Absence of the Hero (23 page)

“Is that all it comes to?” I asked.

“What?”

“My novels, my stories, my poems—is that all they come to: a hard cock?”

“Baby,” she said, “I don't know which I like better, your writing or your cock. And when either of them stops working, I'll be the first to let you know.”

We went to bed three or four hours later. She had flown thousands of miles to see me. That was flattering, and frightening. I held her close and began playing with her hair. Strangely, my cock hardened, but I still felt spermless. I gave her my one-tenth kisses, just brushing or leaping at the mouth quickly, then pulling away. I yanked at her hair, sucked her ears, bit her on the neck.

Then I moved to her breasts, then her
bellybutton, then I was down there where the hairs started
over the cunt. I pulled at a few strands of
them with my teeth. Then suddenly I gave it the
nose run, starting down at the ass and running it
up and through. She groaned, and I gave her yet
another nose run. Then I let loose the tongue, but
quite subtly. I began far away, circling the whole area
and approaching closer and closer. Then I ran it up
and down, ever so lightly, and I could feel the
tip of my tongue brush her clit. I shoved my
tongue, once, into the cunt proper, then I worked it
on the clit, lightly and continuously. I imagined her to
be a strange woman in the back seat of my
car who was powerless to resist me; she wanted to
but didn't know how. I increased the pressure and began
rhythms against the clit with my tongue—one, two, three, quick,
then stop, then one, two, three, quick, then stop. “
YES,
YES, YES, YES, YES
!” she said. Then she farted.
“I'm sorry,” she said. I hit it again. She farted
again. Then I sucked the clit into my mouth, and
she really began to roll and react. I worked it
up and down, now and then getting the flick of
the tongue behind it, and I almost let it go
out of my mouth several times, then sucked it back
in. Her legs closed about my head, and we bounced
about. I still tried to work the magic, but it
was more difficult. She unwrapped me, and I fell back.

“Listen, baby,” I said, “I don't think I can fuck tonight. The readings, all that drinking. I'm burned out.”

“Hey, daddy,” said Zana, “it's all right. I'll be fine.”

We fell asleep after that, and when we awakened we decided to leave that day, Saturday, instead of Sunday. We lucked it with the airport reservations, and we left a note for Holly: “Thanks for letting us use your tub, basin, springs, garbage disposal, and potty. We leave you a touch of Colombian, one mescaline capsule, and our love. Zana and Chinaski.” We also left behind a couple of steaks and four rolls of toilet paper.

Clyde drove us to the airport, gave me the $500 in cash, mostly 20s and 50s, and I knew what Whitman meant when he said, “To have great poets we must have great audiences.” Although I think it worked better the other way around. I bought a couple of rounds at the airport bar, and then we got on the jet. It stopped off at
Houston
, and they discovered motor trouble. All the passengers waggled around the counter clerk as if he were some inside God of information. It was flight number 72.

Zana and I walked down to the bar, which was eons away. We sat at a corner table, alone, and started on the vodka: vodka and 7-Up for me, vodka tonic for her. I remembered being locked in at O'Hare during a tornado warning. All of us were in the airport six and one-half hours. You've never seen so many drunks, except on a New Year's Eve night. One poor fellow stepped out of the bar and started rocking back and forth, teetering. All eyes were watching him. When he fell, he hit in the worst way possible—backward, his head hitting the cement, bobbing up and down a few times, then settling. I was one of the first to run toward him, but others were swifter. The first to get to him was a kindly old man with a long white beard, which was stained with some yellow substance, and he wore a Chicago White Sox baseball cap. He said, “Hey, buddy, you all right? I'm gonna get you some help!” He found the guy's wallet in his jacket pocket, slipped it down the front of his own shirt and ran off hollering, “Help, help, there's a man hurt back there!” Then he was around a corner and gone.

Zana and I sat there drinking and waiting for them to fix the engine. We got into some kind of argument, although what it was about I wasn't sure. Zana was more sure of what it was about, and finally I just got quiet. She kept talking and we both kept drinking. I'm not sure just how much time went by, but these two people, a man and a woman, came into the bar and walked right up to our table and said, “Are you the two people missing from flight 72?”

“Yes,” I said, “we are.”

“Well, the flight is ready. Please
hurry
!”

I left the money for the drinks, and we ran after the two people. “Oh,” said Zana, “don't run so fast. They're not
really
ready; they just act that way.”

“No, no,” I said, “they're ready, they're ready!”

I pulled her along by the hand. “
HURRY
!
HURRY
!” the two in front of us yelled back. We were drunk; it's harder to run in that
condition.
We ran out onto the airport ramp. All the passengers were waiting. Through their windows, they looked at us with something less than looks of love. The pilot stood at the cabin entrance. “
HURRY
!
HURRY
!” he yelled, and we ran up the steps and into the plane. There were two seats in back. We strapped ourselves in, and they pulled away the loading steps and the plane began moving. Soon we were in the air. We got free drinks, and Zana began crying, the tears rolled and rolled. And that was about all there was to the poetry reading sponsored by the dope dealers. Zana finally stopped crying, and when we landed at her hometown airport we were the last off the plane. As I passed by with Zana, one of the stewardesses asked me: “Do you folks have your problems solved now?” And I told her, “Not by
any
means. We're a
long
way from that.”

Which has since proven to be truer and truer, though we are still friends.

East Hollywood sits in the smog in front of the purple mountains. It begins at Hollywood Boulevard and runs east of Western Avenue down to Alvarado Street, bordered by Santa Monica Boulevard on the south. Here you will find the greatest contagion of bums, drunks, pillheads, prostitutes per square foot, in Southern California.

I lived there. I sat at my typewriter
in my underwear drinking beer at high noon, looking out
the window and masturbating as the young girls walked by.
At the age of 50 I was finished with the
ordinary life. I quit my job and decided to become
a professional writer. I wanted to make money writing because
I liked to drink at night and I didn't like
to get up in the morning. I could write a
good dirty story, a rape, a murder, something that many
of them wanted to do but didn't have the guts
to do, so I wrote it down for them in
a believable way and they creamed the white slime down
their legs and I got paid. I liked words. I
could make them dance like chorus girls or I could
use them like machinegun bullets. So I was hustling, a
lot of people hustle, like your mother probably got paid
for letting dogs screw her in the ass in dirty
alleys, only she didn't tell you about it.

The problem with my writing was that my drinking got in the way. I'd whack-off once or twice, get down 5 or 6 cans of beer, open a pint of scotch and sit at the machine. After typing an hour or 2 I'd just sit at the machine and drink. I'd get scared. Suppose the editors were too fucking dumb to tell good writing from bad? What was an editor anyhow? Just a guy whose mother had taken it in some dirty alley, had gotten creamed in the mouth, ass, and cunt simultaneously by 3 unwashed Arabs. Look at what happened to Céline. They stole his bicycle and spit on his shoes, hung cans of goat piss outside his window.

Well, you drink every day and the nuts come around, the crazies. The first was Rolph, the German. He just knocked. He had this black girl with him, Bonnie. He said, “Hey, what are you doing?” and I said, “I wait upon Christ to return as a Chinaman with a wooden leg.” They came in. She was all right, I could tell by looking. But there was something very odd about him. I took a pull at my beer.

“You've been to the madhouse twice,” I told him.

He laughed and jumped up and down on the floor. Then he stopped. They both sat down. Then Rolph said, “Hey, go get us some beer.”

I got up and walked toward the kitchen. I'd walked maybe 5 or 6 steps when he leaped on my back, grabbed my throat with his left arm, and began beating me with his right fist. He was laughing. He was screaming something that I couldn't make out. His fist bounced off of me as he continued to strike. There was nothing gentle about his attack.

“Rolph,” I said, “your mother is a stinking whore!”

He kept beating me.

“Rolph,” I said, “stop that. I am beginning to get irritated. Here I am going to get you and your girlfriend a beer and you are hanging from me like some dumb prick!”

He kept beating at me. I reached over, got the back of his neck, turned, faced toward the couch, and hurled him through the air. Bonnie leaped aside and Rolph landed on the couch, then fell to the floor. He sat up and looked at me. His eyes became misty.

“You are unfair,” he said, “I was only joking. We came by in good faith.”

I looked at Bonnie. “What are you doing with this dufflebag of a man?”

“I love him,” said Bonnie.

“You love dead shit in a hotdog roll,” I said.

Then I looked at Rolph. “Get up, man, I'm going to finish you off!”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “We know about you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I run a bookstore on Kingsley Drive,
The Marmalade Switch
. We want you to do a poetry reading.”

“How much?”

“Half the take.”

“Half the take and all I can drink.”

“You're on. . . .”

That Friday night at 8
P.M.
I drove up. The place was packed. I had never read before but I was known in town because of my dirty stories and poems, and some rumors that I did wild and astonishing things. Some of the rumors were true; the most interesting ones weren't. The truth was that I was simply a desperate and unhappy man. I was confused, sick, and lonely, yet at the same time I had a very hard head. I was disgusted with continuing situations that only left me the choices to run, fight, or suicide. And the beautiful women only ran with the rich and the famous and soon the beautiful women were no longer beautiful. Everything was some big sack of turkeyshit.

There was no place to park so I parked in the supermarket parking lot across the way. There was no need to lock the car, a 1962 Comet. I was the only one who could start it.

I got out with my sheath of poems on a clipboard. Then I heard screams:

“
THERE
'
S THAT SON OF A BITCH
!
LET
'
S TAKE HIS ASS
!”

I could make out Rolph and
some big fat guy running across the dark street toward
me. The miserable fart-suckers were always thinking about me in
terms of Ernest Hemingway: war. They were upon me. They
grabbed me and tried to wrestle me to the ground.
The fat guy was already sweating. He gave me an
elbow into the gut.

“
YOUR FATHER WAS A FAG
!” he screamed.

I threw my poems down. The fat guy had on glasses and I didn't want to blind him so I cracked him one behind the ear. He blinked, farted, then ran off. I decided to finish Rolph off. I got him over the hood of one of the cars in the parking lot and I squeezed his throat good. His eyes bulged out real nice. Even in the dark I could see his face turning purple. Then some people pulled me off, some of the people who had come for the reading. I picked up my poems and went in to read. It was a nice crowd; they liked dirty poems. After it was over I said, “Thank you. Party at my place now.”

Well, parties, they happened almost every night. Just when I wrote I don't know but I wrote a great deal, most of it not too bad. So this one night I was sitting there in the center of the rug and there were people all about. I didn't know who most of them were but they were everywhere—in the bedroom, in the crapper, in the bathtub, in the kitchen, puking, crapping, eating, drinking, talking, fighting, fucking. I just sat there and drank. The women were horrible, showing their stained and unwashed panties, their tits sagging to their bellybuttons. The men were no better: hyenas, coyotes, suckerfish, bird dogs, would-be writers. I passed away from drink and their dullness. . . .

Then I was awakened. Some guy was shaking me.

“Hank! Hank! It's the cops!”

I looked up. There were 2 cops standing in the doorway. There was also a citizen standing there with a shotgun. I was flat on my stomach in the middle of the rug. I raised my head.

“Yes, gentlemen?”

There was one small cop with a mustache. He was smoking a cigar. He had his cap tilted rakishly on his head.

“You own this joint?”

“No, I rent this joint.”

He looked around the room. He peered at stained and unwashed panties. Then he looked back at me.

“Listen, buddy, I've been
here before! I know you! And I'm tired of coming
here! I want a modicum of silence around here! And
if I have to come back here again tonight I'm gonna run your ass in!”

Then the citizen with the shotgun spoke. He was an elderly fellow with something like a small tomato growing out of the left side of his throat. The tomato dripped down over his collar.

“This guy,” he said, looking at me, “is the cause of everything. Since he moved into this neighborhood two months ago, the decent citizens of this community have not had one full night's sleep! Nothing but partying and cursing and broken glass and music, women of shame! I need my sleep!
I DEMAND MY SLEEP
!”

Then he took his shotgun and pointed it right at me. The cops just stood there. I couldn't believe it. I heard the safety click off.

I raised my right hand, formulated it into a gun, pointed at the citizen, and went:

“Pop.”

A whore laughed. The citizen lowered his gun. The cop with the tilted cap said, “Remember, one more complaint and I'm running your ass in!”

“And any more,” said the citizen with the tomato on his neck, “and I'm coming over without calling anybody and I'm going to settle this thing myself. . . .”

They left and I made minor attempts to keep the noise down. They didn't return that night, the cops or the citizen. There were other parties after that but I never saw any of them again. It was like a little one-night play they had put on for our benefit and then they had moved on elsewhere. . . .

My 2nd reading was down at Venice, which isn't East Hollywood but it might as well be. It was a bar right down by the ocean. I drove down alone, early, took a half-pint of whiskey, and sat down by the water drinking it.

I finished the bottle and then walked up the sand and into the bar. They were waiting. There was a little elevated table with a mike and there were 2 six-packs of beer waiting for me. I walked on through the crowd. . . .

“Bukowski!”

“Hey, Bukowski, baby!”

Then a young man, sweating, in a blue workingman's shirt ran up to me, shook my hand, “Remember me, man? I'm Ronnie. . . . Remember me, man?”

“Ronnie,” I told him, “eat a basketful of dried turds.”

I climbed up there and cracked a can of beer. They cheered as I drained the can. They were assholes, readers of my works. I had created for myself. Now I was a victim. I looked down and noticed all the young girls. Many of them hissed and yelled at me, they called me a male chauvinist pig, but all most of them wanted to do was to fuck me. They wanted to fuck me; they wanted to find the seed of my wizened soul, as if it came out of the end of my cock. What the young girls wanted was to will me into their kind of death, which meant another kind of game: getting in and out of bed with them and seeing who came out with the most.

. . . I read to them and I got away with it and I grabbed the money and announced that there would be a party at a poet's place, nearby. I ran to my car, got in, roared off as well as a 1962 Comet can roar off. Drunk, radio on, I had it down to the floorboards. I drove up and down the dark streets of Venice and they followed, the rat pack. Then I took the Comet, ran it up a driveway, and got the car up on the sidewalk, and it felt good driving on the sidewalk. I got it up to 60 mph. and they followed in the street. Suddenly there seemed to be a house in the way. I sheered hard to the left but hit a fence, taking out part of it. I got back into the street, some of the white sticks of fence riding upon the hood like dead bones out of nowhere. Then they clattered off. I drove to the poet's house, climbed out, and they followed me in. . . .

At
my place I had a way of discouraging people from
visiting me too often but new people always managed to
arrive. Robbie seemed a nice enough fellow, gentle eyes, a
beard; he was intense but he knew how to laugh. He published a chapbook of my poems,
I Don't Feel Good Unless I Am Being Evil
. It
sold some copies and we bought drinks with it. Robbie
wrote poems too, not very good ones, and then he
started bringing his friends around—all males. We drank wine and
beer and talked. But they were political. I'm not sure
what they were. They were anarchists or revolutionaries or something
of that order.

I had no politics. I told them
to go ahead and do whatever they wanted to do.
They were organized, though, and dedicated. They had food and weapons and women stored in the Oregon hills.

Edward, one of the members, said to me, “Look, either you are a part of history or you are a useless segment of society. You are allowing yourself to be used and when you allow yourself to be used you are making it more difficult for the remainder of us who are trying to enact a change for the better.”

“All I want to do,” I said, “is to type things down on a piece of paper.”

“You are being selfish,” said a young man with red hair. “You must join the Brotherhood of Man.”

“I don't like brotherhoods,” I answered. “I feel good when I am alone.”

“But you're drinking with us now.”

“I'd as soon drink with anarchists as anybody else.”

“We are not anarchists,” said a brother called Jack. “Anarchy means political and social confusion, and also the will to destruct everything. We only wish to destroy the evil and the decayed.”