More Notes of a Dirty Old Man (20 page)

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Authors: Charles Bukowski,David Stephen Calonne

BOOK: More Notes of a Dirty Old Man
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“Sure.”
The wine was three-quarters full. Harry stood in the center of the room and took a good hit.
“Stand up!” he told Mrs. LeMon. “You got me hot. You got that ass and those legs. A woman your age doesn’t deserve to have that. You got me hot. STAND UP!” I said.
Harry put down the wine bottle and took off his belt. He folded it double and then lifted Mrs. LeMon’s dress. He lifted it above her waist, exposing the thighs, the panties, the garter belt, the white skin between the stockings and the panties.
Harry began to beat her alongside the legs, starting low around the ankles and working up, gradually increasing the tempo and the force, then he got to the upper thighs and thrashed, saying, “You whore, you goddamned whore . . .”
Mrs. LeMon tried to hold in her screams so her son, Gary, downstairs, wouldn’t hear her. Then he spun her and beat upon her ass viciously. She fell to the floor, weeping. Harry disrobed. He walked over, took a good hit of the wine, then walked up to Mrs. LeMon. She appeared to be shivering. Harry grabbed her by the hair and pulled her upward. She screamed as he did so, loudly.
“Goddamn you, shut up! If your son comes up here I’ll kill both of you!” He kissed Mrs. LeMon, spreading the lips of her mouth open. Her face was wet and she was convulsing. He worked her panties off and got it in, taking both hands and spreading the cheeks of her ass wide, extremely wide. He saw her ass in the mirror and himself bent over her like leprosy. They worked across the room knocking over the coffee table, banging into a wall. Her cunt was too large for him. Too many babies. He had to get her in front of the mirror and watch. He finally came. He threw her on the bed. She seemed to be convulsing. He saw a high-heeled shoe on her rug. He dressed, watching her. Fully dressed he opened his shirt a few buttons and dropped the high-heeled shoe in. Then he heard her voice: “You’re leaving, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I’m going to Detroit,
American
, flight 248.”
“I love you, Harry.”
“What? That wasn’t love. That was raw sex shit, dementia. I’m not proud of it.”
“I know I’ll never see you again. Kiss me goodbye, that’s all I ask.”
“God, this is grade-B movie.”
“Harry . . .”
“All right!”
He got into bed next to her with his shoes on. Her mouth opened. He closed on it. And held. She was crying, rushes of water coming out from under her eyelids. The high-heel shoe was between them in his shirt and the heel was stabbing into his chest. Harry pulled away. He got up and then noticed the nightstand on the other side of the bed. There was half a pack of cigarettes and a pack of matches. The matches said: “Save-on a GREAT place to shop! The quality drug stores . . .” He took out a cigarette and lit it.
Lighted
it, as the intellectual writers said. Then he noticed a book on the nightstand. He picked it up: Jong’s
Fear of Flying
. Mrs. LeMon seemed still at last. The wine bottle was on the floor on its side. He picked it up and found one last hit. Then he walked out the door and went down the stairway. Gary was down there. He looked bright but introvert, no challenge. “Is Mom all right?” he asked.
“She’s pleased,” Harry told the kid. The kid caught it. He liked the kid’s kool. One thing about the new generation, they either understood very much instinctively or they became murderers without feeling. There was very little middle ground, and maybe they were right because it was the middle ground, that vast jelly-like totality of billions and billions following all central signals, that had kept the world crawling over and over itself again and again, bored, fatted, starving, inane, feeding on nothing, giving nothing, being nothing.
Harry walked toward the door of the travel agency. He got his hand on the knob when Gary spoke:
“Mr. Benson?”
“Yes?”
“You forgot your tickets.”
“Oh?”
Harry walked back. The kid handed him the tickets enclosed in a neat blue leather folder. “Thanks for coming to see our agency. I hope you’ll use us again on your next flight.”
Harry took the tickets and walked back out the door. He walked back to his car. There were 12 minutes left on the parking meter. He got back in the car, it started; he took a left on 6th street and a right on Vermont. Traffic was bad and Paul Williams was on the radio. He didn’t like either one of them. It was, perhaps, a matter of utter obviousness. He took out the high-heeled shoe and stuck it up on the dash. Yes, much better.
He’d kill them in Detroit.
I turned the car into The Bug Builders in Santa Monica and began walking. I’d blown an engine down there some months past, had gotten a rebuilt and was in for the 3,000 mile check-up. I lived in L.A. and knew I had hours to wait. It was 10:15 a.m. I found a restaurant open and walked in. There was only one man in there, at a back table. I took a table at about the center and the waitress brought me a menu. Breakfast. I ordered ham and eggs, scrambled. I was hungover but thought I might hold it down. I had a paper and opened it. “Dodgers lose.” That cheered me a tick. When the waitress brought my breakfast she refilled my coffee cup. Fine girl with an ordinary ass. I began eating and then two people entered—a boy of about 23 and a woman of 50. They took the table directly across from mine. “That Helen keeps coming in when I’m looking at television and she
insists
on talking. And she talks in this
LOUD
voice!” said the boy. “I tell you, next time she does that I’m going to turn my television on so
LOUD
she won’t be able to be heard! I’m going to
do
it, so help me!”
When I finished eating I stood up and belched as I left the table.
I walked down to the mall. A cop was giving two kids with bicycles citations.
LEPKE
was playing at the movie but it didn’t open until noon. A girl with very good legs and a miniskirt walked by. She saw me looking at her and turned her head and stared at me as she waited for the signal.
What’s she thinking? I thought. If one only knew what they were thinking.
She crossed the street and I watched her haunches revolve. Then I noticed that she had a wrinkle in her skirt where she had sat down and I lost interest.
I walked down Santa Monica to Ocean, then crossed the street and walked through the park. I turned onto the pier and walked along it. The people on the pier were unconcerned; they were neither happy nor sad. They rattled about in the Penny Arcade and bounced against each other in the electric cars. The fishermen weren’t catching much. I walked down one side, came up the other. Coming up the other I came upon two young girls, each about 16. One was sunbathing on top of a cement bench, head down. The other was underneath the bench with her head sticking out toward the ocean. She had the sexiest lips I had ever seen on a woman, a girl. The appeal of those lips was jolting. One doesn’t expect lips like that from under a stone bench at 11:25 a.m. And between those lips, on the side toward me, stuck out a tiny tip of a tongue.
Never had I seen anything more astonishingly sexual and lush. And her eyes were on mine. The effect was so strong that I had to turn away. When I looked again it was as before. I walked on. What does one do? What is the password, or what hope, when a man is 54 and still feels all those designs and patterns and traps and wonderments? Why didn’t they hurry up and fix my fucking car?
I crossed and walked down the stairway to the boardwalk that led to Venice. I was still badly hungover. Breakfast hadn’t helped much. It was hardly down. It hung about halfway up and halfway down. “Drunkenness and suicide are the bedmates of the writer,” somebody had almost said once. It was true; I’d never known a good writer who was not either an alcoholic or a doper or both.
“Charles!”
I walked over. It was a man about 28, dark-haired, big. He had on glasses and needed a shave. “You don’t know me,” he said. “I’ve read your books.”
“I’m sick,” I said, “and walking around while they fix my car.”
“My car’s at Sears. I’m getting a new battery. Can I buy you a drink?”
“Too sick. I never drink before noon.”
“I’m sick, too.”
“Come on. Let’s sit down. I’m wobbly.”
We walked over to a bench facing the ocean. “Venice depresses me,” I said, “especially when you get down to that Jewish sandwich shop and these hard cases, these Tim Leary dropouts demand 20 cents.”
“Yeah, it’s bad. And the liberals down here, the anarchists, the Communists—nothing’s happening, Mrs. Jones—so they turned into transvestites. They’re really only half into it but they’re into it.”
“What do you do, kid?,” I asked, “just sit on these benches and rot and wait?”
“I write scripts for television.” He named one of the shows he wrote. I didn’t know it. All I watched on television was the boxing matches. He went on: “I just wrote two scripts, got $6,000 for each of them. Each took about eight hours. I hardly remember writing them. The money’s so easy I can’t resist, I can’t stop.”
“You’ve got a right. It beats working for McDonald’s.”
Just then a large tractor affair making much noise and painted yellow came by behind us. My friend held his ears. “Jesus, I can’t stand it! What are they doing with that thing? What does it mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything. The city buys those things and then sends them out to belabor a couple of guys sitting on a bench with a hangover. That’s their function. It’s that simple.”
“It’s disgusting.”
“You shouldn’t be out here. You ought to be home in a chair with a vodka-7 in your hand.”
“I have come out here to get away from my wife.”
“Sorry.”
“I came in drunk last night and she says I hit her. I don’t remember. It was something about two ashtrays, one was on top of the other. I couldn’t stand it.”
“A lot of things preceded those two ashtrays.”
“Yes.”
“I have trouble with women, too.”
“Yeah, I’ve read your shit.”
“They read your writing, they know what you are. Then they come in and try to change you. Don’t drink, if you love me. Learn the fox-trot. Attend the family picnic. See your local pastor.”
“Why do they do that?”
“I don’t know why, totally. But I think I have part of it. The woman is the child-bearer and the child-trainer, whether she knows it or not, whether she wants it or not she has this inherent streak. Raising a child to most women means raising it as per the woman’s knowledges and prejudices. It’s hard work. So she begins by trying to be the man-trainer. If they are able to train the man, they feel that surely they’ll be able to train the child. We are the great testing ground for somebody else’s future.”
“Maybe that’s why I hit her.”
“No, it was the ashtrays.”
“I’ve got a secretary. She’s not much but I fuck her.”
“That’s what secretaries are for, especially if they are women’s libbers.”
“Do the women hate you?”
“No, they hate the men who agree with them.”
“My secretary helps me write.”
“That’s good. What do you do, tape it and let her type it?”
“No. I lay down on top of her and I play with her tits. I keep laying down on top of her and playing with her tits and she writes. Soon it’s over and we’ve got something.”
“It comes harder for me. I use two sheets of paper and a carbon.”
“That whole TV scene is too bizarre, it really is. After lunch the producers will send out a chauffeur in a limousine and they’ll come back with some 13-year-old girls.”
“Marvelous. Think of a 13-year-old girl. It must be goodness beyond goodness.”
“That’s not for us, my friend.”
“No, you’ll just keep writing your scripts and sitting here on this bench for 40 more years. Not much will change.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. See those bars holding up those swings? Well, they’ll be a little thicker, that’s all. And rounder. And they’ll be of some silver substance that will glow in the sun.”
“Yeah. And the women will just wear little dots over their cunts and tits, the littlest of dots.”

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