Factotum

by Charles Bukowski

  84

  The Hotel Sans was the best in the city of Los Angeles. It was an old hotel but it had class and a charm missing from the newer places. It was directly across from the park downtown.

  It was renowned for businessmens’ conventions and expensive hookers of almost legendary talent—who at the end of a lucrative evening had even been known to give the bellboys a little. There also were stories of bellboys who had become millionaires—bloody bellboys with eleven inch dicks who had had the good fortune to meet and marry some rich, elderly guest. And the food, the LOBSTER, the huge black chefs in very tall white hats who knew everything, not only about food but about Life and about me and about everything.

  I was assigned to the loading dock. That loading dock had style: for each truck that came in there were ten guys to unload it when it only took two at the most. I wore my best clothes. I never touched anything.

  We unloaded (they unloaded) everything that came into the hotel and most of it was foodstuffs. My guess was that the rich ate more lobster than anything else. Crates and crates of them would come in, deliciously pink and large, waving their claws and feelers.

  “You like those things, don’t you, Chinaski?”

  “Yeah. Oh yeah,” I’d drool.

  One day the lady in the employment office called me over. The employment office was at the rear of the loading dock. “I want you to manage this office on Sundays, Chinaski.” “What do I do?” “Just answer the phone and hire the Sunday dishwashers.” “All right!”

  The first Sunday was nice. I just sat there. Soon an old guy walked in. “Yeah, buddy?” I asked. He had on an expensive suit, but it was wrinkled and a little dirty; and the cuffs were just starting to go. He was holding his hat in his hand. “Listen,” he asked, “do you need somebody who is a good conversationalist? Somebody who can meet and talk to people? I have a certain amount of charm, I tell gracious stories, I can make people laugh.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Make me laugh.”

  “Oh, you don’t understand. The setting has to be right, the mood, the decor, you know…”

  “Make me laugh.”

  “Sir…”

  “Can’t use you, you’re a stiff!”

  The dishwashers were hired at noon. I stepped out of the office. Forty bums stood there. “All right now, we need five good men! Five good ones! No winos, perverts, communists, or child-molestors! And you’ve got to have a social security card! All right now, get them out and hold them up in the air!”

  Out came the cards. They waved them.

  “Hey, I got one!”

  “Hey, buddy, over here! Give a guy a break!”

  I slowly looked them over. “O.K., you with the shit-stain on your collar,” I pointed. “Step forward.”

  “That’s no shit stain, sir. That’s gravy.”

  “Well, I don’t know, buddy, looks to me like you been eatin’ more crotch than roast beef!”

  “Ah, hahaha,” went the bums, “Ah, hahaha!”

  “O.K., now, I need four good dishwashers! I have four pennies here in my hand. I’m going to toss them up. The four men who bring me back a penny get to wash dishes today!”

  I tossed the pennies high into the air above the crowd. Bodies jumped and fell, clothing ripped, there were curses, one man screamed, there were several fistfights. Then the lucky four came forward, one at a time, breathing heavily, each with a penny. I gave them their work cards and waved them toward the employee’s cafeteria where they would first be fed. The other bums retreated slowly down the loading ramp, jumped off, and walked down the alley into the wasteland of downtown Los Angeles on a Sunday.

  85

  Sundays were best because I was alone and soon I began to take a pint of whiskey to work with me. One Sunday after a hard night’s drinking the bottle got to me; I blacked-out. I vaguely remembered some unusual activity that evening after I went home but it was unclear. I told Jan about it the next morning before I went back to work. “I think I fucked up. But maybe it’s my imagination.”

  I went in and walked up to the timeclock. My timecard was not in the rack. I turned and walked over to the old lady who ran the employment office. When she saw me she looked nervous. “Mrs. Farrington, my timecard is missing.”

  “Henry, I always thought you were such a nice boy.”

  “Yes?”

  “You don’t remember what you did, do you?” she asked, looking nervously around.

  “No, Ma’am.”

  “You were drunk. You cornered Mr. Pelvington in the men’s locker room and you wouldn’t let him out. You held him captive for thirty minutes.”

  “What did I do to him?”

  “You wouldn’t let him out.”

  “Who is he?”

  “The Assistant Manager of this hotel.”

  “What else did I do?”

  “You were lecturing him on how to run this hotel. Mr. Pelvington has been in the hotel business for thirty years. You suggested that prostitutes be registered on the first floor only and that they should be given regular physical examinations. There are no prostitutes in this hotel, Mr. Chinaski.”

  “Oh, I know that, Mrs. Pelvington.”

  “Farrington.”

  “Mrs. Farrington.”

  “You also told Mr. Pelvington that only two men were needed on the loading dock instead of ten, and that it would cut down on the theft if each employee was given one live lobster to take home each night in a specially constructed cage that could be carried on buses and streetcars.”

  “You have a real sense of humor, Mrs. Farrington.”

  “The security guard couldn’t get you to let go of Mr. Pelvington. You tore his coat. It was only after we called the regular police that you relented.”

  “I presume I’m terminated?”

  “You have presumed correctly, Mr. Chinaski.”

  I walked off behind a stack of crates. When Mrs. Farrington wasn’t looking I cut for the employee’s cafeteria. I still had my food card. I could get one last good meal. The stuff was nearly as good as what they cooked for the guests upstairs, plus they gave the help more of it. Clutching my food card I walked into the cafeteria, picked up a tray, a knife and fork, a cup and some paper napkins. I walked up to the food counter. Then I looked up. Tacked to the wall behind the counter was a piece of white cardboard covered with a large crude scrawl:

  DON’T GIVE ANY FOOD TO HENRY CHINASKI

  I put the tray back unnoticed. I walked out of the cafeteria. I walked along the loading dock, then I jumped into the alley. Coming toward me was another bum. “Got a smoke, buddy?” he asked. “Yeah.” I took out two, gave him one, took one myself. I lit him up, then I lit myself up. He moved east and I moved west.

  86

  The Farm Labor Market was at Fifth and San Pedro Streets. You reported at 5 a.m. It was still dark when I got there. Men were sitting and standing around, rolling cigarettes and talking quietly. All such places always have the same smell—the smell of stale sweat, urine, and cheap wine.

  The day before I had helped Jan move in with a fat real estate operator who lived on Kingsley Drive. I’d stood back out of sight in the hall and watched him kiss her; then they’d gone into his apartment together and the door had closed. I had walked back down the street alone noticing for the first time the pieces of blown paper and accumulated trash that littered the street. We’d been evicted from our apartment. I had $2.08. Jan promised me she’d be waiting when my luck changed but I hardly believed that. The real estate operator’s name was Jim Bemis, he had an office on Alvarado Street and plenty of cash. “I hate it when he fucks me,” Jan had said. She was now probably saying the same thing about me to him.

  Oranges and tomatoes were piled in several crates and apparently were free. I took an orange, bit into the skin and sucked on it. I had exhausted my unemployment benefits since leaving the Sans Hotel.

  A guy about forty walked up to me. His hair looked dyed, in fact it didn’t look like
human hair but more like thread. The hard overhead light shone down on him. He had brown moles on his face, mostly clustered around his mouth. One or two black hairs grew out of each one.

  “How you doing?” he asked.

  “O.K.”

  “How’d you like a blow job?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “I’m hot, man, I’m excited. I really do it good.”

  “Listen, I’m sorry, I’m not in the mood.”

  He walked off angrily. I looked about the large room. There were fifty men waiting. There were ten or twelve state employment clerks sitting at their desks or walking around. They smoked cigarettes and looked more worried than the bums. The clerks were separated from the bums by a heavy wire mesh fence that went from floor to ceiling. Somebody had painted it yellow. It was a very indifferent yellow.

  When a clerk had to make a transaction with a bum he unlocked and slid open a small glass window in the wire. When the paperwork was taken care of the clerk would slid the glass window shut, lock it from the inside, and each time it happened, hope seemed to vanish. We all came awake when the window would slide open, any man’s chance was our chance, but when it closed, hope evaporated. Then we had each other to look at.

  Along the back wall, behind the yellow screen and behind the clerks, were six blackboards. There was white chalk and erasers, just like in grammar school. Five of the blackboards were washed clean, although it was possible to see the ghost of previous messages, of jobs long filled and now lost forever as far as we were concerned.

  There was a message on the sixth blackboard:

  TOMATO PICKERS WANTED IN BAKERSFIELD

  I had thought that machines had put the tomato pickers out of work. Yet, there it was. Humans apparently were less expensive than machines. And machines broke down. Ah.

  I looked around the waiting room—there were no Orientals, no Jews, almost no blacks. Most of the bums were poor whites or Chicano. The one or two blacks were already drunk on wine.

  Now one of the clerks stood up. He was a big man with a beer gut. What you noticed was his yellow shirt with vertical black stripes. The shirt was overstarched, and he wore armbands—to hold up his sleeves like in photographs taken in the 90’s. He walked over and unlocked the glass window in the yellow screen.

  “All right! There’s a truck in back loading up for Bakersfield!”

  He slid the window shut, locked it, sat down at his desk and lit a cigarette.

  For a moment nobody moved. Then one by one those sitting on the benches began to get up and stretch, their faces expressionless. The men who had been standing dropped their cigarettes on the floor and put them out carefully with the soles of their shoes. Then a slow general exodus began; everyone filed out a side door into a fenced yard.

  The sun was coming up. We really looked at each other for the first time. A few men grinned at the sight of a familiar face.

  We stood in a line, pushing our way toward the back of the truck, the sun coming up. It was time to get going. We were climbing into a World War II army truck with a high canvas roof, torn. We moved forward, pushing rudely, but at the same time trying to be at least half-polite. Then I got tired of the elbows, I stepped back.

  The truck’s capacity was admirable. The big Mexican foreman stood to one side at the back of the truck, waving them on in, “All right, all right, let’s go, let’s go…”

  The men moved forward slowly, as if into the mouth of the whale.

  Through the side of the truck I could see the faces; they were talking quietly and smiling. At the same time I disliked them and felt lonely. Then I decided I could handle tomatoes; I decided to get in. Someone banged into me from behind. It was a fat Mexican woman and she seemed quite emotional. I took her by the hips and boosted her. She was very heavy. She was hard to manage. Finally I got hold of something; it seemed one of my hands had slipped into the deepest recess of her crotch. I boosted her in. Then I reached up to get a grip and pull myself in. I was the last one. The Mexican foreman put his foot on my hand. “No,” he said, “we’ve got enough.”

  The truck’s engine started, stalled, stopped. The driver hit it again. It started and they rolled off.

  87

  Workmen For Industry was located right on the edge of skid row. The bums were better dressed, younger, but just as listless. They sat around on the window ledges, hunched forward, getting warm in the sun and drinking the free coffee that W.F.I. offered. There was no cream and sugar, but it was free. There was no wire partition separating us from the clerks. The telephones rang more often and the clerks were much more relaxed than at the Farm Labor Market.

  I walked up to the counter and was given a card and a pen anchored by a chain. “Fill it out,” said the clerk, a nice-looking Mexican boy who tried to hid his warmth behind a professional manner.

  I began to fill out the card. After address and phone number I wrote: “none.” Then after education and work abilities I wrote: “two years L.A. City College. Journalism and Fine Arts.”

  Then I told the clerk, “I ruined this card. Could I have another?”

  He gave me one. I wrote instead: “Graduate, L.A. High School. Shipping clerk, warehouseman, laborer. Some typing.”

  I handed the card back.

  “All right,” said the clerk, “sit down and we’ll see if anything comes in.”

  I found a space on a window ledge and sat down. An old black man was sitting next to me. He had an interesting face; he didn’t have the usual resigned look that most of us sitting around the room had. He looked as if he was attempting not to laugh at himself and the rest of us.

  He saw me glancing at him. He grinned. “Guy who runs this place is sharp. He got fired by the Farm Labor, got pissed, came down here and started this. Specializes in part-time workers. Some guy wants a boxcar unloaded quick and cheap, he calls here.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard.”

  “Guy needs a boxcar unloaded quick and cheap, he calls here. Guy who runs this place takes 50 per cent. We don’t complain. We take what we can get.”

  “It’s O.K. with me. Shit.”

  “You look down in the mouth. You all right?”

  “Lost a woman.”

  “You’ll have others and lose them too.”

  “Where do they go?”

  “Try some of this.”

  It was a bottle in a bag. I took a hit. Port wine.

  “Thanks.”

  “Ain’t no women on skid row.”

  He passed the bottle to me again. “Don’t let him see us drinking. That’s the one thing makes him mad.”

  While we sat drinking several men were called and left for jobs. It cheered us. At least there was some action.

  My black friend and I waited, passing the bottle back and forth.

  Then it was empty.

  “Where’s the nearest liquor store?” I asked.

  I got the directions and left. Somehow it was always hot on skid row in Los Angeles in the daytime. You’d see old bums walking around in heavy overcoats in the heat. But when the night came down and the Mission was full, those overcoats came in handy.

  When I got back from the liquor store my friend was still there.

  I sat down and opened the bottle, passed the bag.

  “Keep it low,” he said.

  It was comfortable in there drinking the wine.

  A few gnats began to gather and circle in front of us.

  “Wine gnats,” he said.

  “Sons of bitches are hooked.”

  “They know what’s good.”

  “They drink to forget their women.”

  “They just drink.”

  I waved at them in the air and got one of the wine gnats. When I opened my hand all I could see in my palm was a speck of black and the strange sight of two little wings. Zero.

  “Here he comes!”

  It was the nice-looking young guy who ran the place. He rushed up to us. “All right! Get out of here! Get the hell out of here, you fuckin’ winos!
Get the hell out of here before I call the cops!”

  He hustled us both to the door, pushing and cursing. I felt guilty, but I felt no anger. Even as he pushed I knew that he didn’t really care what we did. He had a large ring on his right hand.

  We didn’t move fast enough and I caught the ring just over my left eye; I felt the blood start to come and then felt it swell up. My friend and I were back out on the street.

  We walked away. We found a doorway and sat on the step. I handed him the bottle. He hit it.

  “Good stuff.”

  He handed me the bottle. I hit it.

  “Yeah, good stuff.”

  “Sun’s up.”

  “Yeah, the sun’s up good.”

  We sat quietly, passing the bottle back and forth.

  Then the bottle was empty.

  “Well,” he said, “I gotta be going.”

  “See you.”

  He walked off. I got up, went the other way, turned the corner, and walked up Main Street. I went along until I came to the Roxie.

  Photos of the strippers were on display behind the glass out front. I walked up and bought a ticket. The girl in the cage looked better than the photos. Now I had 38 cents left. I walked into the dark theatre eight rows from the front. The first three rows were packed.

  I had lucked out. The movie was over and the first stripper was already on. Darlene. The first was usually the worst, an old-timer come down, now reduced to kicking leg in the chorus line most of the time. We had Darlene for openers. Probably someone had been murdered or was on the rag or was having a screaming fit, and this was Darlene’s chance to dance solo again.

  But Darlene was fine. Skinny, but with breasts. A body like a willow. At the end of that slim back, that slim body, was an enormous behind. It was like a miracle—enough to drive a man crazy.

  Darlene was dressed in a long black velvet gown slit very high—her calves and thighs were dead white against the black. She danced and looked out at us through heavily mascaraed eyes. This was her chance. She wanted to come back—to be a featured dancer once again. I was with her. As she worked at the zippers more and more of her began to show, to slip out of that sophisticated black velvet, leg and white flesh. Soon she was down to her pink bra and G-string—the fake diamonds swinging and flashing as she danced.