Hot Water Music

by Charles Bukowski

  When I rang he was on his sixth or seventh beer and I walked to the refrigerator and got one for myself. Then I came out and sat down. He looked really low.

  “What is it, Max?”

  “I just lost one. She left a couple of hours ago.”

  “I don’t know what to say, Max.”

  He looked up from his beer. “Listen, I know you’re not going to believe this, but I haven’t had a piece of ass in four years.”

  I sucked at my beer. “I believe you, Max. In fact, in our society there are a great number of people who go from cradle to grave without any ass at all. They sit in tiny rooms and make objects out of tinfoil which they hang in the window and watch while the sun glints on them, watch them twist in the wind…”

  “Well, I just lost one. And she was right here…”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Well, the doorbell rang and there stood a young girl, blonde, in a white dress with blue shoes, and she said, ‘Are you Max Miklovik?’ I told her I was and she said she had read my shit and would I let her in? I told her I would, really, and I let her in and she walked over to a chair in the corner and sat down. I walked into the kitchen and poured two whiskey and waters, walked back out, gave her one and then walked over and sat on the couch.”

  “A looker?” I asked.

  “A real looker and a good body, that dress didn’t hide a thing. Then she asked me, ‘You ever read Jerzy Kosinski?’ ‘I read his Painted Bird,’ I said. ‘A terrible writer.’ ‘He’s a very good writer,’ she said.”

  Max just sat there, thinking about Kosinski, I guess. “Then what happened?” I asked.

  “There was a spider weaving a web up above her. She gave a little scream. She said, ‘That spider shit on me!’”

  “Did it?”

  “I told her that spiders didn’t shit. She said, ‘Yes, they do.’ And I said, ‘Jerzy Kosinski’s a spider,’ and she said, ‘My name’s Lyn,’ and I said, ‘Hello, Lyn.’”

  “Some conversation.”

  “Some conversation. Then she said, ‘I want to tell you something.’ And I said, ‘Go ahead.’ And she said, ‘I was taught to play the piano at the age of 13 by a real count, I saw his papers, he was legitimate, a real count. Count Rudolph Stauffer.’ ‘Drink up, drink up,’ I told her.”

  “Can I have another beer, Max?”

  “Sure, bring me one.”

  When I came back he continued. “She finished her drink and I went over to get her glass. As I reached for her glass I leaned over to kiss her. She pulled away. ‘Shit, what’s a kiss?’ I asked her. ‘Spiders kiss.’”

  “‘Spiders don’t kiss,’ she said. There was nothing to do but go in and mix two more drinks, a bit stronger. I came out, handed Lyn a drink and sat down on the couch again.”

  “I suppose you both should have been on the couch,” I said.

  “But we weren’t. And she went on talking. ‘The Count,’ she said, ‘had a high forehead, hazel eyes, pink hair, long thin fingers and he always smelled of semen.’”

  “Ah.”

  “She said, ‘He was 65 but he was hot. He taught my mother the piano too. My mother was 35 and I was 13 and he taught us both the piano.’”

  “What were you supposed to say to that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. So I told her, ‘Kosinski can’t write shit.’ And she said, ‘He made love to my mother.’ And I said, ‘Who? Kosinski?’ And she said, ‘No, the Count.’ ‘Did the Count fuck you?’ I asked her. And she said, ‘No, he never fucked me. But he touched me in various places, he made me very excited. And he played marvelous piano.’”

  “How did you respond to all that?”

  “Well, I told her about the time I worked for the Red Cross during the Second World War. We went around and collected bottles of blood. There was a nurse there, black hair, very fat, and after lunch she’d lay on the lawn with her legs opened toward me. She’d stare and stare. After we collected the blood I’d take the bottles to the storage room. It was cold in there and the bottles were kept in little white sacks and sometimes when I handed them to the girl in charge of the storage room a bottle would slip out of its sack and break on the floor. SPOW! Blood and glass everywhere. But the girl always said, ‘That’s all right, don’t worry about it.’ I thought she was very kind and I took to kissing her when I delivered the blood. It was very nice kissing her inside that refrigerator but I never got anywhere with the one with black hair who laid on the grass after lunch and opened her legs at me.”

  “You told her that?”

  “I told her that.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She said, ‘That spider’s coming down! It’s coming down on me!’ ‘O, my god,’ I said and I grabbed the Racing Form and opened it and caught the spider between the third race for maiden three-year-olds at six furlongs and the fourth race which was a five thousand dollar claimer for four-year-olds-and-up at a mile-and-one-sixteenth. I threw the paper down and managed to give Lyn a quick kiss. She didn’t respond.”

  “What did she say about the kiss?”

  “She said that her father was a genius in the computer industry and he was seldom home but somehow he found out about her mother and the Count. He got hold of her one day after school and took her head and beat it against the wall, asking her why she had covered up for her mother. It made her father very angry when he found out the truth. He finally stopped beating her head against the wall and went in and beat her mother’s head against the wall. She said it was horrible and they never saw the Count again.”

  “What did you say to that?”

  “I told her that once I met this woman in a bar and I took her home. When she took off her panties there was so much blood and shit in them that I couldn’t do it. She smelled like an oil well. She gave me a back rub with olive oil and I gave her five dollars, a half bottle of stale port wine, the address of my best friend and I sent her on her way.”

  “Did that really happen?”

  “Yeah. Then this Lyn asked me if I liked T. S. Eliot. I told her I didn’t. Then she said, ‘I like your writing, Max, it’s so ugly and demented that it fascinates me. I was in love with you. I wrote you letter after letter but you never answered.’ ‘Sorry, baby,’ I said. She said, ‘I went crazy. I went to Mexico. I got religion. I wore a black shawl and went singing in the streets at 3 a.m. Nobody bothered me. I had all your books in my suitcase and I drank tequila and lit candles. Then I met this matador and he made me forget you. It lasted several weeks.’”

  “Those guys get plenty of pussy.”

  “I know,” Max said. “Anyhow, she said they finally got tired of each other and I said, ‘Let me be your matador.’ And she said, ‘You’re like every other man. All you want to do is fuck.’ ‘Suck and fuck,’ I told her. I walked over to her. ‘Kiss me,’ I said. ‘Max,’ she said, ‘all you want to do is to play. You don’t care for me.’ ‘I care for me,’ I answered. ‘If you weren’t such a great writer,’ she said, ‘no woman would even talk to you.’ ‘Let’s fuck,’ I said. ‘I want you to marry me,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to marry you,’ I said. She picked up her purse and walked out.”

  “That’s the end of the story?” I asked.

  “That’s it,” said Max, “no ass in four years and I lose that one. Pride, stupidity, whatever.”

  “You’re a good writer, Max, but you’re no ladies’ man.”

  “You think a good ladies’ man could have worked it?”

  “Sure, you see each of her gambits must be parried with the correct response. Each correct response turns the conversation in a new direction until the ladies’ man has the woman backed into a corner or, more properly, flat upon her back.”

  “How can I learn?”

  “There’s no learning. It’s an instinct. You have to know what a woman is really saying when she is saying something else. It can’t be taught.”

  “What did she really say?”

  “She wanted you but you didn’t know how to get to her. You c
ouldn’t build a bridge. You flopped, Max.”

  “But she’d read all my books. She thought I knew something.”

  “Now she knows something.”

  “What?”

  “That you’re a dumb ass, Max.”

  “Am I?”

  “All writers are dumb asses. That’s why they write things down.”

  “What do you mean, ‘That’s why they write things down’?”

  “I mean, they write things down because they don’t understand them.”

  “I write a lot of things down,” said Max sadly.

  “I remember when I was a kid I read this book by Hemingway. A guy climbed into bed with this woman again and again and he couldn’t do it although he loved the woman and she loved him. My god, I thought, what a great book. All these centuries and nobody has written about this aspect of the thing. I thought the guy was just too blissfully dumb-ass to do it. Later on I read in the book that he’d had his genitals shot off in the war. What a let-down.”

  “You think that girl will be back?” Max asked me. “You should have seen that body, that face, those eyes.”

  “She won’t be back,” I said, standing up.

  “But what’ll I do?” asked Max.

  “Just go on writing your pitiful poems and stories and novels…”

  I left him there and walked down the stairway. There was no more I could say to him. It was 7:45 p.m. and I hadn’t had dinner. I got into my car and drove over toward McDonald’s, thinking that I’d probably go for the fried shrimp.

  THE DEATH OF THE FATHER I

  My father’s funeral was a cold hamburger. I sat across from the funeral parlor in Alhambra and had a coffee. It would be a short drive to the race track after it was over. A man with a terrible peeling face, very round glasses with thick lenses, walked in. “Henry,” he said to me, then sat down and ordered a coffee.

  “Hello, Bert.”

  “Your father and I became very good friends. We talked about you a lot.”

  “I didn’t like my old man,” I said.

  “Your father loved you, Henry. He was hoping you’d marry Rita.” Rita was Bert’s daughter. “She’s going with the nicest guy now but he doesn’t excite her. She seems to go for phonies. I don’t understand. But she must like him a little,” he said, brightening up, “because she hides her baby in the closet when he comes by.”

  “Come on, Bert, let’s go.”

  We walked across the street and into the funeral parlor. Somebody was saying what a good man my father had been. I felt like telling them the other part. Then somebody sang. We stood and filed past the coffin. I was last. Maybe I’ll spit on him, I thought.

  My mother was dead. I had buried her the year before, gone to the race track and got laid afterwards. The line moved. Then a woman screamed. “No, no, no! He can’t be dead!” She reached down into the casket, lifted his head and kissed him. Nobody stopped her. Her lips were on his. I took my father by the neck and the woman by the neck and pulled them apart. My father fell back into the casket and the woman was led out, trembling.

  “That was your father’s girlfriend,” said Bert.

  “Not a bad looker,” I said.

  When I walked down the steps after the service the woman was waiting. She ran up to me.

  “You look just like him! You are him!”

  “No,” I said, “he’s dead, and I’m younger and nicer.”

  She put her arms around me and kissed me. I pushed my tongue between her lips. Then I pulled away. “Here, here,” I said in a loud voice, “get ahold of yourself!” She kissed me again and this time I worked my tongue deeper into her mouth. My penis was beginning to get hard. Some men and a woman came up to take her away.

  “No,” she said, “I want to go with him. I must talk to his son!”

  “Now, Maria, please, come with us!”

  “No, no, I must talk to his son!”

  “Do you mind?” a man asked me.

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  Maria got into my car and we drove to my father’s house. I opened the door and we walked in. “Look around,” I said. “You can have any of his stuff you want. I’m going to take a bath. Funerals make me sweat.”

  When I came out Maria was sitting on the edge of my father’s bed.

  “Oh, you’re wearing his robe!”

  “It’s mine now.”

  “He just loved that robe. I gave it to him for Christmas. He was so proud of it. He said he was going to wear it and walk around the block for all the neighbors to see.”

  “Did he?”

  “No.”

  “It is a nice robe. It’s mine now.”

  I took a pack of cigarettes from the night stand.

  “Oh, those are his cigarettes!”

  “Want one?”

  “No.”

  I lit up. “How long did you know him?”

  “About a year.”

  “And you didn’t find out?”

  “Find out what?”

  “That he was an ignorant man. Cruel. Patriotic. Money hungry. A liar. A coward. A cheat.”

  “No.”

  “I’m surprised. You look like an intelligent woman.”

  “I loved your father, Henry.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Forty-three.”

  “You’re well preserved. You have lovely legs.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Sexy legs.”

  I went into the kitchen and got a bottle of wine out of the cupboard, pulled the cork, found two wine glasses and walked back in. I poured her a drink and handed her the glass.

  “Your father spoke of you often.”

  “Yes?”

  “He said you lacked ambition.”

  “He was right.”

  “Really?”

  “My only ambition is not to be anything at all; it seems the most sensible thing.”

  “You’re strange.”

  “No, my father was strange. Let me pour you another drink. This is good wine.”

  “He said you were a drunkard.”

  “You see, I have achieved something.”

  “You look so much like him.”

  “That’s just on the surface. He liked soft-boiled eggs, I like hard. He liked company, I like solitude. He liked to sleep nights, I like to sleep days. He liked dogs, I used to yank their ears and stick matches up their ass. He liked his job, I like to lay around.”

  I reached over and grabbed Maria. I worked her lips open, got my mouth inside of hers and began to suck the air out of her lungs. I spit down her throat and ran my finger up the crack of her ass. We broke apart.

  “He kissed me gently,” said Maria. “He loved me.”

  “Shit,” I said, “my mother was underground only a month before he was sucking your nipples and sharing your toilet paper.”

  “He loved me.”

  “Balls. His fear of being alone led him to your vagina.”

  “He said you were a bitter young man.”

  “Hell, yes. Look what I had for a father.”

  I pulled up her dress and began kissing her legs. I began at the knees. I got to the inner thigh and she opened up for me. I bit her, hard, and she jumped and farted. “Oh, I’m sorry.” “It’s all right,” I said.

  I fixed her another drink, lit one of my dead father’s cigarettes and went into the kitchen for a second bottle of wine. We drank another hour or two. The afternoon was just turning into evening but I was weary. Death was so dull. That was the worst thing about death. It was dull. Once it happened there wasn’t anything you could do. You couldn’t play tennis with it or turn it into a box of bonbons. It was there like a flat tire was there. Death was stupid. I climbed into bed. I heard Maria taking off her shoes, her clothes, then I felt her in bed beside me. Her head was on my chest and I felt my fingers rubbing her behind the ears. Then my penis began to rise. I lifted her head and put my mouth on hers. I put it there gently. Then I took her hand and placed it on my cock.

&nbs
p; I had drunk too much wine. I mounted her. I stroked and stroked. I was always on the verge but I couldn’t arrive. I was giving her a long sweaty neverending horsefuck. The bed jerked and bounced, jiggled and moaned. Maria moaned. I kissed her and kissed her. Her mouth gasped for air. “My god,” she said, “you’re REALLY FUCKING me!” I only wanted to finish but the wine had dulled the mechanism. Finally I rolled off.

  “God,” she said. “God.”

  We began kissing and it started all over again. I mounted once more. This time I felt the climax slowly arriving. “Oh,” I said, “oh, Christ!” I finally made it, got up, went to the bathroom, came out, smoking a cigarette and went back to the bed. She was almost asleep. “My god,” she said, “you really FUCKED me!” We slept.

  In the morning I got up, vomited, brushed my teeth, gargled, and cracked a bottle of beer. Maria awakened and looked at me.

  “Did we fuck?” she asked.

  “Are you serious?”

  “No, I want to know. Did we fuck?”

  “No,” I said, “nothing happened.”

  Maria went into the bathroom and showered. She sang. Then she toweled and came out. She looked at me. “I feel like a woman who’s been fucked.”

  “Nothing happened, Maria.”

  We got dressed and I took her to a cafe around the corner. She had sausage and scrambled eggs, wheat toast, coffee. I had a glass of tomato juice and a bran muffin.

  “I can’t get over it. You look just like him.”

  “Not this morning, Maria, please.”

  While I was watching Maria put scrambled eggs and sausage and wheat toast (spread with raspberry jam) into her mouth I realized that we had missed the burial. We had forgotten to drive to the cemetery to watch the old man dropped into the hole. I had wanted to see that. That was the only good part of the thing. We hadn’t joined the funeral procession, instead we had gone to my father’s house and smoked his cigarettes and drunk his wine.

  Maria put a particularly large mouthful of bright yellow scrambled egg into her mouth and said, “You must have fucked me. I can feel your semen running down my leg.”

  “Oh, that’s just sweat. It’s very hot this morning.”

  I saw her reach down under the table and under her dress. A finger came back up. She sniffed it. “That’s not sweat, that’s semen.”