Absence of the Hero (11 page)

I had been drunk for a week, and then a black girl with big innocent eyes read me one of her poems, and the poem was so bad and she was such a nice thing; I couldn't say anything about how bad the poem had been so I went into the bathroom, took the top off the water closet, and broke it on the floor.

Then I came out and stretched on the floor. I was stretched out in front of a folk singer, listening, squeezing her legs, rubbing her thighs when somebody said, “Hank!” and I looked up and there were 2 cops at the door.

I got up.

“You own this joint, buddy?” they asked.

“I rent it.”

“Well, there's too much noise going on here.”

“All right, we'll keep it down.”

“See that you do. Because if I have to come back, somebody is going to land in the slammer.”

They left. I don't remember much about the rest of the party but when I awakened I was alone in my bedroom, sick, too weak to get out of bed. The sun was well up. I had to get off the merry-go-round. I had been drunk too long.

Then the phone rang.

Oh, shit. I picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Hank?”

“Yeah, yeah. Hank.”

“You in bed?”

“Yeah.”

“Get up. We're going on a boat ride over the beautiful Pacific.”

“Maybe you are. I'm not.”

“Come on. Get out of that bed. We'll be over in half an hour.”

I got up, weaved to the bathroom, and looked at my face in the mirror. I gagged, went into the kitchen, and opened the refrigerator. Not a beer in there. My hand trembled as I closed the refrigerator door. I hadn't eaten in 3 days.

I got into some clothes, sat in a chair, and waited.

An hour went by. Good, I thought, they've changed their minds.

I took off my clothes and got back into bed, pulled the covers to my chin.

I must have slept. The doorbell rang. I got into a robe.

It was Barbie and Dutch.

“Come on, come on! Get some clothes on!”

“Listen, I'm sick, really sick . . . I can hardly walk.”

“Come on, get dressed. It'll do you good.”

“Yeah.”

Then we stopped off to pick up the guy with the motor. We drove down to the pier. While they were making arrangements I walked along the pier looking for a place to get a beer. I didn't see any signs for beer. Fresh fish. A merry-go-round. Hamburgers. But no beer.

I walked back.

I walked down the swinging gangplank that hung over the floating dock. I almost broke my leg leaping to the dock. There we were. three white guys with a beautiful black woman. We climbed into the rowboat. Again I barely made it.

I sat on a plank and said, “Shit! Oh, shit!”

“You'll get a good sunburn,” said Dutch. “You're pale. You never go out in the daylight. This way you get off the booze and you get healthy.”

I shook all over. “But I'm dying.”

They looked at me and laughed.

“Can you swim?”

“Not today. Too weak. I'll go right down.”

Clyde was trying to start the motor. It wouldn't start. He kept pulling the cord.

I might luck it yet, I thought.

Five minutes later the motor started. Dutch sat there bailing out the
water from the bottom of the boat with an empty can. There were dead fish in the boat, a week old.

I staggered over and sat next to Barbie. She held my hand.

“Isn't this nice?”

The water was rough. Dutch sat in the prow and leaped up and down as the boat bucked.

“I can swim!” he yelled at me. “I can swim 5 miles!”

We passed a suckerfish floating close to the top of the water.

“Did you see the suckerfish?” Dutch asked me.

“I saw it.”

We got out beyond the breakwater and headed out to sea. We had the smallest boat out there. There were mostly sailboats and one or two large engine-driven yachts.

I began to heave.

“Stick your head over the side!”

There wasn't much. I hadn't eaten in days. It was just green slime.

“What is it, Hank? Are you seasick or is it the hangover?”

“Hangover . . . yurrrp! ahhh! yoorrrrk!”

“Want us to turn back?”

“No . . . yooorrrrrk! . . . go . . . ahead.”

I was finished.

Clyde kept going out to sea. We were out beyond the sailboats. I kept thinking how nice it would be sitting in a chair in my beat-up place, drinking a stout malt liquor, and listening to Stravinsky or Mahler.

“Head back!” I yelled to Clyde.

“What? I can't hear! I'm over the engine!”

“I said, ‘Head back to shore!'”

“What? I can't hear!”

“He says, ‘Head back to shore!'”

“Oh, we'll sail along the coast for a while. As long as you can see those hotels you know we're not too far out.”

The hotels were 40 floors high.

“Shit!” I said.

“What?”

Finally Dutch and Barbie took turns steering and Clyde came and sat by me.

“Isn't this great?”

“It's stupid. Drop me off and you guys go on with it. I'll wait.”

“But I thought you were the great Bukowski, the guy who bummed across the nation a dozen times?”

“A man gets tired of sticking his head into windmills. . . . ”

Harry's was more like it. “. . . damn fools pulled me out of bed with a week's worth of hangover and put me in a leaky rowboat and drove 7 miles out to sea with a ¼-horsepower engine. . . . ”

“But why did you say I was 5 feet tall in that story
Evergreen
printed? I'm not 5 feet tall. . . .”

“. . . they are the kind of people who get on roller coasters. Essentially they are jaded and need an extreme shock to stimulate. . . .”

“. . . you know what 5 feet tall is?”

“No.”

He stood up.

“Five feet comes right here, bastard.”

Harry put his hand right below his hairline.

“I'm 5 feet 2.”

Harry sat back down. “And I wish all the things went on around here that you say go on around here—all the huge reamings and suckings.”

“They do.”

“And I wear a wig that slips, you said. People are staring at my hair.”

Harry was writing critical articles for the
Free Press
. He explained to me the meaning of “Panic” in literature and how “Panic” created Art. He explained the root of the word “Panic.” The old boy was onto something.

The Panic of Hemingway: the boxing gloves, the bullfights, the hunting trips, the rushing out to save a man while under extreme fire. And Camus'
The Stranger
. Nothing but reverse Panic.

Then Harry got onto Maxwell Bodenheim in New York City. Max was always drunk. He'd be walking along the streets of New York at 3
A.M.
in the morning, nobody around, and then he would turn with his sneer on his lips and he would half spit out, half scream the words: “
FASCIST SWINE
!” How he bummed beers in bars and sold his autographed poems—“beautiful poems!”—for a dollar. And the man who had murdered Max had gotten his photo in the papers with this big grin on, and the caption, “Well, anyway, I murdered a communist!” Only Max hadn't been a communist.

Then Harry got into the story about the 6-foot-2 sailor who had taken so much dick he was jaded on dick and he used to go into the bars looking for guys with large hands and forearms and he'd get these guys to jam the forearm into his ass up to the elbow. Harry talked some heavy shit. How all you had to do in Arabia when you were in a jam was drop your pants and grin. They thought you were a holy man.

Then I heard Dutch's car door open 4 floors down. He never got a lube job. He used his doors as a horn.

“Oh oh. There are the sailors. I'll go down and meet them so they won't bother you.”

“I don't want to be a complete shit. I'll go outside and wave,” said Harry.

Harry waved to Dutch. Dutch waved to Harry.

I took the elevator down.

Then I was in the car and we were driving along.

“Well, how did it go?” I asked.

“Oh, god, it was wonderful,” said Barbie.

“We went way out,” said Clyde. “The waves were 7 feet tall. We turned the motor on full blast and smashed into each wave. It was great.”

“Like going through brick walls,” said Dutch. “We really had a time. We got in an hour late and the guy hollered at us.”

“Fuck him,” said Barbie. “I told him off.”

“What we gonna eat?” asked Clyde. “I gotta see
Hair
at 8:30
P.M.
”

“Did you see
Hair
, Hank?”

“Did I ever tell you about the 6-foot-2 sailor who got so jaded with dick he took guys' arms up his ass, right up to the elbow?”

“That's pretty hard to believe,” said Barbie.

“Well, you know, Catherine the Great died after being fucked by a horse.”

“They say Catherine the Great had the palace guards killed after they fucked her,” said Barbie.

“I wonder if they knew they were going to get killed?” asked Clyde. “Seems to me it would be pretty hard to get a hard-on under those conditions.”

We drove along thinking about how hard it would be to get a hard-on under those conditions.

We stopped at a supermarket and Dutch and Barbie got out.

“Get some beer,” I told them.

They finally made it back and I asked Dutch if he had gotten beer and he said, “Yes, yes,” and then we were up in Clyde's $110-a-month apartment full of all the books, stereo, record player—glass doors on the shower—and I sat at a table and watched Barbie cook while drinking my beer.

“I'm pretending you are in my kitchen, baby.”

She grinned.

The dinner was all right. My first food in 3 days.

Then Clyde had to make
Hair
. But first Dutch bought the boat motor from Clyde for $90.

“I'm buying this for you, Bukowski. Now we can go boating every weekend.”

“Thanks, Dutch.”

We left with
the motor, said goodnight to Clyde, and then drove over
to check out Dutch's bookstore. Nobody ever bought books there.
But there was a place in back, large, where people
read poetry to each other. Friday nights. And on Saturday nights, the folk singers.

So we opened the place and Dutch ran around.

“Shit! Somebody's been in here!”

I sat down with my beer and watched.

“Catfood! Somebody fed the cat! And the coffee's still hot! Shit! Who's been in here?”

I just drank my beer.

Dutch walked to the back.

“Hey! The back door's open! I know I locked the back door!”

Then Barbie found a sleeping bag on the floor.

“Shit, this ain't our sleeping bag.”

Then Dutch walked to the toilet. The window was open. Somebody had crawled through the window. Sure, a chair outside there. And a
City Lights Journal
. Goddamn, somebody had been in there. But he couldn't be a bad guy because he fed the cat.

“You mean only good guys feed cats?” I asked.

“Now, Bukowski, if I place a bar across this toilet window, nobody can get in, right?”

“Wrong.”

A 13-year-old kid walked in through the open back door.

“Hey, man,” he said, “everybody's
spaced
! Where am I?”

“You're at the Golden Spider Bookshop,” said Barbie.

“Man!” said the kid.

He walked in, sat on a chair.

“Jesus,” he said, “where's all the people? Robert said this was a live joint, almost as live as Bukowski's. Where's all the people?”

“It's just on Friday and Saturday nights,” said Dutch. “On Sundays we rest.”

“Oh,” said the kid, “well, shit, I'm on acid. Just half a tablet though.”

Then I heard a cat. It was scratching and meowing.

“Dutch, what's that?”

“It's the cat, coming through the bathroom window.”