Absence of the Hero (28 page)

“Tod is busy now, sir.”

Sure enough, Tod was busy. He had some scrabbly-looking creature dressed in rags by a head of hair and was leading him toward the exit with some force and venom.

“
YOU DEMENTED ASSHOLE
!” Tod screamed. “
DON'T EVER COME HERE AGAIN
!
IN FACT, IF I EVEN SEE YOU IN THIS NEIGHBORHOOD I
'
M GOING TO BLOW YOU AWAY
!”

Tod kicked this unblessed individual in the ass, hard, very hard, then reached up into the pulpit where the homosexual stood guard, reached and got out a .45.

“
I
'
LL BLOW YOUR FUCKING MOUTH OFF
!”

The guy blew at the door. I never saw him again.

Tod replaced the .45.

Then he took me into the back of the bookstore. He showed me the movie machines.

“These guys watch this shit and then they
JACK-OFF
right against the viewer! Sometimes I'm busy up front. And I come back here and there's just this
STINK
of
COME
! Nothing stinks worse than come, even shit! Sometimes I come back here and I catch them. Sometimes I don't. Then, you know what I've got? This hardened come! Goddamn, man, it's too much.”

All that broke off. I didn't see Tod, or his wife, for some while. I got the rent up because the checks for the dirty stories started arriving. There were a whole string of publications on Melrose Ave. that went the dirty story route and they had a whole string of sub-publications. I'd get $375 for a suck-fuck story and then they'd write and ask me if they could republish same in some throwaway rag for $75 or $50 and I'd say fine, go ahead. That bit kept me from going back to the factory or trying another run at suicide. Bless all those wonderful bastards.

Anyhow, Tod came back. I had stopped the party nights and was just seriously drinking alone. There he was at the door, along with another beautiful female.

“Ooh, Mr. Chinaski!” she said, “I am so
thrilled
!”

“Me too, baby, what are you drinking?”

Tod, the ladies man, had him another number.

“This is Mercedes,” he told me.

She voluted on in like a snake from heaven.

Over libations, Tod broke it to me.

“There's a vacancy over at our courtyard but nobody knows it yet. This guy is moving out and it's really a deal. He's already moved out but some of his stuff is still in there. I'm in with the landlord and I've got the key. Why don't you come over and look at it?”

Well, I did. I looked. It was a better place, much. And 50 bucks a month cheaper. Plus a glance at Mercedes now and then.

“O.K.” I said to Tod. “One condition. You won't bother me, will you?”

“No way, man. . . . Your place is yours. You want to see me, I'm there. We damn well won't bother you.”

“All right,” I said, thinking that what a man said he meant. Well, not
all
that, but at least
some
of that.

So, there I was in the courtyard of Tod the Ladies Man. . . .

It was all right for a week. He didn't bother me. I got the phone put in, found a new liquor store. There was a place for the typer on the breakfastnook table. With the cheaper rent I had a chance to write the poem. I was tired of writing fuck stories even though I wrote them better than anybody else. What I did was to write a realistic story and just insert a bunch of fuck-suck and yet still go on with the story. With the poem you could write the way you wanted to because nobody paid for poetry.

Then it was a Wednesday night. I had just gotten in from the track, really tired. I drank until 2 or 3
A.M.
each day. But I thrived on all that, it created a good tight line.

I got into the tub and stretched out. I always had the water sizzling hot and seldom used any soap. I had a can of cold beer. I let the cold run inside of me while the hot was on the outside. Then the phone rang.

I was no longer on the steady. I had given my number to maybe 5 that I had fucked once or twice. Dumb fucks. Useless fucks. But one still likes to ring the bell now and then for the sake of some sick glory.

I clambered out, long balls dangling, wondering which of those low numbers was calling.

“Yeah, Chinaski,” I answered.

“Hey, man, this is Tod. What're you doing?”

“I just got in, Tod. My ass is on the floor. Really beat.”

“Come on down. I wanna see ya.”

“Hey, man, when do you think I
write
?”

“Don't give me that shit about
writing
, man. You can write
any
time.”

“You write when it hits you. It's hitting me now.”

“I've got a lot of good stuff down here. Take the night off. I want you to meet my roomy, Laura. I had to dump Mercedes for her. This Laura, you'll cream just glancing at her silhouette. She wants to meet you.”

“All right, Tod, I guess I can spin the ribbon tomorrow night. Be down in ten. . . .” I hung up, thinking, who cares about that eunuch they call Immortality? . . .

There she was, there was Laura. Tod had done it again. Each one a bit better than the other. And intelligent. His women all had a bit of humor, albeit a bit worldly, a touch hard, but not too hard, not so hard that your feelings dropped away in spite of the body. Tod chose a nice blend. But where did he
find
them? All I ever saw were lonely vicious numbers, darkened in spirit because they had not been endowed as well as some others. As one of the creatures dumped upon the earth, I was ugly myself but I rather liked it. But being a woman in America was harder: an ugly woman was looked down upon, where if you looked down upon an ugly man, he was apt to beat the shit out of you and usually did.

Tod had music feeding through the room from a record player. Laura was mincing across the room, smiling a bit, singing words, looking fine. She seemed a bit high. But she worked away without crass flash. Or flash crass. How would Hemingway say this? Not very well, I think. Come join me.

Tod spread the coke upon the glass of the coffee table. The snow was encircled by a bevy of dildoes from his porno store.

He laughed. “You know some of the girls, white girls, come in and they only want black dildoes. So we sell them to them.”

“Big ones?”

“Yeah. Right along with the myth.”

“Is it a myth?”

“I hope so. . . .”

Laura sat down and we nostriled in the snow. I never much cared for it. The non-lasting qualities of it pissed me off. Coke was for chicken shits who wanted to get on and off real fast so they wouldn't get nailed. It was like fucking 8 or 10 times a night but never really coming. Maybe
real
coke was another number but it would never find me.

Tod looked up.

“I deal. Since you're my friend, I can get you down for half-price.”

“You're on.”

“Tod loves you,” said Laura. “I mean in spirit. He's got all your books!”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, man, how about autographing them?”

“What do I get?”

“You can touch Laura's knee. . . .”

“Yeah?”

Tod went into the bedroom and brought
out 6 or 7 paperbacks.
The Night I Fucked a
Chicken with My Mother in the Bed. Your Water-Resistant Pussy
Belches Coors. Limp in Nirvana with Greta Garbo. Suck Me,
Suck You, Suck Suck.
Others of the same ilk. Ink.

“I can't sign this shit. I mean, Shakespeare wrote lousy but he never knew it. I know it when I do it.”

“Let me bribe you. I deal grass. . . .”

Tod threw a packet down, mostly seeds and stems.

I began inscribing.

We went 3 or 4 more coke rounds and then I went back to my place. I sat down to the typer and the keys just looked at me and I looked at them. Fucking Tod, the ladies man. What did I have? He had coke. I got down to my shorts and rolled a joint of seeds and stems. It was funny. The seeds got red hot and dropped out of the paper and fell onto my undershirt, and beneath it, burning me. I ripped them out. I had to drink 5 or 6 cans of beer to come around and walk into the bedroom and sleep. . . . The next morning I had these little red burn-dots all over my chest and gut. . . .

This night I was sitting with one of my numbers, Ursella. Ursella had long red hair which came down to her ass. She was a pill freak. She had a sharp mind but a vicious one. I just liked to look at all that long red hair and drink. We had some sex but it wasn't major. With Ursella I just liked to relax and try to figure out how she had gotten so goddamned
hard
. I
never
wanted to get
that
hard and I thought that maybe by studying it I might avoid it. And not become something that hardly added to the little joy that there was in the world.

She had met Tod Hudson, The Ladies Man of East Hollywood, one night when Tod had come down with Laura. That night I had been very conscious of Tod's perfectly-fitted clothing. I mean, each piece of material gripped to his tiny ass. And his little knit shirts had clung to him. The belt fitted nicely into the notch. My belt dangled out, warped. I had buttons missing from my shirts. Cigarette holes therein. I forgot to comb my hair and I had an untrimmed beard. My pantlegs were either too long or too short. My shorts slipped up into the crotch of my ass and my face was red and puffy from the booze. Tod was like a paper cut-out. Even his farts were probably vanilla-scented.

The phone rang. It was Tod. It was a Thursday night. Laura was a nudie dancer at a nightclub on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights. Like I said, it was a Thursday night. Tod was lonely.

“What are you doing, man?” he asked.

“I'm tired.”

“Why don't you come down here?”

“No, man, I don't want to.”

“Oh, come on, man!”

“No, man. . . .”

“Well,
FUCK YOU
!” he said and hung up.

I walked back on into Ursella.

“That was Tod, wasn't it?”

“Yeah.”

“He wanted to
see
you,
didn't
he?”

“Yeah.”

“You hurt his
feelings
!
”

“Jesus Christ, his woman's working tonight. He can't handle it. . . .”

“When's she work to?”

“Two
A.M.
”

“You hurt his
feelings
! I'm going to
see
him!”

“That's up to you.”

She grabbed her purse, opened the door, slammed it, and was gone.

How about my feelings? I thought.

Then, feeling that was not a rational thought, I went in and poured a tall scotch from the hidden fifth in the broom closet. It was always nice to have an ace. Sometimes without the ace it was over for you.

I finished the drink, then took my shoes off,
and toed on down to Tod's court. I peeked between
the blinds and saw the mound of coke spread between
the dildoes. Ursella was going to get fucked by the
Ladies Man. Frankly, it hurt me. Then I remembered the
boxing matches were on at the Olympic Auditorium. I went
back to my place, had a half-glass of scotch and
beer chaser, and drove out there. . . .

I went down to Tod's court a couple nights later for my discount coke. I also purchased the usual bag of grass that was mostly stems and seeds. Tod was dressed in his usual clean fashion, the usual
tailor
-fit. The guy never had any dirt on him, never a spot. He never needed a shave, there was never a hair sticking out of his nostril. He was Mr. Cool. The only time I had ever seen him pissed was the time that guy had come on his movie machine. He was reading a copy of
New York
. Laura was practicing one of her dances. She danced into the other room to do a change of costume.

Tod looked up. “Hey, man, you should have been with us the other night. We went to see these cartoonists. I phoned you but you weren't in or didn't answer. . . . Those cartoonists are something else. Damn near everybody was there but Crumb. Anyhow, I made some sales. They started snorting. Then the guy's house we were at, I went for a walk with his wife. I brought here over here and fucked her, then brought her back.

“Did you know her very well?”

“Met her about 5 minutes once. . . .”