Run With the Hunted (27 page)

It was a walk-up apartment on the third floor. She opened the door. Maja was sitting on the floor with his bongo drinking a fifth of medium priced port from the bottle. He was barefooted, dressed in tight jeans, and in a white t-shirt with black zebra-stripes. Hester was dressed in an identical outfit. She brought me a bottle of beer, I picked up a cigarette from the pack on the coffee table and began the interview.

“You first met Maja when?”

Hester gave me a date. She also gave me the exact time and place.

“When did you first begin to have love feelings for Maja? What exactly were the circumstances which tripped them off?”

“Well,” said Hester, “it was …”

“She love me when I give her the thing,” said Maja from the rug.

“He has learned English quite quickly, hasn't he?”

“Yes, he's brilliant.”

Maja picked up his bottle and drained off a good slug.

“I put this thing in her, she say, ‘Oh my god oh my god oh my god!' Ha, ha, ha, ha!”

“Maja is marvelously built,” she said.

“She eat too,” said Maja, “she eat good. Deep throat, ha, ha, ha!”

“I loved Maja from the beginning,” said Hester, “it was his eyes, his face … so tragic. And the way he walked. He walks, well, he walks something like a tiger.”

“Fuck,” said Maja, “we fuck we fucky fuck fuck fuck. I am getting tired.”

Maja took another drink. He looked at me.

“You fuck her. I am tired. She big hungry tunnel.”

“Maja has a genuine sense of humor,” said Hester, “that's another thing that has endeared him to me.”

“Only thing dear you to me,” said Maja, “is my telephone pole piss-shooter.”

“Maja has been drinking since this morning,” said Hester, “you'll have to excuse him.”

“Perhaps I'd better come back when he's feeling better.”

“I think you should.”

Hester gave me an appointment at 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon the next day.

It was just as well. I needed photographs. I knew a down-and-out photographer, one Sam Jacoby, who was good and would do the work cheap. I took him back there with me. It was a sunny afternoon with only a thin layer of smog. We walked up and I rang. There was no answer. I rang again. Maja answered the door.

“Hester not in,” he said, “she gone to grocery store.”

“We had an appointment for two o'clock. I'd like to come in and wait.”

We walked in and sat down.

“I play drums for you,” said Maja.

He played the drums and sang some jungle chants. He was quite good. He was working on another bottle of port wine. He was still in his zebra-striped t-shirt and jeans.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” he said, “that's all she want. She make me mad.”

“You miss the jungle, Maja?”

“You just ain't just shittin' upstream, daddy.”

“But she loves you, Maja.”

“Ha, ha, ha!”

Maja played us another drum solo. Even drunk he was good.

When Maja finished Sam said to me, “You think she might have a beer in the refrigerator?”

“She might.”

“My nerves are bad. I need a beer.”

“Go ahead. Get two. I'll buy her some more. I should have brought some.”

Sam got up and walked into the kitchen. I heard the refrigerator door open.

“I'm writing an article about you and Hester,” I said to Maja.

“Big-hole woman. Never fill. Like volcano.”

I heard Sam vomiting in the kitchen. He was a heavy drinker. I knew he was hungover. But he was still one of the best photographers around. Then it was quiet. Sam came walking out. He sat down. He didn't have a beer with him.

“I play drums again,” said Maja. He played the drums again. He was still good. Though not as good as the preceding time. The wine was getting to him.

“Let's get out of here,” Sam said to me.

“I have to wait for Hester,” I said.

“Man, let's go,” said Sam.

“You guys want some wine?” asked Maja.

I got up and walked into the kitchen for a beer. Sam followed me. I moved toward the refrigerator.

“
Please
don't open that door!” he said.

Sam walked over to the sink and vomited again. I looked at the refrigerator door. I didn't open it. When Sam finished, I said, “O.k., let's go.”

We walked into the front room where Maja still sat by his bongo.

“I play drum once more,” he said.

“No, thanks, Maja.”

We walked out and down the stairway and out to the street. We got into my car. I drove off. I didn't know what to say. Sam didn't say anything. We were in the business district. I drove into a gas station and told the attendant to fill it up with regular. Sam got out of the car and walked to the telephone booth to call the police. I saw Sam come out of the phone booth. I paid for the gas. I hadn't gotten my interview. I was out $500. I waited as Sam walked toward the car.

—
S
OUTH OF
N
O
N
ORTH

here they come

these guys

grey truck

radio playing

they are in a hurry

it's quite exciting:

shirt open

bellies hanging out

they run out the trash bins

roll them out to the fork lift

and then the truck grinds it upward

with far too much sound …

they had to fill out application forms

to get these jobs

they are paying for homes and

drive late model cars

they get drunk on Saturday night

now in the Los Angeles sunshine

they run back and forth with their trash bins

all that trash goes somewhere

and they shout to each other

then they are all up in the truck

driving west toward the sea

none of them know

that I am alive

REX DISPOSAL CO.

I had this room in front on DeLongpre

and I used to sit for hours

in the daytime

looking out the front

window.

there were any number of girls who would

walk by

swaying;

it helped my afternoons,

added something to the beer and the

cigarettes.

one day I saw something

extra.

I heard the sound of it first.

“come on, push!” he said.

there was a long board

about 2½ feet wide and

8 feet long;

nailed to the ends and in the middle

were roller skates.

he was pulling in front

two long ropes attached to the board

and she was in back

guiding and also pushing.

all their possessions were tied to the

board:

pots, pans, bedquilts, and so forth

were roped to the board

tied down;

and the skatewheels were grinding.

he was white, red-necked, a

southerner—

thin, slumped, his pants about to

fall from his

ass—

his face pinked by the sun and

cheap wine,

and she was black

and walked upright

pushing;

she was simply beautiful

in turban

long green ear rings

yellow dress

from

neck to

ankle.

her face was gloriously

indifferent.

“don't worry!” he shouted, looking back

at her, “somebody will

rent us a place!”

she didn't answer.

then they were gone

although I still heard

the skatewheels.

they're going to make it,

I thought.

I'm sure they

did.

 

 

It began as a mistake.

It was Christmas season and I learned from the drunk up the hill, who did the trick every Christmas, that they would hire damned near anybody, and so I went and the next thing I knew I had this leather sack on my back and was hiking around at my leisure. What a job, I thought. Soft! They only gave you a block or two and if you managed to finish, the regular carrier would give you another block to carry, or maybe you'd go back in and the soup would give you another, but you just took your time and shoved those Xmas cards in the slots.

I think it was my second day as a Christmas temp that this big woman came out and walked around with me as I delivered letters. What I mean by big was that her ass was big and her tits were big and that she was big in all the right places. She seemed a bit crazy but I kept looking at her body and I didn't care.

She talked and talked and talked. Then it came out. Her husband was an officer on an island far away and she got lonely, you know, and lived in this little house in back all by herself.

“What little house?” I asked.

She wrote the address on a piece of paper.

“I'm lonely too,” I said, “I'll come by and we'll talk tonight.”

I was shacked but the shackjob was gone half the time, off somewhere, and I was lonely all right. I was lonely for that big ass standing beside me.

“All right,” she said, “see you tonight.”

She was a good one all right, she was a good lay but like all lays after the third or fourth night I began to lose interest and didn't go back.

But I couldn't help thinking, god, all these mailmen do is drop in their letters and get laid. This is the job for me, oh yes yes yes.

So I took the exam, passed it, took the physical, passed it, and there I was—a substitute mail carrier. It began easy. I was sent to West Avon Station and it was just like Christmas except I didn't get laid. Every day I expected to get laid but I didn't. But the soup was easy and I strolled around doing a block here and there. I didn't even have a uniform, just a cap. I wore my regular clothes. The way my shackjob Betty and I drank there was hardly money for clothes.

Then I was transferred to Oakford Station.

The soup was a bullneck named Jonstone. Help was needed there and I understood why. Jonstone liked to wear dark-red shirts—that meant danger and blood. There were seven subs—Tom Moto, Nick Pelligrini, Herman Stratford, Rosey Anderson, Bobby Hansen, Harold Wiley and me, Henry Chinaski. Reporting time was 5 a.m. and I was the only drunk there. I always drank until past midnight, and there we'd sit, at 5 a.m. in the morning, waiting to get on the clock, waiting for some regular to call in sick. The regulars usually called in sick when it rained or during a heatwave or the day after a holiday when the mail load was doubled.

There were 40 or 50 different routes, maybe more, each case was different, you were never able to learn any of them, you had to get your mail up and ready before 8 a.m. for the truck dispatches, and Jonstone would take no excuses. The subs routed their magazines on corners, went without lunch, and died in the streets. Jonstone would have us start casing the routes 30 minutes late—spinning in his chair in his red shirt—“Chinaski take route 539!” We'd start a halfhour short but were still expected to get the mail up and out and be back on time. And once or twice a week, already beaten, fagged and fucked we had to make the night pickups, and the schedule on the board was impossible—the truck wouldn't go that fast. You had to skip four or five boxes on the first run and the next time around they were stacked with mail and you stank, you ran with sweat jamming it into the sacks. I got laid all right. Jonstone saw to that.

The subs themselves made Jonstone possible by obeying his impossible orders. I couldn't see how a man of such obvious cruelty could be allowed to have his position. The regulars didn't care, the union man was worthless, so I filled out a 30 page report on one of my days off, mailed one copy to Jonstone and took the other down to the Federal Building. The clerk told me to wait. I waited and waited and waited. I waited an hour and 30 minutes, then was taken in to see a little grey-haired man with eyes like cigarette ash. He didn't even ask me to sit down. He began screaming at me as I entered the door.