More Notes of a Dirty Old Man (17 page)

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Authors: Charles Bukowski,David Stephen Calonne

BOOK: More Notes of a Dirty Old Man
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I figured 500-plus air might make this community college outside Detroit worth my soul so I got on
American
and worked the stewardesses for extra drinks. I was to land a day early, and I made it down the ramp waiting for some professor to grab me and one did and I told him, “I’m yours now. How can you tell what you’ve got until it gets off the plane?”
“We can’t. My job’s more or less on the line each time but it’s worth it.” Each year he went out and got one. It had been Ginsberg, Stephen Spender and James Dickey in the last three years and he still had his job. I warned him that I had been thrown out of the women’s dorm at the University of Kansas after a reading and we walked toward his car. He drove me to a hotel in Detroit and left me with a mass of phone numbers and instructions. The university was getting the room and board, he assured me. After he left I took a shower and phoned down for drinks.
I had been drinking an hour or so—picking out my poems—when the phone rang. It was my buddy Slim de Bouffe who came in at 5 feet and 265 pounds and played with poems and booze and women. He liked my shit. When he knocked on the door the room knocked back. He wrote poems with a hammer. I told him to come on in.
There wasn’t much to the night, mostly drinking, and stories about bad luck with women and good luck with women; about the poetry hustle and the poetry grind and about some of the good people in it and some of the other kind. Slim had a way of dropping little wisdoms out of his mouth as if they didn’t count, as if he were asking for a match or giving directions to the nearest whorehouse. You had to listen carefully to Slim but it was worth it. It was worth some hours of listening. He left late that night and I went to bed and slept in that 100-year-old hotel in the middle of Murder City and I slept well.
Awakening was another matter. I was on the fourth floor and the windows looked out on a building with a flagpole on top of it. I gagged, went to the bathroom, had a minor vomit, opened a warm beer and got the switchboard woman.
“Yes sir?”
“I have a complaint.”
“Yes sir?”
“Look, I’m going to be here 2 or 3 nights which means that I’m going to wake up with 2 or 3 hangovers.”
“You’d better send your complaint to God, sir.”
“All right, connect me.”
“He’s unlisted.”
“Don’t I know. Look, as I was saying, I’m going to wake up here every morning and you know the first sight that will meet my eyes?”
“No, I don’t, sir.”
“The American flag.”
“The American flag?”
“Absolutely.”
“You mean you don’t like the American flag, sir?”
“Of course not. It has these red and white stripes, they wave in the wind, and then there are the stars, there are all these stars up in the corner, you know, on top of the blue . . . I wake up sick. I’ve got to read poetry at the university, they’re going to put me on video tape.”
“Sir, I
like
the American flag!”
“Fine, I’ll take your room and you take mine.”
“Have you fought in any wars, sir?”
“Yes, first I fought for Franco in Spain and then . . .”
She hung up on me.
 
It was hot under the video lights but I worked from a bottle of 100 proof vodka and, when that emptied out, Slim de Bouffe went out into the night and came back with a six-pack. I finished it up under that and the applause seemed fair enough. I fielded some easy questions, got the 500 dollar check and got out. They told me they’d mail the air within ten days. I had to work a bookstore-signing for 50 bucks. Then a night’s sleep and back to L.A. where I had figured this new system on the harness races. The sophisticates always sneered when I talked about the races. The sophisticates always thought soul could be found in the obvious places; that’s why they were sophisticates instead of artists.
There were 600 people in the bookstore. The owner had advertised in the main Detroit newspaper. We couldn’t move. Drinks and food had to be passed hand-to-hand overhead. I drank everything they handed me except wine. I signed books and screamed back insult for insult. I was high up in the sky. I beat their meanness with a more clever meanness. Civilization. They wanted to suck me dry and trash me. I’d come up through the alleys like Jersey Joe and old Jimmy Braddock. They couldn’t trap me with love. Adulation, maybe. I read a couple of poems from
Burning
that somebody shoved at me. Then I fought my way out, cursing that whole gang of bloodsuckers. I got to the curbing and a car pulled up. “In here, Bukowski!” I jumped in and we drove off.
“You’re just like a rock star, baby,” said the kid at the wheel. I looked around: a car full of female groupies.
“Like hell. Either these women get out or I get out. All I want is a ride to the hotel.”
The kid at the wheel pulled over to the curbing. “All right, girls, get it out. Now!”
They got out and we got some dock-hand, back-room cussing from those lovelies and then the kid put it to the floor and we went down the street.
“Eddie Mahler,” he said.
“I’m Charles Bukowski,” I answered.
The kid, Eddie, he was good. The street was very dark as all Detroit streets seemed to be. Eddie had a little game. He’d see a car up ahead and come alongside. Then he’d smash his car into the side of the other car. He’d bounce it good. Then he’d come back and hit it again and again. He’d keep hitting that car until it climbed up over the curbing and stopped. Then Eddie would stop the car and glare at them and I’d sit there and glare at them right along with Eddie. Then we’d drive off and find another car and do the same thing. We got 4 or 5 cars that way.
“You’re a vicious son of a bitch, Eddie. I like you.”
“You and Rod McKuen are my favorite poets.”
“What?”
“Yes, you two guys are the only poets I can stand.”
I let that go. Soon we seemed to be driving along in the country. There were trees and space everywhere. Eddie stopped the car. “Get out,” he said.
I got out.
“O.K,” he said, “I want that 500 dollar check. You’re going to sign it over to me, Edward Mahler.”
“And you’re going to suck your mother’s left tit.”
The first punch came so fast I couldn’t see it. I swung from the heels and missed his head by two feet. He sunk one into my gut and I dropped to my knees and vomited up ten dollars worth of booze. I got back up.
“What did you say that name was?”
“Eddie Mahler.”
“Got a pen, Eddie? I lost mine giving out all those autographs.”
“Sure.”
I walked over to his car and put the check on top of the car roof. It was very wet in the moonlight. I signed the check over to Eddie, handed him the check and the pen and we got back into the car. “The least you can do, punk, is to drive me back to the hotel.”
“Don’t call me a punk.”
“Drive me back to the hotel, punk.”
He started the car, and we drove off. “I want you to meet my mother first. She’s always admired your stuff.”
“All right.”
“You don’t mind?”
“Compared to what’s happened, that’s easy.”
“Sure.”
“Eddie, if this ever gets out, I’m finished. I’m supposed to be the tough guy, the man of the streets. Hell, if this gets out nobody will ever buy my books.”
“I don’t want to compound anything. I’ll keep quiet.”
“I’m not speaking of morals or ethics or anything, Eddie, but that money’s really mine. And . . . hey, shit, what happened to my wristwatch?”
I looked over and Eddie had on two wristwatches. “Give me my wristwatch, punk.”
Eddie slipped my watch off. I put it back on. “One time I’m on the floor drunk, passed-out and I feel somebody lift my wristwatch, then I feel somebody pulling at my finger, he’s trying to get my ring off. I look up and he’s got out this knife, he’s going to peel down my finger to get my ring and it’s not worth $3. You ought to have heard me holler. He scattered.”
“I’ll pay you back $100 a month from this check I took from you,” said Eddie.
“No good,” I said, “you’re driving me back to the hotel. Then we’re going to sleep it off and I’m going to duke it out with you again when I’m sober.”
“O.K, but first I want you to meet my mother.”
Eddie’s mother was very nice. A young blonde. I mean young compared to me. Neither Eddie or I mentioned anything about the check. His mother mixed us all some drinks and we drank an hour or two, then left. Before we left Eddie went to the closet and gave me one of his shirts, a nice purple and white striped job. I put it on, mine had somehow gotten bloodied and ripped during the fight. Before we left, Eddie’s mother got out these photos of her ex-husband, a rather famous gangster who’d been gunned down by the cops. We all did a bit of mourning and weeping for him, me mostly. Then we had another drink and left.
In the hotel in the morning I awakened first, shit and showered. Eddie was out. My first thought was to sneak downstairs and holler cops. But somehow that was out. I got back into bed and opened a warm beer. No refrigeration in the fucking place. Eddie rolled over. “Hey,” he said.
“Yeah?”
Eddie got up, went to his pants and took out his wallet. He walked over and handed me the check. “I knew I could never take this. I knew I’d give it back when I woke up in the morning.”
“Eddie, I’ll take it.”
The kid started getting dressed. “Care for a warm beer?”
“O.K.”
I broke one open for him. Eddie finished dressing, then finished the beer. I found a pen and wrote my address down. “Write me, Eddie.”
He took the slip of paper, put it in his pocket and walked out the door. That’s about all there was to that reading except I met Slim de Bouffe and his girlfriend in this bar later, they were going to get me to the airport and I told them the story as we drank green beer in a place they were mopping up with a very strong disinfectant and we almost vomited together. “You mean you couldn’t take him?” asked de Bouffe.
“I couldn’t take him,” I answered.
Then we all got up and walked over to a sweeter-smelling place.
They were both 7 years old and they found the hole in the fence and crawled through.
“He usually sits out in the yard in this chair. He just sits there looking kind of mad.”
“He might kill us, Billy.”
“Look, Red, he’s in enough trouble, he won’t kill us.”
“You say he looks mad.”
“He’s just pissed. He don’t go to the market or eat out or anything. He sends people out for his things. We got to look out for his people.”
“I’ll bet he has guards everywhere.”
“Not too many, Red, just two or three. I come here every day. I never been caught yet.”
“You like to look at him, Billy?”
“Yeah. Only today I think I want to talk to him.”
“Talk to him?”
“Yeah. Now keep down low against those bushes. Now lay down here.”
“O.K.”
“See him, Red? He’s sitting in that big chair with his cane, he’s just looking off into space, looking mad.”
“I see him.”
“Let’s crawl closer.”
“How about the guards?”
“Oh, they just walk around. They get careless. If we had a gun we could kill him right from here.”
Billy pointed his finger, moving his thumb down: “Pow!”
“I’m scared, Billy!”
“Me, too. That’s the fun of it. Keep crawling closer.”
“It’s him, Billy, it’s him! I’ve seen him on TV, I’ve seen his picture in the papers!”
“Sure it’s him, Red. Who do you think he is?”
“He does look mad! It’s just like seeing God!”
“It’s better, we can talk to him.”
“You—still going to talk to him?”

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