Absence of the Hero (15 page)

If you think getting off one of these stories once or twice a week is an easy way of paying the rent, you're insane. It worries me. “
Listen
,” I asked this woman I used to sleep with, “what am I going to write about when sex dries up inside of me?” “You'll be a writer for the People, you'll be a writer for the betterment of the Masses, that's what you'll be.”

“Listen,” I said, “when are you going home? I knew there was some reason I stopped sleeping with you.”

Right now as I sit here
typing, my girlfriend sits behind me writing her mother: “Dear
Mother: Bukowski wishes to thank you for borning me. He
claims I am the best piece of ass he ever
had. . . .” She laughs, types some more: “He says that he
has given up on the landlady and even the landlady's
daughter and sends you his fond regards. . . .”

We have just finished making love and it was plenty good, but we do have our problems—every time we get into 69, we are interrupted. Today we were working away when somebody knocked on the door. We had to stop. I got up and looked. It was the landlady with two dresses for my seven-year-old daughter who lives in Santa Monica. The time before that we were into 69 and the phone rang. It was somebody telling me that Tiny Tim's son was on TV right then. Another time we were into it, and the door was open, unlocked I mean, and this little black kid from the neighborhood walked in. “What the hell do you want, man?” I asked. “You got any empty bottles?” he asked me.

To me, sex is good and
necessary—like food, sleep, music,
creation
, things you need to live
well with—but it can get humorous. In fact, I was
just going to tell you how humorous it can get
but the phone just rang, a collect call from Florida.
I took it. A girl. She had just moved out
there. “I'm pregnant,” she said. “I don't want the baby.”
“Abort it, then,” I said. “Abortion's only legal in California
and New York; can you lend me some money?” “Hate
to be a dog, kid, but I can't help you.”
As I said, sex is funny. I read in the
paper today that a woman was convicted under a 1868
Florida law and faces twenty years for having an abortion.

Oh, ha ha ha.

I remember this one lady I shacked with for seven years. She had some very good qualities but she had one particularly bad one. I'd be asleep and this hand would come over and grab my penis and almost yank it from my body. Let me tell you, it is not a very good way to be awakened.

After I had finished screaming and pulling her hand off my penis I'd ask the lady, “Good Lord, woman, why did you do that?”

“You were playing with yourself, I caught you, I caught you!”

“You're crazy! It's soft. Listen, you almost ripped that thing from my body. I've only got one of them, you know. . . .”

She got on a streak and did it seven or eight times within two weeks. I learned to sleep on my belly. I was giving her more than enough sex; if I wanted to masturbate in between times, I considered it my right. This lady had another bad habit. She'd walk into the bathroom and scream.

“What's the matter, babe?” I'd ask.

“Look at that tub!” she'd say.

“What's wrong with it?”

“Just look, look, you beast!”

“I'm looking.”

“Can't you see it? Stuck to the edges? You've been playing with yourself in the bathtub!”

“You're crazy.”

“Just look at it! Can't you see it hanging there?”

“Where?” I'd ask.

“There! There!”

“Now look,” I'd ask, “when I put my finger there you tell me if that's what you mean? Is it there?”

“No, further down. To the left.”

“Here?”

“No, just a bit further down.”

“Here?”

“Yes, there. You're touching it now.”

“There's nothing there.”

“Yes, there is. You're touching it, you're touching it!”

She had this bathtub complex. And here we were going through it five times a week. I will admit I am oversexed but I didn't use that bathtub as much as she claimed I did. Many of those little hangings were rough lumps in the enamel.

Then there's this lady I know. She lives in a new apartment with swimming pool. It's a nice swimming pool. But she can't use it now, she tells me. You see, there is this fourteen-year-old girl who is making love to these four or five guys ranging from thirteen to fifteen years old. They make love when her mother is at work. Then they all go out and swim in the pool; they wash off in the pool. “I can't swim in there,” she tells me, “all that come floating around.” The weather has been quite hot, too, going up to 115 degrees. There isn't any lifeguard there but outside of that, it's a very nice pool. I checked the water for sperm but I really couldn't see any. Of course this lady is very afraid of sperm and I suppose there might be some reality in her thinking. She said her best girlfriend once got pregnant by getting into a bathtub and bathing after a male had masturbated in the same tub. You see I am not the only one who uses a bathtub for more than bathing.

I get letters in the mail from people saying that I am surely one of the greatest writers around. I don't get too many of these letters because most people don't know where I live. But I wonder about these letters and these people and wonder if they ever read
all
the things I write, things like I am writing now, for instance. Surely I am vulgar, obscene, and write much too obviously. I would suppose that anybody could yammer on about sex and seem fairly interesting. If I tried to write on ecology or world affairs or the Meaning of Life, I would be a very dull fellow indeed. I am clever and just work in all this dirty stuff. Now, let's see, this piece isn't long enough, let's see if I can get more and more into my dirty mind.

You know, I wonder if Henry Miller is really all that good? I've tried to read his books on cross-country buses but when he gets into those long parts in between sex he is a very dull fellow indeed. On cross-country buses I usually have to put down my Henry Miller and try to find somebody's legs to look up, preferably female. I am a fine one for looking up legs of ladies on cross-country buses . . . city buses, bus stop benches. . . . I must thank myself for buses. I've gotten hotter on and around buses than anywhere else. I often get hotter looking up legs than I do making love to the average woman.

I think I got hotter on a bus
than I ever did in my life. I was a
young man, poor, and not getting much and I was
on this cross-country bus one night alone in my seat
and this young girl got on. Well, you know how
it is, you pretend you are sleeping. They turn the
lights out. I have never been a bold one but
after a while I felt this girl's leg touching mine
ever so slightly. She'll pull away, I thought, but she
didn't pull away. She gradually put on more pressure, so
slowly that it was hardly noticeable. I put on a
little pressure myself. We were both sitting, seats back, and
stretched facing upwards. Our flanks, our legs were pressed together
from ankle to butt. There wasn't a sound. People snored.
I got hotter and hotter. It was a hotness that
flowed through my entire body, never had I been so
heated. The pressure increased. Why doesn't she speak? I thought.
Then we began moving our legs, rubbing them against each
other in the silence and darkness. It was gross and
mad, indecent. It went on and on and on, this
rubbing and twisting . . . for hours. Then the bus would make
a stop, the lights would go on and I would
sit up and rub my eyes as if I had
been asleep. I didn't look at the girl, she didn't
look at me. She got up first and went in
for her hamburger and coffee. I had to wait for
my erection to go down. Then I got up and
went in, sitting far away from the girl. After eating
we re-entered the bus and sat there staring straight forward.
As soon as the lights went out we began again.
Pressing and rubbing. I tell you that it is hard
to imagine the intense hotness I felt. It was all
so deliciously rotten and stupid and fearful, riding along there
rubbing together and not speaking. Then into another café,
sitting apart, then getting back on that bus again. We
never kissed, never spoke.

A more intelligent and less thwarted man
than myself would have gotten acquainted, would have gotten addresses,
phone numbers, names, perhaps would have gotten off with the
girl and gone to a motel with her. But I
was young and had lived a strange and bitter, involuted
life. I couldn't break through. I would break through now
because I've learned certain ways through the years. But you
see, I had all the luck then. For instance, I
remember that ride and that girl much better than many
of the women I have had sexual intercourse with and
have long since forgotten. I remember the intense heat and
I remember her leaving, getting off at her stop somewhere
in the early morning before the sun came up. I
watched her outside as she got her suitcase. I saw
her for the first time,
really
, and she was a
handsome girl, nicely built, nicely dressed, and intelligent-looking.

I rode cross-country buses a great deal when I was young. There was something that I needed,
constant
movement, somehow I
needed
this constant movement to survive what was happening to me inside and what the world was doing to me. I even came up with the theory that I might live on buses forever. But, of course, there were hindrances—lack of income, and I couldn't sleep on buses, and they made me constipated, as well as hot.

I had a similar experience with another girl soon after but I began a conversation which led to kissing and an exchange of information. She said she wanted to study to be a dancer but her parents wouldn't let her. I said, “Ah, that's too bad.” And we rode along, kissing and friendly in the dark, and we ate and talked together and some of the heat vanished. It was not nearly as sneaky and dirty and foolish as the other. The girl even asked me to get off with her at her stop, which was in the middle of a plain in nowhere. It was very dark and empty out there. “Get out here?” I asked.

“Yes, my parents live in a farmhouse here. I want to introduce you. You can live with us.”

“What?” I asked. “Your father might beat me up.”

I wasn't so much afraid of that as the fact that her father might put me to work on his farm and work all the soul out of me. Then I wouldn't be the great and dirty writer that I am now.

I watched her walk away in the moonlight. There was
a certain amount of sadness on my part. But it
did look lonely out there. It's good we did all
that talking and kissing or I might have gotten off
with her, and I'd be raising corn now and killing
hogs. There you go. . . .

Writing stories about sex, humorously or otherwise, has had its effects upon my life. I suffer for my writing. Once in my early
twenties
, having come back home from the bum (and being charged room and board), I was coming down the hill, intoxicated, when my mother leaped out from behind a tree.

“What the hell's wrong, old woman?” I asked.

“It's your father, it's your father!”

“Yeah? Whatsamatta?”

“He found your stories, he read your stories!”

“He shouldn't have gone poking around my suitcase.”

“He's in a rage, your stories infuriated him. Don't go back, he'll kill you, he'll kill you!”

“I'll kick his goddamned ass! I've done it before.”

“Please don't go back. He's thrown all your stories and clothes out on the lawn. I've never seen him so angry!”

“I'm going back and bust him up. Anything I hate, it's these literary critics.”

“No, no, my son! Here, I'll give you ten dollars not to go back. Please take this ten.”

“Okay, I won't go back if you make it a twenty.”

“All right, my son, here's a twenty.”

I put the bill in my front pocket and walked on down the hill. My shirts, pants, stockings, shorts, comb and brush, all the pages of my writings were spread across the front lawn. I was writing about sex then too. The wind had blown the pages of my stories all across the lawn and into the street and across the neighbors' lawns. My suitcase was out there, too, thrown open. I walked about gathering my clothing and things, putting them into the suitcase. I picked up most of the pages of my writing except those in the street and on the neighbors' lawns. I knew that I had plenty more of those good stories in me. My father watched me from behind a drape. I took my suitcase up the hill and waited for a streetcar. I got a place at Third and Flower, a small dirty room full of roaches and life and romance and freedom, and I went outside and sat in a cheap bar and drank for a few hours, then I got a bottle of wine and went back to my room with it and sat in bed with it and drank it in the dark. My father was a fool; how had he ever bred such a brilliant son? . . .