charles bukowski
run with the hunted
a charles bukowski reader
edited by John Martin
Dedication
For William Packard
Editor’s Note
The material in this Bukowski reader is taken from the more than twenty novels, books of short stories, and volumes of poetry that Bukowski has published with Black Sparrow Press over the past twenty-five years. Sometimes autobiographical and sometimes the result of Bukowski’s wonderful gift for observation, these poems and prose pieces, taken together, serve to chronicle this writer’s inner and outer life, from childhood to the present—and an astonishing and heroic life it is. So long as there are intelligent and courageous readers neither Bukowski’s work nor his life, interwoven as they are, will soon be forgotten.
Contents
Dedication
Editor’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Acknowledgments
Other Works
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
& the great white horses come up
& lick the frost of the dream
The first thing I remember is being under something. It was a table, I saw a table leg, I saw the legs of the people, and a portion of the tablecloth hanging down. It was dark under there, I liked being under there. It must have been in Germany. I must have been between one and two years old. It was 1922. I felt good under the table. Nobody seemed to know that I was there. There was sunlight upon the rug and on the legs of the people. I liked the sunlight. The legs of the people were not interesting, not like the tablecloth which hung down, not like the table leg, not like the sunlight.
Then there is nothing … then a Christmas tree. Candles. Bird ornaments: birds with small berry branches in their beaks. A star. Two large people fighting, screaming. People eating, always people eating. I ate too. My spoon was bent so that if I wanted to eat I had to pick the spoon up with my right hand. If I picked it up with my left hand, the spoon bent away from my mouth. I wanted to pick the spoon up with my left hand.
Two people: one larger with curly hair, a big nose, a big mouth, much eyebrow; the larger person always seeming to be angry, often screaming; the smaller person quiet, round of face, paler, with large eyes. I was afraid of both of them. Sometimes there was a third, a fat one who wore dresses with lace at the throat. She wore a large brooch, and had many warts on her face with little hairs growing out of them. “Emily,” they called her. These people didn’t seem happy together. Emily was the grandmother, my father’s mother. My father’s name was “Henry.” My mother’s name was “Katherine.” I never spoke to them by name. I was “Henry, Jr.” These people spoke German most of the time and in the beginning I did too.
The first thing I remember my grandmother saying was, “I will bury all of you!” She said this the first time just before we began eating a meal, and she was to say it many times after that, just before we began to eat. Eating seemed very important. We ate mashed potatoes and gravy, especially on Sundays. We also ate roast beef, knockwurst and sauerkraut, green peas, rhubarb, carrots, spinach, string beans, chicken, meatballs and spaghetti, sometimes mixed with ravioli; there were boiled onions, asparagus, and every Sunday there was strawberry shortcake with vanilla ice cream. For breakfasts we had french toast and sausages, or there were hotcakes or waffles with bacon and scrambled eggs on the side. And there was always coffee. But what I remember best is all the mashed potatoes and gravy and my grandmother, Emily, saying, “I will bury all of you!”
She visited us often after we came to America, taking the red trolley in from Pasadena to Los Angeles. We only went to see her occasionally, driving out in the Model-T Ford.
I liked my grandmother’s house. It was a small house under an overhanging mass of pepper trees. Emily had all her canaries in different cages. I remember one visit best. That evening she went about covering the cages with white hoods so that the birds could sleep. The people sat in chairs and talked. There was a piano and I sat at the piano and hit the keys and listened to the sounds as the people talked. I liked the sound of the keys best up at one end of the piano where there was hardly any sound at all—the sound the keys made was like chips of ice striking against one another.
“Will you stop that?” my father said loudly.
“Let the boy play the piano,” said my grandmother.
My mother smiled.
“That boy,” said my grandmother, “when I tried to pick him up out of the cradle to kiss him, he reached up and hit me in the nose!”
They talked some more and I went on playing the piano.
“Why don’t you get that thing tuned?” asked my father.
—HAM ON RYE
ice for the eagles
I keep remembering the horses
under the moon
I keep remembering feeding the horses
sugar
white oblongs of sugar
more like ice,
and they had heads like
eagles
bald heads that could bite and
did not.
The horses were more real than
my father
more real than God
and they could have stepped on my
feet but they didn’t
they could have done all kinds of horrors
but they didn’t.
I was almost 5
but I have not forgotten yet;
o my god they were strong and good
those red tongues slobbering
out of their souls.
I had begun to dislike my father. He was always angry about something. Wherever we went he got into arguments with people. But he didn’t appear to frighten most people; they often just stared at him, calmly, and he became more furious. If we ate out, which was seldom, he always found something wrong with the food and sometimes refused to pay. “There’s flyshit in this whipped cream! What the hell kind of a place is this?”
“I’m sorry, sir, you needn’t pay. Just leave.”
“I’ll leave, all right! But I’ll be back! I’ll burn this god-damned place down!”
Once we were in a drug store and my mother and I were standing to one side while my father yelled at a clerk. Another clerk asked my mother, “Who is that horrible man? Every time he comes in here there’s an argument.”
“That’s my husband,” my mother told the clerk.
Yet, I remember another time. He was working as a milkman and made early morning deliveries. One morning he awakened me. “Come on, I want to show you something.” I walked outside with him. I was wearing my pajamas and slippers. It was still dark, the moon was still up. We walked to the milk wagon which was horsedrawn. The horse stood very still. “Watch,” said my father. He took a sugar cube, put it in his hand and held it out to the horse. The horse ate it out of his palm. “Now you try it …” He put a sugar cube in my hand. It was a very large horse. “Get closer! Hold out your hand!” I was afraid the horse would bite my hand off. The head came down; I saw the nostrils; the lips pulled back, I saw the tongue and the teeth, and then the sugar cube was gone. “Here. Try it again …” I tried it again. The horse took the sugar cube and waggled his head. “Now,” said my father, “I’ll take you back inside before the horse shits on you.”
I was not allowed to play with other children. “They are bad children,” said my father, “their parents are poor.” “Yes,” agreed my mother. My parents wanted to be rich so they imagined themselves rich.
The first
children of my age that I knew were in kindergarten. They seemed very strange, they laughed and talked and seemed happy. I didn’t like them. I always felt as if I was going to be sick, to vomit, and the air seemed strangely still and white. We painted with watercolors. We planted radish seeds in a garden and some weeks later we ate them with salt. I liked the lady who taught kindergarten, I liked her better than my parents.
—HAM ON RYE
rags, bottles, sacks
as a boy
I remember the sound
of:
“RAGS! BOTTLES! SACKS!”
“RAGS! BOTTLES! SACKS!”
it was during the
Depression
and you could hear the
voice
long before you saw the
old wagon
and the
old tired
swaybacked horse.
then you heard the
hooves:
clop, clop, clop …
and then you saw the
horse and the
wagon
and it always seemed
to be
on the hottest summer
day:
“RAGS! BOTTLES! SACKS!”
oh
that horse was so
tired—
white streams of
saliva
drooling
as the bit dug into
the
mouth
he pulled an intolerable
load
of
rags, bottles, sacks
I saw his eyes
large
in agony
his ribs
showing
the giant flies
whirled and landed upon
raw places on his
skin.
sometimes
one of our fathers would
yell:
“Hey! Why don’t you
feed that horse, you
bastard!”
the man’s answer was
always the
same:
“RAGS! BOTTLES! SACKS!”
the man was
incredibly
dirty, un-
shaven, wearing a crushed
and stained
fedora
he
sat on top of
a large pile of
sacks
and
now and
then
as the horse seemed to
miss
a step
this man would
lay down
the long whip …
the sound was like a
rifle shot
a phalanx of flies would
rise
and the horse would
yank forward
anew
the hooves slipping and
sliding on the hot
asphalt
and then
all we could
see
was the back of the
wagon
and
the massive mound of
rags and bottles
covered with
brown
sacks
and
again
the voice:
“RAGS! BOTTLES! SACKS!”
he was
the first man
I ever wanted to
kill
and
there have been
none
since.
There were continual fights. The teachers didn’t seem to know anything about them. And there was always trouble when it rained. Any boy who brought an umbrella to school or wore a raincoat was singled out. Most of our parents were too poor to buy us such things. And when they did, we hid them in the bushes. Anybody seen carrying an umbrella or wearing a raincoat was considered a sissy. They were beaten after school. David’s mother had him carry an umbrella whenever it was the least bit cloudy.
There were two recess periods. The first graders gathered at their own baseball diamond and the teams were chosen. David and I stood together. It was always the same. I was chosen next to last and David was chosen last, so we always played on different teams. David was worse than I was. With his crossed eyes, he couldn’t even see the ball. I needed lots of practice. I had never played with the kids in the neighborhood. I didn’t know how to catch a ball or how to hit one. But I wanted to, I liked it. David was afraid of the ball, I wasn’t. I swung hard, I swung harder than anybody but I could never hit the ball. I always struck out. Once I fouled a ball off. That felt good. Another time I drew a walk. When I got to first, the first baseman said, “That’s the only way you’ll ever get here.” I stood and looked at him. He was chewing gum and he had long black hairs coming out of his nostrils. His hair was thick with vaseline. He wore a perpetual sneer.
“What are you looking at?” he asked me.
I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t used to conversation.
“The guys say you’re crazy,” he told me, “but you don’t scare me. I’ll be waiting for you after school some day.”
I kept looking at him. He had a terrible face. Then the pitcher wound up and I broke for second. I ran like crazy and slid into second. The ball arrived late. The tag was late.
“You’re out!” screamed the boy whose turn it was to umpire. I got up, not believing it.
“I said, ‘YOU’RE OUT!’” the umpire screamed.
Then I knew that I was not accepted. David and I were not accepted. The others wanted me “out” because I was supposed to be “out.” They knew David and I were friends. It was because of David that I wasn’t wanted. As I walked off the diamond I saw David playing third base in his knickers. His blue and yellow stockings had fallen down around his feet. Why had he chosen me? I was a marked man. That afternoon after school I quickly left class and walked home alone, without David. I didn’t want to watch him beaten again by our classmates or by his mother. I didn’t want to listen to his sad violin. But the next day at lunch time, when he sat down next to me I ate his potato chips.
My day came. I was tall and I felt very powerful at the plate. I couldn’t believe that I was as bad as they wished me to be. I swung wildly but with force. I knew I was strong, and maybe like they said, “crazy.” But I had this feeling inside of me that something real was there. Just hardened shit, maybe, but that was more than they had. I was up at bat. “Hey, it’s the STRIKEOUT KING! MR. WINDMILL!” The ball arrived. I swung and I felt the bat connect like I had wanted it to do for so long. The ball went up, up and HIGH, into left field, ’way OVER the left fielder’s head. His name was Don Brubaker and he stood and watched it fly over his head. It looked like it was never going to come down. Then Brubaker started running after the ball. He wanted to throw me out. He would never do it. The ball landed and rolled onto a diamond where some fifth graders were playing. I ran slowly to first, hit the bag, looked at the guy on first, ran slowly to second, touched it, ran to third where David stood, ignored him, tagged third and walked to home plate. Never such a day. Never such a home run by a first grader! As I stepped on home plate I heard one of the players, Irving Bone, say to the team captain, Stanley Greenberg, “Let’s put him on the regular team.” (The regular team played teams from other schools.)
“No,” said Stanley Greenberg.
Stanley was right. I never hit another home run. I struck out most of the time. But they always remembered that home run and while they still hated me, it was a better kind of hatred, like they weren’t quite sure why.
Football season was worse. We played touch football. I couldn’t catch the football or throw it but I got into one game. When the runner came through I grabbed him by the shirt collar and threw him on the ground. When he started to get up, I kicked him. I didn’t like him. It was the first baseman with vaseline in his hair and the hair in his nostrils. Stanley Greenberg came over. He was larger than any of us. He could have
killed me if he’d wanted to. He was our leader. Whatever he said, that was it. He told me, “You don’t understand the rules. No more football for you.”
I was moved into volleyball. I played volleyball with David and the others. It wasn’t any good. They yelled and screamed and got excited, but the others were playing football. I wanted to play football. All I needed was a little practice. Volleyball was shameful. Girls played volleyball. After a while I wouldn’t play. I just stood in the center of the field where nobody was playing. I was the only one who would not play anything. I stood there each day and waited through the two recess sessions, until they were over.
One day while I was standing there, more trouble came. A football sailed from high behind me and hit me on the head. It knocked me to the ground. I was very dizzy. They stood around snickering and laughing. “Oh, look, Henry fainted! Henry fainted like a lady! Oh, look at Henry!”
I got up while the sun spun around. Then it stood still. The sky moved closer and flattened out. It was like being in a cage. They stood around me, faces, noses, mouths and eyes. Because they were taunting me I thought they had deliberately hit me with the football. It was unfair.
“Who kicked that ball?” I asked.
“You wanna know who kicked the ball?”
“Yes.”
“What are you going to do when you find out?”
I didn’t answer.
“It was Billy Sherril,” somebody said.
Billy was a round fat boy, really nicer than most, but he was one of them. I began walking toward Billy. He stood there. When I got close he swung. I almost didn’t feel it. I hit him behind his left ear and when he grabbed his ear I hit him in the stomach. He fell to the ground. He stayed down. “Get up and fight him, Billy,” said Stanley Greenberg. Stanley lifted Billy up and pushed him toward me. I punched Billy in the mouth and he grabbed his mouth with both hands.
“O.K.,” said Stanley, “I’ll take his place!”
The boys cheered. I decided to run, I didn’t want to die. But then a teacher came up. “What’s going on here?” It was Mr. Hall.
Run With the Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader Page 1