Absence of the Hero

by Charles Bukowski

  I poured us two full glassfuls.

  “You came from the factories and the streets,” he said. “When I first read your writing I knew that you were an exceptional man, that you were one of us.”

  “Don’t butter my ass, Jerko. I like shit where it belongs. I consider the sewage system one of man’s greatest inventions.”

  “We voted against killing you, Hank.”

  “That’s no gift. I have a suicide complex. . . .”

  . . . Well, we drank the fifth, we finished the fifth, and I stood up and said, “Well, let’s go.”

  “You mean you’re going to help me do it?” asked Robbie.

  “It’ll be a cheap thrill. . . .”

  “I knew you’d do it!”

  We walked outside and got into the truck. It had a flatbed in back but the brothers had built some kind of structure upon it, a round whorl of tin with another hunk of tin soldered to the back. And there behind our seats were stacked the 40 Ultimatums.

  Robbie drove. We stopped at the first liquor store and got a gallon jug of cheap wine. We drove off.

  “Now,” said Robbie, “here’s our first mailbox!”

  It was at Hollywood and Vine. Robbie pulled up and I reached back, got an Ultimatum, got out, and dropped it in the mailbox. I leaped back in and we gunned off.

  I felt something. I felt like a child rapist. We passed the bottle.

  “A beautiful night,” said Robbie. “Did you read the address label?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who got mailed the first Ultimatum?”

  “Richard Nixon.”

  From then on it was mailbox after mailbox. Robbie had a map, the mailbox distribution was carefully planned. Then we were in Watts, in honor of our black brothers. I dumped an Ultimatum into a Watts mailbox and leaped back in.

  “Here I am,” I said, “leaping in and out of this truck dumping literature into mailboxes and I don’t even believe in what the literature says. I am more insane than you are.”

  After the last Ultimatum had been mailed Robbie drove me back to my place. We went in and finished the jug of wine. I offered him the couch for the night. He thanked me but said that he had to leave; he had to tell the brothers about the glorious night of the deliverance of the Ultimatums. He left and I locked the door and sat on the couch in the dark and drank a can of beer. I got up, walked to the bedroom, got my shoes off, fell on the bed and slept, fully clothed. . . .

  It must have been 2 months later, about one o’clock in the afternoon, when Robbie knocked. He looked very sad.

  “Sit down,” I said, “I’ll get you a beer.”

  “You go ahead,” he said. “Nothing for me.”

  I came out with the beer and sat across from him.

  “It didn’t work,” he said.

  “What?”

  “All those Ultimatums, to the president, to the press, the TV, the magazines, the governors, it didn’t work. Nothing was ever published, nothing was ever said, nothing was ever heard.”

  “Did you really have the dynamite, the know-how to carry it through?”

  “Yeah, we had it, we knew what to do. Then something else happened.”

  “What?”

  “Women. Up in the Oregon hills where we were hiding out with all our foodstuffs, our guns, the dynamite, it didn’t work. Some of the brothers had women with them, and then some of the brothers started cheating on the other brothers and fucking their women. And the other brothers started fucking the other women. All the trust left, everybody started hating and fighting each other. It just broke up, the whole thing just broke up.”

  “Robbie, that kind of thing happens everywhere, it’s only normal.”

  “Maybe so, but it broke us up.”

  “You need a drink.”

  “I’m not like you. Drink doesn’t solve my pain.”

  “No, it doesn’t solve it, it just takes it into a different stratosphere.”

  “I’ll face it head on.”

  “Good luck.”

  Robbie stood there and we shook hands. He left then. I sat there. I heard an engine start. Then he was gone. . . .

  Three or four weeks later I came home one night and there stacked high on my porch and against the door were the Oregon foodstuffs: sacks of flour and sugar, sacks of beans, hundreds of cans of soups; salt, coffee, dried beef, canned tomatoes, canned milk and cream, pouches of tobacco, cigarette papers. No note, just that, and air pollution. . . .

  The next strange one who came by was a fellow about 10 years younger than I, one Martin Johnson, who claimed he was going to be the next Maxwell Perkins. He was almost bald and had little tufts of red hair about each ear. He was extremely clean, scrubbed, and carried what I thought to be a kindly and dangerous smile.

  “You are one of the better writers around,” he said. “It’s good to meet you.”

  “Sit down,” I told him. “Care for a beer?”

  He sat down. “No, thanks. I don’t drink much. I just bought Robert Creeley 18 cocktails.”

  “We can find a bar somewhere if you wish.”

  He ignored that. “I’m starting a press, the Red Vulture Press, and I’m going to start out with a broadside. Do you have a poem I might look over?” he asked.

  “Open that door over there,” I pointed to the closet.

  Martin Johnson got up, walked over, and pulled the door open. A mountainful of poems wavered a moment, then spilled forward onto the rug.

  “You wrote all those poems?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “What were they doing in the closet?”

  “Well, when I finish 3 or 4 poems, I open the door a tiny notch and jam them in.”

  “Why don’t you send them out?” he asked.

  “No money in that. I write dirty stories.”

  “Mind if I look some of these over?”

  “Go ahead.”

  I went into the kitchen for another beer. I stood at the kitchen window watching a young girl on the steps next door putting on a pair of roller skates. She was facing me and wearing a tiny skirt. She was about 8 years old. Quite a little lady. I watched her get up and skate off. Then I walked back into the other room. Martin Johnson was sitting on the floor reading the poems. After he finished each poem he made a comment:

  “This one’s good. . . .”

  “This one’s great. . . .”

  “This one’s not so good. . . .”

  “This one’s immortal. . . .”

  “This one’s good. . . .”

  He kept reading. Then he stopped. “I really don’t have time to read all these but I’d like to come back . . .”

  “O.K.”

  “Meanwhile, I’d like to take this one to publish as a broadside,” he said. It was called “An Afternoon Stroll Down the Avenue of Death.”

  “Help yourself,” I said.

  The next strange one who came by called himself Red Hand. He was 22, a kid off the road, slight, wiry, talkative.

  “I ran across your stuff, man. Straight language like I’ve never seen before. I just had to come see you.”

  “It’s O.K. Care for a beer?”

  “Sure.”

  I went out and got him one. When I came back in he was doing the old cigarette roll with one hand act. He took the beer with his other hand.

  “See this coat I got on?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Looks like a new coat, don’t it? Know where I got it? City dump! You’d be surprised what people throw away! There’s nothing wrong with this coat. Just a slight rip in the shoulder. There’s that rip, so the buyer threw it away. I got it, I put it on. Nothing wrong, a few bugs in it, that’s all. Lots of good stuff in the dump. People throw away perfectly good things. I find oranges, nothing wrong with them. . . .”

  “Sit down, drink your beer.”

  “Your stuff is straight, man. There are so many phonies. You know Bob Dylan? That Oakie wail he puts on? That’s not him, man. That’s a fake. Come on, I’ll buy you a drink at a bar.”


  “O.K., Red.”

  We walked out on the street with our beercans. We walked down to The Gored Matador around the corner. It was about two-thirty in the afternoon and not very crowded. We sat down.

  “Vodka 7,” I told the barkeep.

  “Whiskey and soda,” said Red.

  The barkeep brought our drinks and Red paid up. He said, “I first read your stuff in the L.A. Free Press. Only good thing in there, that column. . . .”

  “‘Notes of a Dirty Old Man.’”

  “Those stories true?”

  “95%.”

  “I thought so.”

  Just then a fat drunk who was fairly intoxicated came out of the men’s room. As he walked close to Red he lurched and fell against Red’s back. Then he straightened and lurched on.

  Red leaped from his stool. “Hey, fellow!”

  The drunk turned. “What is it?”

  “Come here.”

  “Fuck off!”

  “I said, ‘Come here!’”

  The drunk walked close to Red, then stopped.

  “Now,” said Red, “I want you to apologize.”

  “For what?”

  “Don’t ask me for what! I said, ‘Apologize!’”

  “No,” said the drunk.

  Red’s hands flashed toward his pocket and the switchblade was out. One finger ran along the edge of the blade and the tip of his finger and the tip of the blade were at the man’s stomach.

  “Now,” said Red, “apologize! Or you’re gonna have a gash in front of you as big and as deep as that thing in back they call your ass!”

  “I apologize,” said the drunk. Then he walked back to his seat. It was very quiet in there. Then Red and I finished our drinks and walked out.

  On the way back there was a big guy in boots walking about 45 feet ahead of us.

  “See that damned fool?” said Red. “You never wear boots like that. Those big leather heels, they make too much noise! He can’t hear anything behind him. He’s as good as dead! Watch this!”

  Red started running quietly and then he was behind the big guy. He walked directly behind him, making motions as if to strangle him. It went on a good 20 or 30 seconds. Then Red stopped and dropped back.

  “You see? I had him. The son of bitch had no chance!”

  “You’re right, Red.”

  We went back to my place and had a few more beers. Red told me more tales of the road. He was a good storyteller. I would later use two or three of his stories.

  “Well,” he said, “I’ve got to go. I’m living with this Mexican woman and she’s giving me a hard time! She wants to get fucked all the time and it’s a job. She sits around and says, ‘You don’t fuck me anymore, what are you, a goddamned fag?’ I met her coming through the 3rd Street tunnel one time and she looked very beautiful. We got together, we started living together. I give her a good sweaty horsefuck now and then but it’s never enough; she’s always bitching. I’m going back on the road soon, I can’t stand it. . . .”

  “Come around any time, Red.”

  “I wanna give you this,” he said, and pulled out the switchblade.

  “It’s glorious, Red, thank you very much.”

  He left then, walking past the front of my window, west along the sidewalk. You couldn’t hear his footsteps. . . .

  One night Martin Johnson was back. He had an armful of broadsides with my poem printed on them.

  “Is there any place you can sign these?” he asked.

  “The kitchen table. . . .”

  We walked in.

  “It’s full of beercans,” he said.

  “Just a moment.” I ran the beercans out to the back garbage cans. Then I took a wet rag and tried to get up the ash stains, the beer stains, the puke stains. It took some time. It was almost impossible.

  “Do you have to drink so much?” he asked. “It’s bad for your health.”

  “It’s bad for my mind if I don’t. I write when I’m drunk.”

  Martin put the broadsides down and I started signing.

  “I’d like to look at more of your poems while you do this,” he said.

  “Go ahead. . . .”

  As I was just about finished he brought in another poem, said he’d like to broadside it, and I said he could. He wrote me out a $50 check. “For this broadside you’ve just signed.”

  “Thanks, Martin.”

  “Those 3 paintings out there. Did you do them?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I like them. Do you think you can do some more?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think I know an art gallery who can put on a show for you.”

  “Painting is not my big hard-on.”

  “I’d like to see you try it. Here, get some paints and paper.”

  He wrote me out another 50-buck check.

  “Sure you don’t want a drink?” I asked.

  “No, thank you. . . .”

  Then he was gone with his broadsides. . . .

  One good thing about painting. You can do it anytime. I mean, I can. To write you must feel very good or very bad but to paint you can feel good, bad, or in between. Of course, everything is better for me when I am drunk, and this includes sex, writing, painting, or watching a bullfight. For others it is what it is. But painting, drinking, fucking, writing, they aren’t one but almost one. So I painted and drank, the action was there, the dancing girls; the radio banging and the cheap cigars, paint on your fingers, paint on the cigars, smoking the cigars, swallowing the paint on the cigars, too interested in the show to care and awakening sick in the morning from the poison of swallowing drink and paint, you walk first to the bathroom and vomit and then to the kitchen where you’ve done it and there are 8 or 9 paintings on the floor and 4 or 5 on the table and sink. It’s one bad-ass circus.

  So I painted. And I remembered my 2 sessions in art class, the lack of fire everywhere; it were as if the whole mass of them, teacher and pupils, were giving way to some unmentionable law that everybody must get along together and really not do anything at all. I mean, they were all very gentle with each other, very chummy; it was more like a picnic, a social gathering than it was a striking out into the madness and the hopelessness.

  So I drank and I painted, I painted and I drank. I painted right out of the tube, the brush was too slow for the melody. And since I painted out of the tube, spreading it on thick and rolling, it took the paintings several days to dry. The paintings were everywhere: kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, front room floors.

  The party people came by and I ran them off:

  “You’ll step on my paintings. . . .”

  I took the telephone apart and stuffed toilet paper between the bell and the hammer. I stuffed toilet paper into the doorbell trip above the kitchen door.

  I got some masking tape and started taping the paintings to the walls, everywhere, and then I ran out of wall space and I started taping paintings to the ceiling. Most of my paintings were of animals and people and they hung all about me and over me. There was one night of drinking where I went out to a bar on Sunset Boulevard and I picked up a fairly classy number and I brought her to my place and she said, “God oh mighty, what is this? You’re crazy, aren’t you?”

  “Sometimes I feel crazy and sometimes I don’t,” I told her.

  “I’m leaving,” she said, and she did. . . .

  Martin and his wife Clara came over. I heard the knocking, recognized him through the door blinds, and let them in. Martin and Clara walked about looking at the paintings.

  “You’ve been working,” said Martin.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Can I have this one?” Martin asked me of one of the paintings.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Can I have this one?” asked Clara.

  “Sure.”

  “Can I have this one?” asked Martin.

  “No, that one is for me.”

  They each had a beer with me. “Keep going,” said Martin, “I’m going to get a show going for y
ou.”

  “O.K.,” I said. Martin wrote me out a check for $150 for the paintings and then another check for another $50 worth of supplies. They left. . . .

  The next day I sat around looking at the paintings. I began to dislike them. They weren’t subtle enough; raw was good but when raw got blaring it got too much like Las Vegas neon. I remembered what the art teacher had said to the class, holding up my work:

  “Now here is a man who isn’t afraid of color.”

  But color alone wasn’t enough. I kept looking at the paintings and I disliked them more and more. I began drinking and I began taking down the paintings I didn’t like. I went from room to room taking down paintings. Soon there were only 5 or 6 paintings hanging. Then I took those down. I had nothing. It got into evening. I kept drinking.

  Then I got an idea. By soaking the paintings in hot water in the bathtub I could diminish the overcoloring. I filled the bathtub and got a large painting. I pushed the painting in. Fine, it was working. I pulled the painting out and carried it to the breakfastnook table. I opened some paint tubes and just gave it a touch of color here and there. Fine.

  I began marching my paintings to the bathtub and dumping them in. I pulled them out, touching some up with color, leaving the others as they were. Soon all my paintings had had a bath. They’d never know my technique. I went to bed feeling much better. . . .

  In the morning I got up and looked at my work and I was sickened. I vomited. Then I began crumbling up the paintings and jamming them into my two garbage cans out back. Soon the garbage cans were full but I crumpled up the remainder of the paintings and jammed them into all the empty garbage cans I could find along the row of courts.

  Then I took the telephone apart and took the toilet paper away from the bell and I also re-engaged the front door bell.

  I’d never be a Van Gogh, not even a Dali. It was back to the typewriter by the window while watching the girls go by. I drove to the racetrack that day and lost $80. I slept that night without drinking, and usually any first night without drinking was a wide-awake night but that night I slept on through. I was worn with disgust. When I awakened I just stayed in bed. I stayed there and stared at the ceiling. About 3 P.M. the phone rang. It was Martin Johnson.