Women (3 page)

“You don’t know anything about women, do you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I can tell by reading your poems and stories that you just don’t know anything about women.”

“Tell me more.”

“Well, I mean for a man to interest me he’s got to eat my pussy. Have you ever eaten pussy?”

“No.”

“You’re over 50 years old and you’ve never eaten pussy?”

“No.”

“It’s too late.”

“Why?”

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

“Sure you can.”

“No, it’s too late for you.”

“I’ve always been a slow starter.”

Lydia got up and walked into the other room. She came back with a pencil and a piece of paper. “Now, look, I want to show you something.” She began to draw on the paper. “Now, this is a cunt, and here is something you probably don’t know about—the clit. That’s where the feeling is. The clit hides, you see, it comes out now and then, it’s pink and very sensitive. Sometimes it will hide from you and you have to find it, you just touch it with the tip of your tongue. ...”

“O.K.,” I said, “I’ve got it.”

“I don’t think you can do it. I tell you, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

“Let’s take our clothes off and lay down.”

We undressed and stretched out. I began kissing Lydia. I dropped from the lips to the neck, then down to the breasts. Then I was down at the bellybutton. I moved lower.

“No you can’t,” she said. “Blood and pee come out of there, think of it, blood and pee. ...”

I got down there and began licking. She had drawn an accurate picture for me. Everything was where it was supposed to be. I heard her breathing heavily, then moaning. It excited me. I got a hard-on. The clit came out but it wasn’t exactly pink, it was purplish-pink. I teased the clit. Juices appeared and mixed with the cunt hairs. Lydia moaned and moaned. Then I heard the front door open and close. I heard footsteps. I looked up. A small black boy about 5 years old stood beside the bed.

“What the hell do you want?” I asked him.

“You got any empty bottles?” he asked me.

“No, I don’t have any empty bottles,” I told him.

He walked out of the bedroom, into the front room, out the front door and was gone.

“God,” said Lydia, “I thought the front door was locked. That was Bonnie’s little boy.”

Lydia got up and locked the front door. She came back and stretched out. It was about 4 pm on a Saturday afternoon.

I ducked back down.

6

Lydia liked parties. And Harry was a party-giver. So we were on our way to Harry Ascot’s. Harry was the editor of Retort, a little magazine. His wife wore long see-through dresses, showed her panties to the men, and went barefoot.

“The first thing I liked about you,” said Lydia, “was that you didn’t have a t.v. in your place. My ex-husband looked at t.v. every night and all through the weekend. We even had to arrange our lovemaking to fit the t.v. schedule.”

“Umm. . . .”

“Another thing I liked about your place was that it was filthy. Beer bottles all over the floor. Lots of trash everywhere. Dirty dishes, and a shit-ring in your toilet, and the crud in your bathtub. All those rusty razorblades laying around the bathroom sink. I knew that you would eat pussy.”

“You judge a man according to his surroundings, right?”

“Right. When I see a man with a tidy place I know there’s something wrong with him. And if it’s too tidy, he’s a fag.”

We drove up and got out. The apartment was upstairs. The music was loud. I rang the bell. Harry Ascot answered the door. He had a gentle and generous smile. “Come in,” he said.

The literary crowd was in there drinking wine and beer, talking, gathered in clusters. Lydia was excited. I looked around and sat down. Dinner was about to be served. Harry was a good fisherman, he was a better fisherman than he was a writer, and a much better fisherman than he was an editor. The Ascots lived on fish while waiting for Harry’s talents to start bringing in some money.

Diana, his wife, came out with the plates of fish and passed them around. Lydia sat next to me.

“Now,” she said, “this is how you eat a fish. I’m a country girl. Watch me.”

She opened that fish, she did something with her knife to the backbone. The fish was in two neat pieces.

“Oh, I really liked that,” said Diana. “Where did you say you were from?”

“Utah. Muleshead, Utah. Population ioo. I grew up on a ranch. My father was a drunk. He’s dead now. Maybe that’s why I’m with him. ...” She jerked a thumb at me.

We ate.

After the fish was consumed Diana carried the bones away. Then there was chocolate cake and strong (cheap) red wine.

“Oh, this cake is good,” said Lydia, “can I have another piece?”

“Sure, darling,” said Diana.

“Mr. Chinaski,” said a dark-haired girl from across the room, “I’ve read translations of your books in Germany. You’re very popular in Germany.”

“That’s nice,” I said. “I wish they’d send me some royalties. . . .”

“Look,” said Lydia, “let’s not talk about literary crap. Let’s do something!” She leaped up and did a bump and a grind. “LET’S DANCE!”

Harry Ascot put on his gentle and generous smile and walked over and turned up the stereo. He turned it up as loud as it would go.

Lydia danced around the room and a young blond boy with ringlets glued to his forehead joined her. They began dancing together. Others got up and danced. I sat there.

Randy Evans was sitting next to me. I could see he was watching Lydia too. He began talking. He talked and he talked. Thankfully I couldn’t hear him, the stereo was too loud.

I watched Lydia dance with the boy with the ringlets. Lydia could move it. Her movements lurked upon the sexual. I looked at the other girls and they didn’t seem to be dancing that way; but, I thought, that’s only because I know Lydia and I don’t know them.

Randy kept on talking even though I didn’t answer. The dance ended and Lydia came back and sat down next to me.

“Ooooh, I’m pooped! I think I’m out of shape.”

Another record dropped into place and Lydia got up and joined the boy with the golden ringlets. I kept drinking beer and wine.

There were many records. Lydia and the boy danced and danced—center stage as the others moved around them, each dance more intimate than the last.

I kept drinking the beer and the wine.

A wild loud dance was in progress. . . . The boy with the golden ringlets raised both hands above his head. Lydia pressed against him. It was dramatic, erotic. They held their hands high over their heads and pressed their bodies together. Body against body. He kicked his feet back, one at a time. Lydia imitated him. They stared into each other’s eyes. I had to admit they were good. The record went on and on. Finally, it ended.

Lydia came back and sat down next to me. “I’m really pooped,” she said.

“Look, I said, “I think I’ve had too much to drink. Maybe we ought to get out of here.”

“I’ve watched you pouring it down.”

“Let’s go. There’ll be other parties.”

We got up to leave. Lydia said something to Harry and Diana. When she came back we walked toward the door. As I opened it the boy with the golden ringlets came up to me. “Hey, man, what do you think of me and your girl?”

“You’re O.K.”

When we got outside I began vomiting, all the beer and the wine came up. It poured and splattered into the brush—across the sidewalk—a gusher in the moonlight. Finally I straightened up and wiped my mouth with my hand.

“That guy worried you, didn’t he?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“It almost seemed like a fuck, maybe better.”

“It didn’t mean anything, it was just dancing.”

“Suppose that I grabbed a woman on the street like that? Would music make it all right?”

“You don’t understand. Each time I finished dancing I came back and sat down next to you.”

“O.K., O.K.,” I said, “wait a minute.”

I puked up another gusher on somebody’s dying brush. We walked down the hill out of the Echo Park district toward Hollywood Boulevard.

We got into the car. It started and we drove west down Hollywood toward Vermont.

“You know what we call guys like you?” asked Lydia.

“No.”

“We call them,” she said, “party-poopers.”

7

We came in low over Kansas City, the pilot said the temperature was 20 degrees, and there I was in my thin California sports coat and shirt, lightweight pants, summer stockings, and holes in my shoes. As we landed and taxied toward the ramp everybody was reaching for overcoats, gloves, hats, mufflers. I let them all get off and then climbed down the portable stairway. There was Frenchy leaning against a building and waiting. Frenchy taught drama and collected books, mostly mine. “Welcome to Kansas Shitty, Chinaski!” he said and handed me a bottle of tequila. I took a good gulp and followed him into the parking lot. I had no baggage, just a portfolio full of poems. The car was warm and pleasant and we passed the bottle.

The roadways were frozen over with ice.

“Not everybody can drive on this fucking kind of ice,” said Frenchy. “You got to know what you’re doing.”

I opened the portfolio and began reading Frenchy a love poem Lydia had handed me at the airport:

“... your purple cock curved like a . . .

“. . . when I squeeze your pimples, bullets of puss like sperm …”

“Oh SHIT!” hollered Frenchy. The car went into a spin. Frenchy worked at the steering wheel.

“Frenchy,” I said, lifting the tequila bottle and taking a hit, “we’re not going to make it.”

We spun off the road and into a three foot ditch which divided the highway. I handed him the bottle.

We got out of the car and climbed out of the ditch. We thumbed passing cars, sharing what was left of the bottle. Finally a car stopped. A man in his mid-twenties, drunk, was at the wheel. “Where you fellows going?”

“A poetry reading,” said Frenchy.

“A poetry reading?”

“Yeah, at the University.”

“All right, get in.”

He was a liquor salesman. The back seat of his car was packed with cases of beer.

“Have a beer,” he said, “and get me one too.”

He got us there. We drove right up into the campus center and parked on the lawn in front of the auditorium. We were only 15 minutes late. I got out, vomited, then we all walked in together. We had stopped for a pint of vodka to get me through the reading.

I read about 20 minutes, then put the poems down. “This shit bores me,” I said, “let’s talk to each other.”

I ended up screaming things at the audience and they screamed back at me. That audience wasn’t bad. They were doing it for free. After about another 30 minutes a couple of professors got me out of there. “We’ve got a room for you, Chinaski,” one of them said, “in the women’s dormitory.”

“In the women’s dorm?”

“That’s right, a nice room.”

... It was true. Up on the third floor. One of the profs had brought a fifth of whiskey. Another gave me a check for the reading, plus air fare, and we sat around and drank the whiskey and talked. I blacked out. When I came to everybody was gone and there was half a fifth left. I sat there drinking and thinking, hey, you’re Chinaski, Chinaski the legend. You’ve got an image. Now you’re in the women’s dorm. Hundreds of women in this place, hundreds of them.

All I had on were my shorts and stockings. I walked out into the hall up to the nearest door. I knocked.

“Hey, I’m Henry Chinaski, the immortal writer! Open up! I wanna show you something!”

I heard the girls giggling.

“O.K. now,” I said, “how many of you are in there? 2? 3? It doesn’t matter. I can handle 3! No problem! Hear me? Open up! I have this
HUGE
purple thing! Listen, I’ll beat on the door with it!”

I took my fist and beat on the door. They kept giggling.

“So. You’re not going to let Chinaski in, eh? Well,
FUCK
YOU!”

I tried the next door. “Hey, girls! This is the best poet of the last 18 hundred years! Open the door! I’m gonna show you something! Sweet meat for your vaginal lips!”

I tried the next door.

I tried all the doors on that floor and then I walked down the stairway and worked all the doors on the second floor and then all the doors on the first. I had the whiskey with me and I got tired. It seemed like hours since I had left my room. I drank as I walked along. No luck.

I had forgotten where my room was, which floor it was on. All I wanted, finally, was to get back to my room. I tried all the doors again, this time silently, very conscious of my shorts and stockings. No luck. “The greatest men are the most alone.”

Back on the third floor I twisted a doorknob and the door opened. There was my portfolio of poems . . . the empty drinking glasses, ashtrays full of cigarette stubs . . . my pants, my shirt, my shoes, my coat. It was a wonderful sight. I closed the door, sat down on the bed and finished the bottle of whiskey that I had been carrying with me.

I awakened. It was daylight. I was in a strange clean place with two beds, drapes, t.v., bath. It appeared to be a motel room. I got up and opened the door. There was snow and ice out there. I closed the door and looked around. There was no explanation. I had no idea where I was. I was terribly hung over and depressed. I reached for the telephone and placed a long distance call to Lydia in Los Angeles.

“Baby, I don’t know where I am!”

“I thought you went to Kansas City?”

“I did. But now I don’t know where I am, you understand? I opened the door and looked and there’s nothing but frozen roads, ice, snow!”

“Where were you staying?”

“Last thing I remember I had a room in the women’s dorm.”

“Well, you probably made an ass out of yourself and they moved you to a motel. Don’t worry. Somebody will show up to take care of you.”

“Christ, don’t you have any sympathy for my situation?”

“You made an ass out of yourself. You generally always make an ass out of yourself.”

“What do you mean 'generally always’?”

“You’re just a lousy drunk,” Lydia said. “Take a warm shower.”

She hung up.