The Most Beautiful Woman in Town & Other Stories

by Charles Bukowski

  then in the sixth race, Mister Honey is given a morning line of 10 but is sent off as second choice of 5/2 and wins easy, having won three out of nine in tougher class at short odds. Newport Buell, a cheaper horse is sent off at even money because he closed ground in last at nine to one. a bad bet. the crowd doesn’t understand. in the seventh, Bills Snookums, a winner of seven out of nine in class and with the leading rider Farrington up is made the new 8/5 favorite and justifiably so.

  the crowd bets Princess Sampson down to 7/2. this horse has won only 6 races out of 67. naturally, the crowd gets burned again.

  Princess Sampson shows the best time in a tougher race but just does not want to win. the crowd is time-happy. they do not realize that time is caused by pace and pace is caused by the discretion — or lack of it — of the lead drivers. in the eighth, Abbemite Win gets up in a four or five horse scramble. it was an open race and one I should have stayed out of. in the ninth, they let the public have one. Luella Primrose. the horse had failed consistently at short odds and today got on its own pace without a challenger. 5/2. one for the ladies, and how they screamed. a pretty name. and they’d been losing their drawers on the thing all through the meet.

  most of the cards are as reasonable as this, and it would seem possible to make a living at the track against the 15 percent take. but the outside factors beat you. the heat. tiredness. people spilling beer on your shirt. screaming. stepping on your feet. women showing their legs. pickpockets. touts. madmen. I was $24 ahead going into the ninth race and there wasn’t a play in the ninth.

  being tired, I didn’t have the resistance to stay out. before the race went off I had dropped in $16, shopping, feeling for a winner that didn’t show. then they sent in the public play on me. I was not satisfied with a $24 day. I once worked for $16 a week at New Orleans. I was not strong enough to take a gentle profit, so I walked out $8 winner. not worth the struggle: I could have stayed home and written an immortal poem.

  a man who can beat the races can do about anything he makes up his mind to do. he must have the character, the knowledge, the detachment. even with these qualities, the races are tough, especially with the rent waiting and your whore’s tongue hanging out for beer. there are traps beyond traps beyond traps. there are days when everything impossible happens. the other day they ran in a 50 to one shot in the first race, a 100 to one in the second, and capped off the day with an 18 to one in the last race. when you are trying to scrape up pesos for the landlord and potato and egg money, this kind of day can very much make you feel like an imbecile.

  but if you come back the next day they will give you six or seven reasonable winners at fair prices. it’s there but most of them don’t go back. it takes patience and it’s hard work: you have to think. it’s a battlefield and you can become shell-shocked. I saw a friend of mine out there the other day, glaze-eyed, punched-out. it was late in the day and it had been a reasonable card, but somehow they had gotten past him and I could tell that he had bet too much trying to get out. he walked past me, not knowing where he was. I watched him. he walked right into the women’s crapper. they screamed and he came running out. it was what he needed. it pulled him out and he caught the winner of the next race. but I would not advise this system to all losers.

  there are laughs and there is sadness. there is an old boy who walked up to me one time. “Bukowski,” he said very seriously, “I want to beat the horses before I die.”

  his hair is white, totally white, teeth gone, and I could see myself there in 15 or 20 years, if I make it.

  “I like the six horse,” he told me.

  “luck,” I told him.

  he’d picked a stiff, as usual. an odds-on favorite that had only won one race in 15 starts that year. the public handicappers had the horse on top too. the horse had won $88,000 LAST year. best time. I bet ten win on Miss Lustytown, a winner of nine races this year. Miss Lustytown paid 4/1. the odds-on finished last.

  the old man came by, raging. “how the hell! Glad Rags ran 2:01 and 1/5 last time and gets beat by a 2:02 and 1/5 mare! they oughta close this place up!”

  he raps his program, snarling at me. his face is so red that he appears to have a sunburn. I walk away from him, go over to the cashier’s window and cash in.

  when I get home, there is one magazine in the mail, THE SMITH, parodying my prose style, and another magazine, THE SIXTIES, parodying my poetic style.

  writing? what the hell’s that? somebody is worried or pissed about my writing. I look over and sure enough there’s a typewriter in the room. I am a writer of some kind, there’s another world there of maneuvering and gouging and groups and methods.

  I let the warm water run, get into the tub, open a beer, open the racing form. the phone rings. I let it ring. for me, maybe not for you, it’s too hot to fuck or listen to some minor poet. Hemingway had his pulls. give me a horse’s ass — that gets there first.

  THE BIRTH, LIFE AND DEATH OF AN UNDERGROUND NEWSPAPER

  There were quite a few meetings at Joe Hyans’ house at first and I usually showed drunk, so I don’t remember much about the inception of Open Pussy, the underground newspaper, and I was only told later what had happened. Or rather, what I had done.

  Hyans: “You said you were going to clean out the whole place and that you were going to start with the guy in the wheelchair. Then he started to cry and people started leaving. You hit a guy over the head with a bottle.”

  Cherry (Hyans’ wife): “You refused to leave and you drank a whole fifth of whiskey and kept telling me that you were going to fuck me up against the bookcase.”

  “Did I?”

  “No.”

  “Ah, then next time.”

  Hyans: “Listen, Bukowski, we’re trying to get organized and all you do is come around and bust things up. You’re the nastiest damn drunk I’ve ever seen!”

  “OK, I quit. Fuck it. Who cares about newspapers?”

  “No, we want you to do a column. We think you’re the best writer in Los Angeles.”

  I lifted my drink. “That’s a motherfucking insult! I didn’t come here to be insulted!”

  “OK, maybe you’re the best writer in California.”

  “There you go! Still insulting me!”

  “Anyhow, we want you to do a column.”

  “I’m a poet.”

  “What’s the difference between poetry and prose?”

  “Poetry says too much in too short a time; prose says too little and takes too long.”

  “We want a column for Open Pussy.”

  “Pour me a drink and you’re on.”

  Hyans did. I was on. I finished the drink and walked over to my skidrow court thinking about what a mistake I was making. I was almost fifty years old and fucking with these long-haired, bearded kids. Oh God, groovy, daddy, oh groovy! War is shit. War is hell. Fuck, don’t fight. I’d known all that for fifty years. It wasn’t quite as exciting to me. Oh, and don’t forget the pot. the stash. Groove, baby!

  I found a pint in my place, drank it, four cans of beer and wrote the first column. It was about a three-hundred-pound whore I had once fucked in Philadelphia. It was a good column. I corrected the typing errors, jacked off and went to sleep . ..

  It started on the bottom floor of Hyans’ two-story rented house. There were some half-assed volunteers and the thing was new and everybody was excited but me. I kept searching out the women for ass but they all looked and acted the same — they were all nineteen years old, dirty-blonde, small ass, small-breasted, busy, dizzy, and, in a sense, conceited without quite knowing why. Whenever I’d lay my drunken hands upon them they were always quite cool. Quite.

  “Look, Gramps, the only thing we want to see you raise is a North Vietnamese flag!”

  “Ah, your pussy probably stinks anyhow!”

  “Oh, you are a filthy old man! You really are … so disgusting!”

  And then they’d walk off shaking those little delicious apple buttocks at me, only carrying in their hand — instead of my lovel
y purple head — some juvenile copy about the cops shaking down the kids and taking away their Baby Ruth bars on the Sunset Strip. Here I was, the greatest living poet since Auden and I couldn’t even fuck a dog in the ass . ..

  The paper got too big. Or Cherry got worried about me lounging about on the couch drunk and leering at her five-year-old daughter. When it really got bad was when the daughter started sitting on my lap and looking up into my face while squirming, saying, “I like you, Bukowski. Talk to me. Let me get you another Beer, Bukowski.”

  “Hurry back, sweetie!”

  Cherry: “Listen, Bukowski, you old letch …”

  “Cherry, children love me. I can’t help it.”

  The little girl, Zaza, ran back with the beer, got back into my lap. I opened the beer.

  “I like you, Bukowski, tell me a story.”

  “OK, honey. Well, once upon a time there was this old man and this lovely little girl lost in the woods together …”

  Cherry: “Listen, you old letch …”

  “Ta, ta, Cherry, I do believe you have a dirty mind!”

  Cherry ran upstairs looking for Hyans who was taking a crap. “Joe, Joe, we’ve just got to move this paper out of here! I mean it!” …

  They found a vacant building up front, two floors, and one midnight while drinking port wine, I held the flashlight for Joe while he broke open the phone box on the side of the house and rearranged the wires so he could have extension phones without charge. About this time the only other underground newspaper in L.A. accused Joe of stealing a duplicate copy of their mailing list. Of course, I knew Joe had morals and scruples and ideals — that’s why he quit working for the large metro daily. That’s why he quit working for the other underground newspaper. Joe was some kind of Christ. Sure.

  “Hold that flashlight steady,” he said …

  In the morning, at my place, the phone rang. It was my friend Mongo the Giant of the Eternal High.

  “Hank?”

  “Yeh?”

  “Cherry was over last night.”

  “Yeh?”

  “She had this mailing list. Was very nervous. She wanted me to hide it. Said Jensen was on the prowl. I hid it in the cellar under a pile of India ink sketches Jimmy the Dwarf did before he died.”

  “Did you screw her?”

  “What for? She’s all bones. Those ribs would slice me to pieces while I fucked.”

  “You screwed Jimmy the Dwarf and he only weighed eightythree pounds.”

  “He had soul.”

  “Yeh?”

  “Yeh.”

  I hung up .. .

  For the next four or five issues, Open Pussy came out with sayings like, “WE LOVE THE L.A. FREE PRESS,” “OH, WE LOVE THE L.A. FREE PRESS,” “LOVE, LOVE, LOVE THE L.A. FREE PRESS.”

  They should have. They had their mailing list.

  One night Jensen and Joe had dinner together. Joe told me later that everything was now “all right.” I don’t know who screwed who or what went on under the table. And I didn’t care …

  And I soon found that I had other readers besides the beaded and the bearded …

  In Los Angeles the new Federal Building rises glass-high, insane and modern, with the Kafka-series of rooms each indulged with their own personal frog-jacking-off bit; everything feeding off of everything else and thriving with a kind of worm-in-the apple warmth and clumsiness. I paid my forty-five cents per half hour parking, or rather I was given a time ticket for that amount and I walked into the Federal Building, which had downstairs murals like Diego Rivera would have done if nine tenths of his sensibilities had been cut away — American sailors and Indians and soldiers smiling away, trying to look noble in cheap yellows and retching rotting greens and pissy blues.

  I was being called into personnel. I knew that it wasn’t for a promotion. They took the letter and cooled me on the hard seat for forty-five minutes. It was part of the old you-got-shit-in-yourintestines and we-don’t-have routine. Luckily, from past experience, I read the warty sign, and I cooled it myself, thinking about how each of the girls who walked by would go on a bed, legs high, or taking it in the mouth. Soon I had something huge between my legs — well, huge for me — and had to stare at the floor.

  I was finally called in by a very black and slinky and welldressed and pleasant Negress, very much class and even a spot of soul, whose smile said she knew that I was going to be fucked but who also hinted that she wouldn’t mind throwing me a little peehole herself. It eased matters. Not that it mattered.

  And I walked in.

  “Have a seat.”

  Man behind desk. Same old shit. I sat.

  “Mr. Bukowski?”

  “Yeh.”

  He gave me his name. I wasn’t interested.

  He leaned back, stared at me from his swivel.

  I’m sure he expected somebody younger and better-looking, more flamboyant, more intelligent-looking, more treacherous-looking.… I was just old, tired, disinterested, hung-over. He was a bit gray and distinguished, if you know the type of distinguished I mean. Never pulled beets out of the ground with a bunch of wetbacks or been in the drunktank fifteen or twenty times. Or picked lemons at six a.m. without a shirt on because you knew that at noon it would be 110 degrees. Only the poor knew the meaning of life; the rich and the safe had to guess. Strangely then, I began thinking of the Chinese. Russia had softened; it could be that only the Chinese knew, digging up from the bottom, tired of soft shit. But then, I had no politics, that was more con: history screwed us all, finally. I was done ahead of time — baked, fucked, screwed-out, nothing left.

  “Mr. Bukowski?”

  “Yeh?”

  “Well, ah … we’ve had an informant…”

  “Yeh. Go ahead.”

  “… who wrote us that you are not married to the mother of your child.”

  I imagined him, then, decorating a Christmas tree with a drink in his hand.

  “That’s true. I am not married to the mother of my child, aged four.”

  “Do you pay child support?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much?”

  “I’m not going to tell you.”

  He leaned back again. “You must understand that those of us in government service must maintain certain standards.”

  Not really feeling guilty of anything, I didn’t answer.

  I waited.

  Oh, where are you, boys? Kafka, where are you? Lorca, shot in the dirty road, where are you? Hemingway, claiming he was being tailed by the C.I.A. and nobody believing him but me …

  Then, old distinguished well-rested non-beetpicking gray turned around and reached into a small and well-varnished cabinet behind him and pulled out six or seven copies of Open Pussy.

  He threw them upon his desk like stinking siffed and raped turds. He tapped them with one of his non-lemonpulling hands.

  “We are led to believe that YOU are the writer of these columns — Notes of a Dirty Old Man.”

  “Yeh.”

  “What do you have to say about these columns?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you call this writing?”

  “It’s the best that I can do.”

  “Well, I’m supporting two sons who are now taking journalism at the best of colleges, and I HOPE …”

  He tapped the sheets, the stinking turd sheets, with the bottom of his ringed and un-factoried and un-jailed hand and said:

  “I hope that my sons never turn out to write like YOU do!”

  “They won’t,” I promised him.

  “Mr. Bukowski, I think that the interview is finished.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I lit a cig, stood up, scratched my beer-gut and walked out.

  The second interview was sooner than I expected. I was hard at work — of course — at one of my important menial tasks when the speaker boomed: “Henry Charles Bukowski, report to the Tour Superintendent’s officer

  I dropped my important task, got a travel form from the local screw and walked on over to
the office. The Tour-Soup’s male secretary, an old gray flab, looked me over.

  “Are you Charles Bukowski?” he asked me, quite disappointed.

  “Yeh, man.”

  “Please follow me.”

  I followed him. It was a large building. We went down several stairways and down around a long hall and then into a large dark room that entered into another large and very dark room. Two men were sitting there at the end of a table that must have been seventy-five feet long. They sat under a lone lamp. And at the end of the table sat this single chair — for me.

  “You may enter,” said the secretary. Then he shorted out.

  I walked in. The two men stood up. Here we were under one lamp in the dark. For some reason, I thought of all the assassinations.

  Then I thought, this is America, daddy, Hitler is dead. Or is he?

  “Bukowski?”

  “Yeh.”

  They both shook hands with me.

  “Sit down.”

  Groovy, baby.

  “This is Mr. – – – – from Washington,” said the other guy who was one of the local topdogturds.

  I didn’t say anything. It was a nice lamp. Made of human skin?

  Mr. Washington did the talking. He had a portfolio with quite a few papers within.

  “Now, Mr. Bukowski…”

  “Yeh?”

  “Your age is forty-eight and you’ve been employed by the United States Government for eleven years.”

  “Yeh.”

  “You were married to your first wife two and a half years, were divorced, and you married your present wife when? We’d like the date.”

  “No date. No marriage.”