The Pleasures of the Damned

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The Pleasures of the Damned Page 9

by Charles Bukowski


  everything here shakes

  shivers

  bends

  blasts

  in fierce gamble

  yes, Wagner and the storm intermix with the wine as

  nights like this run up my wrists and up into my head and

  back down into the

  gut

  some men never

  die

  and some men never

  live

  but we’re all alive

  to night.

  no leaders, please

  invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,

  don’t swim in the same slough.

  invent yourself and then reinvent yourself

  and

  stay out of the clutches of mediocrity.

  invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,

  change your tone and shape so often that they can

  never

  categorize you.

  reinvigorate yourself and

  accept what is

  but only on the terms that you have invented

  and reinvented.

  be self-taught.

  and reinvent your life because you must;

  it is your life and

  its history

  and the present

  belong only to

  you.

  song

  Julio came by with his guitar and sang his

  latest song.

  Julio was famous, he wrote songs and also

  published books of little drawings and

  poems.

  they were very

  good.

  Julio sang a song about his latest love

  affair.

  he sang that

  it began so well

  then it went to

  hell.

  those were not the words exactly

  but that was the meaning of the

  words.

  Julio finished

  singing.

  then he said, “I still care for

  her, I can’t get her off my

  mind.”

  “what will I do?” Julio

  asked.

  “drink,” Henry said,

  pouring.

  Julio just looked at his

  glass:

  “I wonder what she’s doing

  now?”

  “probably engaging in oral

  copulation,” Henry

  suggested.

  Julio put his guitar back in

  the case and

  walked to the

  door.

  Henry walked Julio to his car which

  was parked in the

  drive.

  it was a nice moonlit

  night.

  as Julio started his car and

  backed out the drive

  Henry waved him a

  farewell.

  then he went inside

  sat

  down.

  he finished Julio’s untouched

  drink

  then he

  phoned

  her.

  “he was just by,” Henry told

  her, “he’s feeling very

  bad…”

  “you’ll have to excuse me,”

  she said, “but I’m busy right

  now.”

  she hung

  up.

  and Henry poured one of his

  own

  as outside the crickets sang

  their own

  song.

  one for Sherwood Anderson

  sometimes I forget about him and his peculiar

  innocence, almost idiotic, awkward and mawkish,

  he liked walking over bridges and through cornfields.

  to night I think about him, the way the lines were,

  one felt space between his lines, air

  and he told it so the lines remained

  carved there

  something like van Gogh.

  he took his time

  looking about

  sometimes running to save something

  leaving everything to save something,

  then at other times giving it all away.

  he didn’t understand Hemingway’s neon tattoo,

  found Faulkner much too clever.

  he was a midwestern hick

  he took his time.

  he was as far away from Fitzgerald as he was

  from Paris.

  he told stories and left the meaning open

  and sometimes he told meaningless stories

  because that was the way it was.

  he told the same story again and again

  and he never wrote a story that was unreadable.

  and nobody ever talks about his life or

  his death.

  bow wow love

  here things are tough but

  they’re mostly always tough.

  basically I’m just trying to get along

  with the female. when you

  first meet them their eyes

  are all moist with understanding;

  laughter abounds

  like sand fleas. then, Jesus,

  time tinkles on and

  things leak. they

  start BOOMING out DEMANDS.

  and, actually, what they

  demand is basically contrary to whatever

  you are or could be.

  what’s so strange is the sudden

  knowledge that they’ve never

  read anything you’ve written,

  not really read it at

  all. or worse, if they have,

  they’ve come to SAVE

  you! which means mainly

  wanting you to act like everybody

  else and be just like them

  and their friends. meanwhile

  they’ve sucked

  you up and wound you up

  in a million webs, and

  being somewhat of a

  feeling person you can’t

  help but remember their

  good side or the side

  that at first seemed to be good.

  and so you find yourself

  alone in your

  bedroom grabbing your

  gut and saying, o, shit

  no, not again.

  we should have known.

  maybe we wanted cotton

  candy luck. maybe we

  believed. what trash.

  we believed like dogs

  believe.

  (uncollected)

  the day the epileptic spoke

  the other day

  I’m out at the track

  betting Early Bird

  (that’s when you bet at the

  track before it opens)

  I am sitting there having

  a coffee and going over

  the Form

  and this guy slides toward

  me—

  his body is twisted

  his head shakes

  his eyes are out of

  focus

  there is spittle upon his

  lips

  he manages to get close to

  me and asks,

  “pardon me, sir, but could you

  tell me the number of

  Lady of Dawn in the

  first race?”

  “it’s the 7 horse,”

  I tell him.

  “thank you, sir,”

  he says.

  that night

  or the next morning

  really:

  12:04 a.m.

  Los Alamitos Quarter Horse

  Results on radio

  KLAC

  the man told me

  Lady of Dawn

  won the first at

  $79.80

  that was two weeks

  ago

  and I’ve been there

  every racing day since

  and I haven’t seen that

  poor epileptic fellow

  again.
r />   the gods have ways of

  telling you things

  when you think you know

  a lot

  or worse—

  when you think

  you know

  just a

  little.

  when Hugo Wolf went mad—

  Hugo Wolf went mad while eating an onion

  and writing his 253rd song; it was rainy

  April and the worms came out of the ground

  humming Tannhäuser, and he spilled his milk

  with his ink, and his blood fell out to the walls

  and he howled and he roared and he screamed, and

  downstairs

  his landlady said, I knew it, that rotten son

  of a

  bitch has dummied up his brain, he’s jacked-off

  his last piece

  of music and now I’ll never get the rent, and someday

  he’ll be famous

  and they’ll bury him in the rain, but right now

  I wish he’d shut

  up that god damned screaming—for my money he’s

  a silly pansy jackass

  and when they move him out of here, I hope they

  move in a good solid fisherman

  or a hangman

  or a seller of

  biblical tracts.

  in a neighborhood of murder

  murder

  the roaches spit out

  paper clips

  and the helicopter circles and circles

  smelling for blood

  searchlights leering down into our

  bedroom

  5 guys in this court have pistols

  another a

  machete

  we are all murderers and

  alcoholics

  but there are worse in the hotel

  across the street

  they sit in the green and white doorway

  banal and depraved

  waiting to be institutionalized

  here we each have a small green plant

  in the window

  and when we fight with our women at 3 a.m.

  we speak

  softly

  and on each porch

  is a small dish of food

  always eaten by morning

  we presume

  by the

  cats.

  the strangest sight you ever did see—

  I had this room in front on DeLongpre

  and I used to sit for hours

  in the daytime

  looking out the front

  window.

  there were any number of girls who would

  walk by

  swaying;

  it helped my afternoons,

  added something to the beer and the

  cigarettes.

  one day I saw something

  extra.

  I heard the sound of it first.

  “come on, push!” he said.

  there was a long board

  about 2½ feet wide and

  8 feet long;

  nailed to the ends and in the middle

  were roller skates.

  he was pulling in front

  two long ropes attached to the board

  and she was in back

  guiding and also pushing.

  all their possessions were tied to the

  board:

  pots, pans, bed quilts, and so forth

  were roped to the board

  tied down;

  and the skate wheels were grinding.

  he was white, red-necked, a

  southerner—

  thin, slumped, his pants about to

  fall from his

  ass—

  his face pinked by the sun and

  cheap wine,

  and she was black

  and walked upright

  pushing;

  she was simply beautiful

  in turban

  long green earrings

  yellow dress

  from

  neck to

  ankle.

  her face was gloriously

  indifferent.

  “don’t worry!” he shouted, looking back

  at her, “somebody will

  rent us a place!”

  she didn’t answer.

  then they were gone

  although I still heard the

  skate wheels.

  they’re going to make it,

  I thought.

  I’m sure they

  did.

  the 2nd novel

  they’d come around and

  they’d ask

  “you finished your

  2nd novel yet?”

  “no.”

  “whatsamatta? whatsamatta

  that you can’t

  finish it?”

  “hemorrhoids and

  insomnia.”

  “maybe you’ve lost

  it?”

  “lost what?”

  “you know.”

  now when they come

  around I tell them,

  “yeh. I finished

  it. be out in Sept.”

  “you finished it?”

  “yeh.”

  “well, listen, I gotta

  go.”

  even the cat

  here in the courtyard

  won’t come to my door

  anymore.

  it’s nice.

  junk

  sitting in a dark bedroom with 3 junkies,

  female.

  brown paper bags filled with trash are

  everywhere.

  it is one-thirty in the afternoon.

  they talk about mad houses,

  hospitals.

  they are waiting for a fix.

  none of them work.

  it’s relief and food stamps and

  Medi-Cal.

  men are usable objects

  toward the fix.

  it is one-thirty in the afternoon

  and outside small plants grow.

  their children are still in school.

  the females smoke cigarettes

  and suck listlessly on beer and

  tequila

  which I have purchased.

  I sit with them.

  I wait on my fix:

  I am a poetry junkie.

  they pulled Ezra through the streets

  in a wooden cage.

  Blake was sure of God.

  Villon was a mugger.

  Lorca sucked cock.

  T. S. Eliot worked a teller’s cage.

  most poets are swans,

  egrets.

  I sit with 3 junkies

  at one-thirty in the afternoon.

  the smoke pisses upward.

  I wait.

  death is a nothing jumbo.

  one of the females says that she likes my yellow shirt.

  I believe in a simple violence.

  this is

  some of it.

  Mademoiselle from Armentières

  if you gotta have wars

  I suppose World War One was the best.

  really, you know, both sides were much more enthusiastic,

  they really had something to fight for,

  they really thought they had something to fight for,

  it was bloody and wrong but it was Romantic,

  those dirty Germans with babies stuck on the ends of their

  bayonets, and so forth, and

  there were lots of patriotic songs, and the women loved both the soldiers

  and their money.

  the Mexican war and those other wars hardly ever happened.

  and the Civil War, that was just a movie.

  the wars come too fast now

  even the pro-war boys grow weary,

  World War Two did them in,

  and then Korea, that Korea,

  that was dirty, nobody won

  except the black marketeers,

  and BAM!—then came Vietnam
,

  I suppose the historians will have a name and a meaning for it,

  but the young wised up first

  and now the old are getting wise,

  almost everybody’s anti-war,

  no use having a war you can’t win,

  right or wrong.

  hell, I remember when I was a kid it

  was 10 or 15 years after World War One was over,

  we built model planes of Spads and Fokkers,

  we bought Flying Aces magazine at the newsstand

  we knew about Baron Manfred von Richthofen

 

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