Notes of a Dirty Old Man

by Charles Bukowski

  after we cleared I would always say something ridiculous like, “well, suck my dick!” and Bryan would laugh and Neal would just go on driving, neither grim or happy or sardonic, just there — doing the movements. I understood. it was necessary. it was his bull ring, his racetrack. it was holy and necessary.

  the best one was just off Sunset, going north toward Carlton. the drizzle was good now, ruining both the vision and the streets. turning off of Sunset, Neal picked up his next move, full-speed chess, it had to be calculated in an instant’s glance. a left on Carlton would bring us to Bryan’s. we were a block off. there was one car ahead of us and two approaching. now, he could have slowed down and followed the traffic in but he would have lost his movement. not Neal. he swung out around the car ahead of us and I thought, this is it, well, it doesn’t matter, really it doesn’t matter at all. that’s the way it goes through your brain, that’s the way it went through my brain. the two cars plunged at each other, head-on, the other so close that the headlights flooded my back seat. I do think that at the last second the other driver touched his brake. that gave us the hairline. it must have been figured in by Neal. that movement. but it wasn’t over. we were going very high speed now and the other car, approaching slowly from Hollywood Blvd. was just about blocking a left on Carlton. I’ll always remember the color of that car. we got that close. a kind of gray-blue, an old car, coupe, humped and hard like a rolling steel brick thing. Neal cut left. to me it looked as if we were going to ram right through the center of the car. it was obvious. but somehow, the motion of the other car’s forward and our movement left coincided perfectly. the hairline was there. once again. Neal parked the thing and we went on in. Joan brought the dinner in.

  Neal ate all of his plate and most of mine too. we had a bit of wine. John had a highly intelligent young homosexual baby-sitter, who I now think has gone on with some rock band or killed himself or something. anyhow, I pinched his buttocks as he walked by. he loved it.

  I think I stayed long past my time, drinking and talking with Neal. the baby-sitter kept talking about Hemingway, somehow equating me with Hemingway until I told him to shove it and he went upstairs to check Jason. it was a few days later that Bryan phoned me:

  “Neal’s dead, Neal died.”

  “oh shit, no.”

  then Bryan told me something about it. hung up.

  that was it.

  all those rides, all those pages of Kerouac, all that jail, to die alone under a frozen Mexican moon, alone, you understand? can’t you see the miserable puny cactii? Mexico is not a bad place because it is simply oppressed; Mexico is simply a bad place. can’t you see the desert animals watching? the frogs, horned and simple, the snakes like slits of men’s minds crawling, stopping, waiting, dumb under a dumb Mexican moon. reptiles, flicks of things, looking across this guy in the sand in a white t-shirt.

  Neal, he’d found his movement, hurt nobody. the tough young jail kid laying it down alongside a Mexican railroad track.

  the only night I met him I said, “Kerouac has written all your other chapters. I’ve already written your last one.”

  “go ahead,” he said, “write it.”

  end copy.

  ________

  the summers are longer where the suicides hang and the flies eat mudpie. he’s a famous street poet of the ’50’s and still alive. I throw my bottle into the canal, it’s Venice, and Jack is holing up at the place for a week or so, giving a reading somewhere in a few days. the canal looks strange, very strange.

  “hardly deep enough for self-destruction.”

  “yeah,” he says in the Bronx movie voice, “you’re right.”

  he’s gray at 37. hook-nose. slumped. energetic. pissed. male. very male. a little Jewish smile. maybe he’s not Jewish. I don’t ask him.

  he’s known them all. pissed on Barney Rosset’s shoe at a party because he didn’t like something Barney said. Jack knows Ginsberg, Creeley, Lamantia, on and on, and now he knew Bukowski.

  “yeah, Bukowski came to Venice to see me. scars all over his face. shoulders slumped. very tired-looking man. doesn’t say much and when he does it’s kind of dull, kind of commonplace. you’d never think he’d written all those books of poems. but he’s been in the post office too long. he’s slipped. they’ve eaten his spirit out. damn shame, but you know how it works. but he’s still boss, real boss, you know.”

  Jack knows the inside, and it’s funny but real to know that people aren’t much, it’s all a motherfucking jive, and you’ve known it but it’s funny to hear it said while sitting by a Venice canal trying to cure an extra-size hangover.

  he goes through a book. photographs of poets mostly. I am not in there. I began late and lived too long alone in small rooms drinking wine. they always figure that a hermit is insane, and they may be right.

  he goes through the book. jesus christ, it’s a catsass sitting there with that hangover and the water down there, and here is Jack going through the book, I see spots of sunlight, noses, ears, the sheen of the photographic pages. I don’t care, but I guess we need something to talk about and I don’t talk well and he is doing the work, so here we go, Venice canal, the whole chickenshit sadness of living it out —

  “this guy went nuts about 2 years ago.”

  “this guy wanted me to suck his dick in order to get my book published.”

  “did you?”

  “did I? I belted him out! wit’ dis!”

  he shows me the Bronx fist.

  I laugh. he’s comfortable and he’s human. every man is afraid of being a queer. I get a little tired of it. maybe we should all become queers and relax. not belting Jack. he’s good for a change. there are too many people afraid to speak against queers — intellectually. just as there are too many people afraid to speak against the left wing — intellectually. I don’t care which way it goes — I only know: there are too many people afraid.

  so Jack’s good meat. I’ve seen too many intellectuals lately. I get very tired of the precious intellects who must speak diamonds every time they open their mouths. I get tired of battling for each space of air for the mind. that’s why I stayed away from people for so long, and now that I am meeting people, I find that I must return to my cave. there are other things beside the mind: there are insects and palm trees and pepper shakers, and I’ll have a pepper-shaker in my cave, so laugh.

  the people will always betray you.

  never trust the people.

  “the whole poetry game is run by the fags and the left-wing,” he tells me, staring into the canal.

  there is a kind of truth here that it is bitter and false to dispute and I don’t know what to do with it. I am certainly aware that there is something wrong with the poetry game — the books of the famous are so very dull, including Shakespeare. was it the same then?

  I decide to throw Jack some shit.

  “remember the old poetry mag? I don’t know if it was Monroe or Shapiro or what, now it’s gotten so bad I don’t read it anymore, but I remember a statement by Whitman:

  “ ‘to have great poets we need great audiences.’ well, I always figure a Whitman a greater poet than I, if that matters, only this time I think he got the thing backwards. it should read:

  “ ‘to have great audiences we need great poets.’ ”

  “yeah, so, all right,” Jack said, “I met Creeley at a party this time and I asked him if he ever read Bukowski and he got frozen real solid, wouldn’t answer me, man, like you know what I mean.”

  “let’s get the fuck outa here,” I say.

  we go out toward my car. I’ve got a car, somehow. a lemon, of course. Jack’s got the book with him. he’s still turning pages.

  “this guy sucks dick.”

  “oh yeah?”

  “this guy married a schoolteacher who belts his ass with a whip. horrible woman. he ain’t writ a word since his marriage. she’s got his soul in her cunt-strap.”

  “you talking about Gregory or Kero?”

  “no, this is an
other one!”

  “holy Jesus!”

  we keep walking toward my car. I feel rather dull but I can FEEL this man’s energy, ENERGY, and I realize that it might be possible that I am walking next to one of the few immortal and unschooled poets of our time. and then, that doesn’t matter either, after I think about it a moment.

  I get on in. the lemon starts but the gearshift is fucked-up again. I’ve got to drive in low all the way and the bitch stalls at every signal, battery down, I pray, one more start, no cops, no more drunk-driving raps, no more christs of any kinds on anybody’s kind of Cross, we can choose between Nixon and Humphrey and Christ and be fucked anyway we turn, and I turn left, brake up at the address and we get out.

  Jack’s still at the pages.

  “this guy’s o.k. he killed himself, his father, his mother, wife, but didn’t shoot his three children or the dog. one of the best poets since Baudelaire.”

  “yeah?”

  “yeah, shit.”

  we get out of the lemon as I make the sign of the Cross for one more start on the mother battery.

  we walk up and Jack bangs a door.

  “BIRD! BIRD! this is Jack!”

  the door opens and there is the Bird. I look twice. I can’t see whether it is a woman or a man. the face is the distilled essence opium of untouched beauty. it’s a man. the motions are man. I know it but I also know that he can catch hell and ultimate brutality every time he hits the streets. they will kill him because he has not died at all. I have died nine-tenths but keep the other one-tenth like a gun. I can walk down the street and they can’t tell me from the news vendor, even tho the news vendors have more beautiful faces than any president of the united states, but then, that’s no task either.

  “Bird, I need 20,” says Jack.

  Bird peels off a g.d. twenty. his movement is smooth, without worry.

  “thanks, baby.”

  “sure, can you come on in?”

  “all right.”

  we move in. sit down, there’s the bookcase. I lay my eyes across it. there doesn’t seem to be a dull book in there. I catch all the books I’ve admired in there. what the hell? is it a dream? the kid’s face is so beautiful that everytime I look I feel good, like you know, chili and beans, hot, after coming off a bad one, the first food in weeks, well, fuck, I am always on guard.

  the Bird. and the ocean down there. and bad battery. a lemon. the cops patrolling their stupid dry streets. what a bad war it is. and what an idiot nightmare, only this momentary cool space between us, we are all going to be smashed, very quickly into broken children’s toys, into those highheels that ran so gaily down the stairway to be fucked out of it forever, forever, dunces and fools, dunces and tools, god damn our weak bravery.

  we sit down. a quart of scotch appears. I pour a quarter of a pint down without pause, ah, I gag, blink, idiot, working toward 50, still trying to play Hero. asshole hero in a fusillade of puke.

  the Bird’s wife comes in. we are introduced. she is a liquid woman in a brown dress, she just flows flows her eyes laughing, she flows, I tell you, she flows,

  “WOW WOW WOW!” I say.

  she looks so good I’ve got to pick her up, hug her, I carry her on my left hip, spin her, laugh. nobody thinks that I am crazy. we all laugh. we all understand. I put her down. we sit down.

  Jack likes me coming on. he’s been carrying my soul and he’s tired. he grins the grin. he’s o.k. once in a rare lifetime have you ever been in a roomful of people who only helped you when you looked at them, listened to them. this was one of those magic times. I knew it. I glowed like a fucking hot tamale. it didn’t matter. o.k.

  I smacked down another quarter pint out of embarrassment. I realized that I was the weaker of 4 people and I did not want to harm, I only wanted to realize their easy holiness. I loved like a crazy jackoff dog turned into a pen of heated female bitches, only they had miracles to show me beyond sperm.

  the Bird looked at me.

  “see my collage?”

  he held up a very shitty-looking thing with a woman’s earring and some other dab of shit hanging upon it.

  (by the way … I realize I switch from present to past tense, and if you don’t like it … ram a nipple up your scrotum. — printer: leave this in.)

  I go into a long boring hartang harrangue about how I don’t like this or that, and about my sufferance in Art Classes …

  the Bird pulls the stop out of me.

  by yanking the thing apart it’s only a popneedle and then he grins at me, but then I too know the inside: that perhaps, as I am told, from inside, the only junky who can make it is Wm. Burroughs, who owns the Burroughs Co., almost, and who can play it tough while all along being a sissy fat wart-sucking hog inside. this is what I hear, and it’s kept very quiet. is it true? for it all, true or not, Burroughs is a very dull writer and without the insistence of knowledgeable pop in his literary background, he would be almost nothing, as Faulkner is nothing except to very dry Southern extremists like Mr. Corrington, and Mr. Nod, and Mr. Suck-Dry-Shit.

  “Baby,” they start saying to me, “you are drunk.”

  and I am. and I am. and I am.

  there’s nothing now but be turned into the heat or sleep.

  they make a place for me.

  I drink too fast. they talk on. I hear them, gently.

  I sleep. I sleep in comradeship. the sea will not drown me and neither will they. they love my sleeping body. I am an asshole. they love my sleeping body. may all God’s children come to this.

  jesus jesus jesus

  who cares about a dead

  battery?

  ________

  jesus, mother, it was terrible — here they came pounding out of the vast cuntholes in the earth spinning me about with my paper suitcase up near Times Square.

  I finally managed to ask one of them where the Village was and when I got to the Village I found a room and when I opened my wine bottle and took off my shoes I found that the room had an easel, but I wasn’t a painter, just a kid looking for luck, and I sat behind the easel and drank my wine and looked out the dirty window.

  when I went out to get another bottle of wine I saw this young guy standing in a silk bathrobe. he wore a beret and sandals, had a half-diseased beard and spoke into the hall phone:

  “oh, yes yes, darling, I must see you, oh yes, I must! I shall slash my wrists otherwise … ! yes!”

  I’ve got to get out of here, I thought. he wouldn’t slash his shoelaces. what a sickening little snip. and outside, they sat in the cafes, very comfortable, in berets, in the get-up, pretending to be Artists.

  I stayed there a week drinking, finishing out the rent, and then I found a room outside the Village. for the looks and size of the room it was very cheap and I couldn’t understand why. I found a bar around the corner and sipped at beers all day. my money was going but, as usual, I hated to look for a job. each drunken and starvation moment contained some type of easy meaning for me. that night I bought two bottles of port wine and went up to my room. I took off my clothes, got into bed in the dark, found a glass and poured the first wine. then I found why the room was so cheap. the “L” ran right past my window. and that’s where the stop was. right outside my window. the whole room would be lit by the train. and I’d look at a whole trainload of faces. horrible faces: whores, orangutans, bastards, madmen, killers — all my masters. then, swiftly the train would start up and the room would be dark again — until the next trainload of faces, which was always too soon. I needed the wine.

  a Jewish couple owned the building and also ran a tailor and cleaning shop across the street. I decided that my few rags needed cleaning. job-hunting time was belching and farting across my mad horizon. I went in drunk with my rags.

  “… need these cleaned or washed or something …”

  “poor boy! why you are living in THREADS! I couldn’t wash the windows with this stuff. tell you what … oh, Sam!”

  “yeh?”

  “show this nice boy that su
it the man left!”

  “oh yes, it’s such a nice suit, mama! I don’t understand how that man left it!”

  I won’t go through all the dialogue. mainly I insisted that the suit was too small. they said it wasn’t. I said if it wasn’t too small it was too high. they said seven. I said, broke. they said six. I said, I’m broke. when they got down to four I insisted that they get me inside the suit. they did. I gave them the four. went back to my room, took the suit off and slept. when I awakened it was dark (except when the “L” came by) and I decided to put on my new suit and go out and find a woman, a beautiful one, of course, to support a man of my still-hidden talents.

  as I got into the pants the entire crotch split up the back. well, I was game. it was a little cool but I figured the coat would cover. when I got into the coat the left arm ripped out at the shoulder spilling out a sickening gummy padding.

  taken again.

  I got out of what remained of the suit and decided that I’d have to move again.

  I found another place. a rather cellar-like structure, down the steps and in between the tenants’ garbage cans. I was finding my level.

  the first night out after the bars closed I found I had lost my key. I only had on a thin white Calif. shirt. I rode a bus back and forth to keep from freezing. finally the driver said it was the end of the line or the ride was over. I was too drunk to remember.

  when I got out it was still freezing and I was standing outside of Yankee Stadium.

  oh Lord, I thought, here is where my childhood hero Lou Gehrig used to play and now I am going to die out here. well, it’s fitting.

  I walked about a bit, then found a cafe. I walked in. the waitresses were all middle-aged negresses but the coffee cups were large and the doughnut and coffee hardly cost anything.

  I took my stuff over to a table, sat down, ate the doughnut very quickly, sipped at the coffee, then took out a king-sized cigarette and lit it.

  I started hearing voices:

  “PRAISE THE LORD, BROTHER!”

  “OH, PRAISE THE LORD, BROTHER!”