More Notes of a Dirty Old Man (26 page)

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Authors: Charles Bukowski,David Stephen Calonne

BOOK: More Notes of a Dirty Old Man
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“You see what happened?” he asked.
“What?”
“The eight horse broke down in the first race and the nine broke down in the second, I had a broken-leg daily double.”
“The eight and the nine probably would have lost even if they hadn’t broken down.”
“I had a broken-leg daily double,” he repeated as if he hadn’t heard me.
After each race it was the same. He showed me a handful of losing tickets but he always had some excuse. Well, at least he had money to shit away from somewhere.
In the eighth race I had two-win on a long shot. It was a little long-shot play I had devised after studying volumes of race results from tracks in Canada, Mexico and the United States.
“I have no respect for you for betting a horse like that,” Cosmos said.
“What the hell, it paid seventy-six dollars.”
“It was a stupid bet,” he said.
 
That night Sasoon phoned me.
“Steve said he had a broken-leg daily double.”
“He had that,” I said.
“Cosmos wants to talk to you.”
“Put him on.”
“Ank,” he said, “I feel the pain . . . Life is for nothing.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“When I win, I feel nothing, when I lose, I feel the pain. What good is winning? Winning is no good.”
He was right, of course, and he was wrong, too.
 
Cosmos was at the track everyday. He was the worst horseplayer I ever saw. Instinctively he landed upon the shortest-priced stiff, race after race. One day I pulled in close to $600. Steve asked for a $200 loan. I laid it on him.
I didn’t see him the next day or the next. That Friday I couldn’t make the races, had to have a wisdom-tooth extracted. The dentist gave me a bottle of painkilling pills.
“Only take these if you are in agony,” he said.
The agony didn’t arrive. I took a handful of the pills, drank a six-pack of beer and drove out to the night harness races.
I was standing in line and I looked over in the next line and there was a fellow who resembled Steve Cosmos, only he had a ragged-looking beard, really scraggly, and he was dressed in floppy, greasy clothing. Cosmos always dressed neatly and cleanly. I looked at the eyes of the fellow. The eyes looked faded. Not the right eyes. This guy was just a second-rate Cosmos. I looked away and forgot about it.
A couple of races later I was checking my program and the line of asses of the hookers along the bar when I felt a hand upon my wallet and I whirled and there was the second-rate Cosmos only it was the real one under all that, and he said, “Ank, I saw you looking at me . . .”
He pulled out two hundred-dollar bills and handed them to me.
“Now that I’ve reestablished my credit, you ought to be good for $400 next time.”
“How’d you get lucky?” I asked.
“The woman I’m in love with—”
“Who’s that?”
“The lady with the spinning head.”
He meant the roulette wheel. (See: Las Vegas).
 
Things got bad down on Venice Beach. The screenplay kept crawling back kicked in the ass. The standard comment was, “Nobody is interested in the life of a barfly.” They were right, of course. Even the barfly hardly cared. People wanted a loser who became a winner. Or a winner who became a loser. But a loser who stayed a loser? That was too much like themselves. They weren’t interested in themselves.
The fine motorcycles went first. Then Sasoon started renting out the rooms. But Sasoon was into leather and all that and he was often absentminded and sometimes he left one of the girls all bound up and gagged upon the fireplace (his sacrificial Altar of Doom) and with an icepick or pliers or a tong lying nearby, and this shocked some of the roomers who wandered about the place and they moved out. Worse, the hardy ones who remained stopped paying their rent. Next, the Mexican Specials went, and next, I heard Sasoon and Cosmos were gone, they were back in Paris. I got the postcard from Sasoon:
“. . . going to try the screenplay on the French . . . Barbette has landed a leading role in major stage production . . . will send more news soon . . .”
And a line from Cosmos:
“Life is for nothing.”
 
Three or four weeks later I got a letter from Sasoon who was in Paris:
“Hank,
They got Steve. He’s in this ancient prison in Paris, one of the oldest around, a former torture chamber, full of rats. He’s very depressed, very. He’s gambled away much of his wine rations for the future. You should write him. What he did to get in there was so stupid he won’t even tell me about it.
I’m still going around with your screenplay. There has been some interest but nothing definite. But this screenplay is going to make it someday, one way or another, I’ll see to that.
Barbette sends her love to you and to Cristina, too.
Jean Sasoon”
 
 
Then I heard from Cosmos:
“Well, Ank, the police got me and it was so dumb the way I got caught that I’m ashamed to tell, and won’t. My life is over. I will never get out of here. I think of you out there going to the track everyday and I only wish I were standing next to you tearing up my tickets. I will never see you again. Life is ridiculous, it’s all a waste. There are a few fine fellows in here but there’s nothing we can do, or very little. Well, this is it for me. I never believed it would end like this. There are so many charges against me. I can’t believe I did all those things. My lawyer said for me to expect at least ten years, and if I do get ten, I’m lucky. You call that luck? My life is over. Even a butterfly is better off than I . . .
Write if possible.
Steve”
 
 
I wrote Cosmos right away. I wrote a long letter, and feeling that it might be read before it got to him, I wrote about how a man of his quality and character should never be in jail. I wrote that he should be honored, that what the world called justice was really a pathetic thing.
I went on and on in the letter, exclaiming what a noble man Cosmos was. I put it on so good that I almost wept.
It took me a bottle and a half of wine to write the letter, and when I reread it and sealed it up I felt that after reading all that they would let him out immediately . . .
Cosmos responded quickly:
“Say, Ank, that was a great letter and I read it over many times. You are right: I don’t belong in prison. However, it appears that only you and I believe this. I will never get out of here. This is it.
Finis.
I might as well be buried alive. My life was good until now. Now I must pay. Well, all the women are yours, and all the horses, and all that good stuff you drink. Think of me sometimes living in this hole with the rats. Even the walls stink. This is my home now, forever, until . . . and then even when I’m dead they’ll throw me into some special prison for the dead, with dead rats and dead stinking walls . . . Even death will be for nothing.
Steve”
 
 
I was having some trouble with the IRS, which I cleared up, then a chunk of something ripped open my gas tank as I got into a speed duel with some fool on the freeway, and then the freeway jammed and I had to go over the side, and it took three or four days to get that straightened out. Then I wrote Cosmos again, trying to lend cheer. I even enclosed some francs I had left over from the trip over there. And then other standard little pitiable troubles followed, as they will, and I rather woke up one day to the fact that there had been no response to my last letter to Cosmos. Maybe I had said the wrong thing. Or having done a spot of time myself, I realized that some inmates thought those on the outside were out of touch with reality.
It wasn’t so. My letter came back with an official stamp upon it in a dark smeared green. Again, forgive my French, but the stamp said something rather like:
MOVED. ADDRESS UNKNOWN.
Great Christ, I thought, Cosmos has dug a hole through the side of one of those stinking walls. What a clever fellow. I was proud of him.
Then I got the facts from Sasoon:
“. . . I don’t know
how
, but somehow Steve made bail . . . it was quite some sum . . . Then he jumped bail . . . I don’t know where he is. But, after this, if they ever catch him in France again he’s got life for sure.”
 
I rewrote the screenplay, this time calling it the “jazz-soup version.” I mailed a copy to Sasoon. Now he could knock on the same doors all over again. Then I started getting obscene phone calls from teeny-boppers and had to get a new unlisted number. Unlisted numbers last as long as the average marriage: one and one-half years.
I got back into the poem. Tried some oil paintings but just ended up painting various versions of the human face, which is limited subject matter indeed. The horses ran all right but the horseplayers were a dreary group to take. They never admitted failure and kept right on failing. What was really bothering them was loneliness, and absence of brain cells. Sometimes out there I felt as if I were in a giant mental ward, I mean for the insane, you know, with all the doors open and nobody able to walk out. Including . . .
Anyhow, one day the phone rang and it was Sasoon.
“Allo, Hank, it’s Sasoon.”
“Where you at, Jean?”
“Venice.”
“You mean the beach?”
“Well, not exactly. We’re in the ghetto, we live in the black ghetto, nice place, big yard—”
“What are you doing there?”
“Well, we want to shoot a documentary of you, all right?”
“All right,” I said, feeling sorry for Jean because he had been unable to unload the screenplay.
“Guess who’s with me?”
“Barbette?”
“No, she’s working, they’re shooting something in Algier.”
“Who, then?”
There was another voice on the phone:
“I have no interest in the police, they only have an interest in me.”
“Cosmos—”
“Thanks for your letters, my friend. I will always value them.”
“When you guys coming to see me?”
“Oh, no, you come see
us! In the black ghetto!”
“Must I?”
“You must.”
I got the instructions . . .
Although it was high noon I parked my car in a supermarket parking lot outside the ghetto and phoned in.
Sasoon tooled up in another Mexican Special. After exchanges I got in and we moved toward the ghetto.
“How do you like it?” Sasoon mentioned the car. “It’s fifteen years old and only got 20,000 miles on it. This housewife used to just drive it around for shopping, then her husband died and she had to sell it. I really got lucky! You like it?”
“Great, Jean, great.”
The exhaust left a gray-blue haze half a block behind us and the tired crankshaft pushed at the weary piston arms that were just aching to slice off and rocket through the hood.
“I got a deal,” said Jean Sasoon, sitting very straight and peering proudly over the long frontal hunk of that moving piece of shit. I inhaled a complete large can of Bud in three swallows so as not to have to answer to that.
 
We entered the ghetto. The streets were littered with bits of clothing and crap. Stockings. And shoes. But always
one
shoe. And never its mate. Which gave one the strange feeling that somebody had been amputated.
“Ah, look,” said Jean, “see that high rise?”
I saw it.
“The people got in there and then refused to pay rent. It took two years and the state troops to finally get them out of there. And before they did, those people ripped out all the toilets, all the wiring, all the pipes, everything, they kicked holes in the walls, set rooms on fire . . . Now it’s all boarded up. And people still live there. We got people living under our house, we can hear them talking at night . . . They even have radios down there. Sometimes they have fights, we can hear them cursing . . .”
“Very interesting,” I said.
“This is our place,” said Jean, and he began to pull into the driveway into a parking area behind his building. Two young boys, black, about eight or nine years old, sat upon their bicycles and refused to budge. Jean slowly inched his car between them. With an artistic dexterity he pushed the large car between them. Suddenly one of the black boys turned his head and said:
“
Hey, man, watch it!
”
Well, I thought, this is really living, and when the large troops come along our balls will be fried, sliced, diced and skewered. We parked, climbed out, went in.

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