The Pleasures of the Damned

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by Charles Bukowski


  looking into the sky

  little insects whirling above my head

  the breathing of white air

  just breathing and waiting.

  life becomes difficult:

  being ignored

  and ignoring.

  everything turns into white air

  the head fills with white air

  and as invisible women sit in rooms

  with successful bright-eyed young men

  conversing brilliantly about everything

  your sex drive

  vanishes and it really

  doesn’t matter.

  you don’t want food

  you don’t want shelter

  you don’t want anything.

  sometimes you die

  sometimes you don’t.

  as I drive past

  the young man on the bus stop bench

  I am comfortable in my automobile

  I have money in two different banks

  I own my own home

  but he reminds me of my young self

  and I want to help him

  but I don’t know what to do.

  today when I drove past again

  he was gone

  I suppose finally the world wasn’t

  pleased with him being there.

  the bench still sits there on the corner

  advertising something.

  for they had things to say

  the canaries were there, and the lemon tree

  and the old woman with warts;

  and I was there, a child

  and I touched the piano keys

  as they talked—

  but not too loudly

  for they had things to say,

  the three of them;

  and I watched them cover the canaries at night

  with flour sacks:

  “so they can sleep, my dear.”

  I played the piano quietly

  one note at a time,

  the canaries under their sacks,

  and there were pepper trees,

  pepper trees brushing the roof like rain

  and hanging outside the windows

  like green rain,

  and they talked, the three of them

  sitting in a warm night’s semicircle,

  and the keys were black and white

  and responded to my fingers

  like the locked-in magic

  of a waiting, grown-up world;

  and now they’re gone, the three of them

  and I am old:

  pirate feet have trod

  the clean-thatched floors

  of my soul,

  and the canaries sing no more.

  silly damned thing anyhow

  we tried to hide it in the house so that the

  neighbors wouldn’t see.

  it was difficult, sometimes we both had to

  be gone at once and when we returned

  there would be excreta and urine all

  about.

  it wouldn’t toilet train

  but it had the bluest eyes you ever

  saw

  and it ate everything we did

  and we often watched tv together.

  one evening we came home and it was

  gone.

  there was blood on the floor,

  there was a trail of blood.

  I followed it outside and into the garden

  and there in the brush it was,

  mutilated.

  there was a sign hung about its severed

  throat:

  “we don’t want things like this in our

  neighborhood.”

  I walked to the garage for the shovel.

  I told my wife, “don’t come out here.”

  then I walked back with the shovel and

  began digging.

  I sensed

  the faces watching me from behind

  drawn blinds.

  they had their neighborhood back,

  a nice quiet neighborhood with green

  lawns, palm trees, circular driveways, children,

  churches, a supermarket, etc.

  I dug into the earth.

  upon reading an interview with a

  best-selling novelist in our metropolitan

  daily newspaper

  he talks like he writes

  and he has a face like a dove, untouched by

  externals.

  a little shiver of horror runs through me as I read

  about

  his comfortable assured success.

  “I am going to write an important novel next year,” he says.

  next year?

  I skip some paragraphs

  but the interview goes on for two and one-half pages

  more.

  it’s like milk spilled on a tablecloth, it’s as soothing as

  talcum powder, it’s the bones of an eaten fish, it’s a damp

  stain on a faded necktie, it’s a gathering hum.

  this man is very fortunate that he is not standing

  in line at a soup kitchen.

  this man has no concept of failure because he is

  paid so well for it.

  I am lying on the bed, reading.

  I drop the paper to the floor.

  then I hear a sound.

  it is a small fly buzzing.

  I watch it flying, circling the room in an irregular

  pattern.

  life at last.

  harbor freeway south

  the dead dogs of nowhere bark

  as you approach another

  traffic accident.

  3 cars

  one standing on its

  grill

  the other 2 laying

  on their sides

  wheels turning slowly.

  3 of them

  at rest:

  strange angles

  in the dark.

  it has just

  happened.

  I can see the still

  bodies

  inside.

  these cars

  scattered like toys

  against the freeway

  center

  divider.

  like spacecraft

  they have landed

  there

  as you

  drive past.

  there’s no

  ambulance yet

  no police

  cars.

  the rain began

  15 minutes

  ago.

  things occur.

  volcanoes are

  1500 times more

  powerful than

  the first a

  bomb.

  the dead dogs of

  nowhere

  those dogs keep

  barking.

  those cars

  there like that.

  obscene.

  a dirty trick.

  it’s like

  somebody dying

  of a heart

  attack

  in a crowded

  elevator

  everybody

  watching.

  I finally

  reach my street

  pull into

  the driveway.

  park.

  get out.

  she meets me

  halfway

  to the door.

  “I don’t know

  what to do,”

  she says, “the

  stove

  went out.”

  schoolyards of forever

  the schoolyard was a horror show: the bullies, the

  freaks

  the beatings up against the wire fence

  our schoolmates watching

  glad that they were not the victim;

  we were beaten well and good

  time after time

  and afterwards were

  followed

  taunted all the way home where often

  more beatings awaited us. />
  in the schoolyard the bullies ruled well,

  and in the restrooms and

  at the water fountains they

  owned and disowned us at will

  but in our own way we held strong

  never begged for mercy

  we took it straight on

  silently

  we were toughened by that horror

  a horror that would later serve us in good stead

  and then strangely

  as we grew stronger and bolder

  the bullies gradually began to back off.

  grammar school

  jr. high

  high school

  we grew up like odd neglected plants

  gathering nourishment where we could

  blossoming in time

  and later when the bullies tried to befriend us

  we turned them away.

  then college

  where under a new regime

  the bullies melted almost entirely away

  we became more and they became much less.

  but there were new bullies now

  the professors

  who had to be taught the hard lessons we’d learned

  we glowed madly

  it was grand and easy

  the coeds dismayed at our gamble

  and our nerve

  but we looked right through them

  to the larger fight waiting out there.

  then when we arrived out there

  it was back up against the fence

  new bullies once again

  deeply entrenched by society

  bosses and the like

  who kept us in our place for de cades to come

  so we had to begin all over again

  in the street

  and in small rooms of madness

  rooms that were always dim at noon

  it lasted and lasted for years like that

  but our former training enabled us to endure

  and after what seemed like

  an eternity

  we finally found the tunnel at the end of the light.

  it was a small enough victory

  no songs of braggadocio because

  we knew we had won very little from very little,

  and that we had fought so hard to be free

  just for the simple sweetness of it.

  but even now we still can see the grade school janitor

  with his broom

  and sleeping face;

  we can still see the little girls with their curls

  their hair so carefully brushed and shining

  in their freshly starched dresses;

  see the faces of the teachers

  fat folded forlorn;

  hear the bell at recess;

  see the grass and the baseball diamond;

  see the volleyball court and its white net;

  feel the sun always up and shining there

  spilling down on us like the juice of a giant tangerine.

  and we did not soon forget

  Herbie Ashcroft

  our principal tormentor

  his fists as hard as rocks

  as we crouched trapped against the steel fence

  as we heard the sounds of automobiles passing but not stopping

  and as the world went about doing what it does

  we asked for no mercy

  and we returned the next day and the next and the next

  to our classes

  the little girls looking so calm and secure

  as they sat upright in their seats

  in that room of blackboards and chalk

  while we hung on grimly to our stubborn disdain

  for all the horror and all the strife

  and waited for something better

  to come along and comfort us

  in that never-to-be-forgotten

  grammar school world.

  in the lobby

  I saw him sitting in a lobby chair

  in the Patrick Hotel

  dreaming of flying fish

  and he said “hello friend

  you’re looking good.

  me, I’m not so well,

  they’ve plucked out my hair

  taken my bowels

  and the color in my eyes

  has gone back into the sea.”

  I sat down and listened

  to him breathe

  his last.

  a bit later the clerk came over

  with his green eyeshade on

  and then the clerk saw what I knew

  but neither of us knew

  what the old man knew.

  the clerk stood there

  almost surprised,

  taken,

  wondering where the old man had gone.

  he began to shake like an ape

  who’d had a banana taken from his hand.

  and then there was a crowd

  and the crowd looked at the old man

  as if he were a freak

  as if there was something wrong with him.

  I got up and walked out of the lobby

  I went outside on the sidewalk

  and I walked along with the rest of them

  bellies, feet, hair, eyes

  everything moving and going

  getting ready to go back to the beginning

  or light a cigar.

  and then somebody stepped on

  the back of my heel

  and I was angry enough to swear.

  sex

  I am driving down Wilton Avenue

  when this girl of about 15

  dressed in tight blue jeans

  that grip her behind like two hands

  steps out in front of my car

  I stop to let her cross the street

  and as I watch her contours waving

  she looks directly through my windshield

  at me

  with purple eyes

  and then blows

  out of her mouth

  the largest pink globe of

  bubble gum

  I have ever seen

  while I am listening to Beethoven

  on the car radio.

  she enters a small grocery store

  and is gone

  and I am left with

  Ludwig.

  a clean, well-lighted place

  the old fart, he used his literary reputation

  to reel them in one at a time,

  each younger than the last.

  he liked to meet them for luncheon and

  wine

  and he’d talk and listen to them

  talk.

  what ever wife or girlfriend he had at the moment

  was made to

  understand that this sort of thing made him

  feel “young again.”

  and when the luncheons became more

  than luncheons

  the young ladies vied to bed down with

  this

  literary

  genius.

  in between, he continued to write,

  and late at night in his favorite bar

  he liked to talk about writing and his amorous

  adventures.

  actually, he was just a drunk

  who liked young ladies,

  writing itself,

  and talking about writing.

  it wasn’t a bad life.

  it was certainly more interesting than

  what most men were

  doing.

  at one time he was probably the

  most famous writer in the

  world.

  many tried to write like he did

  drink like he did

  act like he did

  but he was the original.

  then life began to

  catch up with him.

  he began to age quickly.

  his large bulk began to wither.

  he was growing old

  before his time.

  fin
ally it got to where he couldn’t

  write anymore,

  “it just wouldn’t come”

  and the psychiatrists couldn’t

  do anything for him but only

  made it worse.

  then he took his own cure,

  early one morning,

  alone

  just as his father had done

  many years

  before.

  a writer who can’t write any

  more is dead

  anyhow.

  he knew that.

  he knew that what he was

  killing was already

  dead.

  and then the critics

  and the hangers-on

  and the publicists

  and his heirs

  moved in

  like vultures.

  something for the touts, the nuns,

  the grocery clerks and you…

  we have everything and we have nothing

  and some men do it in churches

  and some men do it by tearing butterflies

  in half

  and some men do it in Palm Springs

  laying it into butterblondes

  with Cadillac souls

  Cadillacs and butterflies

 

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