You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense

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You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense Page 12

by Charles Bukowski

“goodbye,” said the

  editor.

  I hung up.

  there are certainly any number of lonely

  people without much to do with

  their nights.

  a tragic meeting

  I was more visible and available then

  and I had this great weakness:

  I thought that going to bed with many women

  meant that a man was clever and good and

  superior

  especially if he did it at the age of

  55

  to any number of bunnies

  and I lifted weights

  drank like mad

  and did

  that.

  most of the women were nice

  and most of them looked good

  and only one or two were really dumb and

  dull

  but JoJo

  I can’t even categorize.

  her letters were slight, repeated

  the same things:

  “I like your books, would like to meet

  you…”

  I wrote back and told her

  it would be

  all right.

  then along came the instructions

  where I was to meet

  her: at this college

  on this date

  at this time

  just after her

  classes.

  the college was up in the

  hills and

  the day and time

  arrived

  and with her drawings

  of twisting streets

  plus a road map

  I set out.

  it was somewhere between the Rose Bowl

  and one of the largest graveyards in

  Southern California

  and I got there early and sat in my

  car

  nipping at the Cutty Sark

  and looking at the

  co-eds—there were so many of

  them, one simply couldn’t have

  them all.

  then the bell rang and I got out of my

  car and walked to the front of the

  building, there was a long row of

  steps and the students walked out of the

  building and down the steps

  and I stood and

  waited, and like with airport

  arrivals

  I had no idea

  which one

  it would be.

  “Chinaski,” somebody said

  and there she was: 18, 19,

  neither ugly nor beautiful, of

  average body and features,

  seeming to be neither vicious,

  intelligent, dumb or

  insane.

  we kissed lightly and then

  I asked her if she

  had a car

  and she said

  she had a car

  and I said, “fine, I’ll drive you

  to it, then you follow

  me…”

  JoJo was a good follower, she followed me all

  the way to my beat-up court in east

  Hollywood.

  I poured her a drink and we talked very

  drab talk and kissed a

  bit.

  the kisses were neither good nor bad

  nor interesting or un-

  interesting.

  much time went by and she drank very

  little

  and we kissed some more and she said,

  “I like your books, they really do things

  to me.”

  “Fuck my books!” I told her.

  I was down to my shorts and I had her

  skirt up to her ass

  and I was working hard

  but she just kissed and

  talked.

  she responded and she didn’t

  respond.

  then

  I gave up and started drinking

  heavily.

  she mentioned a few of the other

  writers

  she liked

  but she didn’t like any of them

  the way she liked

  me.

  “yeah,” I poured a new one, “is that

  so?”

  “I’ve got to get going,” JoJo said,

  “I’ve got a class in the

  morning.”

  “you can sleep here,” I suggested, “and

  get an early start, I scramble great

  eggs.”

  “no, thank you, I’ve got to

  go…”

  and she left with

  several copies of my books

  she had never seen

  before,

  copies I had given her

  much earlier in the

  evening.

  I had another drink and decided to

  sleep it off

  as an unexplainable

  loss.

  I switched off the lights

  and threw myself upon the

  bed without

  washing-up or

  brushing my

  teeth.

  I looked up into the dark

  and thought, now, here is one

  I will never be able to

  write about:

  she was neither good nor bad,

  real or unreal, kind or

  unkind, she was just a girl

  from a college

  somewhere between the Rose Bowl and

  the dumping grounds.

  then I began to itch, I scratched

  myself, I seemed to feel things

  on my face, on my belly, I inhaled,

  exhaled, tried to sleep but

  the itching got worse, then

  I felt a bite, then several bites,

  things appeared to be

  crawling on me…

  I rushed to the bathroom

  and switched on the light

  my god, JoJo had fleas.

  I stepped into the shower

  stood there

  adjusting the water,

  thinking,

  that poor

  dear

  girl.

  an ordinary poem

  since you’ve always wanted

  to know I am going to admit that I never liked Shakespeare, Browning, the

  Bronte sisters,

  Tolstoy, baseball, summers on the shore, arm-

  wrestling, hockey, Thomas Mann, Vivaldi, Winston Churchill, Dudley

  Moore, free verse,

  pizza, bowling, the Olympic Games, the Three Stooges, the Marx

  Brothers, Ives, Al Jolson, Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Mickey

  Mouse, basketball,

  fathers, mothers, cousins, wives, shack jobs (although preferable

  to the former),

  and I don’t like the Nutcracker Suite, the Academy Awards, Hawthorne,

  Melville, pumpkin pie, New Year’s Eve, Christmas, Labor Day, the

  Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Good Friday, The Who,

  Bacon, Dr. Spock, Blackstone and Berlioz, Franz

  Liszt, pantyhose,

  lice, fleas, goldfish, crabs, spiders, war

  heroes, space flights, camels (I don’t trust camels) or the

  Bible,

  Updike, Erica Jong, Corso, bartenders, fruit flies, Jane

  Fonda,

  churches, weddings, birthdays, newscasts, watch

  dogs, .22 rifles, Henry

  Fonda

  and all the women who should have loved me but

  didn’t and

  the first day of Spring and the

  last

  and the first line of this poem

  and this one

  that you’re reading

  now.

  from an old dog in his cups…

  ah, my friend, it’s awful, worse

  than that—you just get

  going good—

  one bottle down and

  gone—

  the poems
simmering in your

  head

  but

  halfway between 60 and

  70

  you pause

  before opening the

  second bottle—

  sometimes

  don’t

  for after 50 years of

  heavy drinking

  you might assume

  that extra bottle

  will set you

  babbling in some

  rest home

  or tender you

  a stroke

  alone in your

  place

  the cats chewing at

  your flesh

  as the morning fog

  enters the broken

  screen.

  one doesn’t even think of

  the liver

  and if the liver

  doesn’t think of

  us, that’s

  fine.

  but it does seem

  the more we drink

  the better the words

  go.

  death doesn’t matter

  but the ultimate inconvenience

  of near-death is worse than

  galling.

  I’ll finish the night off

  with

  beer.

  let ’em go

  let’s let the bombs go

  I’m tired of waiting

  I’ve put away my toys

  folded the road maps

  canceled my subscription to Time

  kissed Disneyland goodbye

  I’ve taken the flea collars off my cats

  unplugged the tv

  I no longer dream of pink flamingoes

  I no longer check the market index

  let’s let ’em go

  let’s let ’em blow

  I’m tired of waiting

  I don’t like this kind of blackmail

  I don’t like governments playing cutesy with my life:

  either crap or get off the pot

  I’m tired of waiting

  I’m tired of dangling

  I’m tired of the fix

  let the bombs blow

  you cheap sniveling cowardly nations

  you mindless giants

  do it

  do it

  do it!

  and escape to your planets and space stations

  then you can fuck it

  up there too.

  trying to make it

  new jock in from Arizona

  doesn’t know this town

  but his agent did get him a mount

  in the first race

  last Saturday

  and the jock took the freeway

  in

  on the same day as

  the U.S.C. vs. U.C.L.A. football

  game

  and got caught

  in one of the two special lanes

  which took him to the Rose Bowl

  instead of the race

  track.

  he was forced to drive all the way

  to the football game

  parking lot

  before he could turn

  around.

  by the time he got to the track

  the first race

  was over.

  another jock had won with his

  mount.

  today out there

  I noticed on the program that the

  new jock from Arizona

  had a good mount in the

  6th.

  then the horse became a late

  scratch.

  sometimes getting started

  in the big time

  is tantamount to

  trying to raise an erection

  in a tornado

  and even if you do

  nobody has the time

  to notice.

  the death of a splendid neighborhood

  there was a place off Western Ave.

  where you went up a stairway

  to get head

  and there was a big biker

  sitting there

  wearing his swastika jacket.

  he was there to smell you out

  if you were the

  heat

  and to protect the girls

  if you weren’t.

  it was just above the

  Philadelphia Hoagie Shop

  there in L.A.

  where the girls came down

  when things got

  slow

  and ate something

  else.

  the man who ran the

  sandwich shop

  hated the girls

  he didn’t like to

  serve them

  but he was

  afraid not

  to.

  then one day

  I came by

  and the biker wasn’t there

  or the girls

  either,

  and it hadn’t been a simple

  bust

  it had been a

  shoot-out:

  there were bullet holes

  in the door

  above the

  stairway.

  I went into the Hoagie shop

  for a sandwich and a

  beer

  and the proprietor told

  me,

  “things are better

  now.”

  after that

  I had to leave town

  for a couple of

  days

  and when I got back

  and walked down

  to the Hoagie shop

  I saw that the plate glass

  window

  had been busted

  out

  and was covered with

  boards.

  inside the walls

  and the counter had been

  blackened by

  fire.

  about that same

  time

  my girlfriend went crazy

  and started screwing one man

  after

  another.

  almost everything good was

  gone.

  I gave my landlord a month’s

  notice and moved in

  3 weeks.

  you get so alone at times that it just makes sense

  when I was a starving writer I used to read the major writers in the

  major magazines (in the library, of course) and it made me feel

  very bad because—being a student of the word and the way, I realized

  that they were faking it: I could sense each false emotion, each

  utter pretense, it made me feel that the editors had their

  heads up their asses—or were being politicized into publishing

  in-groups of power

  but

  I just kept writing and not eating very much—went down from 197 pounds

  to 137—but—got very much practice typing and reading printed rejection

  slips.

  it was when I reached 137 pounds that I said, to hell with it, quit

  typing and concentrated on drinking and the streets and the ladies of

  the streets—at least those people didn’t read Harper’s, The Atlantic or

  Poetry, a magazine of verse.

  and frankly, it was a fair and refreshing ten year lay-off

  then I came back and tried it again to find that the editors still had

  their heads up their asses and/or etc.

  but I was up to 225 pounds

  rested

  and full of background music—

  ready to give it another shot in the

  dark.

  a good gang, after all

  I keep hearing from the old dogs,

  men who have been writing for

  decades,

  poets all,

  they’re still at their

  typers

  writing better than

  ever

  past wives and wars and

  jobs<
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  and all the things that

  happen.

  many I disliked for personal

  and artistic

  reasons…

  but what I overlooked was

  their endurance and

  their ability to

  improve.

  these old dogs

  living in smoky rooms

  pouring the

  bottle…

  they lash against the

  typer ribbons: they came

  to

  fight.

  this

  being drunk at the typer beats being with any woman

  I’ve ever seen or known or heard about

  like

  Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Garbo, Harlow, M.M. or

  any of the thousands that come and go on that

  celluloid screen

  or the temporary girls I’ve seen so lovely

  on park benches, on buses, at dances and parties, at

  beauty contests, cafes, circuses, parades, department

  stores, skeet shoots, balloon flys, auto races, rodeos,

  bull fights, mud wrestling, roller derbies, pie bakes,

  churches, volleyball games, boat races, county fairs,

  rock concerts, jails, laundromats or wherever

  being drunk at this typer beats being with any woman

  I’ve ever seen or

  known.

  hot

  there’s fire in the fingers and there’s fire in the shoes and there’s

  fire in walking across a room

  there’s fire in the cat’s eyes and there’s fire in the cat’s

  balls

  and the wrist watch crawls like a snake across the back of the

  dresser

  and the refrigerator contains 9,000 frozen red hot dreams

  and as I listen to the symphonies of dead composers

  I am consumed with a glad sadness

  there’s fire in the walls

  and the snails in the garden only want love

  and there’s fire in the crabgrass

  we are burning burning burning

  there’s fire in a glass of water

  the tombs of India smile like smitten motherfuckers

  the meter maids cry alone at one a.m. on rainy nights

  there’s fire in the cracks of the sidewalks

 

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