“Never saw anybody go under the needle like that!”
“Look at him, cold as steel!”
Again a gathering of nurse-fuckers, a gathering of men who owned big homes and had time to laugh and to read and go to plays and buy paintings and forget how to think, forget how to feel anything. White starch and my defeat. The gathering.
“How do you feel?”
“Wonderful.”
“Don’t you find the needle painful?”
“Fuck you.”
“What?”
“I said—fuck you.”
“He’s just a boy. He’s bitter. Can’t blame him. How old are you?”
“Fourteen.”
“I was only praising you for your courage, the way you took the needle. You’re tough.”
“Fuck you.”
“You can’t talk to me that way.”
“Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.”
“You ought to bear up better. Supposing you were blind?”
“Then I wouldn’t have to look at your goddamned face.”
“The kid’s crazy.”
“Sure he is, leave him alone.”
That was some hospital and I never realized that 20 years later I’d be back, again in the charity ward. Hospitals and jails and whores: these are the universities of life. I’ve got several degrees. Call me Mr.
—SOUTH OF NO NORTH
The ultra-violet ray machine clicked off. I had been treated on both sides. I took off the goggles and began to dress. Miss Ackerman walked in.
“Not yet,” she said, “keep your clothes off.”
What is she going to do to me, I thought?
“Sit up on the edge of the table.”
I sat there and she began rubbing salve over my face. It was a thick buttery substance.
“The doctors have decided on a new approach. We’re going to bandage your face to effect drainage.”
“Miss Ackerman, what ever happened to that man with the big nose? The nose that kept growing?”
“Mr. Sleeth?”
“The man with the big nose.”
“That was Mr. Sleeth.”
“I don’t see him anymore. Did he get cured?”
“He’s dead.”
“You mean he died from that big nose?”
“Suicide.” Miss Ackerman continued to apply the salve.
Then I heard a man scream from the next ward, “Joe, where are you? Joe, you said you’d come back! Joe, where are you?”
The voice was loud and so sad, so agonized.
“He’s done that every afternoon this week,” said Miss Ackerman, “and Joe’s not going to come get him.”
“Can’t they help him?”
“I don’t know. They all quiet down, finally. Now take your finger and hold this pad while I bandage you. There. Yes. That’s it. Now let go. Fine.”
“Joe! Joe, you said you’d come back! Where are you, Joe?”
“Now, hold your finger on this pad. There. Hold it there. I’m going to wrap you up good! There. Now I’ll secure the dressings.”
Then she was finished.
“O.K., put on your clothes. See you the day after tomorrow. Goodbye, Henry.”
“Goodbye, Miss Ackerman.”
I got dressed, left the room and walked down the hall. There was a mirror on a cigarette machine in the lobby. I looked into the mirror. It was great. My whole head was bandaged. I was all white. Nothing could be seen but my eyes, my mouth and my ears, and some tufts of hair sticking up at the top of my head. I was hidden. It was wonderful. I stood and lit a cigarette and glanced about the lobby. Some in-patients were sitting about reading magazines and newspapers. I felt very exceptional and a bit evil. Nobody had any idea of what had happened to me. Car crash. A fight to the death. A murder. Fire. Nobody knew.
I walked out of the lobby and out of the building and I stood on the sidewalk. I could still hear him. “Joe! Joe! Where are you, Joe!”
Joe wasn’t coming. It didn’t pay to trust another human being. Humans didn’t have it, whatever it took.
On the streetcar ride back I sat in the back smoking cigarettes out of my bandaged head. People stared but I didn’t care. There was more fear than horror in their eyes now. I hoped I could stay this way forever.
I rode to the end of the line and got off. The afternoon was going into evening and I stood on the corner of Washington Boulevard and Westview Avenue watching the people. Those few who had jobs were coming home from work. My father would soon be driving home from his fake job. I didn’t have a job, I didn’t go to school. I didn’t do anything. I was bandaged, I was standing on the corner smoking a cigarette. I was a tough man, I was a dangerous man. I knew things. Sleeth had suicided. I wasn’t going to suicide. I’d rather kill some of them. I’d take four or five of them with me. I’d show them what it meant to play around with me.
A woman walked down the street toward me. She had fine legs. First I stared right into her eyes and then I looked down at her legs, and as she passed I watched her ass, I drank her ass in. I memorized her ass and the seams of her silk stockings.
I never could have done that without my bandage
The bandages were helpful. L.A. County Hospital had finally come up with something. The boils drained. They didn’t vanish but they flattened a bit. Yet some new ones would appear and rise up again. They drilled me and wrapped me again.
My sessions with the drill were endless. Thirty-two, thirty-six, thirty-eight times. There was no fear of the drill anymore. There never had been. Only an anger. But the anger was gone. There wasn’t even resignation on my part, only disgust, a disgust that this had happened to me, and a disgust with the doctors who couldn’t do anything about it. They were helpless and I was helpless, the only difference being that I was the victim. They could go home to their lives and forget while I was stuck with the same face.
But there were changes in my life. My father found a job. He passed an examination at the L.A. County Museum and got a job as a guard. My father was good at exams. He loved math and history. He passed the exam and finally had a place to go each morning. There had been three vacancies for guards and he had gotten one of them.
L.A. County General Hospital somehow found out and Miss Ackerman told me one day, “Henry, this is your last treatment. I’m going to miss you.”
“Aw come on,” I said, “stop your kidding. You’re going to miss me like I’m going to miss that electric needle!”
But she was very strange that day. Those big eyes were watery. I heard her blow her nose.
I heard one of the nurses ask her, “Why, Janice, what’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing. I’m all right.”
Poor Miss Ackerman. I was 15 years old and in love with her and I was covered with boils and there was nothing that either of us could do.
“All right,” she said, “this is going to be your last ultra-violet ray treatment. Lay on your stomach.”
“I know your first name now,” I told her. “Janice. That’s a pretty name. It’s just like you.”
“Oh, shut up,” she said.
I saw her once again when the first buzzer sounded. I turned over, Janice re-set the machine and left the room. I never saw her again.
My father didn’t believe in doctors who were not free. “They make you piss in a tube, take your money, and drive home to their wives in Beverly Hills,” he said.
But once he did send me to one. To a doctor with bad breath and a head as round as a basketball, only with two little eyes where a basketball had none. I didn’t like my father and the doctor wasn’t any better. He said, no fried foods, and to drink carrot juice. That was it.
I would re-enter high school the next term, said my father.
“I’m busting my ass to keep people from stealing. Some nigger broke the glass on a case and stole some rare coins yesterday. I caught the bastard. We rolled down the stairway together. I held him until the others came. I risk my life every day. Why should you sit around on your ass, mop
ing? I want you to be an engineer. How the hell you gonna be an engineer when I find notebooks full of women with their skirts pulled up to their ass? Is that all you can draw? Why don’t you draw flowers or mountains or the ocean? You’re going back to school!”
I drank carrot juice and waited to re-enroll. I had only missed one term. The boils weren’t cured but they weren’t as bad as they had been.
—HAM ON RYE
my old man
16 years old
during the depression
I’d come home drunk
and all my clothing—
shorts, shirts, stockings—
suitcase, and pages of
short stories
would be thrown out on the
front lawn and about the
street.
my mother would be
waiting behind a tree:
“Henry, Henry, don’t
go in … he’ll
kill you, he’s read
your stories …”
“I can whip his
ass …”
“Henry, please take
this … and
find yourself a room.”
but it worried him
that I might not
finish high school
so I’d be back
again.
one evening he walked in
with the pages of
one of my short stories
(which I had never submitted
to him)
and he said, “this is
a great short story.”
I said, “o.k.,”
and he handed it to me
and I read it.
it was a story about
a rich man
who had a fight with
his wife and had
gone out into the night
for a cup of coffee
and had observed
the waitress and the spoons
and forks and the
salt and pepper shakers
and the neon sign
in the window
and then had gone back
to his stable
to see and touch his
favorite horse
who then
kicked him in the head
and killed him.
somehow
the story held
meaning for him
though
when I had written it
I had no idea
of what I was
writing about.
so I told him,
“o.k., old man, you can
have it.”
and he took it
and walked out
and closed the door.
I guess that’s
as close
as we ever got.
I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor. But I didn’t particularly want money. I didn’t know what I wanted. Yes, I did. I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn’t have to do anything. The thought of being something didn’t only appall me, it sickened me. The thought of being a lawyer or a councilman or an engineer, anything like that, seemed impossible to me. To get married, to have children, to get trapped in the family structure. To go someplace to work every day and to return. It was impossible. To do things, simple things, to be part of family picnics, Christmas, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Mother’s Day … was a man born just to endure those things and then die? I would rather be a dishwasher, return alone to a tiny room and drink myself to sleep.
My father had a master plan. He told me, “My son, each man during his lifetime should buy a house. Finally he dies and leaves that house to his son. Then his son gets his own house and dies, leaves both houses to his son. That’s two houses. That son gets his own house, that’s three houses …”
The family structure. Victory over adversity through the family. He believed in it. Take the family, mix with God and Country, add the ten-hour day and you had what was needed.
I looked at my father, at his hands, his face, his eyebrows, and I knew that this man had nothing to do with me. He was a stranger. My mother was non-existent. I was cursed. Looking at my father I saw nothing but indecent dullness. Worse, he was even more afraid to fail than most others. Centuries of peasant blood and peasant training. The Chinaski bloodline had been thinned by a series of peasant-servants who had surrendered their real lives for fractional and illusionary gains. Not a man in the line who said, “I don’t want a house, I want a thousand houses, now!”
He had sent me to that rich high school hoping that the ruler’s attitude would rub off on me as I watched the rich boys screech up in their cream-colored coupes and pick up the girls in bright dresses. Instead I learned that the poor usually stay poor. That the young rich smell the stink of the poor and learn to find it a bit amusing. They had to laugh, otherwise it would be too terrifying. They’d learned that, through the centuries. I would never forgive the girls for getting into those cream-colored coupes with the laughing boys. They couldn’t help it, of course, yet you always think, maybe … But no, there weren’t any maybes. Wealth meant victory and victory was the only reality.
What woman chooses to live with a dishwasher?
Throughout high school I tried not to think too much about how things might eventually turn out for me. It seemed better to delay thinking …
Finally it was the day of the Senior Prom. It was held in the girls’ gym with live music, a real band. I don’t know why but I walked over that night, the two-and-one-half miles from my parents’ place. I stood outside in the dark and I looked in there, through the wire-covered window, and I was astonished. All the girls looked very grown-up, stately, lovely, they were in long dresses, and they all looked beautiful. I almost didn’t recognize them. And the boys in their tuxes, they looked great, they danced so straight, each of them holding a girl in his arms, their faces pressed against the girl’s hair. They all danced beautifully and the music was loud and clear and good, powerful.
Then I caught a glimpse of my reflection staring in at them—boils and scars on my face, my ragged shirt. I was like some jungle animal drawn to the light and looking in. Why had I come? I felt sick. But I kept watching. The dance ended. There was a pause. Couples spoke easily to each other. It was natural and civilized. Where had they learned to converse and to dance? I couldn’t converse or dance. Everybody knew something I didn’t know. The girls looked so good, the boys so handsome. I would be too terrified to even look at one of those girls, let alone be close to one. To look into her eyes or dance with her would be beyond me.
And yet I knew that what I saw wasn’t as simple and good as it appeared. There was a price to be paid for it all, a general falsity, that could be easily believed, and could be the first step down a dead-end street. The band began to play again and the boys and girls began to dance again and the lights revolved overhead throwing shades of gold, then red, then blue, then green, then gold again on the couples. As I watched them I said to myself, someday my dance will begin. When that day comes I will have something that they don’t have.
But then it got to be too much for me. I hated them. I hated their beauty, their untroubled youth, and as I watched them dance through the magic colored pools of light, holding each other, feeling so good, little unscathed children, temporarily in luck, I hated them because they had something I had not yet had, and I said to myself, I said to myself again, someday I will be as happy as any of you, you will see.
They kept dancing, and I repeated it to them.
Then there was a sound behind me.
“Hey! What are you doing?”
It was an old man with a flashlight. He had a head like a frog’s head.
“I’m watching the dance.”
He held the flashlight right up under his nose. His eyes were round and large, they gleamed like a cat’s eyes in the moonlight. But his mouth was shriveled, collapsed, and his head was round. It had a pe
culiar senseless roundness that reminded me of a pumpkin trying to play pundit.
“Get your ass out of here!”
He ran the flashlight up and down all over me.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I’m the night custodian. Get your ass out of here before I call the cops!”
“What for? This is the Senior Prom and I’m a senior.”
He flashed his light into my face. The band was playing “Deep Purple.”
“Bullshit!” he said. “You’re at least 22 years old!”
“I’m in the yearbook, Class of 1939, graduating class, Henry Chinaski.”
“Why aren’t you in there dancing?”
“Forget it. I’m going home.”
“Do that.”
I walked off. I kept walking. His flashlight leaped on the path, the light following me. I walked off campus. It was a nice warm night, almost hot. I thought I saw some fireflies but I wasn’t sure.
—HAM ON RYE
the burning of the dream
the old L.A. Public Library burned
down
that library downtown
and with it went
a large part of my
youth.
I sat on one of those stone
benches there with my friend
Baldy when he
asked,
“you gonna join the
Abraham Lincoln
Brigade?”
“sure,” I told
him.