Run With the Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader

by Charles Bukowski

  worse.”

  “I’m sorry, mom.”

  “you know, you were right, your father

  is a terrible man.”

  poor woman. a brutal husband and

  an alcoholic son.

  “excuse me, mom, I’ll be right

  back …”

  the smell had seeped into me,

  my stomach was jumping.

  I got out of the room

  and walked halfway down the stairs,

  sat there

  holding on to the railing,

  breathing the fresh

  air.

  the poor woman.

  I kept breathing the air and

  managed not to

  vomit.

  I got up and walked back up the

  stairs and into the room.

  “he had me committed to a mental

  institution, did you know

  that?”

  “yes. I informed them

  that they had the wrong person

  in there.”

  “you look sick, Henry, are you all

  right?”

  “I am sick today, mom, I’m going

  to come back and see you

  tomorrow.”

  “all right, Henry …”

  I got up, closed the door, then

  ran down the stairs.

  I got outside, to a rose

  garden.

  I let it all go into the rose

  garden.

  poor damned woman …

  the next day I arrived with

  flowers.

  I went up the stairway to the

  door.

  there was a wreath on the

  door.

  I tried the door anyhow.

  it was locked.

  I walked down the stairway

  through the rose garden

  and out to the street

  where my car was

  parked.

  there were two little girls

  about 6 or 7 years old

  walking home from school.

  “pardon me, ladies, but would you

  like some flowers?”

  they just stopped and stared at

  me.

  “here,” I handed the bouquet to the

  taller of the girls, “now, you

  divide these, please give your

  friend half of them.”

  “thank you,” said the taller

  girl, “they are very

  beautiful.”

  “yes, they are,” said the other

  girl, “thank you very

  much.”

  they walked off down the street

  and I got into my car,

  it started, and

  I drove back to my

  place.

  The Death of the Father

  My mother had died a year earlier. A week after my father’s death I stood in his house alone. It was in Arcadia, and the nearest I had come to the house in some time was passing by on the freeway on my way to Santa Anita.

  I was unknown to the neighbors. The funeral was over, and I walked to the sink, poured a glass of water, drank it, then went outside. Not knowing what else to do, I picked up the hose, turned on the water and began watering the shrubbery. Curtains drew back as I stood on the front lawn. Then they began coming out of their houses. A woman walked over from across the street.

  “Are you Henry?” she asked me.

  I told her that I was Henry.

  “We knew your father for years.”

  Then her husband walked over. “We knew your mother too,” he said.

  I bent over and shut off the hose. “Won’t you come in?” I asked. They introduced themselves as Tom and Nellie Miller and we went into the house.

  “You look just like your father.”

  “Yes, so they tell me.”

  We sat and looked at each other.

  “Oh,” said the woman, “he had so many pictures. He must have liked pictures.”

  “Yes, he did, didn’t he?”

  “I just love that painting of the windmill in the sunset.”

  “You can have it.”

  “Oh, can I?”

  The doorbell rang. It was the Gibsons. The Gibsons told me that they also had been neighbors of my father’s for years.

  “You look just like your father,” said Mrs. Gibson.

  “Henry has given us the painting of the windmill.”

  “That’s nice. I love that painting of the blue horse.”

  “You can have it, Mrs. Gibson.”

  “Oh, you don’t mean it?”

  “Yes, it’s all right.”

  The doorbell rang again and another couple came in. I left the door ajar. Soon a single man stuck his head inside. “I’m Doug Hudson. My wife’s at the hairdresser’s.”

  “Come in, Mr. Hudson.”

  Others arrived, mostly in pairs. They began to circulate through the house.

  “Are you going to sell the place?”

  “I think I will.”

  “It’s a lovely neighborhood.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Oh, I just love this frame but I don’t like the picture.”

  “Take the frame.”

  “But what should I do with the picture?”

  “Throw it in the trash.” I looked around. “If anybody sees a picture they like, please take it.”

  They did. Soon the walls were bare.

  “Do you need these chairs?”

  “No, not really.”

  Passersby were coming in from the street, and not even bothering to introduce themselves.

  “How about the sofa?” someone asked in a very loud voice. “Do you want it?”

  “I don’t want the sofa,” I said.

  They took the sofa, then the breakfastnook table and chairs.

  “You have a toaster here somewhere, don’t you, Henry?”

  They took the toaster.

  “You don’t need these dishes, do you?”

  “No.”

  “And the silverware?”

  “No.”

  “How about the coffee pot and the blender?”

  “Take them.”

  One of the lathes opened a cupboard on the back porch. “What about all these preserved fruits? You’ll never be able to eat all these.”

  “All right, everybody, take some. But try to divide them equally.”

  “Oh, I want the strawberries!”

  “Oh, I want the figs!”

  “Oh, I want the marmalade!”

  People kept leaving and returning, bringing new people with them.

  “Hey, here’s a fifth of whiskey in the cupboard! Do you drink, Henry?”

  “Leave the whiskey.”

  The house was getting crowded. The toilet flushed. Somebody knocked a glass from the sink and broke it.

  “You better save this vacuum cleaner, Henry. You can use it for your apartment.”

  “All right, I’ll keep it.”

  “He had some garden tools in the garage. How about the garden tools?”

  “No, I better keep those.”

  “I’ll give you $15 for the garden tools.”

  “O.K.”

  He gave me the $15 and I gave him the key to the garage. Soon you could hear him rolling the lawn mower across the street to his place.

  “You shouldn’t have given him all that equipment for $15, Henry. It was worth much more than that.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “How about the car? It’s four years old.”

  “I think I’ll keep the car.”

  “I’ll give you $50 for it.”

  “I think I’ll keep the car.”

  Somebody rolled up the rug in the front room. After that people began to lose interest. Soon there were only three or four left, then they were all gone. They left me the garden hose, the bed, the refrigerator and stove, and a roll of toilet paper.

  I walked outside and locked the garage door. Tw
o small boys came by on roller skates. They stopped as I was locking the garage doors.

  “See that man?”

  “Yes.”

  “His father died.”

  They skated on. I picked up the hose, turned the faucet on and began to water the roses.

  —HOT WATER MUSIC

  The Genius of the Crowd

  There is enough treachery, hatred,

  violence,

  Absurdity in the average human

  being

  To supply any given army on any given

  day.

  AND The Best At Murder Are Those

  Who Preach Against It.

  AND The Best At Hate Are Those

  Who Preach LOVE

  AND THE BEST AT WAR

  —FINALLY—ARE THOSE WHO

  PREACH

  PEACE

  Those Who Preach GOD

  NEED God

  Those Who Preach PEACE

  Do Not Have Peace.

  THOSE WHO PREACH LOVE

  DO NOT HAVE LOVE

  BEWARE THE PREACHERS

  Beware The Knowers.

  Beware

  Those Who

  Are ALWAYS

  READING

  BOOKS

  Beware Those Who Either Detest

  Poverty Or Are Proud Of It

  BEWARE Those Quick To Praise

  For They Need PRAISE In Return

  BEWARE Those Quick To Censure:

  They Are Afraid Of What They Do

  Not Know

  Beware Those Who Seek Constant

  Crowds; They Are Nothing

  Alone

  Beware

  The Average Man

  The Average Woman

  BEWARE Their Love

  Their Love Is Average, Seeks

  Average

  But There Is Genius In Their Hatred

  There Is Enough Genius In Their

  Hatred To Kill You, To Kill

  Anybody.

  Not Wanting Solitude

  Not Understanding Solitude

  They Will Attempt To Destroy

  Anything

  That Differs

  From Their Own

  Not Being Able

  To Create Art

  They Will Not

  Understand Art

  They Will Consider Their Failure

  As Creators

  Only As A Failure

  Of The World

  Not Being Able To Love Fully

  They Will BELIEVE Your Love

  Incomplete

  AND THEN THEY WILL HATE

  YOU

  And Their Hatred Will Be Perfect

  Like A Shining Diamond

  Like A Knife

  Like A Mountain

  LIKE A TIGER

  LIKE Hemlock

  Their Finest

  ART

  a free 25 page booklet

  dying for a beer dying

  for and of life

  on a windy afternoon in Hollywood

  listening to symphony music from my little red radio

  on the floor.

  a friend said,

  “all ya gotta do is go out on the sidewalk

  and lay down

  somebody will pick you up

  somebody will take care of you.”

  I look out the window at the sidewalk

  I see something walking on the sidewalk

  she wouldn’t lay down there,

  only in special places for special people with special $$$$

  and

  special ways

  while I am dying for a beer on a windy afternoon in

  Hollywood,

  nothing like a beautiful broad dragging it past you on the

  sidewalk

  moving it past your famished window

  she’s dressed in the finest cloth

  she doesn’t care what you say

  how you look what you do

  as long as you do not get in her

  way, and it must be that she doesn’t shit or

  have blood

  she must be a cloud, friend, the way she floats past us.

  I am too sick to lay down

  the sidewalks frighten me

  the whole damned city frightens me,

  what I will become

  what I have become

  frightens me.

  ah, the bravado is gone

  the big run through center is gone

  on a windy afternoon in Hollywood

  my radio cracks and spits its dirty music

  through a floor full of empty beerbottles.

  now I hear a siren

  it comes closer

  the music stops

  the man on the radio says,

  “we will send you a free 25-page booklet:

  FACE THE FACTS ABOUT COLLEGE COSTS.”

  the siren fades into the cardboard mountains

  and I look out the window again as the clasped fist of

  boiling cloud comes down—

  the wind shakes the plants outside

  I wait for evening I wait for night I wait sitting in a chair

  by the window—

  the cook drops in the live

  red-pink salty

  rough-tit crab and

  the game works

  on

  come get me.

  funhouse

  I drive to the beach at night

  in the winter

  and sit and look at the burned-down amusement pier

  wonder why they just let it sit there

  in the water.

  I want it out of there,

  blown-up,

  vanished,

  erased;

  that pier should no longer sit there

  with madmen sleeping inside

  the burned-out guts of the funhouse …

  it’s awful, I say, blow the damn thing up,

  get it out of my eyes,

  that tombstone in the sea.

  the madmen can find other holes

  to crawl into.

  I used to walk that pier when I was 8

  years old.

  john dillinger and le chasseur maudit

  it’s unfortunate, and simply not the style, but I don’t care:

  girls remind me of hair in the sink, girls remind me of intestines

  and bladders and excretory movements; it’s unfortunate also that

  ice-cream bells, babies, engine-valves, plagiostomes, palm trees,

  footsteps in the hall … all excite me with the cold calmness

  of the gravestone; nowhere, perhaps, is there sanctuary except

  in hearing that there were other desperate men:

  Dillinger, Rimbaud, Villon, Babyface Nelson, Seneca, Van Gogh,

  or desperate women: lady wrestlers, nurses, waitresses, whores

  poetesses … alothough,

  I do suppose the breaking out of ice-cubes is important

  or a mouse nosing an empty beercan—

  two hollow emptinesses looking into each other,

  or the nightsea stuck with soiled ships

  that enter the chary web of your brain with their lights,

  with their salty lights

  that touch you and leave you

  for the more solid love of some India;

  or driving great distances without reason

  sleep-drugged through open windows that

  tear and flap your shirt like a frightened bird,

  and always the stoplights, always red,

  nightfire and defeat, defeat …

  scorpions, scraps, fardels:

  x-jobs, x-wives, x-faces, x-lives,

  Beethoven in his grave as dead as a beet;

  red wheel-barrows, yes, perhaps,

  or a letter from Hell signed by the devil

  or two good boys beating the guts out of each other

  in some cheap stadium full of screaming smoke,

  but mostly, I don’t care, sitting here

 
with a mouthful of rotten teeth,

  sitting here reading Herrick and Spenser and

  Marvell and Hopkins and Bronte (Emily, today);

  and listening to the Dvorak Midday Witch

  or Franck’s Le Chasseur Maudit,

  actually I don’t care, and it’s unfortunate:

  I have been getting letters from a young poet

  (very young, it seems) telling me that some day

  I will most surely be recognized as

  one of the world’s great poets. Poet!

  a malversation: today I walked in the sun and streets

  of this city: seeing nothing, learning nothing, being

  nothing, and coming back to my room

  I passed an old woman who smiled a horrible smile;

  she was already dead, and everywhere I remembered wires:

  telephone wires, electric wires, wires for electric faces

  trapped like goldfish in the glass and smiling,

  and the birds were gone, none of the birds wanted wire

  or the smiling of wire

  and I closed my door (at last)

  but through the windows it was the same:

  a horn honked, somebody laughed, a toilet flushed,

  and oddly then

  I thought of all the horses with numbers

  that have gone by in the screaming,

  gone by like Socrates, gone by like Lorca,

  like Chatterton …

  I’d rather imagine our death will not matter too much

  except as a matter of disposal, a problem,

  like dumping the garbage,

  and although I have saved the young poet’s letters,

  I do not believe them

  but like at the

  diseased palm trees

  and the end of the sun,

  I sometimes look.

  rain

  a symphony orchestra.

  there is a thunderstorm,

  they are playing a Wagner overture

  and the people leave their seats under the trees

  and run inside to the pavilion

  the women giggling, the men pretending calm,

  wet cigarettes being thrown away,

  Wagner plays on, and then they are all under the

  pavilion. the birds even come in from the trees

  and enter the pavilion and then it is the Hungarian

  Rhapsody #2 by Lizst, and it still rains, but look,

  one man sits alone in the rain

  listening. the audience notices him. they turn

  and look. the orchestra goes about its

  business. the man sits in the night in the rain,