“Yes,” I said, “we are.”
“Well, the flight is ready. Please hurry!”
I left the money for the drinks, and we ran after the two people. “Oh,” said Zana, “don’t run so fast. They’re not really ready; they just act that way.”
“No, no,” I said, “they’re ready, they’re ready!”
I pulled her along by the hand. “HURRY! HURRY!” the two in front of us yelled back. We were drunk; it’s harder to run in that condition. We ran out onto the airport ramp. All the passengers were waiting. Through their windows, they looked at us with something less than looks of love. The pilot stood at the cabin entrance. “HURRY! HURRY!” he yelled, and we ran up the steps and into the plane. There were two seats in back. We strapped ourselves in, and they pulled away the loading steps and the plane began moving. Soon we were in the air. We got free drinks, and Zana began crying, the tears rolled and rolled. And that was about all there was to the poetry reading sponsored by the dope dealers. Zana finally stopped crying, and when we landed at her hometown airport we were the last off the plane. As I passed by with Zana, one of the stewardesses asked me: “Do you folks have your problems solved now?” And I told her, “Not by any means. We’re a long way from that.”
Which has since proven to be truer and truer, though we are still friends.
East Hollywood: The New Paris
East Hollywood sits in the smog in front of the purple mountains. It begins at Hollywood Boulevard and runs east of Western Avenue down to Alvarado Street, bordered by Santa Monica Boulevard on the south. Here you will find the greatest contagion of bums, drunks, pillheads, prostitutes per square foot, in Southern California.
I lived there. I sat at my typewriter in my underwear drinking beer at high noon, looking out the window and masturbating as the young girls walked by. At the age of 50 I was finished with the ordinary life. I quit my job and decided to become a professional writer. I wanted to make money writing because I liked to drink at night and I didn’t like to get up in the morning. I could write a good dirty story, a rape, a murder, something that many of them wanted to do but didn’t have the guts to do, so I wrote it down for them in a believable way and they creamed the white slime down their legs and I got paid. I liked words. I could make them dance like chorus girls or I could use them like machinegun bullets. So I was hustling, a lot of people hustle, like your mother probably got paid for letting dogs screw her in the ass in dirty alleys, only she didn’t tell you about it.
The problem with my writing was that my drinking got in the way. I’d whack-off once or twice, get down 5 or 6 cans of beer, open a pint of scotch and sit at the machine. After typing an hour or 2 I’d just sit at the machine and drink. I’d get scared. Suppose the editors were too fucking dumb to tell good writing from bad? What was an editor anyhow? Just a guy whose mother had taken it in some dirty alley, had gotten creamed in the mouth, ass, and cunt simultaneously by 3 unwashed Arabs. Look at what happened to Céline. They stole his bicycle and spit on his shoes, hung cans of goat piss outside his window.
Well, you drink every day and the nuts come around, the crazies. The first was Rolph, the German. He just knocked. He had this black girl with him, Bonnie. He said, “Hey, what are you doing?” and I said, “I wait upon Christ to return as a Chinaman with a wooden leg.” They came in. She was all right, I could tell by looking. But there was something very odd about him. I took a pull at my beer.
“You’ve been to the madhouse twice,” I told him.
He laughed and jumped up and down on the floor. Then he stopped. They both sat down. Then Rolph said, “Hey, go get us some beer.”
I got up and walked toward the kitchen. I’d walked maybe 5 or 6 steps when he leaped on my back, grabbed my throat with his left arm, and began beating me with his right fist. He was laughing. He was screaming something that I couldn’t make out. His fist bounced off of me as he continued to strike. There was nothing gentle about his attack.
“Rolph,” I said, “your mother is a stinking whore!”
He kept beating me.
“Rolph,” I said, “stop that. I am beginning to get irritated. Here I am going to get you and your girlfriend a beer and you are hanging from me like some dumb prick!”
He kept beating at me. I reached over, got the back of his neck, turned, faced toward the couch, and hurled him through the air. Bonnie leaped aside and Rolph landed on the couch, then fell to the floor. He sat up and looked at me. His eyes became misty.
“You are unfair,” he said, “I was only joking. We came by in good faith.”
I looked at Bonnie. “What are you doing with this dufflebag of a man?”
“I love him,” said Bonnie.
“You love dead shit in a hotdog roll,” I said.
Then I looked at Rolph. “Get up, man, I’m going to finish you off!”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “We know about you.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I run a bookstore on Kingsley Drive, The Marmalade Switch. We want you to do a poetry reading.”
“How much?”
“Half the take.”
“Half the take and all I can drink.”
“You’re on. . . .”
That Friday night at 8 P.M. I drove up. The place was packed. I had never read before but I was known in town because of my dirty stories and poems, and some rumors that I did wild and astonishing things. Some of the rumors were true; the most interesting ones weren’t. The truth was that I was simply a desperate and unhappy man. I was confused, sick, and lonely, yet at the same time I had a very hard head. I was disgusted with continuing situations that only left me the choices to run, fight, or suicide. And the beautiful women only ran with the rich and the famous and soon the beautiful women were no longer beautiful. Everything was some big sack of turkeyshit.
There was no place to park so I parked in the supermarket parking lot across the way. There was no need to lock the car, a 1962 Comet. I was the only one who could start it.
I got out with my sheath of poems on a clipboard. Then I heard screams:
“THERE’S THAT SON OF A BITCH! LET’S TAKE HIS ASS!”
I could make out Rolph and some big fat guy running across the dark street toward me. The miserable fart-suckers were always thinking about me in terms of Ernest Hemingway: war. They were upon me. They grabbed me and tried to wrestle me to the ground. The fat guy was already sweating. He gave me an elbow into the gut.
“YOUR FATHER WAS A FAG!” he screamed.
I threw my poems down. The fat guy had on glasses and I didn’t want to blind him so I cracked him one behind the ear. He blinked, farted, then ran off. I decided to finish Rolph off. I got him over the hood of one of the cars in the parking lot and I squeezed his throat good. His eyes bulged out real nice. Even in the dark I could see his face turning purple. Then some people pulled me off, some of the people who had come for the reading. I picked up my poems and went in to read. It was a nice crowd; they liked dirty poems. After it was over I said, “Thank you. Party at my place now.”
Well, parties, they happened almost every night. Just when I wrote I don’t know but I wrote a great deal, most of it not too bad. So this one night I was sitting there in the center of the rug and there were people all about. I didn’t know who most of them were but they were everywhere—in the bedroom, in the crapper, in the bathtub, in the kitchen, puking, crapping, eating, drinking, talking, fighting, fucking. I just sat there and drank. The women were horrible, showing their stained and unwashed panties, their tits sagging to their bellybuttons. The men were no better: hyenas, coyotes, suckerfish, bird dogs, would-be writers. I passed away from drink and their dullness. . . .
Then I was awakened. Some guy was shaking me.
“Hank! Hank! It’s the cops!”
I looked up. There were 2 cops standing in the doorway. There was also a citizen standing there with a shotgun. I was flat on my stomach in the middle of the rug. I raised my head.
“Yes, gentlemen?”
There was one small cop with a mustache. He was smoking a cigar. He had his cap tilted rakishly on his head.
“You own this joint?”
“No, I rent this joint.”
He looked around the room. He peered at stained and unwashed panties. Then he looked back at me.
“Listen, buddy, I’ve been here before! I know you! And I’m tired of coming here! I want a modicum of silence around here! And if I have to come back here again tonight I’m gonna run your ass in!”
Then the citizen with the shotgun spoke. He was an elderly fellow with something like a small tomato growing out of the left side of his throat. The tomato dripped down over his collar.
“This guy,” he said, looking at me, “is the cause of everything. Since he moved into this neighborhood two months ago, the decent citizens of this community have not had one full night’s sleep! Nothing but partying and cursing and broken glass and music, women of shame! I need my sleep! I DEMAND MY SLEEP!”
Then he took his shotgun and pointed it right at me. The cops just stood there. I couldn’t believe it. I heard the safety click off.
I raised my right hand, formulated it into a gun, pointed at the citizen, and went:
“Pop.”
A whore laughed. The citizen lowered his gun. The cop with the tilted cap said, “Remember, one more complaint and I’m running your ass in!”
“And any more,” said the citizen with the tomato on his neck, “and I’m coming over without calling anybody and I’m going to settle this thing myself. . . .”
They left and I made minor attempts to keep the noise down. They didn’t return that night, the cops or the citizen. There were other parties after that but I never saw any of them again. It was like a little one-night play they had put on for our benefit and then they had moved on elsewhere. . . .
My 2nd reading was down at Venice, which isn’t East Hollywood but it might as well be. It was a bar right down by the ocean. I drove down alone, early, took a half-pint of whiskey, and sat down by the water drinking it.
I finished the bottle and then walked up the sand and into the bar. They were waiting. There was a little elevated table with a mike and there were 2 six-packs of beer waiting for me. I walked on through the crowd. . . .
“Bukowski!”
“Hey, Bukowski, baby!”
Then a young man, sweating, in a blue workingman’s shirt ran up to me, shook my hand, “Remember me, man? I’m Ronnie. . . . Remember me, man?”
“Ronnie,” I told him, “eat a basketful of dried turds.”
I climbed up there and cracked a can of beer. They cheered as I drained the can. They were assholes, readers of my works. I had created for myself. Now I was a victim. I looked down and noticed all the young girls. Many of them hissed and yelled at me, they called me a male chauvinist pig, but all most of them wanted to do was to fuck me. They wanted to fuck me; they wanted to find the seed of my wizened soul, as if it came out of the end of my cock. What the young girls wanted was to will me into their kind of death, which meant another kind of game: getting in and out of bed with them and seeing who came out with the most.
. . . I read to them and I got away with it and I grabbed the money and announced that there would be a party at a poet’s place, nearby. I ran to my car, got in, roared off as well as a 1962 Comet can roar off. Drunk, radio on, I had it down to the floorboards. I drove up and down the dark streets of Venice and they followed, the rat pack. Then I took the Comet, ran it up a driveway, and got the car up on the sidewalk, and it felt good driving on the sidewalk. I got it up to 60 mph. and they followed in the street. Suddenly there seemed to be a house in the way. I sheered hard to the left but hit a fence, taking out part of it. I got back into the street, some of the white sticks of fence riding upon the hood like dead bones out of nowhere. Then they clattered off. I drove to the poet’s house, climbed out, and they followed me in. . . .
At my place I had a way of discouraging people from visiting me too often but new people always managed to arrive. Robbie seemed a nice enough fellow, gentle eyes, a beard; he was intense but he knew how to laugh. He published a chapbook of my poems, I Don’t Feel Good Unless I Am Being Evil. It sold some copies and we bought drinks with it. Robbie wrote poems too, not very good ones, and then he started bringing his friends around—all males. We drank wine and beer and talked. But they were political. I’m not sure what they were. They were anarchists or revolutionaries or something of that order.
I had no politics. I told them to go ahead and do whatever they wanted to do. They were organized, though, and dedicated. They had food and weapons and women stored in the Oregon hills.
Edward, one of the members, said to me, “Look, either you are a part of history or you are a useless segment of society. You are allowing yourself to be used and when you allow yourself to be used you are making it more difficult for the remainder of us who are trying to enact a change for the better.”
“All I want to do,” I said, “is to type things down on a piece of paper.”
“You are being selfish,” said a young man with red hair. “You must join the Brotherhood of Man.”
“I don’t like brotherhoods,” I answered. “I feel good when I am alone.”
“But you’re drinking with us now.”
“I’d as soon drink with anarchists as anybody else.”
“We are not anarchists,” said a brother called Jack. “Anarchy means political and social confusion, and also the will to destruct everything. We only wish to destroy the evil and the decayed.”
“Stop looking at me,” I told him.
“FUCK YOU!” brother Jack screamed at me.
We drank on into the night and the brothers discussed their plans in front of me. I was honored by their trust. And they were right to trust me because, although I didn’t believe in them, there was no place I could go to that I did believe in. They were nice young boys and they drank right along with me, and they had brought their own drinks with them which was more than could be said for most of my visitors.
Suddenly, about 2 A.M. brother Jack focused upon me. He was then very drunk, bits of spittle running and hanging from his chin. “Then you don’t believe in us?” he asked me.
“Not really.”
“Well,” said brother Jack, “fuck you! FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU!”
There was some silence, then the other brothers went on talking. Brother Jack just stared at me. I was the Enemy. I was either in or I was out. Join or jerk-off into that dark night.
“FUCK YOU!” he screamed again.
He slumped a bit forward on the couch, leaned a bit to the right, and then spilled over onto the rug. He was out.
“Where’s your car?” I asked Robbie.
I walked over and picked up brother Jack. I followed Robbie out the door and into the night. The car wasn’t far down. Robbie opened the back door and I dropped brother Jack on the rear seat. As he landed, his eyes opened and he looked at me.
“FUCK YOU!” he screamed.
I went back in with Robbie and the brothers and we drank a little more and then they left. . . .
Two or 3 nights later Robbie knocked on the door. I let him in and cracked 2 beers. Robbie took a hit.
“Well,” he said, “the brothers took a vote on whether to kill you or not. . . .”
“They did?”
“Yes, and you won by one vote. It was 4 to 3 against killing you.”
“Great. Which way did you vote?”
“I voted against killing you.”
“Have another beer.”
“Thanks, I will. But I’m here to tell you it’s all set.”
“What’s all set?”
“The distribution of literature.”
“What literature?”
“Hank, I told you all about it.”
“I was probably drunk. Tell me again.”
“All right,” said Robbie, “I’ve written up the Ultimatum. I’ve got 40 copies in the truck right now. You’v
e got to help me deliver them. You promised.”
“What Ultimatum?”
“To Richard Nixon, to Time magazine, to the TV stations, to several governors, members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, to the New York Times, to the Christian Science Monitor, to all the people who should know.”
“Know what?”
“That unless air pollution is stopped we are going to blow up the cities one by one. We are going to blow up the dams and we are going to blow up the sewers, we are going to destroy each city, one by one, until air pollution is stopped.”
“Listen, when you get ready to blow up East Hollywood can you give me a couple of days warning? Last thing I want to do is drown in shit.”
“We’ll warn you. We are gong to get the air cleaned up.”
“And you’re going to put shit in the streets?”
“A few must be sacrificed for the good of the many.”
“And I promised you that I would help distribute these pamphlets?”
“Yes, one night you did. And now the Ultimatums are all packed in large envelopes, stamped special delivery, first class. It really cost the brothers some money. Each pamphlet is 26 pages long, detailing our demands. What you and I are going to do is distribute one Ultimatum to each of 40 mailboxes throughout town. If we put them all in one mailbox we might be in danger of being detected.”
“Jesus Christ, Robbie, I can’t do that! I don’t believe in your program! It’s crack-pot, it’s ignorant, you’ll drown more people in water and shit in a year than bad air can kill in a decade!”
“One night you promised me, Hank.”
“What’s wrong with all the other brothers?”
“I admire you, Hank. This is a big thing to me. I want to be with you when we do it.”
“Nothing doing, Jerko. . . .”
The poor freak sat there staring at his shoes. I walked out and got a fifth of vodka and two glasses.
“Look,” I said, “let’s drink this. You can sleep on the couch tonight and in the morning we’ll take your truck down to the city dump and put those Ultimatums where they belong.”
Absence of the Hero Page 19