Читать книгу Notes of a Dirty Old Man - Charles Bukowski - Страница 5

some son of a bitch had held out on the money, everybody claiming they were broke, card game finished, I was sitting there with my buddy Elf, Elf was screwed-up as a kid, all shriveled, he used to lay in bed for years squeezing these rubber balls, doing crazy exercises, and when he got out of bed one day he was as wide as he was tall, a muscled laughing brute who wanted to be a writer but he wrote too much like Thomas Wolfe and, outside of Dreiser, T. Wolfe was the worst American writer ever born, and I hit Elf behind the ear and the bottle fell off the table (he’d said something that I disagreed with) and as the Elf came up I had the bottle, good scotch, and I got him half on the jaw and part of the neck under there and he went down again, and I felt on top of my game, I was a student of Dostoevski and listened to Mahler in the dark, and I had time to drink from the bottle, set it down, fake with a right and lend him the left just below the belt and he fell against the dresser, clumsily, the mirror broke, it made sounds like a movie, flashed and crinkled and then Elf landed one high on my forehead and I fell back across a chair and the thing flattened like straw, cheap furniture, and then I was in deep — I had small hands and no real taste for fighting and I hadn’t put him away — and he came on in like some zany two-bit vengeful individual, and I got in about one for three, not very good ones, but he wouldn’t quit and the furniture was breaking everywhere, very much noise and I kept hoping somebody would stop the damned thing — the landlady, the police, God, anybody, but it went on and on and on, and then I didn’t remember.

when I awakened the sun was up and I was under the bed. I got out from under and found that I could stand up. large cut under chin. scraped knuckles. I’d had worse hangovers. and there were worse places to awaken, like jail? maybe. I looked around. it had been real. everything broken and smeared and shattered, spilled — lamps, chairs, dresser, bed, ashtrays — gored beyond all measure, nothing sensible, everything ugly and finished. I drank some water and then walked to the closet. it was still there: tens, twenties, fives, the money I had thrown into the closet each time I had gone to piss during the card game, and I remembered starting the fight about the MONEY. I gathered up the green, placed it in my wallet, put my paper suitcase on the slanting bed and began to pack my few rags: laborer’s shirts, stiff shoes with holes in the bottom, hard and dirty stockings, lumpy pants with legs that wanted to laugh, a short story about catching crabs at the San Francisco Opera House, and a torn Thrifty Drugstore dictionary — “palingenesis — recapitulation of ancestral stages in life-history.”

the clock was working, the old alarm clock, god bless it, how many times had I looked at it on 7:30 a.m. hangover mornings and said, fuck the job? FUCK THE JOB! well, it said 4 p.m. I was just about to put it into the top of my suitcase when — sure, why not? — there was a knock on my door.

YEAH?

MR. BUKOWSKI?

YEAH? YEAH?

I WANT TO COME IN AND CHANGE THE SHEETS.

NO, NOT TODAY. I’M SICK TODAY.

OH, THAT’S TOO BAD. BUT JUST LET ME COME IN AND CHANGE THE SHEETS. THEN I’LL GO AWAY.

NO, NO, I’M TOO SICK, I’M JUST TOO SICK. I DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE ME THE WAY I AM.

it went on and on. she wanted to change the sheets. I said, no. she said, I want to change the sheets. on and on. that landlady. what a body. all body. everything about her screamed BODY BODY BODY. I’d only been there 2 weeks. there was a bar downstairs. people would come to see me, I wouldn’t be in, she’d just say, “he’s in the bar downstairs, he’s always in the bar downstairs.” and the people would say, “God and Jesus, man, who’s your LANDLADY?”

but she was a big white woman and she went for these Filipinos, these Filipinos did tricks man, things no white men would ever dream of, even me; and these Flips are gone now with their George Raft pulldown widebrims and padded-shoulders; they used to be the fashion leaders, the stiletto boys; leather heels, greasy evil faces — where have you gone?

well, anyhow, there was nothing to drink and I sat there for hours, going crazy; jumpy, I was, gnatz, lumpy balls, there I sat with $450 easy money and I couldn’t buy a draft beer. I was waiting for darkness. darkness, not death. I wanted out. another shot at it. I finally got the nerve up. I opened the door a bit, chain still on, and there was one, a little Flip monkey with a hammer. when I opened the door, he lifted the hammer and grinned. when I closed the door he took the tacks out of his mouth and pretended to pound them into the rug of the stairway leading to the first floor and the only door out. I don’t know how long it went on. it was the same act. everytime I’d open the door he’d lift the hammer and grin. shit monkey! he just stayed on the top step. I began to go crazy. I was sweating, stinking; little circles whirling whirling whirling, light flanks and flashes of light in my dome. I really felt like I was going to go screwy. I walked over and got the suitcase. it was easy to carry. rags. then I took the typewriter. a steel portable borrowed from the wife of a once-friend and never returned. it had a good solid feel: gray, flat, heavy, leery, banal. the eyes whirled to the rear of my head and the chain was off the door, and one hand with suitcase and one hand with stolen typewriter I charged into machinegun fire, the mourning morning sunrise, cracked-wheat crinkles, the end of all.

HEY! WHERE YOU GO?

the little monkey began to raise to one knee, he raised the hammer, and that’s all I needed — the flash of electric light on hammer — I had the suitcase in the left hand, the portable steel typer in the right, he was in perfect position, down by my knees and I swung with great accuracy and some anger, I gave him the flat and heavy and hard side, greatly, along the side of his head, his skull, his temple, his being.

there was almost a shock of light like everything was crying, then it was still. I was outside, suddenly, sidewalk, down all those steps without realization. like luck, there was a yellow cab.

CABBY!

I was inside. UNION STATION.

it was good, the quiet sound of tires in the morning air. NO, WAIT, I said. MAKE IT THE BUS DEPOT.

WHATZ MATTA, MAN? the cabby asked.

I JUST KILLED MY FATHER.

YO KILLED YO FATHA?

YOU EVER HEARD OF JESUS CHRIST?

SHORE.

THEN MAKE IT: BUS DEPOT.

I sat in the bus depot for an hour waiting for the bus to New Orleans. wondering if I had killed the guy. I finally got on with typewriter and suitcase, jamming the typewriter far into the overhead rack, not wanting the thing to fall on my head. it was a long ride with much drinking and some involvement with a redhead from Fort Worth. I got off at Fort Worth too, but she lived with her mother and I had to get a room, and I got a room in a whorehouse by mistake. all night the women hollering things like, “HEY! you’re not going to stick THAT thing in ME for ANY kind of money!” toilets flushing all night. doors opening and closing.

the redhead, she was a nice innocent thing, or bargained for a better man. anyhow, I left town without getting into her pants. I finally made New Orleans.

but the Elf. remember? the guy I fought in my room. well, during the war he was killed by machinegun fire. I’ve heard he lay in bed a long time, 3 or 4 weeks before he went. and the strangest thing, he had told me, no, he had asked me “suppose some STUPID son of a bitch puts his finger to a machinegun and cuts me in half?”

“then, it’s your fault.”

“well, I know you ain’t going to die in front of any god damned machinegun.”

“you’re sure as shit right, I ain’t, babe. unless it’s one of Uncle Sam’s.”

“don’t give me that crap! I know you love your country. I can see it in your eyes! love, real love!”

that’s when I hit him the first time.

after that, you’ve got the rest of the story.

when I got to New Orleans I made sure I wasn’t in any whorehouse, even though the whole town looked like one.

________

we were sitting in the office after dropping another one of those 7 to 1 ballgames, and the season was halfway over and we were in the cellar, 25 games out of first place and I knew that it was my last season as manager of the Blues. our leading hitter was batting .243 and our leading home run man had 6. our leading pitcher stood at 7 and 10 with an e.r.a. of 3.95. old man Henderson pulled the pint out of the desk drawer, took his cut, shoved the bottle at me.

“on top of all this,” said Henderson, “I even caught the crabs about 2 weeks ago.”

“jesus, sorry, boss.”

“you won’t be calling me boss much longer.”

“I know, but no manager in baseball can pull these rummies out of last place,” I said, knocking off a third of a pint.

“and worse,” said Henderson, “I think it was my wife who gave me the crabs.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or what, so I kept quiet.

there was a most delicate knock on the office door and then it opened. and here stood some nut with paper wings glued to his back.

it was a kid about 18. “I’m here to help your club,” said the kid.

he had on these big paper wings. a real nut. holes cut in his suit. the wings are glued to his back. or strapped. or something.

“listen,” said Henderson, “will you please get the hell out of here! we’ve got enough comedy on the field now, just playing it straight. they laughed us right out of the park today. now, get out and fast!”

the kid reached over, took a slug from the pint, set it down and said, “Mr. Henderson, I am the answer to your prayers.”

“kid,” said Henderson, “you’re too young to drink that stuff.”

“I’m older than I look,” said the kid.

“and I got somethin’ that will make you a little older!” Henderson pressed the little button under his desk. that meant Bull Kronkite. I ain’t sayin’ the Bull has ever killed a man but you’ll be lucky to be smoking Bull Durham out of a rubber asshole when he gets through with you. the Bull came in almost taking one of the hinges off the door as he entered.

“which ONE, boss?” he asked, his long stupid fingers twitching as he looked about the room.

“the punk with the paper wings,” said Henderson.

the Bull moved in.

“don’t touch me,” said the punk with the paper wings.

the Bull rushed in, AND SO HELP ME GOD, that punk began to FLY! he flapped around the room, up near the ceiling. Henderson and I both reached for the pint but the old man beat me to it. the Bull dropped to his knees:

“LORD IN HEAVEN, HAVE MERCY ON ME! AN ANGEL! AN ANGEL!”

“don’t be a jerk!” said the angel, flapping around, “I’m no angel. I just want to help the Blues. I been a Blues fan ever since I can remember.”

“all right. come on down. let’s talk business,” said Henderson.

the angel, or whatever it was, flew on down and landed in a chair. the Bull ripped off the shoes and stockings of whatever it was and started kissing its feet.

Henderson leaned over and in a very disgusted manner spit into the Bull’s face: “fuck off, you subnormal freak! anything I hate is such sloppy sentimentality!”

the Bull wiped off his face and left very quietly.

Henderson flipped through the desk drawers.

“shit, I thought I had me some contract papers in here somewhere!”

meanwhile, while looking for the contract papers he found another pint and opened that. he looked at the kid while ripping off the cellophane:

“tell me, can you hit an inside curve? outside? how about the slider?”

“god damned if I know,” said the guy with the wings, “I been hiding out. all I know is what I read in the papers and see on TV but I’ve always been a Blues fan and I’ve felt very sorry for you this season.”

“you been hidin’ out? where? a guy with wings can’t hide out in an elevator in the Bronx! what’s your hype? how’ve you made it?”

“Mr. Henderson, I don’t want to bore you with all the details.”

“by the way, what’s your name, kid?”

“Jimmy. Jimmy Crispin. J.C. for short.”

“hey, kid, what the fuck you tryin’ to do, get funny with me?”

“oh no, Mr. Henderson.”

“then shake hands!”

they shook.

“god damn, your hands is sure COLD! you had anything to eat lately?”

“I had some french fries and beer with chicken about 4 p.m.”

“have a drink, kid.”

Henderson turned to me. “Bailey?”

“yeh?”

“I want the full friggin’ ballteam down on that field at 10 a.m. tomorrow morning. no exceptions. I think we’ve got the biggest thing since the a-bomb. now let’s all get outa here and get some sleep. you got a place to sleep, kid?”

“sure,” said J.C. then he flew down the stairway and left us there.

we had the park locked tight. nobody in there but the ballteam. and with their hangovers and looking at the guy with the wings they thought it was some publicity gag. or a practice for one. they put the team on the field and the kid at the plate. but you should have been there to see those bloodshot eyes OPEN when the kid tapped a roller down the 3rd base line and FLEW to first base! then he touched down and before the 3rd base man could let go of the ball the kid flew on down to 2nd base.

everybody just kind of swayed in the early 10 p.m. sunlight. playing for a team like the Blues you figured you were crazy anyway but this was something else.

then as the pitcher got ready to throw to the batboy who we had put at the plate, J.C. flew on down to third base! he jetted on down! you couldn’t even see the wings, even if you had had time for two alka seltzers that morning. and by the time the ball got to the plate, this thing had flown in and touched home plate.

we found the kid could play the whole outfield. his flying speed was tremendous! we just brought in the two other outfielders and put them in the infield. that gave us two shortstops and two second basemen. and as bad as we were, we were hell.

that night would be our first league game with Jimmy Crispin in the outfield.

first thing I did when I got in was to phone Bugsy Malone.

“Bugsy, what are the odds against the Blues finishing first?”

“ain’t no odds. the bet is off the board. no damn fool would bet the Blues even at 10,000 to one.”

“what’ll you give me?”

“are you serious?”

“yeah.”

“250 to one. you wanna bet a dollar, is that it?”

“one grand.”

“one grand! now wait a minute! let me call you back in two hours.”

the phone rang in an hour and forty-five minutes. “all right, I’ll take you. I can always use a grand. somehow.”

“thanks, Bugsy.”

“you’re welcome.”

that first night game, I’ll never forget it. they thought we were pulling some laugh stunt to get the crowds in but when they saw Jimmy Crispin rise into the sky and pull down an obvious home run that would have cleared the left centerfield fence by ten feet, then the game was on. Bugsy had flown down to check things out and I watched him in his box seat. when J.C. flew up to grab that one Bugsy’s five dollar cigar dropped out of his mouth. but there was nothing in the rulebook that said a man with wings couldn’t play baseball so we had them by the balls. and how. we took that game easy. Crispin scored 4 times. they couldn’t hit anything out of our infield and anything in the outfield was a sure out.

and the games that followed. how the crowds came in. it was enough to drive them mad to see a man flying in the sky but the fact that we were 25 games out and with such little time left was also what kept them coming. the crowd loves to see a man get off the deck. the Blues were driving. it was the miracle of the times.

LIFE came to interview Jimmy. TIME. LIFE. LOOK. he told them nothing. “I just want to see the Blues win the pennant,” he said.

but it was still tough, mathematically, and like a storybook ending it came down to the last game of the season, tied with the Bengals for first place and playing the Bengals, and winner take all. we hadn’t lost a game since Jimmy joined the team. and I was pretty close to $250,000.00. what a manager I was!

we were in the office just before that last night game, old man Henderson and I. and we heard the noise on the stairway, and then a guy fell through the door, drunk. J.C. his wings were gone. just stumps.

“they sawed off my motherfucking wings, the rats! they put this woman on me in the hotel room. what a woman! what a broad! man, they loaded my drinks! I got on top of this cunt and they began SAWING MY WINGS OFF. I couldn’t move! I couldn’t even get my nuts! what a FARCE! and all the time, this guy smoking a cigar, laughing and cackling in the background … — oh god, what a beautiful woman, and I couldn’t get it … — oh, shit …”

“well, baby, you aren’t the first guy a woman has fucked-up. is there any bleeding?” asked Henderson.

“no, it’s just bone, a bone-thing, but I’m so sad, I’ve let you fellows down, I’ve let the Blues down, I feel terrible, terrible, terrible.”

they felt terrible? I was out 250 grand.

I finished the pint on the desk. J.C. was too drunk to play, wings or no wings. Henderson just put his head down on the desk and began crying. I found his luger in the bottom drawer. I put it into my coat and went out of the tower and down into the reserve section. I took the box right behind Bugsy Malone and some beautiful woman he was sitting with. it was Henderson’s box and Henderson was drinking himself to death with a dead angel. he wouldn’t need that box. and the team wouldn’t need me. I’d phoned down to the dugout and told them to turn the thing over to the batboy or somebody.

“hello, Bugsy,” I said.

it was our field so they had first at bats.

“where’s your center fielder? I don’t see him,” said Bugsy, lighting up a five buck cigar.

“our center fielder has gone back to heaven due to one of your $3.50 Sears-Roebuck hacksaws.”

Bugsy laughed. “a guy like me can piss in a mule’s eye and come up with a mint julep. that’s why I am where I am.”

“who’s the beautiful lady?” I asked.

“oh, this is Helena. Helena, this is Tim Bailey, the worst manager in baseball.”

Helena crossed those nylon things called legs and I forgave Crispin for everything.

“nice to meetcha, Mr. Bailey.”

“yeah.”

the game began. it was old times. by the 7th inning we were behind 10 to 0. Bugsy was feeling damn good by then, feeling this broad’s legs, rubbing up against her, having the whole world in his pocket. he turned to me and handed me a five buck cigar. I lit up.

“was this guy really an angel?” he asked me, kind of smiling.

“he said to call him J.C. for short, but damned if I know.”

“looks like Man has beat God nearly everytime they have tangled,” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but the way I figure it, cutting a man’s wings off is kind of like cutting his cock off.”

“maybe so. but the way I see it, the strong make things go.”

“or death makes things stop. which one is it?”

I pulled the luger out and put it at the back of his head.

“for Christ’s sake, Bailey! get hold of yourself! I’ll give you half of everything I’ve got! no, I’ll give you everything I’ve got — this broad, everything, the works — just take that gun away from my head!”

“if you think killing is strong, then TASTE some strong!”

I pulled the trigger. it was awful. a luger. parts of eggshell head, and brain and blood everywhere: over me, over her nylon legs, her dress …

the game was held up an hour while they got us out of there — the dead Bugsy, his crazy hysterical woman, and me. then they finished out the innings.

God over Man; Man over God. mother preserved strawberries while everything was so very sick.

it was the next day in my cell when the screw handed me the paper:

“BLUES PULL IT OUT IN 14th INNING, WIN 12-11 GAME AND PENNANT.”

I walked to the cell window, 8 floors up. I balled the paper up and jammed it through the bars, I jammed and jolted the paper up and shoved it through the bars and as it fell through the air I watched it, it spread, it seemed to have wings, well, horseshit on that, it floated down like any piece of unfolding paper does, toward the sea, those white and blue waves down there and I couldn’t touch them, God beat Man always and continually, God being Whatever It Was — a cocksucker machinegun or the painting of Klee, well, and now, those nylon legs folding around another damn fool. Malone owed me 250 grand and couldn’t pay off. J.C. with wings, J.C. without wings, J.C. on a cross, I was still a little alive and I walked back across the floor, sat upon that prison pot without a lid and began to shit, x-major league manager, x-man, and a slight wind came through the bars and a slight way to go.

________

it was hot in there. I went to the piano and played the piano. I didn’t know how to play the piano. I just hit the keys. some people danced on the couch. then I looked under the piano and saw a girl stretched out under there, her dress up around her hips. I played with one hand, reached under and copped a feel with the other. either the bad music or copping that feel woke up the girl. she climbed out from under the piano. the people stopped dancing on the couch. I made it to the couch and slept for fifteen minutes. I hadn’t slept for two nights and two days. it was hot in there, hot. when I awakened I vomited in a coffee cup. then that was full and I had to let go on the couch. somebody brought a large pot. just in time. I let it go. sour. everything was sour.

I got up and walked into the bathroom. two guys were in there naked. one of them had some shaving cream and a brush and was lathering up the other guy’s cock and balls.

“listen, I got to take a shit,” I told them.

“go ahead,” said the guy being lathered, “we ain’t bothering you.”

I went ahead and sat down.

the guy with the brush said to the guy being lathered, “I hear Simpson got fired from Club 86.”

“KPFK,” said the other guy, “they can more people than Douglas Aircraft, Sears Roebuck and Thrifty Drugs combined. one wrong word, one sentence out of line with their pre-baked conceptions of humanity, politics, art, so forth, and you’ve had it. the only safe guy on KPFK is Eliot Mintz — he’s like a kid’s toy accordion: no matter how you squeeze him you get the same sound.”

“now go ahead,” said the guy with the brush.

“go ahead what?”

“rub your dick until it gets hard.”

I dropped a big one.

“jesus!” said the guy with the brush, but he no longer had the brush. he’d thrown it in the sink.

“jesus what?” said the other guy.

“you got a head on that thing like a mallet!”

“I had an accident once, it caused it.”

“I wish I could have an accident that way.”

I dropped another one.

“now go ahead.”

“go ahead what?”

“bend way back and slip it between your upper legs.”

“like this?”

“yeah.”

“now what?”

“bring your belly down. slide it. back and forth. make your legs tight. that’s it! see! you’ll never need another woman!”

“oh Harry, it just ain’t like pussy! what you giving me? you’re giving me a lot of shit!”

“it just takes PRACTICE! you’ll see! you’ll see!”

I wiped, flushed and got out of there.

I went to the refrigerator and got another can of beer, I got 2 cans of beer, opened them both and began on the first one. I figured that I was someplace in North Hollywood. I sat across from some guy with a red tin helmet on and a two foot beard. he’d been brilliant for a couple of nights but was coming down off the speed and was out of speed. but he hadn’t hit the sleep stage yet, just the sad and vacant stage. just maybe hoping for a joint but nobody was showing anything.

“Big Jack,” I said.

“Bukowski, you owe me 40 dollars,” said Big Jack.

“listen, Jack, I have this idea that I gave you 20 dollars the other night. I really have this idea. I remember this 20.”

“but you don’t remember, do you Bukowski? because you were drunk, Bukowski, that’s why you don’t remember!”

Big Jack had this thing against drunks.

his girl friend Maggy was sitting next to him. “you gave him a 20, all right, but it was because you wanted some more to drink. we went out and got you some stuff and brought you the change.”

“all right. but where are we? North Hollywood?”

“no, Pasadena.”

“Pasadena? I don’t believe it.”

I had been watching these people go behind this big curtain. some of them came out in ten or twenty minutes. some of them never came out. it had been going on for 48 hours. I finished the 2nd beer, got up, pulled the curtain back and went in there. it was very dark in there but I smelled grass. and ass. I stood there and let my eyes adjust. it was mostly guys. licking assholes. reaming. sucking. it was not for me. I was square. it was like the men’s gym after everybody had worked out on the parallel bars. and the sour smell of semen. I gagged. a light colored negro came up to me.

“hey, you’re Charles Bukowski, aren’t you?”

“yeh,” I said.

“wow! this is the thrill of my life! I read CRUCIFIX IN A DEATHHAND. I consider you the greatest since Verlaine!”

“Verlaine?”

“yeah, Verlaine!”

he reached out and cupped a hand around my balls. I took his hand away.

“what’s the matter?” he asked.

“not just yet, baby, I’m looking for a friend.”

“oh, sorry …”

he walked on off. I kept looking around and was just about ready to leave when I noticed a woman kind of leaning against a far corner. she had her legs open but seemed rather dazed. I walked on over and looked at her. I dropped my pants and shorts. she looked all right. I put the thing in. I put in what I had.

“oooh,” she said, “it’s good! you’re so curved! like a gaff!”

“accident I had when I was a child. something with the tricycle.”

“oooooh …”

I was just going good when something RAMMED into the cheeks of my ass. I saw flashes before my eyes.

“hey, what the HELL!” I reached and pulled the thing out. I was standing there with this guy’s thing in my hand. “what do you think you’re doing, buddy?” I asked him.

“listen, friend,” he said, “this whole game is just one big deck of cards. if you want to get into the game you have to take whatever comes up in the shuffle.”

I pulled up my shorts and pants and got out of there.

Big Jack and Maggy were gone. a couple of people were passed out on the floor. I went and got another beer, drank that and walked outside. the sunlight hit me like a squad car with the red lights on. I found my short pushed into somebody else’s driveway with a parking ticket on it. but there was still room to get out of the driveway. everybody knew just how far to go. it was nice.

I stopped at the Standard Station and the man told me how to get on the Pasadena freeway. I made it home. sweating. biting my lips to stay awake. there was a letter in the mailbox from my x-wife in Arizona.

“… I know you get lonely and depressed. when you do, you ought to go to The Bridge. I think that you would like those people. or some of them, anyhow. or you ought to go to the poetry readings at the Unitarian Church …”

I let the water run into the bathtub, good and hot. I undressed, found a beer, drank half, set the can on the ledge and got into the tub, took the lather and the brush and began dabbing at the string and knobs.

________

I met Kerouac’s boy Neal C. shortly before he went down to lay along those Mexican railroad tracks to die. his eyes were sticking out on ye old toothpicks and he had his head in the speaker, jogging, bouncing, ogling, he was in a white t-shirt and seemed to be singing like a cuckoo bird along with the music, preceding the beat just a shade as if he were leading the parade. I sat down with my beer and watched him. I’d brought in a six pack or two. Bryan was handing out an assignment and some film to two young guys who were going to cover that show that kept getting busted. whatever happened to that show by the Frisco poet, I forget his name. anyhow, nobody was noticing Neal C. and Neal C. didn’t care, or he pretended not to. when the song stopped, the 2 young guys left and Bryan introduced me to the fab Neal C.

“have a beer?” I asked him.

Neal plucked a bottle out, tossed it in the air, caught it, ripped the cap off and emptied the half-quart in two long swallows.

“have another.”

“sure.”

“I thought I was good on the beer.”

“I’m the tough young jail kid. I’ve read your stuff.”

“read your stuff too. that bit about climbing out the bathroom window and hiding in the bushes naked. good stuff.”

“oh yeah.” he worked at the beer, he never sat down. he kept moving around the floor. he was a little punchy with the action, the eternal light, but there wasn’t any hatred in him. you liked him even though you didn’t want to because Kerouac had set him up for the sucker punch and Neal had bit, kept biting. but you know Neal was o.k. and another way of looking at it, Jack had only written the book, he wasn’t Neal’s mother. just his destructor, deliberate or otherwise.

Neal was dancing around the room on the Eternal High. his face looked old, pained, all that, but his body was the body of a boy of eighteen.

“you want to try him, Bukowski?” asked Bryan.

“yeah, ya wanta go, baby?” he asked me.

again, no hatred. just going with the game.

“no, thanks. I’ll be forty-eight in August. I’ve taken my last beating.”

I couldn’t have handled him.

“when was the last time you saw Kerouac?” I asked.

I think he said 1962, 1963. anyhow, a long time back.

I just about stayed with Neal on the beer and had to go out and get some more. the work at the office was about done and Neal was staying at Bryan’s and B. invited me over for dinner. I said, “all right,” and being a bit high I didn’t realize what was going to happen.

when we got outside a very light rain was just beginning to fall. the kind that really fucks up the streets. I still didn’t know. I thought Bryan was going to drive. but Neal got in and took the wheel. I had the back seat anyhow. B. got up in front with Neal. and the ride began. straight along those slippery streets and it would seem we were past the corner and then Neal would decide to take a right or a left. past parked cars, the dividing line just a hair away. it can only be described as hairline. a tick the other way and we were all finished.

after we cleared I would always say something ridiculous like, “well, suck my dick!” and Bryan would laugh and Neal would just go on driving, neither grim or happy or sardonic, just there — doing the movements. I understood. it was necessary. it was his bull ring, his racetrack. it was holy and necessary.

the best one was just off Sunset, going north toward Carlton. the drizzle was good now, ruining both the vision and the streets. turning off of Sunset, Neal picked up his next move, full-speed chess, it had to be calculated in an instant’s glance. a left on Carlton would bring us to Bryan’s. we were a block off. there was one car ahead of us and two approaching. now, he could have slowed down and followed the traffic in but he would have lost his movement. not Neal. he swung out around the car ahead of us and I thought, this is it, well, it doesn’t matter, really it doesn’t matter at all. that’s the way it goes through your brain, that’s the way it went through my brain. the two cars plunged at each other, head-on, the other so close that the headlights flooded my back seat. I do think that at the last second the other driver touched his brake. that gave us the hairline. it must have been figured in by Neal. that movement. but it wasn’t over. we were going very high speed now and the other car, approaching slowly from Hollywood Blvd. was just about blocking a left on Carlton. I’ll always remember the color of that car. we got that close. a kind of gray-blue, an old car, coupe, humped and hard like a rolling steel brick thing. Neal cut left. to me it looked as if we were going to ram right through the center of the car. it was obvious. but somehow, the motion of the other car’s forward and our movement left coincided perfectly. the hairline was there. once again. Neal parked the thing and we went on in. Joan brought the dinner in.

Neal ate all of his plate and most of mine too. we had a bit of wine. John had a highly intelligent young homosexual baby-sitter, who I now think has gone on with some rock band or killed himself or something. anyhow, I pinched his buttocks as he walked by. he loved it.

I think I stayed long past my time, drinking and talking with Neal. the baby-sitter kept talking about Hemingway, somehow equating me with Hemingway until I told him to shove it and he went upstairs to check Jason. it was a few days later that Bryan phoned me:

“Neal’s dead, Neal died.”

“oh shit, no.”

then Bryan told me something about it. hung up.

that was it.

all those rides, all those pages of Kerouac, all that jail, to die alone under a frozen Mexican moon, alone, you understand? can’t you see the miserable puny cactii? Mexico is not a bad place because it is simply oppressed; Mexico is simply a bad place. can’t you see the desert animals watching? the frogs, horned and simple, the snakes like slits of men’s minds crawling, stopping, waiting, dumb under a dumb Mexican moon. reptiles, flicks of things, looking across this guy in the sand in a white t-shirt.

Neal, he’d found his movement, hurt nobody. the tough young jail kid laying it down alongside a Mexican railroad track.

the only night I met him I said, “Kerouac has written all your other chapters. I’ve already written your last one.”

“go ahead,” he said, “write it.”

end copy.

________

the summers are longer where the suicides hang and the flies eat mudpie. he’s a famous street poet of the ’50’s and still alive. I throw my bottle into the canal, it’s Venice, and Jack is holing up at the place for a week or so, giving a reading somewhere in a few days. the canal looks strange, very strange.

“hardly deep enough for self-destruction.”

“yeah,” he says in the Bronx movie voice, “you’re right.”

he’s gray at 37. hook-nose. slumped. energetic. pissed. male. very male. a little Jewish smile. maybe he’s not Jewish. I don’t ask him.

he’s known them all. pissed on Barney Rosset’s shoe at a party because he didn’t like something Barney said. Jack knows Ginsberg, Creeley, Lamantia, on and on, and now he knew Bukowski.

“yeah, Bukowski came to Venice to see me. scars all over his face. shoulders slumped. very tired-looking man. doesn’t say much and when he does it’s kind of dull, kind of commonplace. you’d never think he’d written all those books of poems. but he’s been in the post office too long. he’s slipped. they’ve eaten his spirit out. damn shame, but you know how it works. but he’s still boss, real boss, you know.”

Jack knows the inside, and it’s funny but real to know that people aren’t much, it’s all a motherfucking jive, and you’ve known it but it’s funny to hear it said while sitting by a Venice canal trying to cure an extra-size hangover.

he goes through a book. photographs of poets mostly. I am not in there. I began late and lived too long alone in small rooms drinking wine. they always figure that a hermit is insane, and they may be right.

he goes through the book. jesus christ, it’s a catsass sitting there with that hangover and the water down there, and here is Jack going through the book, I see spots of sunlight, noses, ears, the sheen of the photographic pages. I don’t care, but I guess we need something to talk about and I don’t talk well and he is doing the work, so here we go, Venice canal, the whole chickenshit sadness of living it out —

“this guy went nuts about 2 years ago.”

“this guy wanted me to suck his dick in order to get my book published.”

“did you?”

“did I? I belted him out! wit’ dis!”

he shows me the Bronx fist.

I laugh. he’s comfortable and he’s human. every man is afraid of being a queer. I get a little tired of it. maybe we should all become queers and relax. not belting Jack. he’s good for a change. there are too many people afraid to speak against queers — intellectually. just as there are too many people afraid to speak against the left wing — intellectually. I don’t care which way it goes — I only know: there are too many people afraid.

so Jack’s good meat. I’ve seen too many intellectuals lately. I get very tired of the precious intellects who must speak diamonds every time they open their mouths. I get tired of battling for each space of air for the mind. that’s why I stayed away from people for so long, and now that I am meeting people, I find that I must return to my cave. there are other things beside the mind: there are insects and palm trees and pepper shakers, and I’ll have a pepper-shaker in my cave, so laugh.

the people will always betray you.

never trust the people.

“the whole poetry game is run by the fags and the left-wing,” he tells me, staring into the canal.

there is a kind of truth here that it is bitter and false to dispute and I don’t know what to do with it. I am certainly aware that there is something wrong with the poetry game — the books of the famous are so very dull, including Shakespeare. was it the same then?

I decide to throw Jack some shit.

“remember the old poetry mag? I don’t know if it was Monroe or Shapiro or what, now it’s gotten so bad I don’t read it anymore, but I remember a statement by Whitman:

“ ‘to have great poets we need great audiences.’ well, I always figure a Whitman a greater poet than I, if that matters, only this time I think he got the thing backwards. it should read:

“ ‘to have great audiences we need great poets.’ ”

“yeah, so, all right,” Jack said, “I met Creeley at a party this time and I asked him if he ever read Bukowski and he got frozen real solid, wouldn’t answer me, man, like you know what I mean.”

“let’s get the fuck outa here,” I say.

we go out toward my car. I’ve got a car, somehow. a lemon, of course. Jack’s got the book with him. he’s still turning pages.

“this guy sucks dick.”

“oh yeah?”

“this guy married a schoolteacher who belts his ass with a whip. horrible woman. he ain’t writ a word since his marriage. she’s got his soul in her cunt-strap.”

“you talking about Gregory or Kero?”

“no, this is another one!”

“holy Jesus!”

we keep walking toward my car. I feel rather dull but I can FEEL this man’s energy, ENERGY, and I realize that it might be possible that I am walking next to one of the few immortal and unschooled poets of our time. and then, that doesn’t matter either, after I think about it a moment.

I get on in. the lemon starts but the gearshift is fucked-up again. I’ve got to drive in low all the way and the bitch stalls at every signal, battery down, I pray, one more start, no cops, no more drunk-driving raps, no more christs of any kinds on anybody’s kind of Cross, we can choose between Nixon and Humphrey and Christ and be fucked anyway we turn, and I turn left, brake up at the address and we get out.

Jack’s still at the pages.

“this guy’s o.k. he killed himself, his father, his mother, wife, but didn’t shoot his three children or the dog. one of the best poets since Baudelaire.”

“yeah?”

“yeah, shit.”

we get out of the lemon as I make the sign of the Cross for one more start on the mother battery.

we walk up and Jack bangs a door.

“BIRD! BIRD! this is Jack!”

the door opens and there is the Bird. I look twice. I can’t see whether it is a woman or a man. the face is the distilled essence opium of untouched beauty. it’s a man. the motions are man. I know it but I also know that he can catch hell and ultimate brutality every time he hits the streets. they will kill him because he has not died at all. I have died nine-tenths but keep the other one-tenth like a gun. I can walk down the street and they can’t tell me from the news vendor, even tho the news vendors have more beautiful faces than any president of the united states, but then, that’s no task either.

“Bird, I need 20,” says Jack.

Bird peels off a g.d. twenty. his movement is smooth, without worry.

“thanks, baby.”

“sure, can you come on in?”

“all right.”

we move in. sit down, there’s the bookcase. I lay my eyes across it. there doesn’t seem to be a dull book in there. I catch all the books I’ve admired in there. what the hell? is it a dream? the kid’s face is so beautiful that everytime I look I feel good, like you know, chili and beans, hot, after coming off a bad one, the first food in weeks, well, fuck, I am always on guard.

the Bird. and the ocean down there. and bad battery. a lemon. the cops patrolling their stupid dry streets. what a bad war it is. and what an idiot nightmare, only this momentary cool space between us, we are all going to be smashed, very quickly into broken children’s toys, into those highheels that ran so gaily down the stairway to be fucked out of it forever, forever, dunces and fools, dunces and tools, god damn our weak bravery.

we sit down. a quart of scotch appears. I pour a quarter of a pint down without pause, ah, I gag, blink, idiot, working toward 50, still trying to play Hero. asshole hero in a fusillade of puke.

the Bird’s wife comes in. we are introduced. she is a liquid woman in a brown dress, she just flows flows her eyes laughing, she flows, I tell you, she flows,

“WOW WOW WOW!” I say.

she looks so good I’ve got to pick her up, hug her, I carry her on my left hip, spin her, laugh. nobody thinks that I am crazy. we all laugh. we all understand. I put her down. we sit down.

Jack likes me coming on. he’s been carrying my soul and he’s tired. he grins the grin. he’s o.k. once in a rare lifetime have you ever been in a roomful of people who only helped you when you looked at them, listened to them. this was one of those magic times. I knew it. I glowed like a fucking hot tamale. it didn’t matter. o.k.

I smacked down another quarter pint out of embarrassment. I realized that I was the weaker of 4 people and I did not want to harm, I only wanted to realize their easy holiness. I loved like a crazy jackoff dog turned into a pen of heated female bitches, only they had miracles to show me beyond sperm.

the Bird looked at me.

“see my collage?”

he held up a very shitty-looking thing with a woman’s earring and some other dab of shit hanging upon it.

(by the way … I realize I switch from present to past tense, and if you don’t like it … ram a nipple up your scrotum. — printer: leave this in.)

I go into a long boring hartang harrangue about how I don’t like this or that, and about my sufferance in Art Classes …

the Bird pulls the stop out of me.

by yanking the thing apart it’s only a popneedle and then he grins at me, but then I too know the inside: that perhaps, as I am told, from inside, the only junky who can make it is Wm. Burroughs, who owns the Burroughs Co., almost, and who can play it tough while all along being a sissy fat wart-sucking hog inside. this is what I hear, and it’s kept very quiet. is it true? for it all, true or not, Burroughs is a very dull writer and without the insistence of knowledgeable pop in his literary background, he would be almost nothing, as Faulkner is nothing except to very dry Southern extremists like Mr. Corrington, and Mr. Nod, and Mr. Suck-Dry-Shit.

“Baby,” they start saying to me, “you are drunk.”

and I am. and I am. and I am.

there’s nothing now but be turned into the heat or sleep.

they make a place for me.

I drink too fast. they talk on. I hear them, gently.

I sleep. I sleep in comradeship. the sea will not drown me and neither will they. they love my sleeping body. I am an asshole. they love my sleeping body. may all God’s children come to this.

jesus jesus jesus

who cares about a dead

battery?

________

jesus, mother, it was terrible — here they came pounding out of the vast cuntholes in the earth spinning me about with my paper suitcase up near Times Square.

I finally managed to ask one of them where the Village was and when I got to the Village I found a room and when I opened my wine bottle and took off my shoes I found that the room had an easel, but I wasn’t a painter, just a kid looking for luck, and I sat behind the easel and drank my wine and looked out the dirty window.

when I went out to get another bottle of wine I saw this young guy standing in a silk bathrobe. he wore a beret and sandals, had a half-diseased beard and spoke into the hall phone:

“oh, yes yes, darling, I must see you, oh yes, I must! I shall slash my wrists otherwise … ! yes!”

I’ve got to get out of here, I thought. he wouldn’t slash his shoelaces. what a sickening little snip. and outside, they sat in the cafes, very comfortable, in berets, in the get-up, pretending to be Artists.

I stayed there a week drinking, finishing out the rent, and then I found a room outside the Village. for the looks and size of the room it was very cheap and I couldn’t understand why. I found a bar around the corner and sipped at beers all day. my money was going but, as usual, I hated to look for a job. each drunken and starvation moment contained some type of easy meaning for me. that night I bought two bottles of port wine and went up to my room. I took off my clothes, got into bed in the dark, found a glass and poured the first wine. then I found why the room was so cheap. the “L” ran right past my window. and that’s where the stop was. right outside my window. the whole room would be lit by the train. and I’d look at a whole trainload of faces. horrible faces: whores, orangutans, bastards, madmen, killers — all my masters. then, swiftly the train would start up and the room would be dark again — until the next trainload of faces, which was always too soon. I needed the wine.

a Jewish couple owned the building and also ran a tailor and cleaning shop across the street. I decided that my few rags needed cleaning. job-hunting time was belching and farting across my mad horizon. I went in drunk with my rags.

“… need these cleaned or washed or something …”

“poor boy! why you are living in THREADS! I couldn’t wash the windows with this stuff. tell you what … oh, Sam!”

“yeh?”

“show this nice boy that suit the man left!”

“oh yes, it’s such a nice suit, mama! I don’t understand how that man left it!”

I won’t go through all the dialogue. mainly I insisted that the suit was too small. they said it wasn’t. I said if it wasn’t too small it was too high. they said seven. I said, broke. they said six. I said, I’m broke. when they got down to four I insisted that they get me inside the suit. they did. I gave them the four. went back to my room, took the suit off and slept. when I awakened it was dark (except when the “L” came by) and I decided to put on my new suit and go out and find a woman, a beautiful one, of course, to support a man of my still-hidden talents.

as I got into the pants the entire crotch split up the back. well, I was game. it was a little cool but I figured the coat would cover. when I got into the coat the left arm ripped out at the shoulder spilling out a sickening gummy padding.

taken again.

I got out of what remained of the suit and decided that I’d have to move again.

I found another place. a rather cellar-like structure, down the steps and in between the tenants’ garbage cans. I was finding my level.

the first night out after the bars closed I found I had lost my key. I only had on a thin white Calif. shirt. I rode a bus back and forth to keep from freezing. finally the driver said it was the end of the line or the ride was over. I was too drunk to remember.

when I got out it was still freezing and I was standing outside of Yankee Stadium.

oh Lord, I thought, here is where my childhood hero Lou Gehrig used to play and now I am going to die out here. well, it’s fitting.

I walked about a bit, then found a cafe. I walked in. the waitresses were all middle-aged negresses but the coffee cups were large and the doughnut and coffee hardly cost anything.

I took my stuff over to a table, sat down, ate the doughnut very quickly, sipped at the coffee, then took out a king-sized cigarette and lit it.

I started hearing voices:

“PRAISE THE LORD, BROTHER!”

“OH, PRAISE THE LORD, BROTHER!”

I looked around. all the waitresses were praising me and some of the customers too. it was very nice. recognition at last. the Atlantic and Harper’s be damned. genius would always out. I smiled at them all and took a big drag.

then one of the waitresses screamed at me:

“NO SMOKING IN THE HOUSE OF THE LORD, BROTHER!”

I put the cigarette out. I finished the coffee. then I went outside and looked at the lettering on the window:

FATHER DIVINE’S MISSION.

I lit another cigarette and began the long walk back to my place. when I got there nobody would answer the bell. I finally stretched out on top of the garbage cans and went to sleep. I knew that down on the pavement the rats would get me. I was a clever young man.

I was so clever that I even got a job the next day. and the next night, hungover, shaky, very sad, I was at work.

two old guys were to break me in. they’d each been on the job since the subways were invented. we walked along with these heavy sheets of cardboard under the left arm and a little tool in the right hand that looked like a beercan opener.

“all the people in New York have these little green-colored bugs all over them,” one of the old guys said.

“izzat so?” I said, not giving the least damn what color the bugs were.

“you’ll see ’em on the seats. we find ’em on the seats each night.”

“yeh,” said the other old man.

we walked along.

good god, I thought, did this ever happen to Cervantes?

“now watch,” said one of the old guys. “each card has a little number. we replace each card with the little number with another card with the same number.”

flip, flip. he beercan-opened the strips, flipped in the new advertisement, replaced the strips, took the old advertisement and put it on the bottom of the pile of cards under his left arm.

“now you try it.”

I tried it. the little strips didn’t want to give. I had a bum can opener. and was sick and shaky.

“you’ll get it,” said an old guy.

I AM getting it, you fuck, I thought.

we moved along.

then we stepped out of the rear of the car and they went ahead stepping along the railroad ties between the tracks. the space between each board was about three feet. a body could easily fall through without even trying. and we were elevated about 90 feet from the street. and it must have been 90 feet to the new car. the two old guys skipped over the boards with their heavy cardboard load and waited for me at the new car. there was a train stopped across the way picking up passengers. it was well-lit around there, but that was all. the lights from the train clearly showed me the three foot gap between the boards.

“COME ON! COME ON! WE’RE IN A HURRY!”

“god damn you and your hurry!” I screamed at the two old guys. then I stepped out on the boards with my load of cardboard under my left arm and the beercan opener in my right hand. one step, two steps, three steps … hungover, sick.

then the train that was loading pulled out. it was dark as a closet. darker than a closet. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t take the next step. and I couldn’t turn around. I just stood there.

“come on! come on! we got a lot more cars to do!”

finally my eyes refocused a bit. I began the wobbly steps again. some of the boards were soft, were worn round and splintered. I ceased to hear their shouting. I took the transfixed strides one after the other, expecting each next step to be the one that sent me on down through.

I made the other car and threw the cardboard ads and the can opener on the floor.

“watza matta?”

“watza matta? watza matta? I say, ‘FUCK IT!’ ”

“what’s wrong?”

“one misstep and a man can get killed. don’t you idiots realize that?”

“nobody’s gotten killed yet.”

“nobody drinks like I do, either. now, come on, tell me, how do I get the hell out of here?”

“well, there’s a stairway down to the right but you’ve got to walk across the tracks instead of along them and that means stepping over two or three third rails.”

“fuck it. what’s a third rail?”

“that’s the power. you touch one and you’re gone.”

“show me the way.”

the old boys pointed to the stairway down. it didn’t seem too far away.

“thank you, gentlemen.”

“watch the third rail. it’s gold. don’t touch it or you’ll burn.”

I stepped on out. I could sense them watching me. each time I reached a third rail I stepped high and fancy. they had a soft and calm look to them in the moonlight.

I reached the stairway and was alive again. at the bottom of the stairway there was a bar. I heard people laughing. I went into the bar and sat down. some guy was telling stories about how his mother took care of him, made him take piano and painting lessons and how he managed to get money out of her, one way or the other, to get drunk on. the whole bar was laughing. I began laughing too. the guy was a genius, giving it away for nothing. I laughed until the bar closed and we broke up, each going our different ways.

I left New York soon after, never went back, never will. cities are built to kill people, and there are lucky towns and the other kind. mostly the other kind. in New York you’ve got to have all the luck. I knew I didn’t have that kind. next thing I knew I was sitting in a nice room in east Kansas City listening to the manager beat up the maid because she’d failed to sell me a piece of her ass. it was real and peaceful and sane again. I listened to the screams while sitting up in bed, reached for my glass, had a good one, then stretched out among the clean sheets. the guy could really lay it on. I could hear her head bouncing against the wall.

maybe the next day when I wasn’t so tired from the bus trip I’d let her have a little. she had a nice ass. at least he wasn’t beating on that. and I was out of New York, almost alive.

________

those were the nights, the old days at the Olympic. they had a bald little Irishman making the announcements (was his name Dan Tobey?), and he had style, he’d seen things happen, maybe even on the riverboats when he was a kid, and if he wasn’t that old, maybe Dempsey-Firpo anyhow. I can still see him reaching up for that cord and pulling the mike down slowly, and most of us were drunk before the first fight, but we were easy drunk, smoking cigars, feeling the light of life, waiting for them to put two boys in there, cruel but that was the way it worked, that is what they did to us and we were still alive, and, yes, most of us with a dyed redhead or blonde, even me. her name was Jane and we had many a good ten-rounder between us, one of them ending in a k.o. of me. and I was proud when she’d come back from the lady’s room and the whole gallery would begin to pound and whistle and howl as she wiggled that big magic marvelous ass in that tight skirt — and it was a magic ass: she could lay a man stone cold and gasping, screaming love-words to a cement sky. then she’d come down and sit beside me and I’d lift that pint like a coronet, pass it to her, she’d take her nip, hand it back, and I’d say about the boys in the gallery: “those screaming jackoff bastards, I’ll kill them.”

and she’d look at her program and say, “who do you want in the first?”

I picked them good — about 90 percent — but I had to see them first. I always chose the guy who moved around the least, who looked like he didn’t want to fight, and if one guy gave the Sign of the Cross before the bell and the other guy didn’t you had a winner — you took the guy who didn’t, but it usually worked together: the guy who did all the shadow boxing and dancing around usually was the one who gave the Sign of the Cross and got his ass whipped.

there weren’t many bad fights in those days and if there were it was the same as now — mostly between the heavyweights. but we let them know about it in those days — we tore the ring down or set the place on fire, busted up the seats. they just couldn’t afford to give us too many bad ones. the Hollywood Legion ran the bad ones and we stayed away from the Legion. even the Hollywood boys knew the action was at the Olympic. Raft came, and the others, and all the starlets, hugging those front row seats. the gallery boys went ape and the fighters fought like fighters and the place was blue with cigar smoke, and how we screamed, baby baby, and threw money and drank our whiskey, and when it was over, there was the drive in, the old lovebed with our dyed and vicious women. you slammed it home, then slept like a drunk angel. who needed the public library? who needed Ezra? T.S. E.E.? D.H. H.D.? any of the Eliots? any of the Sitwells?

I’ll never forget the first night I saw young Enrique Balanos. at the time, I had me a good colored boy. he used to bring a little white lamb into the ring with him before the fight and hug it, and that’s corny but he was tough and good and a tough and good man is allowed certain leeways, right?

anyway, he was my hero, and his name might have been something like Watson Jones. Watson had good class and the flair — swift, quick quick quick, and the PUNCH, and he enjoyed his work. but then, one night, unannounced, somebody slipped this young Balanos in against him, and Balanos had it, took his time, slowly worked Watson down and took him over, busted him up good near the end. my hero. I couldn’t believe it. if I remember, Watson was kayoed which made it a very bitter night, indeed. me with my pint screaming for mercy, screaming for a victory that simply would not happen. Balanos certainly had it — the fucker had a couple of snakes for arms, and he didn’t move — he slid, slipped, jerked like some type of evil spider, always getting there, doing the thing. I knew that night that it would take a very excellent man to beat him and that Watson might as well take his little lamb and go home.

it wasn’t until much later that night, the whiskey pouring into me like the sea, fighting with my woman, cursing her sitting there showing me all that fine leg, that I admitted that the better man had won.

“Balanos. good legs. he doesn’t think. just reacts. better not to think. tonight the body beat the soul. it usually does. goodbye Watson, goodbye Central Avenue, it’s all over.”

I smashed my glass against the wall and went over and grabbed me some woman. I was wounded. she was beautiful. we went to bed. I remember a light rain came through the window. we let it rain on us. it was good. it was so good we made love twice and when we went to sleep we slept with our faces toward the window and it rained all over us and in the morning the sheets were all wet and we both got up sneezing and laughing, “jesus christ! jesus christ!” it was funny and poor Watson laying somewhere, his face slugged and pulpy, facing the Eternal Truth, facing the six rounders, the four rounders, then back to the factory with me, murdering eight or ten hours a day for pennies, getting nowhere, waiting on Papa Death, getting your mind kicked to hell and your spirit kicked to hell, we sneezed, “jesus christ!” it was funny and she said, “you’re blue all over, you’ve turned all BLUE! jesus, look at yourself in the mirror!” and I was freezing and dying and I stood in front of the mirror and I was all BLUE! ridiculous! a skull and shit of bones! I began to laugh, I laughed so hard I fell down on the rug and she fell down on top of me and we both laughed laughed laughed, jesus christ we laughed until I thought we were crazy, and then I had to get up, get dressed, comb my hair, brush my teeth, too sick to eat, heaved when I brushed my teeth, I went outside and walked toward the overhead lighting factory, just the sun feeling good but you had to take what you could get.

________

Santa Anita, March 22, 1968, 3:10 p.m. I can’t catch Quillo’s Babe the even-money shot with Alpen Dance. the 4th race is over and I haven’t touched a thing, I am $40.00 down, I should have had Boxer Bob in the 2nd with Bianco, one of the best unknown riders at the track at 9/5; any other jock, say Lambert or Pineda or Gonzales, the horse would have gone at 6/5 or even-money. but I’ve got an old saying (I make up old sayings as I walk around in rags) that knowledge without follow-through is worse than no knowledge at all. because if you’re guessing and it doesn’t work you can just say, shit, the gods are against me. but if you know and don’t do, you’ve got attics and dark halls in your mind to walk up and down in and wonder about. this ain’t healthy, leads to unpleasant evenings, too much to drink and the shredding machine.

all right. old horseplayers don’t just fade away. they die. hard and finally, on east 5th or selling papers out front with a sailor’s cap on, pretending it’s all a lark, your mind split in half, your guts dangling, your cock without sweet pussy. I think that it was one of Freud’s favorite pupils, who has now become a philosopher of some renown — my x-wife used to read him — who said that gambling was a form of masturbation. very nice to be a bright boy and say these things. and there is always a minor truth contained in almost every saying. if I were an easy bright boy I think I would say something like, “cleaning the fingernails with a dirty fingernail file is a form of masturbation.” and I would probably win a scholarship, a grant, the king’s sword on shoulder and 14 hot pieces of ass. I will only say this, out of a background of factories, park benches, two-bit jobs, bad women, bad weather of Life — the reason the average person is at the track is that they are driven screwy by the turn of the bolt, the foreman’s insane face, the landlord’s hand, the lover’s dead sex; taxation, cancer, the blues; clothes that fall apart on a 3rd wearing, water that tastes like piss, doctors that run assembly-line and indecent offices, hospitals without heart, politicians with skulls filled with pus … we can go on and on but would only be accused of being bitter and demented, but the world makes madmen (and women) of us all, and even the saints are demented, nothing is saved. so shit. well. according to my figures I’ve only had 2500 pieces of ass but I’ve watched 12,500 horse races, and if I have any advice to anybody it’s this: take up watercolor painting.

but what I am trying to tell you is, that the reason most people are at the racetrack is that they are in agony, ey yeh, and they are so desperate that they will take a chance on further agony rather than face their present position (?) in life. now the big boys are not as half-ass as we think they are. they sit on mountain tops studying the ant-swirl. don’t you think Johnson is proud of his bellybutton? and don’t you realize, at the same time, that Johnson is one of the biggest assholes ever fomented upon us? we are hooked, slapped and chopped silly; so silly that some of us finally love our tormentors because they are there to torment us along logical lines of torture. this seems so reasonable, since there isn’t anything else showing. it’s got to be right because that’s all there is. what? Santa Anita is there. Johnson is there. and, one way or another we keep them there. we build our own racks and scream when our genitals are torn off by the subnormal keeper waving the big silver cross (gold is out). let this explain, then, why some of us, if not most of us, if not all of us are there, say on a day like March 22, 1968, an afternoon in Arcadia, Calif.

end of 5th race won by the 12 horse Quadrant. the board reads 5/2 and I have to win on the nose. horse won big, running past horses in the stretch and drawing out. I have ten win and am $40.00 down and wait on the official sign. a 5/2 shot pays between $7.00 and $7.80 and so ten win means a return of between $35.00 and $39.00. so I figure I am about even. the horse was three on the line and never moved from 5/2 all during the betting. the official payoff was flashed on the board:

5:40.

right on the toteboard. $five-four-oooh. which lies halfway between 8/5 and 9/5 and is not 5/2 at all. earlier in the week, in an overnight gesture, the track doubled the parking fee from 25 cents to 50 cents. I doubt that the parking lot attendants’ salaries were doubled. also they snatched the whole $2.00 instead of the $1.95 on entering. now, $5.40. god damn. a slow unbelievable moan went across the grandstand and through the infield. in watching nearly 13,000 races I had never seen an occurrence like this. the board is not infallible. I have seen a 9/5 pay $6.00, and other slight variances, but never have I seen a 5/2 pay close to 8/5 nor have I ever seen a 5/2 drop in one flash (the last one) from 5/2 to close to 8/5. it would have taken an almost unbelievable amount of money bet at the last moment to do this.

the crowd began to BOOOOO BOOOOOO BOOOOO! it died, then began again. BOOO, BOOOOOO, BOOOOO! and each time it began it lasted longer. the mob smelled rotten fish plus greed. the mob had been knifed, again. $5.40 meant a return to me of $27.00 instead of a possible $39.00. and I wasn’t the only one affected. you could feel the mob writhing, stung; to many out there each race meant rent or no rent, food or no food, car payment or no car payment.

I looked down at the track and there was a man out there waving his program, pointing at the board. he was evidently talking to a track steward. then the man waved his program at the crowd, waving them in, asking them to come out onto the track. one man came through, leaping the rail. the crowd cheered. another man found the gateway opening in the rail. now there were three. the crowd cheered. people were feeling better. now they came, more and more and the crowd cheered. everybody was feeling better. a chance. a chance? something of some sort. more came. there must have been between 40 and 65 people spread across the track.

the announcer came on over the speaker: “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, WE ARE ASKING YOU TO PLEASE CLEAR THE TRACK SO THAT WE MAY BEGIN THE 6th RACE!”

his voice was not kindly. there were ten track policemen down there in their Santa Anita grays. each man carried a gun. the crowd booed, BOOOOOOOED!

then one of the players down there noticed that the next race was on the turf. hell, they were blocking the dirt track. the crowd moved on over to the grass infield which circles inside the dirt track as the horses came out for the post parade. there were eight horses led by the outrider in his red hunting jacket and black cap. the crowd spread across the track.

“PLEASE,” the announcer said, “CLEAR THE TRACK! PLEASE CLEAR THE TRACK! THE TOTEBOARD WAS UNABLE TO REGISTER THE LAST FLASH DOWN IN THE BETTING. THE PRICE IS CORRECT!”

the horses moved slowly toward the waiting crowd. those horses looked very big and nervous.

I asked Denver Danny, a guy who has hung around the tracks much longer than I, “what the hell gives, Denver?”

“the board reads properly,” he said, “that’s not the bitch. each dollar bet is recorded. when the machines closed the board read 5/2; the board flashed again and there were the final variances but the 5/2 remained. now the French have an old saying, ‘who is to guard the guards themselves?’ as you recall, Quadrant was the obvious winner a 3rd of the way down the stretch, drawing out. a number of things could have happened. perhaps the machines were never locked during the running. when Quadrant was the obvious winner management could have stood there and kept punching out winning tickets. others say that one or two machines can be fixed to remain open and in use when the others are locked. I really don’t know. all I know is that some SHIT went on and everybody else here knows it too.”

the horses moved on toward the crowd. the outrider and the front horse, a monster, RICH DESIRE, br. g.4, Pierce up, moved toward the line of waiting people. one of the boys called the track police something very filthy and three of the cops took him over to the rail and roughed him up a bit. the crowd got on them and they let him go and ran back to their positions in front of the line of people spread across the track. the horses kept moving forward, and you could see that they intended to go through. the orders were in. this was the moment: men on horses against men with nothing. two of three guys lay down in front of the horses, right in front of the line of march. this was it. the outrider’s face distorted suddenly, it got as red as his hunting jacket, and he grabbed the number one horse, RICH DESIRE, by the rein, spurred his horse and rammed through human flesh, eyes shut. the horse got through. I’m not sure whether he broke anybody’s back or not.

but the outrider had earned his salary. a good management boy. and some of the few scabs in the stands cheered. but it wasn’t over. a few of the guys grabbed at the number one horse and tried to pull the jock out of the saddle and to the ground. then the police moved in. the other horses got on through but the boys momentarily had the number one horse and Pierce was almost pulled out of the saddle. this was the final sway of the tide.

I’m sure that if they could have gotten Pierce out of the saddle they would have ended up burning the grandstands and smashing up the whole damn dumb scene. meanwhile the cops were working over the boys pretty good. no guns were pulled but it looked like the cops were enjoying the action, especially one cop who kept hitting an old man along the top of the head, back of the neck and along the spine. Pierce got on through with RICH DESIRE, an aptly named gelding, and the horse warmed up for their mile and one half on the turf. the cops seemed particularly vicious and energetic and the protesters didn’t seem too interested in fighting back. the game was lost. so the track was cleared.

the next voice that went up was: “DON’T BET! DON’T BET! DON’T BET!”

what a thing that would have been, eh? not a dollar for the vultures — fat subnormal slobs thrown out of Beverly Hills homes. all too good. there was already six grand in the mutuels when they started to holler, “DON’T BET!” we were hooked, bleeding, gotten forever … there was nothing we could do but bet again and again and again and take it.

ten cops stood along the infield rail. proud and true and sweating, they’d earned a hard day’s pay. the winner of the 6th was OFF, who read nine to one and paid that. if the board has paid eight or seven there would be no Santa Anita today.

I read that the next day, Saturday, there were around 45,000 people at the track, which was about normal.

I was not there and I was not missed and the horses ran and I wrote this.

March 23, 8 p.m., Los Angeles the same damn sadness and no place to go.

maybe next time we’ll get that number one horse.

it takes practice, a little laughter and some luck.

________

this guy in the army fatigues came up to me and said, “now that it happened to Kennedy you’ll have something to write about.” he claims to be a writer, why doesn’t he write about it? I’ve always got to pick up their messy balls and put them into a little literary sack for them. I think we’ve got enough experts on the case now — that’s what this decade is: the Decade of the Experts and the Decade of the Assassins. and neither one of them worth crystallized dog turds. the main problem with a thing like that last assassination is that we not only lose a man of some worth but we also lose political, spiritual and social gains, and there are such things, even if they do seem high-sounding. what I mean is, that in an assassination crisis the anti-human and reactionary forces tend to solidify their prejudices and to use all ruptures as a means of knocking natural Freedom off the goddamned end seat at the bar.

I don’t want to get as holy about being active and involved with mankind as Camus did (see his essays) because basically most of mankind sickens me and the only saving that can be done is a whole new concept of Universal Education-Vibration understanding of happiness, reality and flow, and that’s for the little children who ain’t murdered yet, but they will be, I’ll lay you twenty-five to one, for no new concept will be allowed — it would be too destructive to the power gang. no, I’m no Camus, but, sweetheart, it bothers me to see the Klankheads making hay out of Tragedy.

Gov. Reagan’s statement, in part: “The average man, decent, law-abiding, God-fearing, is as disturbed and worried as you and I about what happened.

“He, and all of us, are the victims of an attitude that has been growing in our land for nearly a decade — an attitude that says a man can choose the laws he must obey, that he can take the law into his own hands for a cause, that crime does not necessarily mean punishment.

“This attitude has been spurred by demagogic and irresponsible words of so-called leaders in and out of office.”

but, God, I can’t go on. it’s so dreary. the Father-Image with ye old razor strop to whip our ass. now the good governor is going to take away our toys and put us to bed without dinner.

lord lord, I didn’t murder Kennedy, either one of them. or King. or Malcom X. or the rest. but it’s fairly obvious to me that the Left Wing Liberal forces are being picked off one by one — whatever the reason (a suspect who once worked in a health food store and hated Jews) — whatever the reason, the left-wingers are being murdered and put into their graves while the right-wingers don’t even get grass-stains upon their pantscuffs. and weren’t Roosevelt and Truman also shot at? Democrats. how very odd.

that the assassins are sick, I will admit, and that the Father-Image is also sick, I will also admit. I’m also told by the God-fearing that I have “sinned” because I was born a human being and once upon a time human beings did something to one Jesus Christ. I neither killed Christ or Kennedy and neither did Gov. Reagan. that makes us even, not him one up. I see no reason to lose any judicial or spiritual freedoms, small as these may be now. who is bullshitting who? if a man dies in bed while fucking, must the rest of us stop copulating? if one non-citizen is a madman must all citizens be treated as madmen? if somebody killed God, did I want to kill God? if somebody wanted to kill Kennedy did I want to kill Kennedy? what makes the governor, himself, so right and the rest of us so wrong? speech-writers, and not very good ones at that.

a very curious aside: I had no reason to drive throughout town June 6th and 7th and in the Negro districts nine out of ten cars had their headlights burning in daylight in tribute to Kennedy; driving North the ratio lessened until along Hollywood Blvd. and along Sunset between La Brea and Normandie it became one in ten. Kennedy was a white man, babies. I am white. as I drove my headlights did not burn. nevertheless, while driving between Exposition and Century, I got some cool and wonderful chills that made me feel better.

but like I say, everybody including the governor has a mouth and almost everybody let go, ingraining their prejudices, making personal hay outa tragedy. those who got wanta keep and they are going to tell you how wrong everything is that might strip them of their golden drawers. I am apolitical but with these murky curve-balls these reactionaries throw, I might get pissed and into the game yet.

even the sportswriters got into the game, and as anybody knows the sportswriters are the worst of the worst when it comes to writing and especially when it comes to thinking. I don’t know which is worse, their writing or their thinking, but whichever is on top it is a union which will only bear illegitimate and unendearing monsters. as you must realize, the worst form of humor takes its dreary tool in extreme exaggeration. so does the worst form of ego-patronizing and emotional-patronizing type of thinking.

one sportswriter on our largest non-striking newspaper came on like this, in part (while R. Kennedy was in surgery):

“The Violent State of America: A Nation in Surgery”

“… once again America the Beautiful has taken a bullet to the groin. The country is in surgery. The Violent States of America. One bullet is mightier than one million votes …

“It’s not a Democracy, it’s a Lunacy. A country that shrinks from punishing its criminals, disciplining its children, locking up its mad …

“the President of the United States is chosen in a hardware store, a mail order catalogue …

“Freedom is being gunned down. The ‘right’ to murder is the ultimate right in this country. Sloth is a virtue. Patriotism is a sin. Conservation is an anachronism. God is over thirty years old. To be young is the only religion — as if it were a hardwon virtue. ‘Decency’ is dirty feet, a scorn for work. ‘Love’ is something you need penicillin for. ‘Love’ is handing a flower to a naked young man with vermin in his hair while your mother sits home with a broken heart. You ‘love’ strangers, not parents.

“I like people with curtains on the window, not people with ‘pads.’ The next guy that calls money ‘bread’ should be paid off in whole wheat. I am sick of being told I should try to ‘understand’ evil. Should a canary ‘understand’ a cat?

“The Constitution was never conceived as a shield for degeneracy. You start out burning the flag and you end up burning Detroit. You do away with the death penalty for everyone but Presidential candidates — and presidents …

“… Men of God become men of the Mob. The National Anthem is a scream in the night. Americans can’t walk in their own parks, get on their own buses. They have to cage themselves.

“ ‘Get off your knees, America!’ people cry, but it is ignored. Bare your teeth, they say. Threaten to fight back. The lion bares his teeth and the jackals slink away. A cowering animal invites attack. But America is not listening.

“… neurotic students with their feet on desks they couldn’t make, pulling down universities they wouldn’t know how to rebuild.

“…it all begins with that, the deification of drifters, wastrels, poltroons — insolent guests at the gracious table of democracy overturning it on their dismayed hosts…

“… Pray God our healers can repair Bobby Kennedy. Who is going to repair America?”

do you want this guy? I thought so. too easy. pre-graduate purple prose colored only from a survival viewpoint of present position. do you drive a garbage truck? don’t feel bad. there are better jobs, done worse.

lock up the mad. but who is mad? we all play our little game, depending upon the positions of the pawns, the knights, the castles, the king, the queen, ah, what the hell, I’m beginning to sound like him.

and now we will have the headshrinkers, the thinkers, the panels, the appointed presidential boards trying to figure out what’s wrong with us. who’s mad, who’s glad, who’s sad, who’s right, who’s wrong. lock up the mad, when fifty-nine out of sixty men you meet on the street are cuckoo with industrial neuroses and wives and strives and no time to loosen up and find out where they are or why, and when money which has kept them boosted and blinded for so fucking long, when that’s no good no longer, then what we gonna do? come, baby, the assassins have been with us for a long time. only it ain’t been a blast, just a man with a face like sawdust and eyes like shitstains, so many men like that and women too. millions of them.