way to the crapper
and then you would curse him good, set him straight, so that
he would know enough to either be more careful or to
just lay there and hold it.
there was a large hill in back dense with foliage
you could see it through the barred window
and a few of the guys after being released would not go back to
skid row, they’d just walk up into that green hill where
they lived like animals.
part of it was a campground and some lived out of the
trash cans while others trekked back to skid row for meals but then
returned
and they all sold their blood each week for
wine.
there must have been 18 or 20 of them up there and
they were more or less just as happy as corporate lawyers
stockbrokers or airline
pi lots.
civilization is divided into parts, like an orange, and when you
peel the skin off, pull the sections apart, chew it, the
final result is a mouthful of pale pulp which you can either
swallow or spit
out.
some just swallow it
like the guys down at North Avenue
21.
the wrong way
luxury ocean liners
crossing the water
full of the indolent
and rich
passing from this place to that
with their hearts gone
and their guts empty
like Xmas turkeys
the great blue sky above
wasted
all that water
wasted
all those
fingers, heads, toes, buttocks,
eyes, ears, legs, feet
asleep in
their American Express Card
staterooms.
it’s like a floating tomb
going nowhere.
these are the floating dead.
yet the dead are not ugly
but the near-dead surely
are
most
surely are.
when do they laugh?
what do they think about
love?
what are they
doing
midst all that water?
and where do they seek
to go?
no wonder
Tony phoned and told me that
Jan had left him but that he was all right;
it helped him he said to think about other great men
like D. H. Lawrence
pissed off with life in general but still
milking his cow;
or to think about
T. Dreiser with his masses of copious
notes
painfully constructing his novels which then made
the very walls applaud;
or I think about van Gogh, Tony continued, a madman
who continued to make great paintings as the
village children threw rocks at his
window;
or, there was Harry Crosby and his mistress
in that fancy hotel room, dying together, swallowed by
the Black Sun;
or, take Tchaikovsky, that homo, marrying a
female opera singer and then standing in a freezing
river hoping to catch pneumonia while she went mad;
or Dos Passos, after all those left-wing books,
putting on a suit and a necktie and voting Republican;
or that homo Lorca, shot dead in the road, supposedly
for his politics but really because the mayor of that
town thought his wife had the hots for the poet;
or that other homo Crane, jumping over the rail of the boat
and into the propellor because while drunk he had
promised to marry some woman;
or Dostoyevsky crucified on the roulette wheel with
Christ on his mind;
or Hemingway, getting his ass kicked by Callaghan
(but Hem was correct in maintaining that F.
Scott couldn’t write);
or sometimes, Tony continued, I remember that guy
with syphilis who went mad and just kept rowing in
circles on some lake—a Frenchman—anyhow, he
wrote great short stories…
listen, I asked, you gonna be all
right?
sure, sure, he answered, just thought I’d phone, good
night.
and he hung up
and I hung up, thinking Jesus
Christ no wonder Jan left
him.
a threat to my immortality
she undressed in front of me
keeping her pussy to the front
while I lay in bed with a bottle of
beer.
where’d you get that wart on
your ass? I asked.
that’s no wart, she said,
that’s a mole, a kind of
birthmark.
that thing scares me, I said,
let’s call
it off.
I got out of bed and
walked into the other room and
sat on the rocker
and rocked.
she walked out. now, listen, you
old fart. you’ve got warts and scars and
all kinds of things all over
you. I do believe you’re the ugliest
old man
I’ve ever seen.
forget that, I said, tell me some more
about that
mole on your butt.
she walked into the other room
and got dressed and then ran past me
slammed the door
and was
gone.
and to think,
she’d read all my books of
poetry too.
I just hoped she wouldn’t tell
anybody that
I wasn’t pretty.
my telephone
the telephone has not been kind of late,
of late there have been more and more calls
from people who want to come over and talk
from people who are depressed
from people who are lonely
from people who just don’t know what to do
with their time;
I’m no snob, I try to help, try to suggest something that
might be of assistance
but there have been more calls
more and more calls
and what the callers don’t realize is that
I too have
problems
and even when I don’t
it’s
necessary for me
sometimes
just to be alone and quiet and
doing nothing.
so the other day
after many days of listening to depressed and lonely people
wanting me to assuage their grief,
I was lying there
enjoying looking at the ceiling
when the phone rang
and I picked it up and said,
“listen, what ever your problem is or what ever it is you want,
I can’t help you.”
after a moment of silence
whoever it was hung up
and I felt like a man who had escaped.
I napped then, perhaps an hour, when the phone rang
again and I picked it up:
“what ever your problem is
I can’t help you!”
“is this Mr. Chinaski?”
“yes.”
“this is Helen at your dentist’s
office to remind you
that you have an appointment at
3:30 tomorrow
afternoon.”
I told her
I’d be
there for her.
Carson McCullers
she died of alcoholism
wrapped in a blanket
on a deck chair
on an ocean
steamer.
all her books of
terrified loneliness
all her books about
the cruelty
of loveless love
were all that was left
of her
as the strolling vacationer
discovered her body
notified the captain
and she was quickly dispatched
to somewhere else
on the ship
as everything
continued just
as
she had written it.
Mongolian coasts shining in light
Mongolian coasts shining in light,
I listen to the pulse of the sun,
the tiger is the same to all of us
and high oh
so high on the branch
our oriole
sings.
putrefaction
of late
I’ve had this thought
that this country
has gone backwards
4 or 5 de cades
and that all the
social advancement
the good feeling of
person toward
person
has been washed
away
and replaced by the same
old
bigotries.
we have
more than ever
the selfish wants of power
the disregard for the
weak
the old
the impoverished
the
helpless.
we are replacing want with
war
salvation with
slavery.
we have wasted the
gains
we have become
rapidly
less.
we have our Bomb
it is our fear
our damnation
and our
shame.
now
something so sad
has hold of us
that
the breath
leaves
and we can’t even
cry.
where was Jane?
one of the first actors to play Tarzan was living at the
Motion Picture Home.
he’d been there for years waiting to die.
he spent much of his time
running in and out of the wards
into the cafeteria and out into the yard where he’d yell,
“ME TARZAN!”
he never spoke to anyone or said anything else, it was always just
“ME TARZAN!”
everybody liked him: the old actors, the retired directors,
the ancient script writers, the aged cameramen, the prop men, stunt men, the old
actresses, all of whom were also there
waiting to die; they enjoyed his verve,
his antics, he was harmless and he took them back to the time when they
were still in the business.
then the doctors in authority decided that Tarzan was possibly dangerous
and one day he was shipped off to a mental institution.
he vanished as suddenly as if he’d been eaten by a
lion.
and the other patients were outraged, they instituted legal proceedings
to have him returned at once but
it took some months.
when Tarzan returned he was changed.
he would not leave his room.
he just sat by the window as if he had
forgotten
his old role
and the other patients missed
his antics, his verve, and
they too felt somehow defeated and
diminished.
they complained about the change in Tarzan
doped and drugged in his room
and they knew he would soon die like that
and then he did
and then he was back in that other jungle
(to where we will all someday retire)
unleashing the joyful primal call they could no longer
hear.
there were some small notices in the
newspapers
and the paint continued to chip from the hospital
walls,
many plants died, there was an unfortunate
suicide,
a growing lack of trust and
hope, and
a pervasive sadness:
it wasn’t so much Tarzan’s death the others mourned,
it was the cold, willful attitude of the
young and powerful doctors
despite the wishes of the
helpless old.
and finally they knew the truth
while sitting in their rooms
that it wasn’t only the attitude of the doctors
they had to fear,
and that as silly as all those Tarzan films had been,
and as much as they would miss their own lost
Tarzan,
that all that was much kinder than the final vigil
they would now have to sit and patiently endure
alone.
something about a woman
ah, Merryman,
a fighter on the docks,
killed a man while they were unloading
bananas.
I mean the man he killed
clubbed him first
from behind
with an anchor chain
(something about a woman)
and we all circled around
while
Merryman
did him in
under a hard-on sun,
finally strangling him to death
throwing him into the
ocean.
Merryman leaped to the dock
and walked
away, nobody tried to stop
him.
then we went back to work and
unloaded the rest of the bananas.
nothing was ever said about the murder
between any of us
and I never saw anything about it
in the papers.
although I saw some of the bananas
later in the
markets:
2 lbs. for a quarter
they seemed a
bargain.
(uncollected)
Sunday lunch at the Holy Mission
he got knifed in broad daylight, came up the street
holding his hands over his gut, dripping red
on the pavement.
nobody waiting in line left their place to help him.
he made it to the Mission doorway, collapsed in the
lobby where the desk clerk screamed, “hey, you
son-of-a-bitch, what are you doing?”
then he called an ambulance but the man was dead
when they got there.
the police came and circled the spots of blood
on the pavement
with white chalk
photographed everything
then asked the men waiting for their Sunday meal
if they had seen anything
if they knew anything.
they all said “no” to both.
while the police strutted in their uniforms
the others finally loaded the body into an ambulance.
afterwards the homeless men rolled cigarettes
as they waited for their meal
talking about the action
blowing farts and smoke
enjoying the sun
feeling quite like
celebrities.
trashcan lives
&nbs
p; the wind blows hard to night
and it’s a cold wind
and I think about
the boys on the row.
I hope some of them have a bottle
of red.
it’s when you’re on the row
that you notice that
everything
is owned
and that there are locks on
everything.
this is the way a democracy
works:
you get what you can,
try to keep that
and add to it
if possible.
this is the way a dictatorship
works too
only they either enslave or
destroy their
derelicts.
we just forget
ours.
in either case
it’s a hard
cold
wind.
school days
I’m in bed.
it’s morning
and I hear:
where are your socks?
The Pleasures of the Damned Page 7
