2.
I have a saying, “You will find the lowest of the breed at the racetracks.” I am there almost every day working out my various systems, waiting the long 30 minutes between races. I don’t know how many of those 30 minutes I have given away over the years sitting there waiting for a race that is generally over in a minute and nine seconds. And at the quarter horse races most of them are finished in 17 seconds plus a tick. A racetrack never has a losing day. For each dollar bet they give back about 85 cents. In Mexico they give back 75 cents. In some of the tracks in Europe they give back 50 cents. It doesn’t matter, the people continue to play. Check the faces at any track going into the last race. You will see the story.
When I came out of the Charity Ward of the L.A. County General Hospital in 1955 after drinking ten years without missing a night or day (except while in jail) they told me that if I ever took another drink I would be dead. I went back to my shack job and I asked her, “What the hell am I going to do now?”
“We’ll play the horses,” she said.
“Horses?”
“Yeah, they run and you bet on them.”
She had found some money on the boulevard so we went out. I had 3 winners, one of them paid over 50 bucks. It seemed very easy.
We went out a second time and I won again.
That night I decided that if I mixed some wine with milk it might not hurt me. I tried a glass, half wine, half milk. I didn’t die. The next glass I tried a little less milk and a little more wine. By the time the night was over I had been drinking straight wine. In the morning I got up without hemorrhaging. After that I drank and played the horses. 27 years later I am still doing both. Time is made to be wasted . . .
I was out there again today. There are some creatures out there, shirttails hanging out, shoes run down, eyes dulled. Many are there day after day. How they manage to keep going out there is the mystery. They are losers. But somehow they manage to find entrance fee, somehow they manage to place some feeble bets. But today I saw the worst. I had seen him the day before also. He looked worse than any skid row bum, he had a scabby beard, part of the leather had lifted from his shoes showing parts of his feet—he was barefoot. He wore a greasy brown overcoat but he had a bit of money. I saw him placing some bets. He didn’t sit in the stands but on some steps outside the stands and he played a harmonica very badly. I looked at him: he had on some glasses but one of the eyeglasses had fallen out and the one that remained was a dark black. As I walked slowly by he started talking to me. He spoke very rapidly: “Hey, ge out ree hoo nar bah!” Sentences followed that were of similar order. I couldn’t imagine this fellow placing a bet or driving an automobile. But he had a right to. Who said he couldn’t? And who said he had to look a certain way? Or talk a certain way? Society dictated our modes and ways. Maybe he was helpless. I remembered starving in New York City, trying to be a writer. One night I had gone out and bought a bag of popcorn, it was my first food in several days. The popcorn was hot and greasy and salty, each kernel was a miracle. I walked along in a beautiful trance, feeling the kernels enter my body, feeling them in my mouth. My trance was not entirely complete. Two large men walked toward me. They were talking to each other. As they got closer to me, one of them looked up and just as they passed me he said loudly to his buddy: “Jesus Christ, did you see that.” I was the freak to them, the idiot, the one who didn’t fit the mould. I walked along then, the kernels not tasting quite so well.
As I passed the man at the racetrack sitting on his steps I knew that any of us could get lost away from the crowd, some of us even wanted to. I walked down and found a seat. The horses broke from the gate. It was 6 furlongs. I had the one horse in a maiden race. Orange silks. The one horse is usually bad at 6 furlongs but I had a reason for the bet. My horse broke poorly, rushed up, fell back, I lost sight of him, then as they took the curve for home I saw my orange silks again, he was coming from the outside. He seemed to hang in mid-stretch, then he came on again to win drawing out. They put up the price: $14.60. I had it ten win. $73. I got up to go cash my ticket. When I did I no longer saw the man sitting on his steps. I didn’t see him for the rest of the day. I’ll be looking for him tomorrow. There’s a good card going. Three maiden races. I love those maiden races.
3.
What about Fame? they ask me. Will Fame destroy you? Well, now, if I am famous and if it destroys me (meaning my talent) then sixty one years of my life will have gone by without my having sensed any of the traps. I think it’s easier for a writer to be destroyed by Fame when he is in his twenties. The ladies, the lights, the admiration will do him in. The young have no background to ward Fame off with. Besides, many of the famous are famous not because their work is excellent and original but because the masses identify with the output. And they don’t identify with it because it’s real but because it is false as most of them are false in their ideals, their actions, their lives. I am thinking now of the richest comedian in the land (they call him a comedian, although he has never made me laugh). This fellow has been dropping one line jokes on the people for decades, beginning long ago on the radio. His jokes are inoffensive and trivial, he has what I think of as an All-American Mickey Mouse Soul. He has burned-out thousands of writers with his flippant little one-liners, and he goes on and on gathering in millions of dollars. His material is thin, inane, useless; he is rich and famous; he is a carbon copy of the masses.
There are writers like this fellow. Their books line the stands of the bookstores in the shopping malls. THE HEARTBEAT’S WAIL. THUNDERBLOSSOM. BLOOD SWORD. These writers are more rich than famous.
Then, there are the literary writers of poem, of story, of novel. Their idea is that if something is written tediously enough, if it is involuted enough, if it is hardly understood, then, that’s art. Because, you see, this is the way it has been for centuries, they are only carrying on the tradition. These writers are more famous than rich. They are famous because they promote, publish and teach each other, mostly at the universities. They are not rich because they are the only ones who buy each other’s books. They complain constantly of the success of such writers as those who put out books entitled THE HEARTBEAT’S WAIL; THUNDERBLOSSOM and so forth. But they write just as badly, only in another way.
So, you see, if you have FAME you can never be sure that you deserve it. You may have your FAME for all the wrong reasons. This might be my case. So, you see, if I have FAME for all the wrong reasons I am already destroyed, and if I have it for the right reasons, I can never be sure of that, so there’s only one thing to do: go on typing, as I have been doing here.
4.
In my old starvation days, prowling the libraries, I did a great deal of reading, mostly in the libraries. The old L.A. Public Library was my favorite. After sitting in Pershing Square and listening to the boys argue about whether there was a God or not I would walk over to the library. After eating up several rooms of books (not really) I found myself in the Philosophy Room. Those boys had some style. They talked about what mattered. Or seemed to. Or should. One of the things they talked about was the need for Solitude. That made sense to me. That need. I mean, when I was sitting at a table reading a book and somebody came to my table and sat down it disturbed me. Why sit near me? And when I looked about and saw other empty tables, I felt really repulsed. I know that I am supposed to love my fellow man but I don’t. I don’t hate him; I often dislike him; I just don’t want him about. I feel better alone.
I loved Solitude. Still do. I grow when I am alone. People diminish me. Especially men, they seem quite unoriginal. Women, at times, are useful. Also they are funny and tragic. But too many continued hours and days with them leads to madness.
There must be others like me. I always seem to be living with a woman and one acts differently then out of courtesy. But in my in between times of living alone, I had my little delicacies. Like, I’d simply take the phone off the hook, disconnect the doorbell, pull down all the shades and go to bed for 3 or 4 days and nights, just ari
sing now and then to do my toilet, drink water, nibble on a bit of food. These times were precious to me, holy. I was like a battery getting a recharge—off of myself and the absence of Humanity. I have never been lonely. I have been confused, depressed, insane, suicidal, but never lonely in the sense that some person or persons might solve something for me. I never had a television set until I was 52 years old. And I only saw one movie in 20 years—The Lost Weekend. I went to check it out for authenticity.
Being alone has always been very necessary to me. At one time I was on one of my hot winning streaks at the racetracks. The money just came to me. A certain basic simple system was working for me. The horses moved south and I walked off my job and followed them down to Del Mar.
It was a good life. I’d win each day at the track. I had a routine. After the track I’d stop off at the liquor store for my fifth of whiskey and my six-pack of beer and the cigars. Then I’d get back into the car and cruise the coast for a new motel room. I liked a different one each night. I’d find a motel, park my stuff, shower, change clothes and then get my ass back into the car and cruise the coast again—this time for an eating place. And what I would look for was an eating place without many people in it. (The worst, I know.) But I didn’t like crowds. So, I always found one. Went in and ordered.
So, this particular night, I found a place, went in, sat at the counter, ordered: porterhouse steak with French fries, beer. Everything was fine. The waitress didn’t bother me. I sucked at my beer, ordered another. Then the meal came. Goddamn, it looked good. I began. I had a few fine bites, then the door opened and this fellow came in. There were 14 empty stools at the counter. This fellow sat down next to me.
“Hi, Doris, how’s it going?”
“O.K, Eddie. How ya doing?”
“Fine.”
“What’ll ya have, Eddie?”
“Oh, just a cup of coffee, I guess . . .”
Doris brought Eddie his coffee.
“I think the fuel pump on my car is going out . . .”
“Always some damn thing, huh Eddie?”
“Yeah, now my wife needs new plates, Doris.”
“You mean houseware?”
“I mean mouthware!”
“Oh, Eddie, ha, ha, ha!”
“Well,” Eddie said, “when it rains it pours!”
I picked up my plate and my beer, my fork, my knife, my spoon, my napkin, my ass and moved it all the way over to a far booth. I sat down and began again. As I did I watched Eddie and Doris. They were whispering. Then Doris looked at me:
“Is everything all right, sir?”
“Now,” I told her, “it is . . .”
Nothing diminishes me like the crowd.
Say like on New Year’s night at midnight, everybody screaming, joyous, celebrating; I feel completely denuded, foolish, unhappy. If I am in a room full of them. If I am alone it’s better. New Year’s Eve is like any other eve to me: I drink.
Or standing with a group, being sworn in to a government job, I feel like I am eating shit stew, facing the flag, pledging allegiance. I always get out of that: I move my lips but in the sound of all the voices I don’t have to say any words and nobody knows.
There are certain privacies that are joyous and necessary. I maintain that I have certain inherent rights to oneness and that I am my own keeper. I am not cranky about this bit, just a touch fucking rigid: it creates a comedy of my own that I can laugh at, though soundlessly.
Some refuse to believe that I have these certain beliefs. There was this lady I had lived with for a year or so, a live one, a bit offed by shock therapy but better than most, she said in her cups, one night:
“Ah shit . . . I’ve read your stuff, I’ve heard you talk . . . you’re such a LONER! You’re such a fuckin’ RECLUSE! How come then you WRITE your stuff and then you send it OUT?”
“It helps pay for all that swill you jam down your throat.”
“You mean drink?”
“Yes.”
“That’s no answer! You’re copping out!”
She was right, of course.
I remember reading in the papers about this guy they found in the park. He’d been living in a cave there and coming out at night and living off the picnic scraps. They caught him. And took him off. And when I read that I thought, there but for the grace of the typewriter goes me. The keys are my solitude, my luck, my picnic scraps. Hate me but buy my books. And read the old philosophers on Solitude. And don’t write me, phone me, or write like me. And if you ever see me anywhere it isn’t me. Forget it.
1
People who call other people assholes generally are.
2
When you’ve considered everything, you’ve considered too much.
3
Human relationships do not work.
4
Brilliant men are created out of desperate circumstances; fools are also.
5
When you marry the woman you also marry her entire family.
6
Most men who sleep late in the morning are a superior breed.
7
Women are braver in situations they have to face alone; men tend to get braver in and before crowds.
8
I have never met a nonimmaculate cat.
9
The poets do the least to become known.
10
Fame is too often the result of bad public taste; Immortality too often a matter of poor critical judgment.
11
I’m often delighted when something terrible happens to me. It’s not so much a matter of masochism, it’s more a feeling of a balance come due; it has to happen, and since it does happen, one greets it with an oblique delight—feeling that after that better things are sure to follow???
12
Keep your sunny-side up. Nobody wants to hear about the night your mother kicked your ass in the deli takeout parlor . . .
13
All the women in my life have become the Reoccuring Woman: their complaints have been just as similar and just as realistic. So I judge them, in comparison, only upon the artistry of their head-jobs and their kitchen work, faithfulness and so forth. And when I line them up in this fashion I can’t come up with a winner. Just a loser: me.
14
Whenever one of my women goes to another man in preference to me, I am thoroughly astonished, especially when I meet him in person. But all things are illusionary, including those dull, drab sons of bitches, so it’s all right, I suppose.
15
Dostoevski was precisely passionate, but when he ended up with Christ in his lap I wrote him off as going the long way around to find what most idiots accepted in the beginning. Not that I didn’t find his journey vibrant. For this, I almost forgave him his final Error. Tolstoy, who ended up the same way, was simply dull throughout. Which I can’t forgive.
16
Religion is not the Opium of the People. It’s a peanut-butter sandwich. On white bread.
17
A whore is a woman who takes more than she gives. A man who takes more than he gives is called a businessman.
18
When the agony of all the people is heard, nothing will be done.
19
I am only a realist in certain areas. For instance, it discourages me that people have upper and lower intestines. As I watch people, I am conscious of these (and other) parts. I’m hexed. For instance, when a man says to me, “She’s really a beautiful woman,” I feel like answering, “I won’t know until I examine the healthiness of her excreta.”
20
The best people are the ones you never meet.
21
I much prefer it when a woman discards me. Then I am sure that the error is hers.
22
I have met both the rich and the poor and have found them to be equally unnatural in their positions.
23
There is a certain actress who must be nearing 70, at least, for I saw her in movies when I was a boy and I’m
now 62. But she is photographed again and again as looking 32. It has gone on for decades. Marvelous, I think, young forever! And she is often photographed with her sisters, and they’ve all held on well. They are all photographed smiling together, heads always held upward to hide the neck lines. Marvelous, I think, we all need the dream.
24
One of the most depressing places to be upon the earth is to be sitting in some Los Angeles café at 9:35 A.M. and having the waitress hand you the menu of various egg delicacies as her ankles are thin and her buttocks resigned, she has been used and abandoned by her men and she just wants the rent and a way to go, and then you look up and in a mellifluous voice full of victory and hope and understanding you order item #3, the cut-rate special.
More Notes of a Dirty Old Man: The Uncollected Columns Page 15