The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills

by Bukowski, Charles

  guts.

  I wave the girl and the nurse

  away.

  IV.

  the woman is still stunned with

  drugs but I tell her

  a great woman has arrived!

  and make my fists into little balls and I

  hold up my arms and

  snarl-cry.

  the nurse is fat and Mexican, has eaten too many

  tortillas.

  nice to have met you, sweetheart, I

  tell her.

  V.

  then I am back at the shack. I sit down and listen to

  the bathtub drip.

  I go over and pull all the blinds down and fall on the

  couch. all I can hear is tires on

  steel streets.

  VI.

  there is a meeow from the screen and I let him

  in: sober, indifferent,

  hungry.

  VII.

  we walk into the kitchen

  male, swaggering under the electric light;

  4 balls, 2 heads

  dominion over all the continent

  over ships that sail in and out

  over small female things and jewels.

  I get down the can of

  cat food and open

  it. Plato is left in the

  glove compartment.

  on getting famous and being asked:

  can you recite?

  can you be there at nine?

  …and all they know is kill, these pungent insects,

  and as we whirl in new worlds

  I am filled with space and I

  am ill; I roll a child’s marble

  upon the rug, then hear it

  clatter off into some new corner

  and I puke as the telephone rings;

  MR. SPANISH, A VOICE SAYS, WE WANT

  YOU TO SPEAK BEFORE THE

  SOCIETY. WE FEEL IT WILL BE

  VITAL. I hang up, of course,

  and I find an orange

  in the icebox, but before

  I can peel it and eat it

  I am ill again.

  and

  I take off

  and fold my shoes, sit down cross-

  legged, (like a statue I wish I

  owned), and wait, at 3 p.m.,

  to die.

  the great one:

  down at the end of the bar

  he used to bum

  drinks, now he is a balding man and

  I lean close:

  you are the finest poet

  of our age, you are the

  only one that everybody

  understands…

  we drink coffee, we sit in his small

  poorly furnished house, his oil paintings

  are on the walls. I am going to give him

  money, paper, paint, a better

  typewriter. he is going to give me some

  original

  manuscripts.

  I look at him and sense that he fears

  me. he coughs, his stomach must feel

  oily, dense,

  ill.

  I tell him:

  I know all about you:

  you had a cruel Spanish

  stepfather, you lived with

  numerous whores, drank yourself

  senseless,

  starved…

  yeah, he

  says.

  I lean closer:

  in my own quiet way,

  I am a worshipper of

  heroes…

  when I leave with his manuscripts (signed)

  and one of his oils plus

  3 wire-coiled and unreadable

  notebooks

  he doesn’t come to the door with me. there is a

  mirror and he sits looking into the

  mirror and he

  bows his head, ashamed and

  finished.

  “The Artist,” an ancient sage had once said,

  “is always sitting on the doorsteps of the

  rich.”

  I swing into my caddy, throw the junk in the back and

  drive off.

  yellow

  Seivers was one of the hardest running backs since

  Jimmy Brown, and lateral motion too,

  like a chorus girl, really, until one day he got hit on

  the blind side by Basil Skronski; we carried Seivers off the field

  but Skronski had gotten one rib and cracked another.

  the next year Seivers wasn’t even good in practice, gun shy as a

  squirrel in deer season; he stopped contact, fumbled, couldn’t even

  hold a look-in pass or a handoff—all that wasted and he could go the 100 in 9.7.

  I’m 45 years old, out of shape, too much beer, but one of the best

  assistant coaches in the pro game, and I can’t stand to see a man

  jaking it. I got him in the locker room the other day when the whole

  squad was in there. I told him, “Seivers, you used to be a player

  but now you’re chickenshit!”

  “you can’t talk that way to me, Manny!” he said, and I turned him

  around, he was lacing on a shoe, and I right-cracked him

  right on the chin, he fell against a locker

  and then he began to cry—the greatest since Brown,

  crying there against the locker, one shoe off, one on.

  “come on, men, let’s get outa here!” I told the gang, and we ran

  on out, and when we got back he had cleared out, he was gone, his

  gear was gone. we got some kid from Illinois running his spot now,

  head down, knees high, he don’t care where’s he’s going.

  guys like Seivers end up washing dishes for a buck an hour

  and that’s just what they deserve.

  ::: the days run away like wild horses over the hills

  the phone rings and it is usually the woman with the

  sexy voice from the phone company telling me

  to please pay my phone bill,

  but this time a voice says quietly,

  “you son of a bitch,”

  and it is the editor of a dozen magazines,

  everything from religious pamphlets

  to do-it-yourself abortions,

  and he asks,

  “why haven’t you called?”

  and I say, “we don’t get along.”

  “catalysis,” he says,

  “dig?”

  “dig,” I say,

  and then he tells me that he has seen me

  in issue No. 5 of Crablegs and Muletears

  and that I am getting better,

  and I tell him that I am a slow starter

  and being only 42

  I still stand a chance to spread sand

  in Abdulah’s garden,

  and he says come on over

  I want you to meet a friend

  and I tell him I will give him a ring

  after the track…

  it is Saturday and hot

  and the faces of greed rushing past

  pinched and dried and impossible

  want to make me kneel amongst the lilies and pray

  but instead I go to a bar

  where I can get good vodka and orange for 70¢

  and people keep talking to me,

  it is one big lonely hearts club,

  people lonely for a voice and a million dollars

  and not getting much of either,

  and by the 9th race I am one hundred dollars in the hole

  and a big colored guy walks up to me

  and spreads the tickets of the last winner in his hand

  like violin music,

  and I say

  “fine, fine,”

  and he says, “I am with a couple of old broads

  and now they are trying to find me,

  but I am ducking out, I am going to lock the doors

  and get drunk.”

  “fine,” I say,
and he walks off

  and I keep wondering why so many colored people

  talk to me, and then I remembered

  I was in a bar once and a big black guy swore me into

  something called the Muslims;

  I had to repeat a lot of fancy words and

  we drank all night,

  but I thought he was kidding:

  I am not out to destroy all the white race—

  only a small part of it:

  myself.

  “who you like?” another guy asks me

  and I say “the 3rd horse,” and he says

  “the 3 is out,” and walks off

  and that is all I want to hear

  and I put 20 to win on the 3,

  get a screwdriver

  and walk down to the last turn

  where if you’ve been around long enough

  you can pick out the winner

  before the stretch drive begins.

  and I’m there when the 3 drives past

  a length and a half behind the 6,

  the others are out,

  and it looks close, both are running hard

  without signs of tiring

  but I have to close the gap

  and I look up at the board and see that

  the 6 is 25-1 and I am only 7-1

  and with a little luck I might make it,

  and I did by three-quarters of a length

  and the frogs of my mind lined up and

  jumped over death (for a little while)

  and I walked over and got my $166.

  I was in the tub with a beer when the phone rang,

  “bastard, where are you?”

  it was the editor.

  “see you in 30 minutes,” I told him.

  “I don’t want any stuff outa you or I’ll lay

  you out,” he tells me.

  “fine,” I say, “30 minutes then.”

  which gives me time for a couple more beers.

  the place is in the back in South Hollywood,

  a small cell with a water heater

  in the bathroom, and a rack of books take up

  half the room: much Huxley (Aldous), Lawrence

  (not of Arabia), and a lot of tomes and vessels

  of people halfway in the playground

  between poetry and the novel

  and lacking either the motivation or the discipline

  to write straight philosophy,

  and he had a woman in there

  in the last peach fuzz of her youth,

  pale orange, a little spiritless,

  but quiet, which was good,

  and he said, “baby, get the man a beer,”

  and I threw him my latest book

  which I inscribed, “to a connoisseur

  of vagina and verse…”

  and he said, “you are getting fat, bastard,

  but you are looking better than the last time

  I saw you.”

  “was that in Paris?” I asked.

  “Pasadena, Calif.,” he answered.

  “Faulkner’s dead now too,” I said.

  “how do you like the bitch?” he asked,

  “look at her.”

  I looked at her and thanked her for the beer.

  “fair stand the fields of France,”

  I said.

  “I need a hundred and a half,” he told me.

  “Jesus,” I answered,

  “I was just gonna ask you for the same thing.”

  “I hear Harry is back with his old lady.”

  “yeah. looking for a job. painting furniture, baby-sitting.

  he was even a bartender one night.”

  “Harry? a bartender?”

  “just for 3 hours. then he said he got tired.”

  “tired?”

  “‘tired’ is the word he used.”

  “I need a hundred and a half.”

  “who the hell doesn’t?”

  “Faulkner doesn’t,” he said.

  “I wonder what he mixed in his drinks? I’ve got to slow

  down…”

  the bitch had some poems she wrote and I read them

  and they were not bad considering that she was built for

  other things, and the rest of the night was fairly dull,

  no fist fights, too old to tango, tiger asleep in the shade,

  and I promised I would write an essay ON THE MEANING OF

  MODERN POETRY which he promised to print unseen

  and which I knew I would never write.

  the night was full of promises, an old tiger

  and a peach. I drove home down the side streets,

  swinging wide around the police station,

  smoking king-sized and humming parts from Carmen

  because it was very dark and Bizet drove better than

  Ludwig who had his mind on more important things.

  I parked out in front and no sooner did I get the car door open

  than the rummy downstairs said,

  “hey, ace, how about a cold one?”

  I took a beer out of the bag and slipped it in through the screen.

  “I need a dollar,” he said.

  “now, ain’t that a bitch? I was just gonna ask you for the same thing.”

  “you’re in a bad mood,” he said.

  “sure,” I said, “haven’t you heard? Faulkner’s dead.”

  “Faulkner? wasn’t he a bullring jock? Pomona Fairgrounds?

  Rudioso? Caliente? you knew the kid?”

  “I knew the kid,” I said

  and then walked on upstairs.

  the rest of the night was no-account, as the Arkies say,

  and there were a couple of numbers I could dial,

  4 or 5 numbers, some black, some white,

  some old, some young,

  but I kept thinking of white hospitals

  and palm trees in the shade,

  and it was quiet, at last it was quiet,

  and there are times when you have to come back

  and look around, there are times of Ludwig,

  there are times of walls,

  there are times of thinking of Ernest

  and that shotgun raised to his head;

  there are times for thinking

  of dead loves, dead flowers,

  of all the dead, dead people who give you a name,

  from Florida to Del Mar, Calif.,

  all the sadness like a parade

  of gentle fools gone,

  water running in sinks,

  stockings washed,

  gowns worn, thrown away,

  the ugly duckling world

  quietly slipping away from me

  and myself slipping away,

  an old tiger,

  sick of the battle.

  the next morning I was awakened by a knock on the door,

  so I ignored it, I never answer the door,

  I don’t want to see anybody,

  but it kept up with a kind of gentle persistence

  so I got up and put on my old yellow robe

  dead voices from bedrooms

  and opened the door.

  “I am here to help the handicapped people,” she said.

  “do come in,” I said.

  she was a young girl 19, 20, 21,

  her eyes as innocent as the map of Texas spread

  over the clouds,

  and she walked across the rug and sat down

  and I went into the kitchen and took the cap

  off of 2 beers. my goldfish swam like crazy.

  I walked out with the beers, I said,

  “love must be always

  because stones gone flat with leaning

  take ships to sea

  take cats and dogs and

  everything.”

  she laughed and the day began without

  error.

  worms

  a guy told me,

  you don’t have to worry about worms when you’re
>
  dead

  they never get to you

  the body changes like in all different

  ways—by the time

  they’ve worked through the casket

  things have happened and it

  always happens

  different—

  they’ve dug up these old kings outa tombs, ya

  know:

  one guy was just

  a little splotch of black

  water, another had a

  beard 18 feet long and another had

  turned to a kind of rock-like

  salt.

  yeah? I said.

  yeah, he said.

  he knew all these things.

  he lived high in the hills and had these

  tremendous brains.

  before I left I reached out and

  pulled the worms out of his

  eyes nose belly shoes hair ears

  and then he said

  good night

  and I said

  good night

  and I got in my car and drove off

  and the worms laughed

  all the way home.

  to hell with Robert Schumann

  I finished my drink and went back

  upstairs to hear the second half—

  another piano concerto, and

  2 are too many and

  I couldn’t make it out

  having lost my program so

  I left the place and drove 21 blocks

  South and East

  to where 2 flyweights

  a Jap and a Mexican were

  going at it. the

  Mexican butted the Jap and

  the Jap bled from a cut

  above the eye

  but only fought harder