Tales of Ordinary Madness

by Charles Bukowski

  he and Tina went into the breakfastnook and he took out the cake, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TINA, and found the 4 candleholders and he worked the damned 4 candles into the holders and stuck them into the cake and then he heard the water running ...

  she was taking a bath.

  “listen, don’t you want to watch Tina blow out her candles? shit you came all the way from New Mexico. if you don’t want to watch, tell us, and we’ll go ahead.”

  “all right, I’ll be out ...”

  “fine ...”

  here she came. and he lit the damned candles, four. fire. on the cake.

  “Happy Birthday to you

  Happy Birthday to you

  Happy Birthday, dear, Tina ...”

  so on. and corny. but her face, Tina’s, was like 10,000 films of happiness. he never saw anything like it. he had to put a steel bar around his belly and his lungs and his eyes to keep from crying.

  “o.k., kid, blow ‘em out. can you do it?”

  Tina leaned forward and got the first 3, but the green candle held and he started to laugh. it was funny, it was really funny to him: “shit, you can’t get the GREEN one! how come you can’t get the GREEN one?”

  she kept at it. then she got it. and they both laughed. he cut the cake and then they had the icecream with it. corny. but he liked her happiness. then mama got up.

  “I have to take my bath.”

  “o.k.” ....

  she came out.

  “the toilet’s clogged.”

  he went on in. the toilet never clogged until she arrived. she threw in masses of grey hair, various cunt contrivances and bogs and clogs of toilet paper. he used to think that he imagined it all, but the moment of her arrival and the clogging of the toilet and the arrival of the ants and all manner of dark-death thoughts and gloom came with her – this very good person who hated war and hated hate and was for love.

  he wanted to dig his hand in there and pull all that contrivance out but all she said was, “get me a saucepan!”

  and Tina said, “what’s a saucepan?”

  and he said, “that’s a word people like to say when they can’t think of anything else to say. there is really and never has been anything like a saucepan.”

  “what’ll we do?” asked Tina.

  “I’ll give her a pot,” he said.

  they brought her a pot and she fucked around the toilet bowl but nothing happened to all that terrible rubbery and heroic shit she had dumped into there. it just gurgled and farted back, like she was always farting.

  “let me get the landlord,” he said.

  “BUT I WANT TO TAKE MY BATH!” she screamed.

  “all right,” he said, “you take your bath. we’ll let the shitpot wait.”

  she went on in. and then she turned on the shower. she must have stood under that shower for 2 hours. something about the tinkling of that water upon her brain made her feel good and secure. he had to take Tina in once to peepee. she didn’t even know they were there. her face and soul were turned to the heavens: anti-war, poetic, the mother, the sufferer. the non-eater of grapes, purer than distilled shit, his water and power bill mounting and dancing upon her mighty soul. But perhaps these were Communist Party tactics – to drive everybody crazy?

  he finally joked her out of there and got the landlord. it was all right for her poetic soul to languish – Walter Lowenfels could have her – but he had to take a shit.

  the landlord was o.k. with a few blips and blops of his famous red plunger the mind was cleared to the sea. the landlord left and he sat down and let go.

  she was completely goofy when he came out so he suggested that she spend the rest of the day and night at the nearest bookstore or whorehouse or whatever it was and that he’d play around with Tina.

  “fine. I’ll be back with mother around noon tomorrow.”

  he and Tina packed her into the car and they drove her to the bookstore. immediately upon letting her out of the door, the hate on her face left, the hatred upon her face left, and walking toward the doorway, she was once again for PEACE, LOVE, POETRY, all things good.

  he asked Tina to get in the front seat with him. she took one of his hands and he steered with the other.

  “I said ‘goodbye’ to Mama. I love Mama.”

  “sure you do. and I’m sure Mama loves you too.”

  so there he drove, with her and him, both very serious, she 4, he a bit older, waiting on red lights, sitting next to each other. that’s all there was.

  it was plenty.

  NOTES OF A POTENTIAL SUICIDE

  I sit by the window as the garbage men drive up. they empty the garbage cans. I listen for mine. there it is: CRASK TINKLE CRASH BLUNK BLASH! one of the gentlemen looks at the other:

  “man, they got one powerful drinker in there!”

  I lift my bottle and wait for further developments in space flight.

  ***

  somebody puts a book by Norman Mailer on me. it is called Christians and Cannibals. God, he just writes on and on. there’s no force, no humor. I don’t understand it. just a pushing out of the word, any word, anything. is this what happens to the famous? think how lucky we are!

  ***

  2 come by. a Jew and a German. “where we going?” I ask. they don’t answer. the German is driving. he breaks all laws of driving. he has the gas down to the floor. we are in the hills then and he’s skimming along the edge of the road – there a 2 thousand foot drop.

  it is not nice, I think, to die by another man’s hand.

  we make it to the observatory. how dull. they both seem happy with it. the Jew likes zoos but it is night and the zoo is closed. there are some people who must always go somewhere.

  “let’s go to a movie!”

  “let’s go boating!”

  “let’s get laid!”

  “screw all that stuff,” I always say, “just let me sit here.”

  so people no longer ask. they just get me in a car and then I can be surprised with whatever special dullness awaits.

  so the German runs up to the building. there are notches between the blocks that run up the front of the building. the German starts climbing up the notches. then he’s halfway up the building, hanging over the doorway. god, how dull, I think. I wait for him to either fall down or climb down.

  a teacher comes by. he is with highschool students. they are all lined-up as they walk through the doorway. the teacher looks up and sees the German.

  “is that one of mine?” he asks.

  “no, that one’s mine,” I tell him.

  they march in. the German climbs down. we walk into the building. it is the same as it was 30 years ago. the big swinging ball that hangs from a wire in the pit. everybody looks at the ball swinging.

  god, I think, how dull.

  then I follow the German and the Jew and they walk around and push buttons. things jiggle and move a bit. or there is an electric spark. ½ of the stuff is broken and pushing the buttons is futile. the German gets lost from us. I walk around with the Jew. he finds a machine that records tremors.

  “Hey, Hank!” he hollers.

  “yeh.”

  “come here! now look when I count 3, both of us will leap up into the air.”

  “all right.”

  he weighs 200, I weigh 225.

  “one, two, three!”

  we leap and land. the machine scribbles some lines.

  “one, two, three!”

  we leap.

  “now once more! one –”

  “to hell with it,” I say, “let’s go catch a drink!”

  I walk away.

  the German walks up. “let’s get out of here,” he suggests.

  “sure,” I say.

  “some bitch repulsed me,” the German says, “it’s disgusting.”

  “don’t worry,” I say, “she probably has shitstains in her panties.”

  “but I like them that way.”

  “you like to sniff it?”

  “of course.”

 
“sorry, then, it’s a bad evening for you.”

  the Jew runs up. “let’s go to Schwab’s drugstore!” he hollers.

  “o, for Christ’s sake,” I say.

  we get back into the car and once again the German has got to show us how close he can carry us to death. then we are out of the hills.

  all the people in Los Angeles are doing it: running ass-wild after something that is not there. it is basically a fear of facing one’s self, it is basically a fear of being alone. my fear is of the crowd, the ass-wild running crowd; the people who read Norman Mailer and go to baseball games and cut and water their lawns and bend over the garden with a trowel.

  the German drives toward Schwab’s. he wants to sniff.

  ***

  there is a symphony orchestra back east. the conductor makes it by playing what I might call the Beginner’s Melodies. these extracts from music are what please almost any beginner in the classical music field. but if a man has any sensibilities at all he can’t listen to these beginning pieces more than 4 or 5 times without becoming just a bit ill. but this particular orchestra lards it on week after week, and the audience is a middle-aged audience, and where they come from and what has retarded them, I have no idea. but after hearing these simplistic and basic and somewhat sugary pieces, they really believe they have heard something new and great and profound, and they leap from their seats and scream “BRAVO! BRAVO!” just like they’ve heard it’s done. the conductor comes out and takes bow after bow and then asks the orchestra to stand. my only thought is, does this conductor know he is conning them or is he also retarded?

  some of the pieces I would have to put in the grammar school of music and which this conductor likes to play are, Offenbach’s La Vie Parisienne, Ravel’s Bolero, Rossini’s overture, La Gazza ladra, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite (may the devil save us!): Bizet’s Carmen or portions thereof; Copland’s El Salon Mexico, de Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat Dance, Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (may the devil save us twice over!); and there are many others which do not come to me at the moment ...

  but let this particular crowd come into contact with this basic sugar, they go harmlessly apeshit.

  and driving home, you get a scene something like this. the old man about 52, owner of 3 furniture stores, feeling intelligent:

  “by god, you’ve got to hand it to – – – –, there’s a man who really knows his music! he can really make you feel it!”

  wife:

  “yes, I always feel so uplifted! by the way, should we eat at home or out!”

  ***

  of course, there’s no accounting for taste, or lack of it. one man’s pussy is another man’s handjob. I can’t understand the popularity of Faulkner, baseball games, Bob Hope, Henry Miller, Shakespeare, Ibsen, the plays of Chekhov. G. B. Shaw makes me yawn all over. Tolstoy also. War and Peace is the biggest flop for me since Gogol’s Overcoat. Mailer I have spoken of. Bob Dylan affects me as overacting while Donovan appears to have real style. I just don’t understand. Boxing, professional football, basketball seem to move with force. the early Hemingway was good. Dos was a rough boy. Sherwood Anderson all the way. the early Saroyan. tennis and opera, you take it. new cars, to hell with them. stocking panties, ugg. rings, watches, ugg. very early Gorky. D. H. Lawrence, o.k. Celine, without a doubt. scrambled eggs, shit. Artaud when he gets hot. Ginsberg, sometimes. wrestling – what??? Jeffers, of course. on and on, you know. who’s right? I am, of course. why, yes, of course.

  ***

  when I was a boy I went to something that was called an Air Show. they had stunt fliers, air races, parachute jumps. one stunt flier, I recall, was very good. they’d put a hanky on a hook down close to the ground and he’d fly in very low in this old German fokker and pick up the hanky with a hook on one of his wings. then he’d do a barrel roll right down against the ground, almost. he had very good control of his plane. the air races were best – for kids, and maybe the others too – so many crashes. all the planes were built in different shapes, very strange-looking things. brightly colored. and they’d crash. crash after crash after crash. it was very exciting. my friend’s name was Frank. he is now a superior court judge.

  “hey, Hank!”

  “yeah, Frank?”

  “follow me.”

  we went under the stands.

  “you can look up the women’s dresses here,” he said.

  “yeah?”

  “yeah, look!”

  “geez!”

  the stands were built of boards and you could see right up through them.

  “hey, look at this one!”

  “oh, boy!”

  Frank went walking around.

  “pssst! over here!”

  I walked over. “yeah.”

  “look, look! you can see the pussy!”

  “where? where?”

  “look, look where I’m looking!”

  we stood there and looked at that thing. we looked at it a long time.

  then we walked out and watched the rest of the show.

  the parachute jumpers were at it. they were trying to see how close they could come to a circle drawn on the ground. they didn’t seem to come very close. then one guy jumped and his chute only opened part way. he had some wind in it so he wasn’t dropping as fast as a man would without a chute, and you could watch him. he seemed to be kicking, and working his hands and arms out against the strings, trying to untangle the parachute. but he wasn’t solving it.

  “can’t anybody help him?” I asked.

  Frank didn’t answer. he had a camera and was taking pictures. many of the people were taking pictures of the thing. some even had movie cameras.

  the man was nearing the ground, still trying to untangle the strings. then he hit. when he hit you could see him bounce up from the ground. the chute covered him. they canceled the rest of the jump. the Air Show was almost over.

  it had been quite something. those crashes, the jumper and the pussy.

  we rode our bicycles all the way home and talked about it.

  it looked as if life were going to be quite a thing.

  NOTES ON THE PEST

  Pest, n. (Fr. peste, from L. pestis, a plague, a pest (whence pestilent, pestiferous): same root as perdo, to destroy (PERDITION).) A plague, pestilence, or deadly epidemic disease; anything very noxious, mischievous, or destructive; a mischievous or destructive person.

  the pest, in a sense, is a very superior being to us: he knows where to find us and how – usually in the bath or in sexual intercourse or asleep. he is also very good at catching you in the crapper about halfway through a bowel-movement. if he is at the door you can scream, “Jesus, wait a minute, what the hell, wait a minute!” but the sound of the human voice in agony only encourages the pest – his beat, his ring becomes more excited. the pest usually beats and rings. you must let him in. and when he leaves – finally – you will be ill for a week. the pest not only pisses on your soul – he is also very good at leaving his yellow water on your toilet lid. he leaves hardly enough to see; you don’t know it is there until you sit down and it is too late.

  unlike you, the pest has hours of time to shoot through the head. and all his ideas are contrary to yours but he never knows this because he is continually talking and even when you get a chance to disagree, the pest does not hear. he really never hears your voice. it is just a vague area of break to him, then he continues his dialogue. and while the pest continues on you wonder how he ever got his dirty little snout into your soul. the pest is also very aware of your sleeping hours and he will phone you time after time while you are asleep and his first question will be, “did I awaken you?” or he will come upon your place and all the shades will be down but he will knock and ring anyhow, wildly, wildly in orgasm. if you do not answer he will shout out, “I know that you’re in there! I can see your car outside!”

  these destroyers, although they have no idea of your thought process, they do sense your dislike for them, yet in
another way this only encourages them. also they realize that you are a certain type of person – that is, given a choice of hurting or being hurt, you will accept the latter, pests thrive on the best slices of humanity; they know where the good meat is.

  the pest is always full of dry standard nonsense that he mistakes for self-wisdom. some of his favorite remarks are:

  “there is no such thing as ALL bad. you say that all cops are bad. well they’re not. I’ve met some good ones. there is such a thing as a good cop.”

  you never get a chance to explain to him that when a man puts that uniform on that he is the paid protector of things of the present time. he is here to see that things stay the way they are. if you like the way things are, then all cops are good cops. if you don’t like the way things are, then all cops are bad cops. there is such as thing as ALL bad. but the pest is soaked in these addled and homespun philosophies and he will not let them go. the pest, being unable to think, attaches himself to people – grimly and finally and forever.

  “we are not informed as to what is going on, we don’t have the real answers. we must trust our leaders.”

  this one is so damned silly that I am not even going to comment on it. in fact, thinking it over, I am not going to list any more of the pest’s comments for I am beginning to get ill.

  so then. well, this pest need not be a person who knows you by name or location. the pest is everywhere, always, ready to attach his poisoned stinking deathray onto you. I remember one particular time when I was lucky with the horses. I was down at Del Mar driving a new car. each night after the races I would select a new motel, and after a shower and change of clothing I would get into the car and drive along the coast looking for a good place to eat. by a good place to eat, I meant a place not too crowded that served good food. it seems like a contrary thing. I mean, if the food is good the people should be there. but like many seeming truths, this truth is not necessarily so. sometimes the crowd flocks to places that serve absolute garbage. so each night it was my pilgrimage to search out a place that served good food but that was not filled with the madding crowd. it took some time. one night I drove for an hour and thirty minutes before locating my spot. I parked the car and went in. I ordered a New York cut, french fries, so forth, and sat there over my coffee until the food arrived. the whole diner was empty; it was a marvelous night. then just with the arrival of my New York cut, the door opened and in came the pest. of course, you guessed it. there were 32 stools in the place but he HAD TO take the stool next to mine and begin conversing with the waitress over his doughnut. he was a real flat fish. his dialogue knifed into my guts. dull rotting tripe, the stench of his soul swinging through the air wrecking everything. and he gave me just enough elbow in the plate. the pest is very good with just enough elbow in the plate. I got the New York cut down and then went out and got so drunk that I missed the first three races the next day.