Hot Water Music

by Charles Bukowski

  Maria finished eating and we left. She gave me her address and I drove her there. I parked at the curbing. “Care to come in?”

  “Not just now. I’ve got to take care of things. The Estate.”

  Maria leaned over and kissed me. Her eyes were large, stricken, stale. “I know you’re much younger but I could love you,” she said. “I’m sure I could.”

  When she got to her doorway she turned. We both waved. I drove to the nearest liquor store, got a half pint and the day’s Racing Form. I looked forward to a good day at the track. I always did better after a day off.

  THE DEATH OF THE FATHER II

  My mother had died a year earlier. A week after my father’s death I stood in his house alone. It was in Arcadia, and the nearest I had come to the house in some time was passing by on the freeway on my way to Santa Anita.

  I was unknown to the neighbors. The funeral was over, and I walked to the sink, poured a glass of water, drank it, then went outside. Not knowing what else to do, I picked up the hose, turned on the water and began watering the shrubbery. Curtains drew back as I stood on the front lawn. Then they began coming out of their houses. A woman walked over from across the street.

  “Are you Henry?” she asked me.

  I told her that I was Henry.

  “We knew your father for years.”

  Then her husband walked over. “We knew your mother too,” he said.

  I bent over and shut off the hose. “Won’t you come in?” I asked. They introduced themselves as Tom and Nellie Miller and we went into the house.

  “You look just like your father.”

  “Yes, so they tell me.”

  We sat and looked at each other.

  “Oh,” said the woman, “he had so many pictures. He must have liked pictures.”

  “Yes, he did, didn’t he?”

  “I just love that painting of the windmill in the sunset.”

  “You can have it.”

  “Oh, can I?”

  The doorbell rang. It was the Gibsons. The Gibsons told me that they also had been neighbors of my father’s for years.

  “You look just like your father,” said Mrs. Gibson.

  “Henry has given us the painting of the windmill.”

  “That’s nice. I love that painting of the blue horse.”

  “You can have it, Mrs. Gibson.”

  “Oh, you don’t mean it?”

  “Yes, it’s all right.”

  The doorbell rang again and another couple came in. I left the door ajar. Soon a single man stuck his head inside. “I’m Doug Hudson. My wife’s at the hairdresser’s.”

  “Come in, Mr. Hudson.”

  Others arrived, mostly in pairs. They began to circulate through the house.

  “Are you going to sell the place?”

  “I think I will.”

  “It’s a lovely neighborhood.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Oh, I just love this frame but I don’t like the picture.”

  “Take the frame.”

  “But what should I do with the picture?”

  “Throw it in the trash.” I looked around. “If anybody sees a picture they like, please take it.”

  They did. Soon the walls were bare.

  “Do you need these chairs?”

  “No, not really.”

  Passersby were coming in from the street, and not even bothering to introduce themselves.

  “How about the sofa?” someone asked in a very loud voice. “Do you want it?”

  “I don’t want the sofa,” I said.

  They took the sofa, then the breakfast nook table and chairs.

  “You have a toaster here somewhere, don’t you, Henry?”

  They took the toaster.

  “You don’t need these dishes, do you?”

  “No.”

  “And the silverware?”

  “No.”

  “How about the coffee pot and the blender?”

  “Take them.”

  One of the ladies opened a cupboard on the back porch. “What about all these preserved fruits? You’ll never be able to eat all these.”

  “All right, everybody, take some. But try to divide them equally.”

  “Oh, I want the strawberries!”

  “Oh, I want the figs!”

  “Oh, I want the marmalade!”

  People kept leaving and returning, bringing new people with them.

  “Hey, here’s a fifth of whiskey in the cupboard! Do you drink, Henry?”

  “Leave the whiskey.”

  The house was getting crowded. The toilet flushed. Somebody knocked a glass from the sink and broke it.

  “You better save this vacuum cleaner, Henry. You can use it for your apartment.”

  “All right, I’ll keep it.”

  “He had some garden tools in the garage. How about the garden tools?”

  “No, I better keep those.”

  “I’ll give you $15 for the garden tools.”

  “O.K.”

  He gave me the $15 and I gave him the key to the garage. Soon you could hear him rolling the lawn mower across the street to his place.

  “You shouldn’t have given him all that equipment for $15, Henry. It was worth much more than that.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “How about the car? It’s four years old.”

  “I think I’ll keep the car.”

  “I’ll give you $50 for it.”

  “I think I’ll keep the car.”

  Somebody rolled up the rug in the front room. After that people began to lose interest. Soon there were only three or four left, then they were all gone. They left me the garden hose, the bed, the refrigerator and stove, and a roll of toilet paper.

  I walked outside and locked the garage door. Two small boys came by on roller skates. They stopped as I was locking the garage doors.

  “See that man?”

  “Yes.”

  “His father died.”

  They skated on. I picked up the hose, turned the faucet on and began to water the roses.

  HARRY ANN LANDERS

  The phone rang. It was the writer, Paul. Paul was depressed. Paul was in Northridge.

  “Harry?”

  “Yeh?”

  “Nancy and I broke up.”

  “Yeh?”

  “Listen, I want to get back with her. Can you help me? Unless you want to get back with her?”

  Harry smiled into the telephone. “I don’t want to get back with her, Paul.”

  “I don’t know what went wrong. She started on the money thing. She started hollering about money. She waved phone bills in my face. Listen, I been hustling. I got this act. Barney and I, we’re both dressed in penguin suits…he says one line of a poem, I say the other…four microphones…we got this jazz group playing in back of us…”

  “Phone bills, Paul, can be distracting,” said Harry. “You ought to stay off her line when you’re juiced. You know too many people in Maine, Boston and New Hampshire. Nancy is an anxiety-neurosis case. She can’t start her car without having a fit. She straps herself in, starts trembling and honking her horn. Mad as a hatter. And it extends into other areas. She can’t go into a Thrifty Drugstore without getting offended by a stockboy chewing on a Mars candy bar.”

  “She says she supported you for three months.”

  “She supported my cock. Mostly with credit cards.”

  “Are you as good as they say you are?”

  Harry laughed. “I give them soul. That can’t be measured in inches.”

  “I want to get back with her. Tell me what to do?”

  “Either suck pussy like a man or find a job.”

  “But you don’t work.”

  “Don’t measure yourself by me. That’s the mistake most people make.”

  “But where can I get some coin? I’ve really hustled. What am I going to do?”

  “Suck air.”

  “Don’t you know anything about mercy?”

  “The only pe
ople who know about mercy are the ones who need it.”

  “You’ll need mercy some day.”

  “I need it now—it’s just that I need it in a form different than you do.”

  “I need coin, Harry, how am I going to make it?”

  “Shoot the 30-foot basket. A three-pointer. If you make it you’re in the clear. If you miss, you got yourself a jail cell—no light bills, no phone bills, no gas bills, no bitching females. You can learn a trade and you earn four cents an hour.”

  “You can really lay the shit on a man.”

  “O.K., get the candy out of your ass and I’ll tell you something.”

  “It’s out.”

  “I’d say the reason Nancy dropped you is another guy. Black, white, red or yellow. Note this rule and you’ll always be covered: a female seldom moves away from one victim without having another near at hand.”

  “Man,” said Paul, “I need help, not theory.”

  “Unless you understand the theory you’ll always need help…”

  Harry picked up the phone, dialed Nancy’s number.

  “Hello?” she answered.

  “It’s Harry.”

  “Oh.”

  “I hear through the vine you got taken in Mexico. Did he get it all?”

  “Oh, that…”

  “A washed-up Spanish bullfighter, wasn’t it?”

  “With the most beautiful eyes. Not like yours. Nobody can see your eyes.”

  “I don’t want anybody to see my eyes.”

  “Why not?”

  “If they saw what I was thinking, I couldn’t fool them.”

  “So, you’ve phoned to tell me you’re running with blinkers on?”

  “You know that. What I called for is to tell you that Paul wants to come back. Does that help you in any way?”

  “No.”

  “I thought so.”

  “Did he really phone you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, I’ve got a new man now. He’s marvelous!”

  “I told Paul you were probably interested in somebody else.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I knew.”

  “Harry?”

  “Yeh, doll?”

  “Go fuck yourself…”

  Nancy hung up.

  Now there, he thought, I try to be the peacemaker and both of them get pissed. Harry walked into the bathroom and looked at his face in the mirror. My god, he had a kind face. Couldn’t they see that? Understanding. Nobility. He spotted a blackhead in near his nose. He squeezed. Out it came, black and lovely, dragging a yellow tail of pus. The breakthrough, he thought, is in understanding women and love. He rolled the blackhead and the pus between his fingers. Or maybe the breakthrough was the ability to kill without caring. He sat down to take a shit while he thought it over.

  BEER AT THE CORNER BAR

  I don’t know how many years ago it was, 15 or 20. I was sitting in my place. It was a hot summer night and I felt dull.

  I walked out the door and down the street. It was past dinner time for most families and they sat about watching their tv sets. I walked up to the boulevard. Across the street was a neighborhood bar, an old-fashioned building and bar constructed of wood, painted green and white. I walked in.

  After nearly a lifetime spent in bars I had entirely lost my feeling for them. When I wanted something to drink I usually got it at a liquor store, took it home and drank alone.

  I walked in and found a stool away from the crowd. I wasn’t ill at ease, I simply felt out of place. But if I wanted to go out there was nowhere else for me to go. In our society most of the interesting places to go are either against the law or very expensive.

  I ordered a bottle of beer and lit a cigarette. It was just another neighborhood bar. They all knew each other. They told dirty jokes and watched tv. There was only one woman in there, old, in a black dress, red wig. She had on a dozen necklaces and kept lighting her cigarette over and over again. I began to wish I was back in my room and decided to go there after I finished my beer.

  A man came in and took the barstool next to mine. I didn’t look up, I wasn’t interested, but from his voice I imagined him to be about my age. They knew him in the bar. The bartender called him by name and a couple of the regulars said hello. He sat next to me with his beer for three or four minutes; then he said, “Hi, how ya doin’?”

  “I’m doing O.K.”

  “You new in the neighborhood?”

  “No.”

  “I haven’t seen you in here before.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “You from Los Angeles?” he asked.

  “Mostly.”

  “You think the Dodgers will make it this year?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t like the Dodgers?”

  “No.”

  “Who do you like?”

  “Nobody. I don’t like baseball.”

  “What do you like?”

  “Boxing. Bullfighting.”

  “Bullfighting’s cruel.”

  “Yes, anything is cruel when you lose.”

  “But the bull doesn’t stand a chance.”

  “None of us do.”

  “You’re pretty goddamned negative. Do you believe in God?”

  “Not your kind of god.”

  “What kind?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I’ve been going to church ever since I can remember.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Can I buy you a beer?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  The beers arrived.

  “Did you read the papers today?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you read about those 50 little girls who were burned to death in that Boston orphanage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wasn’t that horrible?”

  “I suppose it was.”

  “You suppose it was?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “If I had been there I suppose I would have had nightmares about it for the rest of my life. But it’s different when you just read about it in the newspapers.”

  “Don’t you feel sorrow for those 50 little girls who burned to death? They were hanging out of the windows screaming.”

  “I suppose it was horrible. But you see it was just a newspaper headline, a newspaper story. I really didn’t think much about it. I turned the page.”

  “You mean you didn’t feel anything?”

  “Not really.”

  He sat a moment and had a drink of his beer. Then he screamed, “Hey, here’s a guy who says he didn’t feel a fucking thing when he read about those 50 little orphan girls burning to death in Boston!”

  Everyone looked at me. I looked down at my cigarette. There was a minute of silence. Then the woman in the red wig said, “If I was a man I’d kick his ass all up and down the street.”

  “He don’t believe in God either!” said the guy next to me. “He hates baseball. He loves bullfights, and he likes to see little orphan girls burned to death!”

  I ordered another beer from the bartender, for myself. He pushed the bottle at me with repugnance. Two young guys were playing pool. The youngest, a big kid in a white t-shirt, laid his stick down and walked over to me. He stood behind me sucking air into his lungs, trying to make his chest bigger.

  “This is a nice bar. We don’t tolerate assholes in here. We kick their butts good, we beat the shit out of them, we beat the living shit out of them!”

  I could feel him standing there behind me. I lifted my beer bottle and poured beer into my glass, drank it, lit a cigarette. My hand was perfectly steady. He stood there for some time, then finally walked back to the pool table. The man who had been sitting next to me got off his stool and moved away. “The son of a bitch is negative,” I heard him say. “He hates people.”

  “If I was a man,” said the woman in the red wig, “I’d make him beg for mercy. I can’t stand bastards like him.”

  �
��That’s how guys like Hitler talk,” said somebody.

  “Real hateful jerks.”

  I drank that beer, ordered another. The two young guys continued to shoot pool. Some people left and the remarks about me began to die down except in the case of the woman in the red wig. She got drunker.

  “Prick, prick…you’re a real prick! You stink like a cesspool! Betcha hate your country, too, don’t you? Your country and your mother and everybody else. Aw, I know you guys! Pricks, cheap cowardly pricks!”

  She finally left about 1:30 a.m. One of the kids shooting pool left. The kid in the white t-shirt sat down at the end of the bar and talked to the guy who had bought me the beer. At five minutes to two, I got up slowly and walked out.

  Nobody followed me. I walked up the boulevard, found my street. The lights in the houses and the apartments were out. I found my front court. I opened my door and walked in. There was one beer in the refrigerator. I opened it and drank it.

  Then I undressed, went to the bathroom, pissed, brushed my teeth, turned out the light, walked to the bed, went to bed and slept.

  THE UPWARD BIRD

  We were going to interview the well-known poetess, Janice Altrice. The editor of America in Poetry was paying me $175 to write her up. Tony accompanied me with his camera. He was to get $50 for the photographs. I had borrowed a tape recorder. The place was back in the hills up a long road. I pulled the car over, took a pull of vodka and passed the bottle to Tony.

  “Does she drink?” asked Tony.

  “Probably not,” I said.

  I started the car and we went on. We turned right up a narrow dirt road. Janice was standing in front waiting for us. She was dressed in slacks and wore a white blouse with a high lace collar. We climbed out of the car and walked toward where she stood on the slope of lawn. We introduced ourselves and I started the battery-operated tape recorder.

  “Tony’s going to take some shots of you,” I told her, “be natural.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  We walked up the slope and she pointed to the house. “We bought it when prices were very low. We couldn’t afford it now.” Then she pointed to a smaller house on the side of the hill. “That’s my study, we built it ourselves. It even has a bathroom. Come and see it.”