South of No North

by Charles Bukowski

  I asked him if he’d fucked his nice nurse. He smiled gently. The smile said yes. Then he told me that since the divorce, well, he’d dated one of his patients, and he knew it wasn’t ethical to get that way with patients…

  “No, I think it’s all right, Doctor.”

  “She’s a very intelligent woman. I married her.”

  “All right.”

  “Now I’m happy…but…”

  Then he spread his hands apart and opened his palms upward…

  I told him about my fear of lines. He gave me a standing prescription for Librium.

  Then I got a nest of boils on my ass. I was in agony. They tied me with leather straps, these fellows can do anything they want with you, they gave me a local and strapped my ass. I turned my head and looked at my Doctor and said, “Is there any chance of me changing my mind?”

  There were three faces looking down at me. His and two others. Him to cut. Her to supply cloths. The third to stick needles.

  “You can’t change your mind,” said the doctor, and he rubbed his hands and grinned and began…

  The last time I saw him it had something to do with wax in my ears. I could see his lips moving, I tried to understand, but I couldn’t hear. I could tell by his eyes and his face that it was hard times for him all over again, and I nodded.

  It was warm. I was a bit dizzy and I thought, well, yes, he’s a fine fellow but why doesn’t he let me tell him about my problems, this isn’t fair, I have problems too, and I have to pay him.

  Eventually my doctor realized I was deaf. He got something that looked like a fire extinguisher and jammed it into my ears. Later he showed me huge pieces of wax…it was the wax, he said. And he pointed down into a bucket. It looked, really, like refried beans.

  I got up from the table and paid him and I left. I still couldn’t hear anything. I didn’t feel particularly bad or good and I wondered what ailment I would bring him next, what he would do about it, what he would do about his 17 year old daughter who was in love with another woman and who was going to marry the woman, and it occurred to me that everybody suffered continually, including those who pretended they didn’t. It seemed to me that this was quite a discovery. I looked at the newsboy and I thought, hmmmm, hmmmm, and I looked at the next person to pass and I thought hmmmm, hmmmm, hmmmmmm, and at the traffic signal by the hospital a new black car turned the corner and knocked down a pretty young girl in a blue mini dress, and she was blond and had blue ribbons in her hair, and she sat up in the street in the sun and the scarlet ran from her nose.

  CHRIST ON ROLLERSKATES

  It was a small office on the third floor of an old building not too far from skid row. Joe Mason, president of Rollerworld, Inc., sat behind the worn desk which he rented along with the office. Graffiti were carved on the top and sides: “Born to die.” “Some men buy what other men are hanged for.” “Shit soup.” “I hate love more than I love hate.”

  The vice president, Clifford Underwood, sat in the only other chair. There was one telephone. The office smelled of urine, but the restroom was 45 feet down the hall. There was a window facing the alley, a thick yellow window that let in a dim light. Both men were smoking cigarettes and waiting.

  “When’d you tell ’im?” asked Underwood.

  “9:30,” said Mason.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  They waited. Eight more minutes. They each lit another cigarette. There was a knock.

  “Come in,” said Mason. It was Monster Chonjacki, bearded, six foot six and 392 pounds. Chonjacki smelled. It started to rain. You could hear a freightcar going by under the window. It was really 24 freightcars going north filled with commerce. Chonjacki still smelled. He was the star of the Yellowjackets, one of the best roller skaters on either side of the Mississippi, 25 yards to either side.

  “Sit down,” said Mason.

  “No chair,” said Chonjacki.

  “Make him a chair, Cliff.”

  The vice president slowly got up, gave every indication of a man about to fart, didn’t and walked over and leaned against the rain which beat against the thick yellow window. Chonjacki put both cheeks down, reached and lit up a Pall Mall. No filter. Mason leaned across his desk:

  “You are an ignorant son of a bitch.”

  “Wait a minute, man!”

  “You wanna be a hero, don’t you sonny? You get excited when little girls without any hair on their pussies scream your name? You like the dear old red, white and blue? Ya like vanilla ice cream? You still beat your tiny little pud, asshole?”

  “Listen here, Mason…”

  “Shut up! Three hundred a week! Three hundred a week I been giving you! When I found you in that bar you didn’t have enough for your next drink…you had the d.t.’s and were livin’ on hogs-head soup and cabbage! You couldn’t lace on a skate! I made you, asshole, from nothing, and I can make you right back into nothing! As far as you’re concerned, I’m God. And I’m a God who doesn’t forgive your mother-floppin’ sins either!”

  Mason closed both eyes and leaned back in the swivel. He inhaled his cigarette; a bit of hot ash dropped on his lower lip but he was too mad to give a damn. He just let the ash burn him. When the ash stopped burning he kept his eyes closed and listened to the rain. Ordinarily he liked to listen to the rain. Especially when he was inside somewhere and the rent was paid and some woman wasn’t driving him crazy. But today the rain didn’t help. He not only smelled Chonjacki but he felt him there. Chonjacki was worse than diarrhea. Chonjacki was worse than the crabs. Mason opened his eyes, sat up and looked at him. Christ, what a man had to go through just to stay alive.

  “Baby,” he said softly, “you broke two of Sonny Welborn’s ribs last night. You hear me?”

  “Listen…” Chonjacki started to say.

  “Not one rib. No, not just one rib. Two. Two ribs. Hear me?”

  “But…”

  “Listen, asshole! Two ribs! You hear me? Do you hear me?”

  “I hear you.”

  Mason put out his cigarette, got up from the swivel and walked around to Chonjacki’s chair. You might say Chonjacki looked nice. You might say he was a handsome kid. You’d never say that about Mason. Mason was old. Forty-nine. Almost bald. Round shouldered. Divorced. Four boys. Two of them in jail. It was still raining. It would rain for almost two days and three nights. The Los Angeles River would get excited and pretend to be a river.

  “Stand up!” said Mason.

  Chonjacki stood up. When he did, Mason sunk his left into his gut and when Chonjacki’s head came down he put it right back up there with a right chop. Then he felt a little better. It was like a cup of Ovaltine on a coldass morning in January. He walked around and sat down again. This time he didn’t light a cigarette. He lit his 15 cent cigar. He lit his after-lunch cigar before lunch. That’s how much better he felt. Tension. You couldn’t let that shit build. His former brother-in-law had died of a bleeding ulcer. Just because he hadn’t known how to let it out.

  Chonjacki sat back down. Mason looked at him.

  “This, baby, is a business, not a sport. We don’t believe in hurting people, do I get my point across?”

  Chonjacki just sat there listening to the rain. He wondered if his car would start. He always had trouble getting his car started when it rained. Otherwise it was a good car.

  “I asked you, baby, did I get my point across?”

  “Oh, yeah, yeah…”

  “Two busted ribs. Two of Sonny Welborn’s ribs busted. He’s our best player.”

  “Wait! He plays for the Vultures. Welborn plays for the Vultures. How can he be your best player?”

  “Asshole! We own the Vultures!”

  “You own the Vultures?”

  “Yeah, asshole. And the Angels and the Coyotes and the Cannibals and every other damn team in the league, they’re all our property, all those boys…”

  “Jesus…”

  “No, not Jesus. Jesus doesn’t have anything to do with it! But, wait, you give me an idea, ass
hole.”

  Mason swiveled toward Underwood who was still leaning against the rain. “It’s something to think about,” he said.

  “Uh,” said Underwood.

  “Take your head off your pud, Cliff. Think about it.”

  “About what?”

  “Christ on rollerskates. Countless possibilities.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. We could work in the devil.”

  “That’s good. Yes, the devil.”

  “We might even work in the cross.”

  “The cross? No, that’s too corny.”

  Mason swiveled back toward Chonjacki. Chonjacki was still there. He wasn’t surprised. If a monkey had been sitting there he wouldn’t have been surprised either. Mason had been around too long. But it wasn’t a monkey, it was Chonjacki. He had to talk to Chonjacki. Duty, duty…all for the rent, an occasional piece of ass and a burial in the country. Dogs had fleas, men had troubles.

  “Chonjacki,” he said, “please let me explain something to you. Are you listening? Are you capable of listening?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “We’re a business. We work five night a week. We’re on television. We support families. We pay taxes. We vote. We get tickets from the fucking cops like anybody else. We get toothaches, insomnia, v.d. We’ve got to live through Christmas and New Year’s just like anybody else, you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “We even, some of us, get depressed sometimes. We’re human. I even get depressed. I sometimes feel like crying at night. I sure as hell felt like crying last night when you broke two of Welborn’s ribs…”

  “He was ganging me, Mr. Mason!”

  “Chonjacki, Welborn wouldn’t pull a hair from your grandmother’s left armpit. He reads Socrates, Robert Duncan, and W. H. Auden. He’s been in the league five years and he hasn’t done enough physical damage to bruise a church-going moth…”

  “He was coming at me, he was swinging, he was screaming…”

  “Oh, Christ,” said Mason softly. He put his cigar in the ashtray. “Son, I told you. We’re a family, a big family. We don’t hurt each other. We’ve got ourselves the finest subnormal audience in sports. We’ve drawn the biggest breed of idiots alive and they put that money right into our pockets, get it? We’ve drawn the top-brand idiot right away from professional wrestling, I Love Lucy, and George Putnam. We’re in, and we don’t believe in either malice or violence. Right, Cliff?”

  “Right,” said Underwood.

  “Let’s do him a spot,” said Mason.

  “O.k.,” said Underwood.

  Mason got up from his desk and moved toward Underwood. “You son of a bitch,” he said. “I’ll kill you. Your mother swallows her own farts and has a syphilitic urinary tract.”

  “Your mother eats marinated catshit,” said Underwood.

  He moved away from the window and toward Mason. Mason swung first. Underwood rocked back against the desk.

  Mason got a stranglehold around his neck with his left arm and beat Underwood over the head with his right fist and forearm.

  “Your sister’s tits hang from the bottom of her butt and dangle in the water when she shits,” Mason told Underwood. Underwood reached back with one arm and flipped Mason over his head. Mason rolled up against the wall with a crash. Then he got up, walked over to his desk, sat down in the swivel, picked up his cigar and inhaled. It continued to rain. Underwood went back and leaned against the window.

  “When a man works five nights a week he can’t afford to get injured, understand, Chonjacki?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now look, kid, we got a general rule here—which is…Are you listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “…which is—when anybody in the league injures another player, he’s out of a job, he’s out of the league, in fact, the word goes out—he’s blacklisted at every roller derby in America. Maybe Russia and China and Poland, too. You got that in your head?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now we’re letting you get by with this one because we’ve spent a lot of time and money giving you this buildup. You’re the Mark Spitz of our league, but we can bust you just like they can bust him, if you don’t do exactly what we tell you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But that doesn’t mean lay back. You gotta act violent without being violent, get it? The mirror trick, the rabbit out of the hat, the full ton of bologna. They love to be fooled. They don’t know the truth, hell they don’t even want the truth, it makes them unhappy. We make them happy. We drive new cars and send our kids to college, right?”

  “Right.”

  “O.k., get the hell out of here.”

  Chonjacki rose to leave.

  “And kid…”

  “Yes?”

  “Take a bath once in awhile.”

  “What?”

  “Well, maybe that isn’t it. Do you use enough toilet paper when you wipe your ass?”

  “I don’t know. How much is enough?”

  “Didn’t your mother tell you?”

  “What?”

  “You keep wiping until you can’t see it anymore.”

  Chonjacki just stood there looking at him.

  “All right, you can go now. And please remember everything I’ve told you.”

  Chonjacki left. Underwood walked over and sat down in the vacant chair. He took out his after-lunch 15 cent cigar and lit it. The two men sat there for five minutes without saying anything. Then the phone rang. Mason picked it up. He listened, then said, “Oh, Boy Scout Troop 763? How many? Sure, sure, we’ll let ’em in for half price. Sunday night. We’ll rope off a section. Sure, sure. Oh, it’s all right…” He hung up.

  “Assholes,” he said.

  Underwood didn’t answer. They sat listening to the rain. The smoke from their cigars made interesting designs in the air. They sat and smoked and listened to the rain and watched the designs in the air. The phone rang again and Mason made a face. Underwood got up from his chair, walked over and answered it. It was his turn.

  A SHIPPING CLERK WITH A RED NOSE

  When I first met Randall Harris he was 42 and lived with a grey haired woman, one Margie Thompson. Margie was 45 and not too handsome. I was editing the little magazine Mad Fly at the time and I had come over in an attempt to get some material from Randall.

  Randall was known as an isolationist, a drunk, a crude and bitter man but his poems were raw, raw and honest, simple and savage. He was writing unlike anybody else at the time. He worked as a shipping clerk in an auto parts warehouse.

  I sat across from both Randall and Margie. It was 7:15 p.m. and Harris was already drunk on beer. He set a bottle in front of me. I’d heard of Margie Thompson. She was an old-time communist, a world-saver, a do-gooder. One wondered what she was doing with Randall who cared for nothing and admitted it. “I like to photograph shit,” he told me, “that’s my art.”

  Randall had begun writing at the age of 38. At 42, after three small chapbooks (Death Is a Dirtier Dog Than My Country, My Mother Fucked an Angel, and The Piss-Wild Horses of Madness), he was getting what might be called critical acclaim. But he made nothing on his writing and he said, “I’m nothing but a shipping clerk with the deep blue blues.” He lived in an old front court in Hollywood with Margie, and he was weird, truly. “I just don’t like people,” he said. “You know, Will Rogers once said, ‘I never met a man I didn’t like.’ Me, I never met a man I liked.”

  But Randall had humor, an ability to laugh at pain and at himself. You liked him. He was an ugly man with a large head and a smashed-up face—only the nose seemed to have escaped the general smashup. “I don’t have enough bone in my nose, it’s like rubber,” he explained. His nose was long and very red.

  I had heard stories about Randall. He was given to smashing windows and breaking bottles against the wall. He was one nasty drunk. He also had periods where he wouldn’t answer the door or the telephone. He didn’t own a T.V., only a small radio and he only listened to symphony music—strange for a
guy as crude as he was.

  Randall also had periods when he took the bottom off the telephone and stuffed toilet paper around the bell so it wouldn’t ring. It stayed that way for months. One wondered why he had a phone. His education was sparse but he’d evidently read most of the best writers.

  “Well, fucker,” he said to me, “I guess you wonder what I’m doing with her?” he pointed to Margie.

  I didn’t answer.

  “She’s a good lay,” he said, “and she gives me some of the best sex west of St. Louis.”

  This was the same guy who had written four or five great love poems to a woman called Annie. You wondered how it worked.

  Margie just sat there and grinned. She wrote poetry too but it wasn’t very good. She attended two workshops a week which hardly helped.

  “So you want some poems?” he asked me.

  “Yes, I’d like to look some over.”

  Harris walked over to the closet, opened the door and picked some torn and crushed papers off the floor. He handed them to me. “I wrote these last night.” Then he walked into the kitchen and came out with two more beers. Margie didn’t drink.

  I began to read the poems. They were all powerful. He typed with a very heavy hand and the words seemed chiseled in the paper. The force of his writing always astounded me. He seemed to be saying all the things we should have said but had never thought of saying.

  “I’ll take these poems,” I said.

  “O.k.,” he said. “Drink up.”

  When you came to see Harris, drinking was a must. He smoked one cigarette after another. He dressed in loose brown chino pants two sizes too large and old shirts that were always ripped. He was around six feet and 220 pounds, much of it beerfat. He was round-shouldered, and peered out at you from behind slitted eyelids. We drank a good two hours and a half, the room heavy with smoke. Suddenly Harris stood up and said, “Get the hell out of here, fucker, you disgust me!”