Tales of Ordinary Madness

by Charles Bukowski

  the pest is anywhere you work, anywhere that you are employed. I am pest-meat. I once worked in a place where this man hadn’t spoken to anybody for 15 years. on my second day there he spoke to me for 35 minutes. he was completely insane. one sentence would be on one subject, the other on another entirely unrelated. which is all right except the stuff was mottled dead humorless rankeled stink. they kept him because he was a good worker. “a good day’s work for a good day’s pay.” there is at least one madman on every job, a pest, and they always find me. “every nut in the joint likes you,” is a sentence that I have heard on job after job. it is not encouraging.

  but perhaps it will help if we all realize that perhaps all of us have been pests at one time or another to somebody but we never knew it. shit, it’s a horrible thought but most probably true and maybe it will help us bear up under the pest. basically, there is no 100 percent man. we are all run through with various madnesses and uglinesses that we ourselves are not aware of but that everybody else is aware of. how ya gonna keep us down on the farm?

  yet, still you must admire the man who takes action against the pest. the pest shrivels against direct action and soon attaches himself elsewhere. I know a man, a kind of intellectual-poet type, a lively life-filled sort who has a large sign attached to his front door. I do not remember it directly but it goes something like this (and done in a beautifully-printed hand):

  to whom it may concern: please phone me for appointments when you want to see me. I will not answer unsolicited knocks upon the door. I need time to do my work. I will not allow you to murder my work. please understand that what keeps me alive will make me a better person toward and for you when we finally meet under easy and unstrained conditions.

  I admired this sign. I did not take it as a snobbery or an overevaluation of self. he was a good man in good sense and had enough humor and courage to state his natural rights. I first came upon the sign by accident, and after staring at it and hearing him in there I walked to my car and drove away. the beginning of understanding is the beginning of everything and it’s time some of us began. for instance, I have nothing against Love-ins so long as I AM NOT FORCED TO ATTEND. I am not even against love, but we were speaking of pests, weren’t we?

  even I, prime pest-meat that I am, even I once made a move against a pest. I was, at the time, working 12 hours a night, god forgive me and god forgive god, but anyhow this very pesty pest could not resist phoning me every morning about 9 a.m. I got in about 7:30 and after a couple of beers I usually managed to go to sleep. he had it timed just right. and he gave me the same old stupid drab drivel. just knowing that he had awakened me and heard my voice charged him up. he coughed and mewed and hacked and sputtered. “listen,” I finally said, “why in the hell do you keep waking me up at 9 a.m.? you know I work all night. 12 hours a night! why in the hell do you keep right on awakening me at 9 a.m.?”

  “I thought,” he said, “you might be going to the track. I wanted to get you before you went to the track.”

  “listen,” I said, “first post is onefortyfive p.m. and how in the hell do you think I am going to play the horses when I work 12 hours a night? how in the hell do you think I can work all that in? I have to sleep, shit, bathe, eat, fuck, buy new shoelaces, all that stuff, don’t you have any sense of reality? don’t you realize that when I come in from the job that they’ve taken every damn thing out of me? don’t you realize that there’s nothing left? I can’t make the racetrack. I’m too weak to even scratch my ass. why the hell do you keep phoning at 9 a.m. every morning?”

  as they say, his voice was husky with emotion – “I want to get you before you go to the racetrack.”

  it was useless. I hung the phone up. then I got a large cardboard carton. then I took the phone and stuck it into the bottom of the large cardboard carton. then I stuffed the damn thing solidly with rags. I did it every morning when I arrived and I took the thing out when I awakened. the pest was dead. he came to see me one day.

  “how come you don’t answer your phone anymore?” he asked.

  “I stuff the phone in a box of rags when I come home.”

  “but don’t you realize that when you stuff that phone into a box of rags that, symbolically, you are stuffing me into a box of rags?”

  I looked at him and said very slowly and quietly, “that’s right.”

  it was never ever quite the same with us again. I heard from a friend of mine, an older man than I, very alive but not an artist (thank god) and he told me: “McClintock phones me 3 times a day. does he still phone you?”

  “not any more.”

  the McClintocks are the joke of the town but the McClintocks never realize that they are the McClintocks. you can always tell a McClintock. each McClintock carries a little black book filled with phone numbers. and if you have a telephone, look out. the pest will strongarm your phone, first assuring you that all the calls are local (they aren’t) and then he will begin (she will begin) unloading their never-ending poison spiel into the ear of the disgusted listener, these McClintock-pest types can talk for hours, and although you try not to listen, listening can’t be helped and you feel a kind of humorous sympathy for the poor person at the other agony-end of the wire.

  perhaps some day the world will be constructed, reconstructed, that the pest through the generosity of decent living and clear ways will no longer be the pest. there is the theory that the pest is created by things that should not be there. bad government, bad air, fucked-up sex, a mother with a wooden arm, a father who used to goose himself with brillo pads, so forth. whether the Utopian society will ever arrive we will never know. but right now we still have these screwed-up areas of humanity to deal with – the starvation hordes, the black the white and the red, the sleeping Bombs, the love-ins, the hippies, the not-so hippies, Johnson, roaches in Albequerque, bad beer, the clap, chickenshit editorials, this this that that, and the Pest. the pest is still here. I live today not tomorrow. my Utopia means less pests NOW. and I’d sure like to hear your story. I am sure that each of us bears one or 2 McClintocks. you could probably make me laugh with your stories about the McClintockpest. god, which reminds me!!!!! I’VE NEVER HEARD A McCLINTOCK LAUGH!!!

  think of that.

  think of any pest you have ever known and ask yourself have they ever laughed? have you ever heard them laugh?

  jesus, come to think of it, I don’t laugh much myself. I can’t laugh except when I am by myself. I wonder if I have been writing about myself? a pest pestered by pests. think of that. a whole pest colony twisting and sinking fang and 69-ing. 69-ing?? let’s light a Chesterfield and forget the whole thing. see you in the morning. stuffed in a box of rags and petting cobra tits.

  hello. I didn’t wake you up, did I?

  umm, I didn’t think so.

  A BAD TRIP

  did you ever consider that lsd and color tv arrived for our consumption about the same time? here comes all this explorative color pounding, and what do we do? we outlaw one and fuck up the other. t.v., of course, is useless in present hands; there’s not much of a hell of an argument here. and I read where in a recent raid it was alleged that an agent caught a container of acid in the face, hurled by alleged manufacturer of a hallucinogenic drug. this is also a kind of a waste. there are some basic grounds for outlawing lsd, dmt, stp – it can take a man permanently out of his mind – but so can picking beets, or turning bolts for GM, or washing dishes or teaching English I at one of the local universities. if we outlawed everything that drove men mad, the whole social structure would drop out – marriage, the war, bus service, slaughterhouses, beekeeping, surgery, anything you can name. anything can drive men mad because society is built on false stilts. until we knock the whole bottom out and rebuild, the madhouses will remain overlooked. and cuts in madhouse budgets by our good governor are taken by me to indirectly imply that those driven mad by society are not fit to be supported and cured by society, especially in an inflationary and tax-mad age. such money could be better used to build roa
ds or to be sprinkled ever-so-lightly upon the Negro to keep him from burning down our cities. and I have a splendid thought: why not assassinate the insane? think of the money we could save. even a madman eats too much and needs a place to sleep, and the bastards are disgusting – the way they scream and smear their shit on the walls, all that. all we’d need is a small medical board to make the decisions and a couple of good-looking nurses (male or female) to keep the psychiatrists’ extracurricular sexual activities satisfied.

  so let’s get back, more or less, to lsd. as it is true that the less you get the more you chance – say beet-picking – it is also true that the more you get the more you chance. any explorative complexity – painting, writing poetry, robbing banks, being a dictator and so forth, takes you to that place where danger and miracle are rather like Siamese twins. you seldom go wire to wire, but while you’re going the living is fairly interesting. it’s good enough to sleep with another man’s wife but someday you know you are going to be caught with your pants down. this only makes the act more pleasurable. our sins are manufactured in heaven to create our own hell, which we evidently need. get good enough at anything and you will create your own enemies. champions get the razzberry; the crowd aches to see them get knocked off in order to bring them down to their own bowl of shit. not many damn fools get assassinated; a winner can be brought down by a mail-order rifle (so the fable says) or by his own shotgun in a small town like Ketchum. or like Adolph and his whore as Berlin split its sides in the last page of their history. lsd can flake you too because it is not an arena for loyal shipping clerks. granted, bad acid like bad whores can take you out. bathtub gin, bootleg liquor had its day too. the law creates its own disease in poisonous black markets. but, basically, most bad trips are caused by the individual being trained and poisoned beforehand by society itself. if a man is worried about rent, car payments, time-clocks, a college education for his child, a 12-dollar dinner for his girlfriend, the opinion of his neighbor, standing up for the flag or what is going to happen to Brenda Starr, an lsd tablet will most probably drive him mad because, in a sense, he is already insane and only borne along on social tides by the outward bars and dull hammers that render him insensible to any individualistic thinking. a trip calls for a man who has not yet been caged, who has not yet been fucked by the big Fear that makes all society go. unfortunately, most men overestimate their worthiness as basic and free individuals, and it is the mistake of the hippie generation not to trust anybody over 30. 30 doesn’t mean a damn thing. most beings are captured and trained, totally, by the age of 7 or 8. many of the young LOOK free but this is only a chemical thing of body and energy and not a realistic thing of spirit. I have met free men in the strangest of places and at ALL ages – as janitors, car thieves, car washers, and some free women too – mostly as nurses or waitresses, and at ALL ages. the free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.

  an lsd trip will show you things which no rules cover. it will show you things not in textbooks and things which you cannot protest to your city councilman about. grass only makes the present society more bearable; lsd is another society within itself. if you are socially orientated, you can probably mark lsd off as a “hallucinogenic drug,” which is an easy way of getting off and forgetting the whole thing. but hallucination, the definition of it, depends upon which pole you are operating from. whatever is happening to you at the time it is happening does become the reality – it can be a movie, a dream, sexual intercourse, murder, being murdered or eating ice cream. only lies are imposed later; what happens, happens. hallucination is only a dictionary word and a social stilt. when a man is dying to him it is very real; to others, it is only bad luck or something to be disposed of. Forest Lawn takes care of everything. when the world begins to admit that ALL the parts fit the whole, then we may begin to have a chance. whatever a man sees is real. it was not brought there by an outside force, it was there before he was born. don’t blame him because he sees it now, and don’t blame him for going mad because the educational and spiritual forces of society were not wise enough to tell him that exploration never ends, and that we must all be little shits boxed in with our a, b, c’s and nothing else. it is not lsd that causes the bad trip – it was your mother, your President, the little girl next door, the icecream man with dirty hands, a course in algebra or Spanish superimposed, it was the stench of a crapper in 1926, it was a man with a nose too long when you were told long noses were ugly; it was laxative, it was the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, it was tootsie rolls and Toots and Casper, it was the face of FDR, it was lemon drops, it was working in a factory for ten years and getting fired because you were five minutes late, it was that old bag who taught you American history in the 6th grade, it was your dog run over and nobody to properly draw you the map afterwards, it was a list 30 pages long and 3 miles tall.

  a bad trip? this whole country, this whole world is on a bad trip, friend. but they’ll arrest you for swallowing a tablet.

  I’m still on the beer because basically, at 47, they’ve got a lot of hooks in me. I’d be a real damn fool to think that I’ve escaped all their nets. I think Jeffers said it pretty well when he said, more or less, look out for the traps, friend, there are plenty of them, they say even God got trapped when He once walked on Earth. of course, now some of us are not so sure it was god, but whoever he was, he had some fairly good tricks but it seemed he talked too much. anybody can talk too much. even Leary. or me.

  it’s a cold Saturday now and the sun’s going down. what do you do with an evening? if I were Liza I’d comb my hair but I’m not Liza. well, I’ve got this old National Geographic and the pages shine like something’s really happening. of course, it’s not. all around in this building they are drunk. a whole honeycove of drunks for the end. the ladies walk by my window. I emit, I hiss a rather tired and gentle word like “shit,” then tear this page from the machine. it’s yours.

  ANIMAL CRACKERS IN MY SOUP

  I had come off a long drinking bout during which time I had lost my petty job, my room, and (perhaps) my mind. After sleeping the night in an alley I vomited in the sunlight, waited five minutes, then finished the remainder of the wine bottle that I found in my coat pocket. I began walking through the city, quite without purpose. When I was walking I felt as if I had some portion of the meaning of things. Of course, it was untrue. But standing in an alley hardly helped either.

  I walked for some time, scarcely aware. I was vaguely considering the fascination of starving to death. I only wanted a place to lie down and wait. I didn’t feel any rancor against society because I didn’t belong in it. I had long ago adjusted to that fact.

  Soon I was on the edge of town. The houses were spaced farther apart. There were fields and small farms. I was more sick than hungry. It was hot and I took off my coat and carried it over my arm. I began to get thirsty. There wasn’t a sign of water anywhere. My face was bloodied from falling the night before, my hair was uncombed. Dying of thirst wasn’t my idea of an easy death; I decided to ask for a glass of water. I passed the first house, which somehow looked unfriendly to me, and walked farther down the road to a very large, three-story, green house, hung about with vines and shrubbery and many trees. As I walked up on the front porch, I heard strange noises inside, and there seemed to be the smell of raw meat and urine and excreta. However, I felt a friendliness about the house; I rang the bell.

  A woman of about thirty came to the door. She had long hair, a brownish red, quite long, and these brown eyes looked out at me. She was a handsome woman, dressed in tight blue jeans, boots, a pale pink shirt. Her face and eyes showed neither fear nor apprehension.

  “Yes?” she said, almost smiling.

  “I’m thirsty,” I said. “Could I have a glass of water?”

  “Come in,” she said, and I followed her into the front room. “Sit down.”

  I sat down, lightly, upon an old chair. She went into the kitchen for the water.
As I sat there, I heard something running down the hall toward the front room. It circled about the room in front of me, then stopped and looked at me. It was an orangutan. The thing leaped up and down in glee when it saw me. Then it ran toward me and leaped upon my lap. It put its face against mine. Its eyes looked into mine a moment, then its head pulled away. It grabbed my coat, leaped to the floor and ran down the hall with my coat, making strange sounds.

  She came back with my glass of water, handed it to me.

  “I’m Carol,” she said.

  “I’m Gordon,” I said, “but then it hardly matters.”

  “Why doesn’t it matter?”

  “Well, I’m through. It’s over. You know.”

  “What was it? Alcohol?” she asked.

  “Alcohol,” I said, then waved beyond the walls, “and them.”

  “I have trouble with ‘them’ too. I’m quite alone.”

  “You mean you live in this big house all alone?”

  “Well, hardly.” She laughed.

  “Oh yeah, that big monkey stole my coat.”

  “Oh, that’s Bilbo. He’s cute. He’s crazy.”

  “I’ll need that coat for tonight. It gets cold.”