I found myself flying to this other
state to see her—twice. and
each time noticing
more men’s heads about her
apartment.
“who’s this guy?” I asked her
about one of them.
“oh, that’s Billyboy, the bronco
rider . . .”
I left 2 or 3 days
later . . .
lives continued and 2 or 3 women later
my friend Jack Bahiah came by. we
talked of this and that, then Jack
mentioned that he had flown out to
see the sculptress.
“did she do your head, Jack?”
“yeah, man, she did my head but it
didn’t look like me, man. guess who
it looked like, man?”
“I dunno, man . . .”
“it looked like you . . .”
“Jack, my man, you always had a great line
of shit . . .”
“no shit, man, no shit . . .”
Jack and I drank much wine that night, he’s
pretty good at pouring it down.
“I was holding her in my arms in the bed
and she said, ‘God, I love him, Jack, I
miss him!’ and then she started crying.”
I didn’t hate him at all for fucking her
for sleeping against her when I had slept
against her for 5 or 6 years, and that shows
the durability of humans: we can roust it
out and punch it down and forget it.
I know that she’s still sculpting men’s
heads and can’t stop. she once told me
that Rodin did something similar in a
slightly different way. all right.
I wish her the luck of the clay and
the luck of the men. it’s been a long
night into noon, sometimes, for most
of us.
chili and beans
hang them upside down through the plentiful
night,
burn their children and molest their crops,
cut the throats of their wives,
shoot their dogs, pigs and servants;
whatever you don’t kill, enslave;
your politicians will make you heroes,
courts of international law will rule
your victims guilty;
you will be honored, given medals,
pensions, villas along the river
with your choice of pre-prostitute
women;
the priests will open the doors of God
to you.
the important thing is victory,
it always has been;
you will be ennobled,
you will be promoted as the humble and
gracious conqueror
and you will believe it.
what it means is that the human mind
is not yet ready
so you will claim a victory for the
human spirit.
a cut throat can’t answer.
a dead dog can’t bite.
you’ve won.
proclaim the decency.
go to your grave cleanly—
nobody cares
nobody really cares
didn’t you know?
didn’t you remember?
nobody really cares
even those footsteps
walking toward somewhere
are going nowhere
you may care
but nobody cares—
that’s the first step
toward wisdom
learn it
and nobody has to care
nobody is supposed to care
sexuality and love are flushed away
like shit
nobody cares
learn it
belief in the impossible is the
trap
faith kills
nobody cares—
the suicides, the dead, the gods
or the living
think of green, think of trees, think
of water, think of luck and glory of a
sort
but cut yourself short
quickly and finally
of depending upon the love
or expecting the love of
another
nobody cares.
kuv stuff mox out
gunned down outside the Seaside Motel I stand looki
ng at the live lobster in a fishshop on the Redondo
Beach pier the redhead gone to torture other males
it’s raining again it’s raining again and again som
etimes I think of Bogart and I don’t like Bogart an
y more kuv stuff mox out—when you get a little mon
ey in the bank you can write down anything on the p
age call it Art and pull the chain gunned down in a
fish market the lobsters you see they get caught lik
e we get caught. think of Gertie S. sitting there
telling the boys how to get it up. she was an ocea
n liner I prefer trains pulling boxcars full of gun
s underwear pretzels photos of Mao Tse-tung barbell
s kuv stuff mox out—(write mother) when you flower
my stone notice the fly on your sleeve and think of
a violin hanging in a hockshop. many hockshops hav
e I been gunned down in best one in L.A. they pull
a little curtain around he who wishes to hock and h
e who might pay something. it’s an Art hockshops a
re needed like F. Scott Fitz was needed which makes
us pause this moment: I like to watch live lobster
s they are fire under water hemorrhoids—gross othe
r magic—balls!: they are lobsters but I like to w
atch them when I if I should get rich I will get a
First page of the first 10-page draft.
large glass tank say ten feet by four by four and I
’ll sit and watch them for hours while drinking the
white moselle I am drinking now and when people com
e by I will chase them away like I do now. I mean,
some people say change means growth well certain per
manent acts also prevent decay like flossing fuckin
g fencing fatting belching and bleeding under a hun
dred watt General Electric bulb. novels are nice m
ice are fussy and my lawyer tells me that Abraham L
incoln did some shit that never got into the histor
y books—which makes it the same wall up and down.
never apologize. understand the sorrow of error. b
ut never. don’t apologize to an egg a serpent a lo
ver. gunned down in a green taxi outside Santa Cru
z with an AE-I in my lap grifted in the pickpocket’
s hand slung like a ham. was it Ginsberg did a may
pole dance in Yugoslavia to celebrate May D
ay catch me doing that and you can cut both my back
pockets off. you know I never heard my mother piss
. I’ve heard many women piss but now that I think
of it I can’t ever remember hearing my mother piss.
I am not particular about planets I don’t dislike t
hem I mean like peanut shells in an ashtray that’s
planets. sometimes every 3 or 4 years you see a fa
ce it is usually not the face of a child but that f
ace makes an astonishing day even though the light
is in a certain way or you were driving by in an a
utomobile or you were walking and the face was movi
ng past in a bus or an auto it make that day of the
moment like a brain-jolt something to tell you it’s
always solitary being gunned down while slipping a
stick
of gum out of the wrapper outside Hollywood’s
oldest pool parlor on the west side of Western belo
w the boulevard. the gross is net and the net is g
ross and Gertie S. never showed her knees to the bo
ys and Van Gogh was a lobster a roasted peanut. I
think that “veer” is a splendid word and it’s still
raining gunned down in water waterbags worth of pig
’s snouts cleverly like cigarettes for men and for
women I care enough to proclaim liberty throughout
the land then wonder why nuns are nuns butchers tha
t and fat men remind me of glorious things breathin
g dust through their hems. if I gunned down Bogar
t he’d spit out his cigarette grab his left side in
black and white striped shirt look at me through a
butterfat eye and drop. if meaning is what we do w
e do plenty if meaning isn’t what we do check squar
e #9 it probably falls halfway in between which sus
tains balance and the poverty of the poor and fire
hydrants mistletoe big dogs on big lawns behind iron
fences. Gertie S., of course, was more interested
in the word than the feeling and that’s clearly fai
r because men of feeling (or women) (or) (you see)
(how nice) (I am) usually become creatures of Actio
n who fail (in a sense) and are recorded by the peo
ple of words whose works usually fail not matter. (
how nice). roll and roll and roll it keeps raining
gunned down in a fish market by an Italian with bad
breath who never knew I fed my cat twice a day and
never masturbated while he was in the same room. no
w you know in this year of 1978 I paid $8441.32 to
the government and $2419.84 to the State of Califor
nia because I sat down to this typewriter usually d
runk after the horse races and I don’t even use a ma
jor commercial publisher and I used to live off of
one nickel candy bar a day typewriter in hock I pri
nted my stuff with a pen and it came back. I mean,
fellow dog, men sometimes turn into movies. and som
etimes movies can get to be not so good. pray for
me. I don’t apologize. cleverness is not the out
endurance helps if you can hit the outside spiker
at 5:32 twilight—bang! the Waner brothers used to
bat two three for the Pirates now only 182 people i
n Pittsburgh remember them and that’s exactly proper
. what I didn’t like about that Paris gang was tha
t they made too much of writing but nobody can say
that they didn’t get it down as well as possible wh
en all the heads and eyes seemed to be looking else
where that’s why in spite of all the romanticism at
tached I go along not for the propaganda but for th
e sillier reasons of luck and the way. my lobsters
horses and lobsters and white moselle and there’s a
good woman near me after all of the bad or the seem
ing bad. Rachmaninoff is on now on the radio and I
finish my second bottle of moselle. what a lovely
emotional hound he was my giant black cat stretched
across the rug the rent is paid the rain has stoppe
d there is a stink to my fingers my back hurts gunn
ed down I fall roll those lobsters examine them the
re’s a secret there they hold pyramids drop them al
l the women of the past all the avenues doorknobs bu
ttons falling from shirt I never heard my mother pi
ss and I never met your father I think that we’d ha
ve drunk enough, properly.
a long hot day at the track
out at the track all day burning in the sun
they turned it all upside down, sent in all
the longshots. I only had one winner, a 6
to one shot. it’s on days like that you notice
the hoax is on.
I was in the clubhouse. I usually meet the
maître d’ of Musso’s in the clubhouse. that
day I met my doctor. “where the hell you been?”
he asked me. “nothing but hangovers lately,”
I told him. “you come by anyhow. you don’t
have to be sick. we’ll have lunch. I know a
Thai place, we’ll eat Thai food. you still
writing that porno stuff?” “yeah,” I said,
“it’s the only way I can make it.” “let me
sit with you,” he said, “I’ve got the 6.”
“I’ve got the 6 too,” I said, “that means
we’re fucked.”
we sat down and he told me about his four
wives: the first one didn’t want to copulate.
the second wanted to go skiing at
Aspen all the time. the third one was
crazy. the fourth one was all right, they’d
been together seven years.
the horses came out of the gate. the doctor
just looked at me and talked about his fourth
wife. he was some talking doctor. I used to
get dizzy spells listening to him as I sat on
the edge of the examination table. but he had
brought my child into the world and he had sliced
out my hemorrhoids.
he went on about his fourth wife . . .
the race was 6 furlongs and unless it’s a pack
of slow maidens 6 furlongs are usually run
somewhere between one minute and nine or ten
seconds. the one horse was 24 to one and had
jumped out to a three length lead. the son of
a bitch looked like he had no intention of
stopping.
“look,” I said, “aren’t you going to watch
the race?”
“no,” he said, “I can’t stand to watch, it
upsets me too much.”
he began on his fourth wife again.
“hold it,” I said, “they’re coming down the
stretch!”
the 24 to one had 5 lengths at the wire. it
was over.
“there’s no logic to any of this stuff out here,”
said the doctor.
“I know,” I said, “but the question I want you to
answer is: ‘why are we out here?’”
he opened his wallet and showed me a photo of
his two children. I told him that they were very
nice children and that there was one race left.
“I’m broke,” he said, “I’ve got to go. I’ve lost
$425.”
“all right, goodbye.” we shook hands.
“phone me,” he said, “we’ll eat at the Thai place.”
the last race wasn’t any better: they ran in a
9 to one shot who was stepping up in class and
hadn’t won a race in two years.
I went down the escalator with the losers. it
was a hot Thursday in July. what was my doctor
doing at the racetrack on a Thursday? suppose
I’d had cancer or the clap? Jesus Christ, you
couldn’t trust anybody anymore.
I’d read in the paper in between races
where these kids had busted into this
house and had beaten a 96-year-old woman
to death and had almost beaten to death
her 82-year-old blind sister or daughter,
I didn’t remember. but they had taken a
color television set.
I thought, if they catch me out here
tomorrow I deserve to lose. I’m not
going to be h
ere, I don’t think I
will.
I walked toward my car with the next
day’s Racing Form curled up in my
right hand.
the letters of John Steinbeck
I dreamt I was freezing and when I woke up and found out
I wasn’t freezing I somehow shit the bed.
I had been working on the travel book that night and
hadn’t done much good and they were taking my horses
away, moving them to Del Mar.
I’d have time to be a writer now. I’d wake up in the
morning and there the machine would be looking at me,
it would look like a tarantula; not so—it would look
like a black frog with fifty-one warts.
you figure Camus got it because he let somebody else
drive the car. I don’t like anybody else driving the
car, I don’t even like to drive it myself. well,
after I cleaned the shit off I put on my yellow
walking shorts and drove to the track. I parked and
went in.
the first one I saw was my biographer. I saw him
from the side and ducked. he was cleanly-dressed,
smoked a pipe and had a drink in his hand.
last time over at my place he gave me two books:
Scott and Ernest and The Letters of John Steinbeck.
I read those when I shit. I always read when I shit
and the worse the book the better the bowel movement.
then after the first race my doctor sat down beside me.
he looked like he had just gotten out of surgery and
hadn’t washed very well. he stayed until after the
8th race, talking, drinking beer and eating hot dogs.
then he started in about my liver: “you drink so god
damned much I want to take a look at your liver. you
come see me now.” “all right,” I said, “Tuesday after-
noon.”
I remembered his receptionist. last time I had been there
the toilet had overflowed and she had got down on the floor
on her knees to wipe it up and her dress had pulled up
high above her thighs. I had stood there and watched,
telling her that Man’s two greatest inventions had been
the atom bomb and plumbing.
Storm for the Living and the Dead Page 8
