Читать книгу The Pleasures of the Damned - Charles Bukowski - Страница 42

no wonder

no wonder

Tony phoned and told me that

Jan had left him but that he was all right;

it helped him he said to think about other great men

like D. H. Lawrence

pissed off with life in general but still

milking his cow;

or to think about

T. Dreiser with his masses of copious

notes

painfully constructing his novels which then made

the very walls applaud;

or I think about van Gogh, Tony continued, a madman

who continued to make great paintings as the

village children threw rocks at his

window;

or, there was Harry Crosby and his mistress

in that fancy hotel room, dying together, swallowed by

the Black Sun;

or, take Tchaikovsky, that homo, marrying a

female opera singer and then standing in a freezing

river hoping to catch pneumonia while she went mad;

or Dos Passos, after all those left-wing books,

putting on a suit and a necktie and voting Republican;

or that homo Lorca, shot dead in the road, supposedly

for his politics but really because the mayor of that

town thought his wife had the hots for the poet;

or that other homo Crane, jumping over the rail of the boat

and into the propellor because while drunk he had

promised to marry some woman;

or Dostoyevsky crucified on the roulette wheel with

Christ on his mind;

or Hemingway, getting his ass kicked by Callaghan

(but Hem was correct in maintaining that F.

Scott couldn’t write);

or sometimes, Tony continued, I remember that guy

with syphilis who went mad and just kept rowing in

circles on some lake—a Frenchman—anyhow, he

wrote great short stories …

listen, I asked, you gonna be all

right?

sure, sure, he answered, just thought I’d phone, good

night.

and he hung up

and I hung up, thinking Jesus

Christ no wonder Jan left

him.