The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way

by Charles Bukowski

  But the old boys with white hair and shopping bags all live downtown in those ancient hotels with the large plate glass windows and all those people sitting in the lobby waiting to die. The old boys talk horses all the way in: what they did do, what they will do, the time they hit the double at Bowie or Belmont or Turf Paradise for $725. They are mad, mad, mad! And I detest discussing horses vocally. And the last old guy I took down there, I got a flat tire at 5th and Spring and I vowed never to do it again. . . . What I am trying to say is that I lost at the races Monday and this is the long way to say it. But I’ve got a new system now. All you do is. . . .

  If you think I’ve had some wild parties, they had one in Munich the other night. Five million people celebrated the marriage of King Ludwig I of Bavaria 138 years ago. It took them 16 days and nights. Despite police, the people stole over 200,000 one-liter beermugs. Over one million gallons of fortified beer were consumed, and over half a million grilled chickens were eaten. There were 500 arrests for fights, 15 purse snatchers caught, 399 Huns made the drunk tank, and around 250 were treated for injuries.

  But I’ve had a few good nights off DeLongpre myself. One night I am passed out in the middle of the floor and somebody shakes me, “Hey, Bukowski, the cops are here!” I get up and one of the cops says to me, “Hey, buddy, do you own this place?” “No, I rent this place.” “Well, keep the noise down. If I come back I’m throwing you in the slammer!” Another time they came riding shotgun. I’d run everybody off, which made a lot of noise and I was sitting there calmly listening to Shostakovich’s 5th. “Hey, buddy,” said the cop, “I know you. We’ve been here before.” “What do you do for a living?” asked another cop. “I’m a writer.” “A writer, huh?” “Yeh.” “Ha, ha, ha,” laughed the cop, “a writer, eh?” Then he walked over to my typewriter and began reading the sheet in there. It was part of my 5,000-word essay on The Meaning of Suicide. After searching under the bed and in the closets for dead bodies they drove off and I took a pint of scotch out from under the couch and finished it.

  There are too many to remember but I suppose one of the best was once when I lived on the 4th floor of this hotel on Union Ave. And I was drinking in the afternoon with a male friend and two ladies. I forget what we were drinking but I felt that the party was getting very dull so I went to the window. Well, there were two windows together over the alley and I locked my legs around the centerpiece that separated the windows and hung over the alley upside down. Soon I was almost hanging by my ankles. My friends were begging me to come back into the apartment. And when I looked down there was a crowd gathered in the alley. I’d heard that people were always encouraging near-suicidal acts, but it was a nice crowd down there. I could see their hands waving at me, I could see the tops of their palms, and several of them were saying at once, “Don’t drop! Don’t drop! Don’t drop!” I got a very warm feeling from these gestures and decided to pull myself back into the apartment. But at first try I found that my legs wouldn’t lift me. It wasn’t a good feeling. Then gathering myself, I managed somehow to coil upwards and grab the centerpiece. I climbed back into the room. Everybody in there was saying over and over again, “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ.” I sat down and poured a drink. Then there was a knock on the door. I opened it. It was the manager.

  “Was that you who was hanging out the window up here?”

  “Yeh.”

  “What did you do it for?”

  “I was bored.”

  “Well, listen, I want to tell you something.”

  “Yeh?”

  “You do that one more time and I’m calling the police.”

  “O.K.,” I said and closed the door.

  It was one of those hotels where they didn’t allow cooking. Every time you left your place they searched it for a hotplate. We used to buy weenies and heat them in the hot water in the wash basin in the crapper. It wasn’t a very nice place.

  Is this a column yet? . . .

  “Oh yeah,” said Neeli at one of the last parties, “tell the one about the guy.”

  “What guy?”

  “The guy at Mad Jack’s.”

  Well, Neeli was there. And me and Mad Jack and his girl. We were drinking beer and wine and screaming and playing the piano and I didn’t know how to play the piano, and we were having a good time somehow and we went out for more to drink and in the liquor store this guy saw us laughing and he said, “You guys are having a good time, can I come along?” And I said, “Sure,” and he went back with us and sat there and then he started bragging about how he had killed seven men in the war, he kept right on about his seven-man kill, nothing else, and finally I said, “Listen, that’s not all that big—killing seven men in a war. It’s sanctioned, it’s blessed, it’s no big thing. Now if you kill a man outside of a war, that might take a little guts.”

  “You don’t like me, do you?”

  “Not a bit.”

  He got up and left and we forgot about him. In about 10 minutes he was back. He had a gunbelt and a holster on and a gun was in the holster and there were bullets in the gun. He walked over to my chair. “You still don’t like me, eh?”

  “No.”

  He drew the gun and stuck it into my belly.

  “I believe I am going to kill you.”

  “Listen, buddy,” I said, “I’ve had a suicide complex for years. You’ll be doing my ass a favor. But you’re going to get life if you do this. Go ahead, pull the trigger. I don’t believe you have the guts.”

  He just looked at me and kept the gun in my stomach. He had a stinking little yellow beard and yellow teeth and tiny hard eyes. I reached over for my glass and had a drink. Neeli, Mad Jack, and his girlfriend stood silent and watching. Then he pulled the gun out of my belly, put it back in the holster, walked to the door and down the steps. I walked over to the piano and began playing it. . . .

  I really hate partie. . . .

  This is a column.

  Open City, November 3–16, 1972

  Notes of a Dirty Old Man

  I had given up on women. I mean, a man simply resigns and says, that’s it, there’s no going on with that. I mean, I had really gotten out of it, and at best it seemed as good a time as any. I passed the ladies on the street, and I mean, truly, they barely registered. They registered, say, as a tree or a phone pole might register. It was hardly a flaming life but it had its comforts. I remember the ending of The Razor’s Edge, where the man had searched all through the world for meaning and found it by being a taxi car driver and giving up on women. I had had only one drunken affair in four years, had gone to bed with the lady, but had been too intoxicated to climax. I felt I had known enough women enough length of time to rate a retirement from that arena. I had quit a job of 11 years (Civil Service and security) and was sitting about writing dirty stories and immortal poems and giving poetry readings for the rent and beer and child support. It was a different life and in the leisure hours drink began to take over. Mostly beer, but I was able to create under the influence of many bottles of beer. I worked and drank most of the night while listening to symphony music and smoking cheap cigars. I got a beer-gut, red-faced, but I wasn’t particularly lonely—the beer filled in the gaps when the creation wasn’t working. I’d remain up each night until 3 or 4 a.m., go to sleep, rise about 2 p.m., open a beer, sit down to a typer, and repeat the process. I wrote my first novel, Post Office, in 29 nights. Actually I felt much like a monk working deep in a cave, unbothered.

  Then I noticed that at most of the local readings in town a girl would come up afterwards and lean over the table, look at me and say, “Hi.” “Hi,” I’d say, and she didn’t make much of an impression—I only thought, well, that’s the same one. I’ve seen her before.

  Then the girl was at my door one night. “Hi,” she said, and handed me a mimeo’d sheet: it had little poems in it and rather an ingrown-ranting and love-boggling going on between certain writers in there. I read through it and thought, now what did she hand me this thing for?

&n
bsp; A week later she was brought to my place by the owner of a local bookstore where I had given one of my readings. She ran about the room proclaiming a rather bad and rather long rhymer she had written. The bookstore owner chased her about the room. The whole process bored me and I wished they’d get out and get it on with each other. I found her name was Charlotte and after the bookstore guy left she stayed a few moments. I began, vaguely, to notice the color of her hair (and that it was long), and that there was something interesting about her nose and her mouth, and that she had an interesting behind. However, I had seen such things before. And when Charlotte left soon afterwards I didn’t particularly grieve. She was 20 years younger: let some young man suffer under all that. I drank some more beer, got a good run of Bach on the radio, and forgot all about her. . . .

  It was around evening the next time Charlotte rang. She had a camera and some flashbulbs. “I want to take some photos. I’d like to sculpt you, O.K.?”

  “O.K.,” I said, holding my bottle of beer. It was then that I noticed this long brown eye around the edge of the camera. That eye looked right into me and it seemed to be laughing and it seemed to be doing something else. A most interesting eye, I thought, look at that eye.

  “You’re looking silly,” she said, “don’t pose.”

  “Of course I’m looking silly,” I said, “it’s an old man leering at a young girl.”

  Then she took one of the used flashbulbs and stuck it in her mouth. “Please don’t do that,” I asked.

  Charlotte left soon after with her photos. “I’ll work off of these first, then you can come and sit.”

  “Why don’t you stick around for a beer?”

  “No, no, I’ve got to go.”

  She seemed very business-like but after she left I found myself still thinking about her. . . .

  The first sitting was a week or so later at 11 a.m. at her Glendale apartment. She took me into the breakfast nook and there sat the beginning of a Bukowski head on the table. “Don’t be nervous now. If I had a studio you wouldn’t be nervous. Do you need a beer?”

  “Yes.”

  Charlotte sat and sculpted me and we talked. She gave me directions on how to sit, how to turn. Those brown eyes looked at me; they were very large and warm but she still appeared business-like. What else could I expect?

  “Now, get closer.”

  “No, closer than that.”

  I got closer. “You know,” she said, putting those warm brown eyes on me (very strange eyes, they seemed to have no pupils). “You know,” she said, “when my husband divorced me he said, ‘I hope you meet a real crud.’ And now I have.”

  I laughed. What a delightful lady.

  “You’ve got all those scars and bumps all over your face, you really give me something to work with.”

  “Thank you,” I answered.

  “All your writings about women,” she said, “when I read your writings about women I thought, now here’s a man who really doesn’t know anything about women.”

  “Oh?” I asked.

  “Yes, it’s true, it’s quite obvious.”

  Charlotte had a little wooden stick with a wire loop. She shook it at me and her eyes brightened. I laughed. She was continuously waving that stick at me. Whenever she did, these waves began circling in me.

  Don’t be a silly old man, I thought.

  “Listen, Charlotte, please don’t wave that stick at me.”

  She laughed and desisted for a while, then shook the stick at me. She was quite good with the clay. Her works were all over her apartment and they were very realistic, amazingly human works. I held myself together through the sitting and she asked if I might come back at 11 the next morning. “Of course,” I said. . . .

  I don’t know how many days later it was, and I was in a dream state, largely unconscious of my actions, and when she went to the refrigerator I got up and followed her. When she turned I had her in my arms, crushing her, my lips upon hers. She fought but I was too strong for her.

  “Easy now,” she said, “let’s go easy, please.”

  “All right.”

  But when I sat down again I felt I knew her much better . . .

  The days went on and the work went slowly. There were more kisses, always more and more kisses. I was an old bull heated out of his head; I had gone years without women and many more without love. But I felt that the feelings were coming mostly from me, and I wanted to be careful. She had been interested in my poems and stories and wanted to sculpture my head. There was nothing I could presume. There was little doubt that I was having love feelings of some sort. Those days in the kitchen were very magic to me. But I was just a poet, and an old one at that. I kept telling myself, Bukowski, you are supposed to know all about the world so don’t bullshit yourself. . . .

  I suppose I did bullshit myself a couple of days later. I picked Charlotte up and carried her to the bedroom. I got her on the bed and we kissed and clutched quite hotly for some time. But when it came to doing it Charlotte resisted. I felt that she had been teasing me, fooling me, playing high-school games. I pulled my pants up and leaped out of bed:

  “Goddamn you, go to hell. Just because you’re 20 years younger than me, you can’t push me around!”

  “And just because you’ve written a couple of poems you can’t push me around!”

  I walked out of the bedroom, across the front room, and slammed the door. I was finished. It had all been nonsense from the beginning. I got in my car and drove off. . . .

  In a day or so I got a letter in the mail:

  “Dear Son of a Bitch Bukowski:

  I got thinking about you tonight and how smug you felt when you left my door and got so mad that I went over and put your head on the floor and I stomped on it . . . stomped, I danced. It was a terrible mess with all the black clay over my kitchen floor. I am afraid I will never get it all cleaned up. Will you come over and help me clean it up? Something. I want to put it all back together again so it is you again. What I want to know is will you make another baby with me? How could I have done it to my own flesh and blood?? Everything will be all right if you don’t take this loss too hard. Darling, sweetheart, Baby, say something. Well, nothing can be done about it now. I feel just terrible . . . excuse me a minute.

  I got so mad at myself I just went over and took a handful of clay . . . big black gobs and started throwing it, I threw it on the wall, on the ceiling. I went mad. My God, you Son of a Bitch, what are you doing to me? All over my white ceiling, I’m exhausted . . . it’s on the stove and refrigerator; there is some even over my painting of Norman Mailer. The dog barked, the kids bawled, and then they decided it was fun and helped me throw too, it is stuck up there, it might never come down. My Christ, they are going to lock me up if anyone sees this. A big hunk of your nose right in the middle of . . . oh, oh, it just fell. It’s a good thing I’m moving. I could never clean up this mess, but I feel great now. Renewed, refreshed, I can breathe deep. I just burst out of the glass bottle you put me in with little air holes. You are a madman to think you can bottle me. No games, Madman. You’ve met a Madwoman and I can play games too.

  Charlotte . . .”

  I had told Charlotte, in jest, that I would like to put her in a glass bottle with a tin lid with little air holes punched in. Or I had thought it had been in jest.

  I went over the next day. Charlotte met me at the door. “I’m really sorry. I wasted a lot of your time. I’d like to do another head.”

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  We walked into the kitchen. There sat the head unbroken and untouched. I started laughing. Then I kissed her. . . .

  The new place she moved to had a kitchen too. It was 11 a.m. again and we sat there. The kisses and embraces and looks continued. Gradually the subject got around to going down. Don’t ask me how the subject got around to going down. Charlotte seemed to move it there.

  “You mean you never?” she asked.

  “Never.”

  “And you’re 50?”

/>   “Yes.”

  “You never wanted to?”

  “No.”

  “Nobody ever asked you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

  “I’m a late starter. I started writing poetry at the age of 35.”

  “Poetry and that other thing aren’t the same thing.”

  “I hope not.”

  I don’t remember how we got away from the sculpture and into the bedroom. Anyhow, there we were on the blue bedspread. We kissed and fondled. All that looking into those dark brown eyes for hours, for days, for weeks. . . .

  I got her panties off, then I looked at the thing.

  “No, no, don’t do it, you won’t like it! Blood comes out of there and pee! You won’t like it!”

  I leaned forward and put my head down. It was hairy as a bear, matted and deranged. I plunged forward and thought of all the great men of the centuries who had died similar deaths. Little did I realize that one day I would enjoy doing it. It had a strange taste, a very strange and good taste that I recognized immediately as the taste of almonds. Almonds. I began to chew upon almonds, breaking shells, chewing, sucking . . . she quivered and twisted up above . . .

  “Your first time?” she asked laying on the pillow at looking at me.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re very good; I guess it’s your imagination and intensity . . .”

  I put myself up against Charlotte and held her. . . .

  I went home and wrote a poem about the incident. The first line began: “I have eaten your cunt like a peach. . . .” I drove over to Charlotte’s, put the poem (enclosed in an envelope) in her mailbox. Then I drove back and telephoned her to look in the mailbox.