More Notes of a Dirty Old Man: The Uncollected Columns

by Charles Bukowski

  Write if possible.

  Steve”

  I wrote Cosmos right away. I wrote a long letter, and feeling that it might be read before it got to him, I wrote about how a man of his quality and character should never be in jail. I wrote that he should be honored, that what the world called justice was really a pathetic thing.

  I went on and on in the letter, exclaiming what a noble man Cosmos was. I put it on so good that I almost wept.

  It took me a bottle and a half of wine to write the letter, and when I reread it and sealed it up I felt that after reading all that they would let him out immediately . . .

  Cosmos responded quickly:

  “Say, Ank, that was a great letter and I read it over many times. You are right: I don’t belong in prison. However, it appears that only you and I believe this. I will never get out of here. This is it. Finis. I might as well be buried alive. My life was good until now. Now I must pay. Well, all the women are yours, and all the horses, and all that good stuff you drink. Think of me sometimes living in this hole with the rats. Even the walls stink. This is my home now, forever, until . . . and then even when I’m dead they’ll throw me into some special prison for the dead, with dead rats and dead stinking walls . . . Even death will be for nothing.

  Steve”

  I was having some trouble with the IRS, which I cleared up, then a chunk of something ripped open my gas tank as I got into a speed duel with some fool on the freeway, and then the freeway jammed and I had to go over the side, and it took three or four days to get that straightened out. Then I wrote Cosmos again, trying to lend cheer. I even enclosed some francs I had left over from the trip over there. And then other standard little pitiable troubles followed, as they will, and I rather woke up one day to the fact that there had been no response to my last letter to Cosmos. Maybe I had said the wrong thing. Or having done a spot of time myself, I realized that some inmates thought those on the outside were out of touch with reality.

  It wasn’t so. My letter came back with an official stamp upon it in a dark smeared green. Again, forgive my French, but the stamp said something rather like:

  MOVED. ADDRESS UNKNOWN.

  Great Christ, I thought, Cosmos has dug a hole through the side of one of those stinking walls. What a clever fellow. I was proud of him.

  Then I got the facts from Sasoon:

  “. . . I don’t know how, but somehow Steve made bail . . . it was quite some sum . . . Then he jumped bail . . . I don’t know where he is. But, after this, if they ever catch him in France again he’s got life for sure.”

  I rewrote the screenplay, this time calling it the “jazz-soup version.” I mailed a copy to Sasoon. Now he could knock on the same doors all over again. Then I started getting obscene phone calls from teeny-boppers and had to get a new unlisted number. Unlisted numbers last as long as the average marriage: one and one-half years.

  I got back into the poem. Tried some oil paintings but just ended up painting various versions of the human face, which is limited subject matter indeed. The horses ran all right but the horseplayers were a dreary group to take. They never admitted failure and kept right on failing. What was really bothering them was loneliness, and absence of brain cells. Sometimes out there I felt as if I were in a giant mental ward, I mean for the insane, you know, with all the doors open and nobody able to walk out. Including . . .

  Anyhow, one day the phone rang and it was Sasoon.

  “Allo, Hank, it’s Sasoon.”

  “Where you at, Jean?”

  “Venice.”

  “You mean the beach?”

  “Well, not exactly. We’re in the ghetto, we live in the black ghetto, nice place, big yard—”

  “What are you doing there?”

  “Well, we want to shoot a documentary of you, all right?”

  “All right,” I said, feeling sorry for Jean because he had been unable to unload the screenplay.

  “Guess who’s with me?”

  “Barbette?”

  “No, she’s working, they’re shooting something in Algier.”

  “Who, then?”

  There was another voice on the phone:

  “I have no interest in the police, they only have an interest in me.”

  “Cosmos—”

  “Thanks for your letters, my friend. I will always value them.”

  “When you guys coming to see me?”

  “Oh, no, you come see us! In the black ghetto!”

  “Must I?”

  “You must.”

  I got the instructions . . .

  Although it was high noon I parked my car in a supermarket parking lot outside the ghetto and phoned in.

  Sasoon tooled up in another Mexican Special. After exchanges I got in and we moved toward the ghetto.

  “How do you like it?” Sasoon mentioned the car. “It’s fifteen years old and only got 20,000 miles on it. This housewife used to just drive it around for shopping, then her husband died and she had to sell it. I really got lucky! You like it?”

  “Great, Jean, great.”

  The exhaust left a gray-blue haze half a block behind us and the tired crankshaft pushed at the weary piston arms that were just aching to slice off and rocket through the hood.

  “I got a deal,” said Jean Sasoon, sitting very straight and peering proudly over the long frontal hunk of that moving piece of shit. I inhaled a complete large can of Bud in three swallows so as not to have to answer to that.

  We entered the ghetto. The streets were littered with bits of clothing and crap. Stockings. And shoes. But always one shoe. And never its mate. Which gave one the strange feeling that somebody had been amputated.

  “Ah, look,” said Jean, “see that high rise?”

  I saw it.

  “The people got in there and then refused to pay rent. It took two years and the state troops to finally get them out of there. And before they did, those people ripped out all the toilets, all the wiring, all the pipes, everything, they kicked holes in the walls, set rooms on fire . . . Now it’s all boarded up. And people still live there. We got people living under our house, we can hear them talking at night . . . They even have radios down there. Sometimes they have fights, we can hear them cursing . . .”

  “Very interesting,” I said.

  “This is our place,” said Jean, and he began to pull into the driveway into a parking area behind his building. Two young boys, black, about eight or nine years old, sat upon their bicycles and refused to budge. Jean slowly inched his car between them. With an artistic dexterity he pushed the large car between them. Suddenly one of the black boys turned his head and said:

  “Hey, man, watch it!”

  Well, I thought, this is really living, and when the large troops come along our balls will be fried, sliced, diced and skewered. We parked, climbed out, went in.

  There was Cosmos, sitting on the couch, large cheap jug of wine before him, he was trying to light a beer-soaked cigar. He looked up and saw me: “Ank, son of a bitch, what’re you doing in black hell?” He was very drunk.

  Sasoon showed me the place. It had two kitchens. And not much else. Except for a tremendous backyard full of weeds. We came back out and sat with Cosmos.

  “Look, Ank,” he said, “my life is finished. I end here.”

  “He’s going to write me his life story,” said Sasoon, “and I’m going to make a film out of it.”

  “Jean try to make me a writer. I’m no writer. Jean fuck me up good—”

  “How’s that, Steve?”

  “Well, I am ten thousand ahead and then Jean says, ‘Let’s take a break.’ And I say, ‘How?’ and he says, ‘We’ll go see Tom Jones.’ So we go see Tom Jones. And he’s got this big silver cross on and his shirt is open and the silver cross is mixed in with his stinking chest hair and he’s dressed in tight-fitting leather and wearing a dildo and he sings his love songs and the women scream. We watch the whole Tom Jones show and then go back to the wheel and I can’t go shit. Tom Jones has broken my rhyth
m. It’s Jean’s fault: that fuckin’ Tom Jones!”

  Cosmos lifts the entire jug of cheap wine and takes a tremendous hit.

  Sasoon shows me his burglar alarm. It’s a large cardboard box with little holes punched in the side. And in pencil, written in longhand: BURGLAR ALARM and also: TARANTULA! DO NOT OPEN!

  Just think of that. And I had spend so much money on Westec Security.

  We sat and drank awhile. Cosmos just went on and on about Tom Jones.

  “What for, I need Tom Jones?”

  “He cost me ten thousand!”

  “Who is this Tom Jones? He looks like a fuckin’ fool!”

  Sasoon mentioned some of his ideas for the documentary and then I got out of there . . .

  I saw Cosmos at the track the next day. He too had a Mexican Special.

  “Jean has me on an allowance. This is my two-weeks allowance. I’ve got to win. He makes me write. He stands over me in this black shirt while I write. I’m like a slave. I must win!”

  Then he put his head into the racing form. I told him I was going to get a coffee. I didn’t want to spoil his concentration. I knew that he was going to buy a mass of daily-double tickets.

  I met my friend the shrink who ran a nightclub and pushed drugs. He needed three jobs to support his horse habit.

  “You need anything?” he asked. “I’ve got good stuff. Whatever you want, name it.”

  “Nothing right now, thanks.”

  I got down 20 win on a four-to-one short and the race was off. I came in a distant second and went over to where Cosmos was sitting. He showed me all his losing daily-double tickets. It was like seeing an old movie all over again.

  Cosmos lost all day long.

  “Well, there went my allowance,” he said. “Maybe I can get a two-weeks advance.”

  It was very sad. I got him a drink at the bar.

  He lifted his drink.

  “Life is for nothing,” he said.

  I phoned Cosmos that night. Sasoon was off somewhere. There was an answering machine. Cosmos’ voice was on it:

  “I AM NOT IN AND I WILL NEVER BE IN. YOU CAN LEAVE A MESSAGE BUT IT WON’T DO ANY GOOD. WHOEVER YOU ARE, I DON’T WANT TO SEE YOU OR HEAR WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY. IF YOU WANT TO TALK TO SOMEBODY, TALK TO THIS MACHINE. I DON’T WANT TO TALK.”

  I waited for the beep.

  “All right, machine, go suck yourself off—”

  A voice broke in, “Oh, it’s you, Ank—”

  “You all right, Steve?”

  “I drink the wine and feel the pain . . . When I come home there are two black guys in this house. They have a knife. ‘Give us the money,’ they say. ‘What money?’ I ask. “There’s no money. I need your money!’ I have this long stick, I hit them over the head with this stick. They run out of the house and I chase them with the stick! Jean is out somewhere fucking. He thinks that burglar alarm works. It’s no good.”

  “You sure you’re all right?”

  “Yes, I drink the wine and feel the pain . . .”

  I didn’t see Steve at the track for a week or so. Good, I thought, he’s busy writing his life’s story.

  Then I got a call from Jean.

  “You should see this place now! Steve has planted a vegetable garden, built a barbecue and put a fireplace in the house!”

  “A fireplace?”

  “Yeah, we went out one night and stole some bricks.”

  “I’m sorry you can’t get rid of my screenplay, Jean.”

  “Don’t worry. We will. Why don’t you come out? Steve is barbecuing some chicken—”

  “Stolen?”

  “Oh, no, we got a good buy. Come on out . . .”

  It was a Sunday. A terrible day at the track, anyhow. Cristina and I drove out. When we got there everybody was on the red wine and Steve was quite drunk. There were eight or 10 people there. I didn’t know who they were. There were no introductions. But they were all into film and they were all Europeans. Which, of course, beats people being into film and being Americans.

  Steve had burnt the chicken. It was black and hard on the outside and the insides were raw. And the salad was demented. Stacks of paper plates were everywhere but nobody had eaten, although some had tried. Cosmos just sat and smiled. He had on a chef’s hat but there was a smear of dirt halfway up. The eight or 10 people were broken up into groups and didn’t seem to like each other.

  “Look what Steve did!” Jean waved his arm.

  And it was quite a sight. It was obvious that things had been planted. There were paths and designs. It was marvelously done. Poor Steve had busted his ass. And there were chickens and ducks running about the yard.

  “We will have our own heggs,” said Cosmos. Then he gulped off his paper cup of wine.

  “Come and see the fireplace,” said Jean.

  Cristina and I went in with Jean and there it was. Quite professionally done. Cosmos could do all these things. Spoke many languages. And the garden too had been very professional, very artistic. Steve had taken husbandry or whatever the hell you call it at the university.

  We went back in the yard and began on the red wine. Over the fence little black faces watched. Steve threw them pieces of black chicken. Cosmos and Sasoon had settled into the ghetto . . .

  The next time I saw Cosmos I was at the night harness races. He had a big handful of money, fifties and hundreds, and he was with a couple of women and a guy. The guy seemed very intelligent, well balanced. Jean was to tell me later that he was from the French Mafia. They gave Steve money whenever he asked for it. One time Steve had done time rather than reveal something he knew about them, which would have gotten him off.

  Steve rushed off to bet and the Mafia guy said to me, “He’s crazy.”

  “I never thought about it that way,” I told him.

  Steve did hit one exacta that night so he only dropped a couple hundred. I saw the Mafia guy hand him some money for the last race.

  I made $68 and drove back on in.

  The documentary didn’t interest me too much. Jean had picked up a soundman and a cameraman and I got drunk and answered his questions. It was strange when I saw the playbacks, though—I said many odd things, I had no idea that all these things were crawling in my brain. Well, all right.

  But Jean said it would take some weeks. But when you’re drinking, it’s not really work. That’s the way I write. But this is supposedly about my friend the gambler, so let me say he had to go to Vegas with a buddy and they were going to rip off the wheel up there. One of Steve’s main problems was that he won it crooked and then he’d lose it back honest.

  So Cosmos was gone, and then Sasoon had to make a run to Paris and so the house in the ghetto was empty, and an arrangement had been made with a neighbor to feed the chickens and the ducks.

  It was strange to me that I had gotten so involved with these two Frenchmen, and me being of German extraction, even having been born there. But they didn’t feel like the enemy to me. I could never have dealt with Americans the same way, I just didn’t like them. The only good American guys are in the madhouses and jails, and the women are very hostile and obvious. Well, so, anyhow....

  I was at the track and I looked up and there’s Cosmos.

  “Ank,” he said, “I got back, went to the place, and it’s locked tight. I don’t have a key, I don’t know what I did with my key. I got to wait for Jean to get back. What’ll I do?”

  “There’s my place. I have an extra bedroom.”

  “I’ll pay you,” he said, “look . . .”

  He showed me his wallet. It was so full of hundreds that he could hardly fold it to get it into his pocket.

  “No money,” I said.

  “All right,” he said, “we’ll do it this way. Whoever wins at the track each day buys the meals and drinks.”

  “Suppose we both lose?” I asked.

  “Are we that bad?”

  “Some of us are.”

  So I drove out to the track each day with a companion. He was still the worst horsepla
yer I had ever met. He managed to fall upon the worst short-priced horse race after race. And his horses didn’t even run. They just wearily trailed the field each race at prices like 5/2, 6/5, 3 to one, 7 to 2. How he could keep doing this so consistently I had no idea. But he did.

  I took him to various places for dinner.

  Once he complained, “This place is not as nice as some of those other places we’ve been.”

  “Maybe not,” I answered, “but just this once, force the food and drink down somehow . . .”

  Cosmos liked a couple of drinks before and a couple after dinner.

  Afterwards we’d go back to my place and I’d open the wine and we’d sit there and then he’d want to watch the TV. So we drank and watched TV. Since he was the guest I let him select the programs. He liked the situation comedies with laugh tracks, the family, middle-class bits. Total nightmares of stupidity. You could guess each new line before it arrived. Steve laughed often: “Oh, this is very funny!”

  I put it down as a difference in cultures.

  Meanwhile, Cosmos could easily fold his wallet. The hundreds had gotten down to where he could glance at them in a moment.

  “You ought to stick to roulette,” I told him.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Cosmos had said, “money is for nothing.”

  “Yeah,” I had said, laying out my American Express card to the waiter.

  Yes, I know I’m taking too long to tell this, but I want you to get the full flavor, whether it matters or not. It really means something but what it means I’m not sure. What are you doing now, anyhow? Just resting or hiding. Rest and hide within this crap . . .

  Sasoon came back and rescued me, I got the call about noon, it was a Monday and nothing was running.

  “They stole all the ducks and chickens, they broke in here and got all the food and the wine and all our clothes. They took everything but the typewriter. I don’t think they knew what it was.”