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.
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.
Very well, I watch my ladies vanish into their high-rise walls to shower and eat and watch tv, read the paper, phone Joyce, then smear themselves with cream, set the alarm and sleep. I am not a woman but I must imagine that some of them have sexual drives and a wish for male companionship and love. It must be so. But there’s the job. And there’s nobody down there, my god. There’s the weekend. What to do with the weekend? Those sons of bitches just want to get in my panties, that’s all. Hit and run, goodbye. Who wants to be part of a cunt pile?
Everybody’s blocked off from each other. Finally, out of desperation and advancing age, a man is chosen, first, perhaps for sexual pleasure and then later for marriage, a marriage that never works, a marriage that becomes dull and desperate, another durable hell or maybe an unendurable one. Marriage is a contract to live in dullness until death do us part. What else then? Prostitution? Ugggg.
Hundreds of thousands of lonely and frustrated men and women living mostly without sex and certainly without love, working at jobs they hate, running red lights, crashing into fire plugs
and store windows, gambling, drinking, taking dope, smoking 2 packs a day, masturbating, going crazy, going crazier and crazier, getting religious, buying goldfish and cats and monkeys . . .
Hundreds of thousands of lonely and frustrated men and women who settle for Disneyland instead of love, who settle for a baseball game instead of sex . . . Hundreds of thousands of lonely and frustrated men and women who’ll pass each other on the sidewalk and be afraid to look at each other’s faces, at each other’s eyes for fear they’ll be accused of being on the make. Blocks and walls of horror-movie magazines, girly magazines, nudey magazines, nude movies, vibrators, dirty jokes—everything but contact and real action. I must guess that the United States must be the loneliest place in the world with England not far behind. Too often I’d heard the guys talk on the job about the wild times they had in the army, the drunks, the whores . . . When I asked them, “What are you doing now? Why did you stop?” I got these strange looks. It’s simple. They are afraid here now in civilian life. Have to keep the job. Have to pay off the car. Have to—No army to take care of them now. No 3 square meals. No bunk. No sure payday. No Uncle Sam to cure their clap . . . Their wildness, their courage was regulated and safe enough.
I tell you, we must be the most backward nation on earth. In our prisons we do not believe in allowing the men even limited sexual relationships with the opposite sex, yet we wonder why the men molest and ravage each other in desperation. You say they made a mistake? Crime is in the definition of it. Suppose you made a mistake? Would you like to be beaten by a dozen men and made into a sexual idiot? What judge passed that sentence? It’s strange that in one of the most backward states, Mississippi, certain inmates are allowed to have limited sexual relationships with women—even though most of them are or pose as wives—from the outside.
We murder ourselves with sex and occupation; the madhouses crawl with sexually maladjusted and occupationally-destroyed people.
Answers? Who knows? We’re structured in. The bars are heavy.
The other day I stopped for gas. I don’t know how it got around to the subject, I think a woman walked by and that started it, but the attendant said, “I haven’t had a piece of ass in 5 years.” I laughed. “You’re kidding, man.” “No, I’m serious. 5 years now.” He was in his 20’s. I drove away thinking about what a friend of mine had said, “Where are the women? Tell me, where are they? Where’s the action?” There’s none. It’s a desert.
My friend drives from Los Angeles to Mexico each weekend to fulfill his sexual desires in a whorehouse.
I don’t know, my friends. Look at these walls, look at these people, look at these faces, these streets . . . We’ve all locked ourselves up. The rapists come out at night and the murderers, and the ladies lock themselves in and wait for the big one, the dream man, the money and soul man, the man of brilliant conversation, the man that mama might like. Set the alarm. He may walk in on the job . . . tomorrow, next week, next month, next year . . . surely he’s out there . . . These sons of bitches just want to get into my panties . . . I wonder what Bukowski’s like?
Monday afternoon was my day to see the girl. She was 7.
The hangover wasn’t too bad and I drove down to Santa Monica via Pico Boulevard. When I got there the door was open. I pushed in. She was writing a note. The mother of my child. Her name was Vicki.
“I was just going to leave you this note. Louise is at Cindy’s.”
“O.K.”
“Look. Could I have some money?”
“How much?”
“Well, I could use $45 now.”
“I can only let you have 20.”
“All right.”
She lived in an unfurnished one-bedroom Synanon apt., $130 a month. Vicki was one of those who had to always belong to some organization . . . she had gone from poetry reading workshops to the communist party to Synanon. Whenever she became insulated she went to a new organization. Well, that was as sensible as anything else.
We walked over to Cindy’s. Cindy was black. The 2 girls played with their paper dolls on the floor. Her mother was white, fat and in bed.
“She’s got asthma,” Vicki said to me.
“Hello,” I said to Cindy’s mother.
Cindy’s father wasn’t about. He was on the cure and working a gas station.
“Will you drive me to Synanon?” Vicki asked. “Or I can take the bus.”
(Synanon had a bus line too.)
“All right,” I said, “I’ll drive you down.”
“Come on, Louise,” she said, “pick up your stuff and let’s go.”
“But, Mommy, I just want to get this last dress on the doll.”
“All right, but hurry up” . . .
I left Vicki off in front of the building. Then we drove east.
“Where we going, Hank?”
“To the beach, I guess.”
“But I wanted to go to the Synanon beach . . .”
“The beaches are all alike . . . there’s dirty water and dirty sand.”
Louise began sobbing. “But I wanted the Synanon beach! They don’t like war! They don’t kill people!”
“Look, little one, we’re almost at the other beach. Let’s try it anyhow.”
“But people don’t carry guns at Synanon!”
“You’re probably right, but I’m afraid that sometimes we still need guns just like we need knives and forks.”
“Silly,” she said, “you can’t eat with a gun!”
“A lot of people do,” I said.
It was winter and cold and there weren’t many cars about or people either. Louise had had lunch at noon but I hadn’t eaten yet. We walked into the little Jewish grocery store next to the candleshop. I got a hotdog, some chips and a 7-UP. Louise got some kind of candy cracker and a 7-UP. We walked to the last cement table near the water.
“It’s cold,” I said. “Let’s turn our backs to the sea.”
So we sat there facing the boardwalk. There were 14 or 15 people about but they had the strange tranquility of the seagulls, the winter seagulls. No, it wasn’t a tranquility but a deadness. They were like bugs. They simply stood or sat together, motionless, not talking.
“It’s too bad I have to look at those people,” I said, biting into my hotdog.
“Why don’t you want to look at them?”
“They have no desire.”
“What’s ‘Desire’?”
“Well, let’s see. ‘Desire’ is wanting something you usually can’t get right when you want it, but if you have enough ‘Desire’ you can sometimes get it anyhow . . . Oh, hell—that sounds like ‘Ambition’ which is something you’re trained to do instead of something you want to do . . . Let’s just say that those people don’t want anything.”
“Those people don’t want anything?”
“Right. In a sense, nothing affects them so they don’t want anything, they aren’t anything. Especially in Western Civilization.”
“But that’s the way they are. Maybe that’s a good way to be.”
“Some wise men say so. I guess all of everything is how you work at it. A direction. I still don’t like to look at those people while I’m eating.”
“Hank! You’re not nice! There’s nothing wrong with those people! I ought to slap you across the face with this cracker!”
She picked up the cracker as if to hit me with it. I thought that was very funny. I laughed. She laughed too. We both felt good together, at last.
We finished eating and walked down toward the water. I sat down on a little cliff above the water and wet shore, and Louise built a sand castle . . .
It was then that I noticed the two men walking along the waterfront from the east. And the one man walking along the waterfront from the west. They all appeared to be in their mid-twenties. The man walking from the west had a large bag and seemed to be stopping and picking things up and dropping them into this bag. He didn’t seem to sense the two men approaching him from the east, but there was still quite a football field between th
em. 2 football fields.
The two walking from the east had on heavy boots and kicked at things along the shore. The one from the west almost swayed in the wind, bending over, picking up things for his paper sack. And I thought, it’s too bad, but the poor guy with the paper sack doesn’t realize that the other two guys are going to jump on him and beat him up. Can’t he realize that? It was a surety. And since I sensed it, I couldn’t understand how the guy with the bag couldn’t sense it. And the lifeguard in his little white shack on stilts . . . couldn’t he see?
It almost happened in front of me. All the men had beards but the 2 from the east had shorter beards; their beards almost looked angry . . . The guy with the paper sack just had hair all over his face and neck and back and front and everywhere. Then he looked up and saw the other two . . . He tried to walk around them, on the side toward the sea. Just then a wave rolled in and the guy nearest him pushed him into the water. His paper sack went out with the tide.
As he got up, the other guy hit him and he went down again and then they were kicking at his body and his face with their boots. At first he held his hands over his face, then his hands fell away, but they kept kicking at his face.
Then they rolled him over and took something out of his pocket. A wallet. They took something out of the wallet and then threw the wallet far out into the sea.
Then they looked around and saw me sitting there. They looked at me. It was a kind of zoo thing—the way monkeys looked at you. They could see that I was old but they could see that I was big too, and I looked bigger in that black lumberjack my landlord had given me.
I looked at their faces and noticed that they were not particularly brave faces. I turned to the kid and told her, “You stay up here on the sand . . .”
Then I leaped from the cliff and hit the wet sand and walked toward them. I pulled the switchblade, hit the button and the blade jumped out.