
them.
but the potatoes had a way
of not becoming as tiresome
as the hash, the eggs, the
beans.
one day, arriving home,
we placed all our foodstuffs
on the kitchen counter and
stared at them.
then we turned away.
“I'm going to hold up a
bank!” my father suddenly
said.
“oh no, Henry, please!”
said my mother,
“please don't!”
“we're going to eat some
steak, we're going to eat
steaks until they come out
of our ears!”
“but Henry, you don't have
a gun!”
“I'll hold something in my
coat, I'll pretend it's a gun!”
“I've got a water pistol,”
I said, “you can use that.”
my father looked at me.
“you,” he said, “SHUT UP!”
I walked outside.
I sat on the back steps.
I could hear them in there
talking but I couldn't quite make it
out.
then I could hear them again, it was
louder.
“I'll find a new way to cook every-
thing!” my mother said.
“I'm going to rob a god-damned
bank!” my father said.
“Henry,
please, please
don't!”
I heard my mother.
I got up from the steps.
walked away into the
afternoon.
all people start to
come apart finally
and there it is:
just empty ashtrays in a room
or wisps of hair on a comb
in the dissolving moonlight.
it is all ash
and dry leaves
and grief gone
like an ocean liner.
when the shoes fill with blood
you know
that the shoes are dead.
true revolution
comes from true revulsion;
when things get bad enough
the kitten will kill the lion.
the statues in the church of my childhood
and the candles that burn at their feet
if I could only take these
and open their eyes
and feel their legs
and hear their clay mouths
say the true
clay
words.
down in New Orleans
this young pretty girl
showed me a room for rent and
it was dark in there and we stood
very close
and as we stood there
she said,
“the room is $4.50 a week.”
and I said,
“I usually pay $3.50.”
as we stood there in the dark
I decided to pay her $4.50 because
maybe I'd see her in the hall once in a
while
and I could not understand then why
women had to be like she was
they always waited for you
to give a sign
to make the first move
or not to make the first move
and I said,
“I'll take the room,” and I gave her
the money
although I could see that
the sheets were dirty and the bed
wasn't made
but I was young and a virgin,
frightened and
confused
and I gave her the money
and she closed the door behind her
and there was no toilet and no sink
and no window.
the room was damp with suicide and death
and I undressed and lay down on the bed
and I lived there a week
and I saw many other people in the hall
old drunks
people on relief
crazy people
good young people
dull old people
but I never saw her again.
finally
I moved around the corner
to a new place
for $3.50 a week
run by another female
a 75-year-old religious maniac
with bad eyes and a limp
and we didn't have any trouble
at all
and there was a sink
and a window
in the room.