Factotum

by Charles Bukowski

  “Good night, men,” said Bud with a big grin on his face…

  Paul’s place was a block off to the south. He had a lower front apartment with the windows facing Seventh Street.

  “There’s the machine,” he said. He turned it on.

  “Look at it, look at it. It sounds like a washing machine. The woman upstairs, she sees me in the hall and she says, ‘Paul you must really be a clean guy. I hear you washing your clothes three or four times a week.’”

  “Turn it off,” I said.

  “Look at my pills. I’ve got thousands of pills, thousands. I don’t even know what some of them are.”

  Paul had all the bottles on the coffee table. There were eleven or twelve bottles, all different sizes and shapes and filled with colored pills. They were beautiful. As I watched he opened a bottle and took three or four pills out of it and swallowed them. Then he opened another bottle and took a couple of pills. Then he opened a third bottle.

  “Come on, what the hell,” he said. “let’s get on the machine.”

  “I’ll take a rain check. I got to go.”

  “All right,” he said, “if you won’t fuck me, I’ll fuck myself!”

  I closed the door behind me and walked out on the street. I heard him turn on the machine.

  78

  Mr. Manders walked back to where I was working and stood and looked at me. I was packing a large order of paints and he stood there watching me. Manders had been the original owner of the store but his wife had run off with a black man and he had started drinking. He drank his way out of the ownership. Now he was just a salesman and another man owned his store.

  “You putting FRAGILE labels on these cartons?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you pack them well? Plenty of newspaper and straw?”

  “I think I’m doing it right.”

  “Do you have enough FRAGILE labels?”

  “Yes, there’s a whole boxfull under the bench here.”

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing? You don’t look like a shipping clerk.”

  “What does a shipping clerk look like?”

  “They wear aprons. You don’t wear an apron.”

  “Oh.”

  “Smith-Barnsley called to say that they had received a broken pint jar of rubber cement in a shipment.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “You let me know if you run out of FRAGILE labels.”

  “Sure.”

  Manders walked off down the aisle. Then he stopped and turned and watched me. I ripped some tape off the dispenser and with an extra flourish I wrapped it around the carton. Manders turned and walked away.

  Bud came running back. “How many six-foot squeegies you got in stock?”

  “None.”

  “This guy wants five six-foot squeegies now. He’s waiting for them. Make them up.”

  Bud ran off. A squeegie is a piece of board with a rubber edge. It’s used in silk-screening. I went to the attic, got the lumber down, measured off five six-foot sections, and sawed the boards. Then I began drilling holes into the wood along one edge. You bolted the rubber into place after drilling the holes. Then you had to sand the rubber down until it was level, a perfectly straight edge. If the rubber edge wasn’t perfectly straight, the silk-screen process wouldn’t work. And the rubber had a way of curling and warping and resisting.

  Bud was back in three minutes. “You got those squeegies ready yet?”

  “No.”

  He ran back to the front. I drilled, turned screws, sanded. In five more minutes he was back. “You got those squeegies ready yet?”

  “No.”

  He ran off.

  I had one six-foot squeegie finished and was halfway through another when he came back again.

  “Never mind. He left.”

  Bud walked back up toward the front…

  79

  The store was going broke. Each day the orders were smaller and smaller. There was less and less to do. They fired Picasso’s buddy and had me mop the crappers, empty the baskets, hang the toilet paper. Each morning I swept and watered the sidewalk in front of the store. Once a week I washed the windows.

  One day I decided to clean up my own quarters. One of the things I did was to clean out the carton area where I kept all the empty cartons I used for shipping. I got them all out of there and swept up the trash. As I was cleaning up I noticed a small oblong grey box at the bottom of the bin. I picked it up and opened it. It contained twenty-four large-sized camel hair brushes. They were fat and beautiful and sold for $10 each. I didn’t know what to do. I looked at them for some time, then closed the lid, walked out the back and put them in a trashcan in the alley. Then I put all the empty cartons back in the bin.

  That night I left as late as possible. I walked to the nearby cafe and had a coffee and apple pie. Then I came out, walked down the block, and turned up the alley. I walked up the alley and was a quarter of the way when I saw Bud and Mary Lou enter the alley from the other end. There was nothing to do but to keep walking. It was final. We got closer and closer. Finally as I passed them I said, “Hi.” They said, “Hi.” I kept walking. I walked out the other end of the alley and across the street and into a bar. I sat down. I sat there and had a beer and then had another. A woman down the bar asked me if I had a match. I got up and lighted her cigarette; as I did that, she farted. I asked her if she lived in the neighborhood. She said she was from Montana. I remembered an unhappy night I’d had in Cheyenne, Wyoming, which is near Montana. Finally I left and walked back to the alley.

  I went up to the trashcan and reached in. It was still there: the oblong grey box. It didn’t feel empty. I slipped it through the neck of my shirt and it dropped down, slipped down, slid down against my gut and lay there. I walked back to where I lived.

  80

  The next thing that happened was that they hired a Japanese girl. I had always had a very strange idea, for a long time, that after all the trouble and pain was over, that a Japanese girl would come along one day and we would live happily ever after. Not so much happily, as easily and with deep understanding and mutual concern. Japanese women had a beautiful bone structure. The shape of the skull, and the tightening of the skin with age, was a lovely thing; the skin of the drum drawn taut. With American women the face got looser and looser and finally fell apart. Even their bottoms fell apart and became indecent. The strength of the two cultures was very different too: Japanese women instinctively understood yesterday and today and tomorrow. Call it wisdom. And they had staying power. American women only knew today and tended to come to pieces when just one day went wrong.

  So I was very taken with the new girl. Also I was still drinking heavily with Jan which befuddled the brain, gave it a strange airy feeling, made it take strange twists and turns, gave it courage. So the first day she came back with the orders I said, “Hey, let’s touch. I want to kiss you.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  She walked away. As she did I noticed she had a slight limp. It figured: the pain and the weight of centuries…

  I kept after her like a horny redneck drunk on beer in a Greyhound bus passing through Texas. She was intrigued—she understood my craziness. I was enchanting her without realizing it.

  One day a customer telephoned to ask if we had gallon cans of white glue in stock and she came back to check some cartons stacked in one corner. I saw her and asked if I might help. She said, “I’m looking for a carton of glue stamped 2-G.”

  “2-G,” I said, “huh?”

  I put my arm around her waist.

  “We’re going to make it. You are the wisdom of centuries and I am me. We are meant for each other.”

  She began to giggle like an American woman. “Japanese girls don’t do that. What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  She rested against me. I noticed a row of paint cartons pushed against the wall. I led her over and gently sat her on the row of cartons. I pushed her down. I climbed on top of her and
began kissing her, pulling up her dress. Then Danny, one of the clerks walked in. Danny was a virgin. Danny went to painting class at night and fell asleep during the day. He couldn’t separate art from cigarette butts. “What the hell’s going on here?” he asked, and then he walked swiftly away toward the front office.

  Bud called me into the front office the next day. “You know, we had to let her go too.”

  “It wasn’t her fault.”

  “She was with you back there.”

  “I instigated.”

  “She submitted, according to Danny.”

  “What does Danny know about submission? The only thing he has ever submitted to is his hand.”

  “He saw you.”

  “Saw what? I didn’t even have her panties off.”

  “This is a business house.”

  “There’s Mary Lou.”

  “I hired you because I thought you were a dependable shipping clerk.”

  “Thanks. And I end up getting fired for trying to fuck a slant-eyed squaw with a gimp in her left leg on top of forty gallons of auto paint—which, by the way, you’ve been selling to the L.A. City College Art Department as the real thing. I ought to turn you over to the Better Business Bureau.”

  “Here’s your check. You’re finished.”

  “All right. See you at Santa Anita.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  There was an extra day’s pay on the check. We shook hands and I walked out.

  81

  The next job didn’t last long either. It was little more than a stopover. It was a small company specializing in Christmas items: lights, wreaths, Santa Clauses, paper trees, all that. When I was hired they told me that they’d have to let me go the day before Thanksgiving; that there wasn’t any business after Thanksgiving. There were a half-dozen of us hired under the same conditions. They called us “warehousemen” and mainly we loaded and unloaded trucks. Also, a warehouseman is a guy who stands around a lot smoking cigarettes, in a dream-like state. But we didn’t last until Thanksgiving, the half-dozen of us. It was my idea that we go to a bar everyday for lunch. Our lunch periods became longer and longer. One afternoon we simply didn’t return. But the next morning, like good guys, we were all there. We were told we were no longer wanted. “Now,” said the manager, “I’ve got to hire a whole new god damned crew.” “And fire them on Thanksgiving,” said one of us. “Listen,” said the manager, “You guys want to work one more day?” “So you’ll have time to interview and hire our replacements?” asked one of us. “Take it or leave it,” said the manager. We took it and we worked all day, laughing like hell, throwing cartons through the air. Then we picked up our final checks and went back to our rooms and our drunken women.

  82

  It was another fluorescent light fixture house: The Honeybeam Company. Most of the cartons were five or six feet long, and heavy when packed. We worked a ten hour day. The procedure was quite simple—you went out to the assembly line and got your parts, brought them back, and packed them up. Most of the workers were Mexican and black. The blacks worked on me and accused me of having a smart mouth. The Mexicans stood back quietly and watched. Each day was a battle—both for my life and my ability to keep up with the lead packer, Monty. They worked on me all day long.

  “Hey, boy. Boy! Come ’ere, boy! Boy, I want to talk to you!”

  It was little Eddie. Little Eddie was good at it.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Boy, I’m talking to you!”

  “Eddie, how’d you like to have a jack-handle slid up your ass while you’re singing ‘Old Man River?’”

  “How’d you get all those holes in your face, white boy? Fall on a drill while you were asleep?”

  “Where’d you get that scar on your lower lip? Your boyfriend keep his razor strapped to his dick?”

  I went out at breaktime and traded a few with Big Angel. Big Angel whipped me but I got in some shots, didn’t panic, and held my ground. I knew he had only ten minutes to work on me and that helped. What hurt most was a thumb he got in my eye. We walked back in together, huffing and puffing.

  “You’re no pro,” he said.

  “Try me sometime when I’m not hungover. I’ll run you right off the lot.”

  “O.K.,” he said, “come in some time sweet and clean and we’ll try it again.

  I decided right then to never come in sweet and clean.

  Morris was the foreman. He had terribly flat vibes. It was as if he were made of wood, clear through. I tried not to talk to him more than I had to. He was the son of the owner and had tried to make it as a salesman, outside. He failed and they brought him back inside. He walked up. “What happened to your eye? It’s all red.”

  “I was walking under a palm tree and I was attacked by a blackbird.”

  “He got your eye?”

  “He got it.”

  Morris walked off, the crotch of his pants was jammed up into his ass…

  The best part was when the assembly line couldn’t keep up with us and we stood around waiting. The assembly line was manned mostly by young Mexican girls with beautiful skin and dark eyes; they wore tight bluejeans and tight sweaters and gaudy earrings. They were so young and healthy and efficient and relaxed. They were good workers, and now and then one would look up and say something and then there would be explosions of laughter and glances as I watched them laugh in their tight bluejeans and their tight sweaters and thought, if one of them was in bed with me tonight I could take all this shit a whole lot better. We all were thinking that. And we were also thinking, they all belong to somebody else. Well, what the hell. It didn’t make any difference. In fifteen years they’d weigh 185 pounds and it would be their daughters who were beautiful.

  I bought an eight-year-old automobile and stayed on the job there through December. Then came the Christmas party. That was December 24th. There were to be drinks, food, music, dancing. I didn’t like parties. I didn’t know how to dance and people frightened me, especially people at parties. They attempted to be sexy and gay and witty and although they hoped they were good at it, they weren’t. They were bad at it. Their trying so hard only made it worse.

  So when Jan leaned up against me and said, “Fuck that party, stay home with me. We’ll get drunk here,” I didn’t find that very hard to do.

  I heard about the party the day after Christmas. Little Eddie said, “Christine cried when you didn’t show up.”

  “Who?”

  “Christine, the cute little Mexican girl.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “She works on the back row, in assembly.”

  “Cut the shit.”

  “Yeah. She cried and cried. Somebody drew a great big picture of you with your goatee and hung it on the wall and underneath they wrote, ‘Give me another drink!’”

  “I’m sorry, man. I got tied up.”

  “It’s all right. She finally stopped being mad and danced with me. She got drunk and threw up some cake and she got drunker and danced with all the black guys. She dances real sexy. She finally went home with Big Angel.”

  “Big Angel probably stuck his thumb in her eye,” I said.

  The day before New Year’s after the afternoon break, Morris called me over and said, “I want to talk to you.”

  “O.K.”

  “Over here.”

  Morris walked me over to a dark corner next to a row of stacked packing boxes. “Listen, we’re going to have to let you go.”

  “All right. This is my last day?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will the check be ready?”

  “No, we’ll mail it.”

  “All right.”

  83

  National Bakery Goods was located nearby. They gave me a white smock and a locker. They made cookies, biscuits, cupcakes and so forth. Because I had claimed two years of college on my application, I got the job as Coconut Man. The Coconut Man stood up on a perch, scooped his shovel into the shredded coconut barrel and dumped the white flakes into a machin
e. The machine did the rest: it spit coconut on the cakes and other sundry items passing below. It was an easy job and a dignified one. There I was, dressed in white, scooping white shredded coconut into a machine. On the other side of the room were dozens of young girls, also dressed in white, with white caps on. I wasn’t quite sure what they were doing but they were busy. We worked nights.

  It happened my second night. It began slowly, a couple of the girls began singing, “Oh, Henry, oh Henry, how you can love! Oh, Henry, oh Henry, heaven’s above!” More and more girls joined in. Soon they were all singing. I thought, surely, they were singing to me.

  The girls’ supervisor rushed up screaming, “All right, all right, girls, that’s enough!”

  I dipped my shovel calmly into the shredded coconut and accepted it all…

  I had been there two or three weeks when a bell rang during the late shift. A voice came over the intercom. “All the men come to the rear of the building.”

  A man in a business suit walked toward us. “Gather around me,” he said. He had a clipboard with a sheet of paper on it. The men circled him. We were all dressed in white smocks. I stood at the edge of the circle.

  “We are entering our slack period,” said the man. “I’m sorry to say that we’re going to have to let all of you go until things pick up. Now, if you’ll line up in front of me, I’ll take your names, phone numbers and addresses. When things get better, you’ll be the first to know.”

  The men began to form a line but with much jostling and cursing. I didn’t get into line. I looked at all my fellow workers dutifully giving their names and addresses. These, I thought, are the men who dance beautifully at parties. I walked back to my locker, hung up the white smock, left my shovel leaning against the door, and walked out.