The Most Beautiful Woman in Town (14 page)

They moved me into a room with a black guy and a white guy. The white guy kept getting fresh roses every day. He raised roses which he sold to florists. He wasn't raising any roses right then. The black guy had busted open like me. The white guy had a bad heart, a very bad heart. We lay around and the white guy talked about breeding roses and raising roses and how he could sure use a cigarette, my god, how he needed a cigarette. I had stopped vomiting blood. Now I was just shitting blood. I felt like I had it made. I had just emptied a pint of blood and they had taken the needle out.

“I'll get you some smokes, Harry.”

“God, thanks, Hank.”

I got out of bed. “Give me some money.”

Harry gave me some change.

“If he smokes he'll die,” said Charley. Charley was the black guy.

“Bullshit, Charley, a couple of little smokes never hurt anybody.”

I walked out of the room and down the hall. There was a cigarette machine in the waiting lobby. I got a pack and walked back. Then Charley and Harry and I lay there smoking cigarettes. That was morning. About noon the doctor came by and put a machine on Harry. The machine spit and farted and roared.

“You've been smoking, haven't you?” the doctor asked Harry.

“No doctor, honest, I haven't been smoking.”

“Which of you guys bought him these smokes?”

Charley looked at the ceiling. I looked at the ceiling.

“You smoke another cigarette and you're dead,” said the doctor.

Then he took his machine and walked out. As soon as he left I took the pack out from under the pillow.

“Lemme have one,” said Harry.

“You heard what the doctor said,” said Charley.

“Yeah,” I said, exhaling a sheath of beautiful blue smoke, “you heard what the doctor said: ‘You smoke another cigarette and you're dead.' ”

“I'd rather die happy than live in misery,” said Harry.

“I can't be responsible for your death, Harry,” I said, “I'm going to pass these cigarettes to Charley and if he wants to give you one he can.”

I passed them over to Charley who had the center bed.

“All right, Charley,” said Harry, “let's have 'em.”

“I can't do it, Harry, I can't kill you Harry.”

Charley passed the cigarettes back to me.

“Come on, Hank, lemme have a smoke.”

“No, Harry.”

“Please, I beg you, man, just one smoke just one!”

“Oh, for Christ's sake!”

I threw him the whole pack. His hand trembled as he took one out.

“I don't have any matches. Who's got matches?”

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” I said.

I threw him the matches .. .

They came in and hooked me to another bottle. About ten minutes my father arrived. Vicky was with him, so drunk she could hardly stand up.

“Lover!” she said, “Lover boy!”

She staggered up against the edge of the bed.

I looked at the old man. “You son of a bitch,” I said, “you didn't have to bring her up here drunk.”

“Lover boy, don't you wanna see me, huh? Huh, lover boy?”

“I warned you not to get involved with a woman like that.”

“She's broke. You bastard, you bought her whiskey, got her drunk and brought her up here.”

“I told you she was no good, Henry. I told you she was a bad woman.”

“Don't you love me anymore, lover boy?”

“Get her out of here … NOW!” I told the old man.

“No, no, I want you to see what kind of a woman you have.”

“I know what kind of woman I have. Now get her out of here now, or so help me Christ I'm going to pull this needle out of my arm and whip your ass!”

The old man moved her out. I fell back on the pillow.

“She's a looker,” said Harry.

“I know,” I said, “I know.” .. .

I stopped shitting blood and I was given a list of what to eat and I was told that the first drink would kill me. They had also told me that I would die without an operation. I had had a terrible argument with a female Japanese doctor about operation and death. I had said “No operation” and she had walked out, shaking her ass at me in anger. Harry was still alive when I left, nursing his cigarettes.

I walked along in the sunlight to see how it felt. It felt all right. The traffic went by. The sidewalk was as sidewalks had always been. I was wondering whether to take a bus in or try to phone somebody to come and get me. I walked into this place to phone. I sat down first and had a smoke.

The bartender walked up and I ordered a bottle of beer.

“What's new?” he asked.

“Nothing much,” I said. He walked off. I poured the beer into a glass, then I looked at the glass a while and then I emptied half of it. Somebody put a coin in the juke box and we had some music. Life looked a little better. I finished that glass, poured another and wondered if my pecker would ever stand up again. I looked around the bar: no women. I did the next best thing: I picked up the glass and drained it.

THE DAY WE TALKED ABOUT JAMES THURBER

I was down on my luck or my talent was finished. It was Huxley, or one of his characters, I believe, who said in
Point Counter Point:
“Anybody can be a genius at twenty-five: at fifty it takes some doing.” Well, I was forty-nine, which isn't fifty — short a few ‘months. And my paintings weren't moving. There had recently been a small book of poems:
The Sky Is the Biggest Cunt of Them All
, for which I received a hundred dollars four months ago, and now the thing is a collector's item, listing at twenty-dollars at rare book dealers. I didn't even have a copy of my own book. A friend had stolen it while I was drunk. A friend?

My luck was down. I was known by Genet, Henry Miller, Picasso, so on and so on, and I couldn't even get a job as a dishwasher. I tried in one place but only lasted one night with my bottle of wine. A big fat lady, one of the owners, proclaimed, “Why this man doesn't know
how
to wash dishes!” Then she showed me how one part of the sink — it had an acid of some sort in it — was where you
first
put the dishes,
then
you transferred them over to the soap and water side. They fired me that night. But meanwhile I had drunk two bottles of wine and eaten half a leg of lamb which they had left just behind me.

It was, in a sense, terrifying to end up a zero, but what hurt more was that there was a five-year-old daughter of mine up in San Francisco, the only person in the world I loved, who needed me, and shoes and dresses and food and love and letters and toys and an occasonal visit.

I was forced to live with some great French poet who was now living in Venice, California, and this guy went
both
ways — I mean he fucked men and women and was fucked by men and women. He had likable ways, and a humorous and brilliant way of speaking. And he wore a little wig which kept slipping, and had to keep setting the damned thing straight as he talked to you. He spoke seven languages but he had to speak English while I was around. And he spoke each language as if it were his natural tongue.

“Ah, don't worry, Bukowski,” he would smile, “I will take
care
of you!”

He had this twelve-inch dick, limp, and he had appeared in some of the underground newspapers when he had arrived in Venice, with notices and reviews of his power as a poet (one of the reviews had been written by me), but some of the underground papers had printed this photo of the great French poet — naked. He was about five feet tall and had hair all over his chest and arms. The hair ran all the way down from his neck to his balls — black, grizzly, stinking mass of stuff — and here in the middle of the photo was this monstrous thing hanging there, round-headed, thick: a bull's cock upon a tinkertoy of a man.

Frenchy was one of the greatest poets of the century. All he did was sit around and write his shitty little immortal poems and he had two or three sponsors who sent him money. Who wouldn't:(?): immortal cock, immortal poems. He knew Corso, Burroughs, Ginsberg, kaja. He knew all that early hotel gang who lived at the same place, popped together, fucked together, and created separately. He'd even met Miro and Hem walking down the avenue, Miro carrying Hem's boxing gloves as they walked toward the battleground where Hemingway was hoping to kick the shit outa somebody. Of
course
, they all knew each other and paused a moment to flip off a little brilliant conversational crap.

The immortal French poet had seen Burroughs crawling along the floor “blind drunk” at B's place.

“He reminds me of you, Bukowski. There's no front. He drinks until he drops, until his eyes glaze. And this night he was crawling along the rug too drunk to get up and he looked up at me and he said to me, ‘They fucked me! They got me drunk! I signed the contract. I sold all the movie rights to
Naked Lunch
for fivehundred dollars. Well, shit, it's too late!' ”

Of course Burroughs was lucky — the option ran out and he had the five hundred dollars. I got hung up drunk for fifty bucks on some of my shit, two-year option, and I still have eighteen months to sweat. They caught Nelson Algren the same way –
Man With the Golden Arm;
they made millions, Algren got peanut shells. He had been drunk and failed to read the small print.

They played me good on movie rights to
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
. I was drunk and they brought in an eighteen-year-old cunt with a mini up to her hips, high heels, and long stockings. I hadn't had a piece of ass for two years. I signed away my life. And I probably could have driven a Railway Express truck through her vagina. I never even found out.

So there I was, down and out, fifty, outa luck and outa talent, couldn't even get a job as a newspaper boy, janitor, dishwasher, and the French poet immortal always had something going at his place — young men and young women always knocking at his door. And such a clean apartment! His john looked like nobody'd ever shit in it. All the tiles gleaming white clean, and with these little fat fluffy rugs everywhere. New sofas, new chairs. A refrigerator which shined like a mad and enlarged tooth that had been scrubbed until it cried. Everything, everything, touched of the delicacy of no-pain, no-worry, no-world out there at all. Meanwhile everybody knew what to say and do and how to act — it was a code — discreet and without sound: huge reamings and suckings and fingers up into the asshole and everywhere else. Men, women, children indulged. Boys.

And there was the Big C. Big H. And Hash. Mary. Name it.

It was an Art quietly done, everybody gently smiling, waiting, then doing. Leaving. Then coming back again.

There was even whiskey, beer, wine, for such clods as I — cigars and the stupidity of the past.

The immortal French poet went on and on with his various things. He rose early and did various yoga exercises, and would then stand looking at himself in the full-length mirror, brushing his hands over his tiny bit of sweat, and then, reaching and touching his huge cock and sacks — saving the cock and sacks for last — lifted them, savoring them, then letting them go: PLUNK.

About then I'd go into the bathroom and vomit. Come out.

“You didn't get any of it on the floor, did you, Bukowski?”

He didn't ask me if I were dying. He was only worried about his clean bathroom floor.

“No, Andre, I deposited all the vomit into the proper channels.”

“Good boy!”

Then just to show off, knowing that I was sicker than seven hells, he would go over to the corner, stand on his head in his fucking bermuda shorts, cross his legs, look at me upside down like that, and say: “You know, Bukowski, if you would ever sober up and put on a tuxedo, I promise you this — if you ever walked into a room dressed that way, every woman in the room would faint.”

“I don't doubt that.”

Then he did a little flipover, landed on his feet: “Care for breakfast?”

“Andre, I haven't cared for breakfast for the last thirty-two years.”

Then there'd be a knock on the door, lightly, oh so
delicately
you'd think it was a fucking bluebird tapping with one wing, dying, asking for a sip of water.

Mostly it would be two or three young men, with strawlike, shitty-looking beards.

It was
usually
men, although now and then it was a young girl, quite lovely, and I always hated to leave when it was a girl. But
he
had the twelve inches
limp
plus the immortality. So I always knew my role.

“Listen, Andre, this headache … I think I'll take a little stroll along the beach.”

“Oh, no, Charles! No
need
, really!”

And even before I could get to the door, I'd look back and she'd already have Andre's fly open, or if the bermudas didn't have a fly, there it would be down around his French ankles, and she would be grabbing that twelve inches of
limp
to see what it could do if teased a bit. And Andre would always have her dress up around her hips by then and his finger fluttering, gorging, seeking the secret of the hole in that gap between her tight, cleanly washed pink panties. And for the finger, there was always something: the
seemingly
new melodramatic hole or asshole or if, master that he was, he could slip around and through the tight, washed pinkness, upward, there he was, preparing that cunt that had had only eighteen hours rest.

So I always had my walk along the beachfront. Since it was so early I did not have to view that giant spread of humanity wasted, stuffed side by side, gagging, croaking things of flesh, Frogs' tumors. I didn't have to see them walking or lounging about with their horrible bodies and sold-out lives — no eyes, no voices, nothing, and not knowing it — just the shit of the waste, the smear along the cross.

But the mornings, early, were not bad, especially during the weekdays. Everything belonged to me, and the very ugly gulls — who became more ugly as the bags and crumbs began to vanish around Thursday or Friday — for this was the end of Life to them. They had no way of knowing that on Saturday and Sunday the mob would be back with their hotdog buns and various sandwiches. Well, I thought, maybe the gulls are worse off than I am? Maybe.

Andre got an offer to do a reading somewhere — Chicago, N.Y., Frisco, somewhere — one day, and so there he was gone and I was in the place, alone. I had a chance to use the typer. Not much good came out of that typer. Andre could make the thing work almost perfectly. It was strange that he was such a great writer and that I wasn't. It didn't seem as if there was
that
much difference between us. But there was — he knew how to lay down one word next to the other. But when I sat down that white sheet of paper just sat there and
looked
at me. Each man had his various hells but I had a three-length lead on the field.

So I drank more and more wine and waited on my death. Andre had been gone a couple of days when one morning about 10:30 a.m. there was this knock on the door. I said, “Just a moment,” went into the bathroom, vomited, rinsed my mouth. Lavoris. I got into some shorts, then put on one of Andre's silken robes. I opened the door.

There was a young guy and a girl out there. She had on this very short skirt and high heels, and her nylons ran almost all the way up to her ass. The guy was just a guy, young, a kind of Cashmere Bouquet type — white T-shirt, thin, open-mouthed, holding his arms halfway up his sides as if he were going to take off and fly.

The girl asked, “Andre?”

“No. I'm Hank. Charles. Bukowski.”

“You're making a joke aren't you, Andre?” the girl asked.

“Yeh. I'm a joke,” I answered.

There was a light rain out there. They stood there.

“Well, anyhow, come on in out of the rain.”

“You
are
Andre!” said the bitch. “I
recognize
you, that aged face — two hundred years old!”

“OK, OK,” I said. “Come on in. I am Andre.”

They had two bottles of wine. I went into the kitchen for the corkscrew and the glasses. I poured three wines. I was standing up drinking my wine, glancing up her legs best I could, when he reached out, unzipped my fly and began sucking at my dick. He made very much noise with his mouth. I patted him on top of the head, then asked the girl, “What's your name?”

“Wendy,” she said, “and I've always admired your poetry, Andre. I think that you are one of the greatest living poets.”

The guy kept working away, sucking and slopping it up, his head bobbing like some crazy thing with a lost mind.

“One of the greatest?” I asked. “Who are the others?”

“One other,” said Wendy. “Ezra Pound.”

“Ezra always bored me,” I said.

“Really?”

“Really. He works too hard at it. Over-serious, over-learned, and finally just a dull craftsman.”

“Why do you simply sign your work ‘Andre'?”

“Because I feel like it.”

The guy was working very hard then. I grabbed his head, pulled it forward into me and unloaded.

Then I zipped up, poured three more wines.

We simply sat and talked and drank. I don't know how long it went on. Wendy had beautiful legs and fine thin ankles which she kept twisting and turning as if she were on fire or something. They
did
know their literature. We talked of various things. Sherwood Anderson —
Winesburg
, all that stuff. Dos. Camus. The Cranes, the Dickeys, the Brontes; Balzac, Thurber, on and on …

We finished both wines and I found some more stuff in the refrigerator. We worked on that. Then, I don't know. I rather went crazy and began clawing at her dress — what there was of it. I saw a bit of underslip and panties; then I ripped the dress at the top, ripped the brassiere. I got a tit. I got a tit. It was fat. I kissed and sucked at the thing. Then I twisted it in my hand until she screamed, and as she did, I pushed my mouth against hers, gagging the screams.

I ripped the dress back — nylon, nylon legs knees flesh. And I picked her up out of the chair and ripped those chickenshit panties off and rammed it home.

“Andre,” she said.
“Oh
, Andre!”

I looked over and the guy was watching us and jacking off in his chair.

I took her standing up, but we were all over the room. I was driving it in, and we knocked over chairs, broke lamps. At one time I had her across the coffee table, but I felt the legs giving under both of us, so I lifted her up before we could quite flatten the table to the floor.

“Oh, Andre!”

Then she quivered all over once, then once again, like something on a sacrificial altar. Then, knowing she was weakened and out of her senses, out of her being, I simply layed the whole thing into her like a hook, held it still, hung her there like some crazy sea-fish speared forever. In half a century I had learned a few tricks. She was out of consciousness. Then I leaned back and rammed rammed her, rammed her, had her head bobbing like some crazy puppet, and her ass, and she came again just as I did, and when we came I damn near died. Both of us damn near died.