“goodbye,” said the
editor.
I hung up.
there are certainly any number of lonely
people without much to do with
their nights.
a tragic meeting
I was more visible and available then
and I had this great weakness:
I thought that going to bed with many women
meant that a man was clever and good and
superior
especially if he did it at the age of
55
to any number of bunnies
and I lifted weights
drank like mad
and did
that.
most of the women were nice
and most of them looked good
and only one or two were really dumb and
dull
but JoJo
I can’t even categorize.
her letters were slight, repeated
the same things:
“I like your books, would like to meet
you…”
I wrote back and told her
it would be
all right.
then along came the instructions
where I was to meet
her: at this college
on this date
at this time
just after her
classes.
the college was up in the
hills and
the day and time
arrived
and with her drawings
of twisting streets
plus a road map
I set out.
it was somewhere between the Rose Bowl
and one of the largest graveyards in
Southern California
and I got there early and sat in my
car
nipping at the Cutty Sark
and looking at the
co-eds—there were so many of
them, one simply couldn’t have
them all.
then the bell rang and I got out of my
car and walked to the front of the
building, there was a long row of
steps and the students walked out of the
building and down the steps
and I stood and
waited, and like with airport
arrivals
I had no idea
which one
it would be.
“Chinaski,” somebody said
and there she was: 18, 19,
neither ugly nor beautiful, of
average body and features,
seeming to be neither vicious,
intelligent, dumb or
insane.
we kissed lightly and then
I asked her if she
had a car
and she said
she had a car
and I said, “fine, I’ll drive you
to it, then you follow
me…”
JoJo was a good follower, she followed me all
the way to my beat-up court in east
Hollywood.
I poured her a drink and we talked very
drab talk and kissed a
bit.
the kisses were neither good nor bad
nor interesting or un-
interesting.
much time went by and she drank very
little
and we kissed some more and she said,
“I like your books, they really do things
to me.”
“Fuck my books!” I told her.
I was down to my shorts and I had her
skirt up to her ass
and I was working hard
but she just kissed and
talked.
she responded and she didn’t
respond.
then
I gave up and started drinking
heavily.
she mentioned a few of the other
writers
she liked
but she didn’t like any of them
the way she liked
me.
“yeah,” I poured a new one, “is that
so?”
“I’ve got to get going,” JoJo said,
“I’ve got a class in the
morning.”
“you can sleep here,” I suggested, “and
get an early start, I scramble great
eggs.”
“no, thank you, I’ve got to
go…”
and she left with
several copies of my books
she had never seen
before,
copies I had given her
much earlier in the
evening.
I had another drink and decided to
sleep it off
as an unexplainable
loss.
I switched off the lights
and threw myself upon the
bed without
washing-up or
brushing my
teeth.
I looked up into the dark
and thought, now, here is one
I will never be able to
write about:
she was neither good nor bad,
real or unreal, kind or
unkind, she was just a girl
from a college
somewhere between the Rose Bowl and
the dumping grounds.
then I began to itch, I scratched
myself, I seemed to feel things
on my face, on my belly, I inhaled,
exhaled, tried to sleep but
the itching got worse, then
I felt a bite, then several bites,
things appeared to be
crawling on me…
I rushed to the bathroom
and switched on the light
my god, JoJo had fleas.
I stepped into the shower
stood there
adjusting the water,
thinking,
that poor
dear
girl.
an ordinary poem
since you’ve always wanted
to know I am going to admit that I never liked Shakespeare, Browning, the
Bronte sisters,
Tolstoy, baseball, summers on the shore, arm-
wrestling, hockey, Thomas Mann, Vivaldi, Winston Churchill, Dudley
Moore, free verse,
pizza, bowling, the Olympic Games, the Three Stooges, the Marx
Brothers, Ives, Al Jolson, Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Mickey
Mouse, basketball,
fathers, mothers, cousins, wives, shack jobs (although preferable
to the former),
and I don’t like the Nutcracker Suite, the Academy Awards, Hawthorne,
Melville, pumpkin pie, New Year’s Eve, Christmas, Labor Day, the
Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Good Friday, The Who,
Bacon, Dr. Spock, Blackstone and Berlioz, Franz
Liszt, pantyhose,
lice, fleas, goldfish, crabs, spiders, war
heroes, space flights, camels (I don’t trust camels) or the
Bible,
Updike, Erica Jong, Corso, bartenders, fruit flies, Jane
Fonda,
churches, weddings, birthdays, newscasts, watch
dogs, .22 rifles, Henry
Fonda
and all the women who should have loved me but
didn’t and
the first day of Spring and the
last
and the first line of this poem
and this one
that you’re reading
now.
from an old dog in his cups…
ah, my friend, it’s awful, worse
than that—you just get
going good—
one bottle down and
gone—
the poems
simmering in your
head
but
halfway between 60 and
70
you pause
before opening the
second bottle—
sometimes
don’t
for after 50 years of
heavy drinking
you might assume
that extra bottle
will set you
babbling in some
rest home
or tender you
a stroke
alone in your
place
the cats chewing at
your flesh
as the morning fog
enters the broken
screen.
one doesn’t even think of
the liver
and if the liver
doesn’t think of
us, that’s
fine.
but it does seem
the more we drink
the better the words
go.
death doesn’t matter
but the ultimate inconvenience
of near-death is worse than
galling.
I’ll finish the night off
with
beer.
let ’em go
let’s let the bombs go
I’m tired of waiting
I’ve put away my toys
folded the road maps
canceled my subscription to Time
kissed Disneyland goodbye
I’ve taken the flea collars off my cats
unplugged the tv
I no longer dream of pink flamingoes
I no longer check the market index
let’s let ’em go
let’s let ’em blow
I’m tired of waiting
I don’t like this kind of blackmail
I don’t like governments playing cutesy with my life:
either crap or get off the pot
I’m tired of waiting
I’m tired of dangling
I’m tired of the fix
let the bombs blow
you cheap sniveling cowardly nations
you mindless giants
do it
do it
do it!
and escape to your planets and space stations
then you can fuck it
up there too.
trying to make it
new jock in from Arizona
doesn’t know this town
but his agent did get him a mount
in the first race
last Saturday
and the jock took the freeway
in
on the same day as
the U.S.C. vs. U.C.L.A. football
game
and got caught
in one of the two special lanes
which took him to the Rose Bowl
instead of the race
track.
he was forced to drive all the way
to the football game
parking lot
before he could turn
around.
by the time he got to the track
the first race
was over.
another jock had won with his
mount.
today out there
I noticed on the program that the
new jock from Arizona
had a good mount in the
6th.
then the horse became a late
scratch.
sometimes getting started
in the big time
is tantamount to
trying to raise an erection
in a tornado
and even if you do
nobody has the time
to notice.
the death of a splendid neighborhood
there was a place off Western Ave.
where you went up a stairway
to get head
and there was a big biker
sitting there
wearing his swastika jacket.
he was there to smell you out
if you were the
heat
and to protect the girls
if you weren’t.
it was just above the
Philadelphia Hoagie Shop
there in L.A.
where the girls came down
when things got
slow
and ate something
else.
the man who ran the
sandwich shop
hated the girls
he didn’t like to
serve them
but he was
afraid not
to.
then one day
I came by
and the biker wasn’t there
or the girls
either,
and it hadn’t been a simple
bust
it had been a
shoot-out:
there were bullet holes
in the door
above the
stairway.
I went into the Hoagie shop
for a sandwich and a
beer
and the proprietor told
me,
“things are better
now.”
after that
I had to leave town
for a couple of
days
and when I got back
and walked down
to the Hoagie shop
I saw that the plate glass
window
had been busted
out
and was covered with
boards.
inside the walls
and the counter had been
blackened by
fire.
about that same
time
my girlfriend went crazy
and started screwing one man
after
another.
almost everything good was
gone.
I gave my landlord a month’s
notice and moved in
3 weeks.
you get so alone at times that it just makes sense
when I was a starving writer I used to read the major writers in the
major magazines (in the library, of course) and it made me feel
very bad because—being a student of the word and the way, I realized
that they were faking it: I could sense each false emotion, each
utter pretense, it made me feel that the editors had their
heads up their asses—or were being politicized into publishing
in-groups of power
but
I just kept writing and not eating very much—went down from 197 pounds
to 137—but—got very much practice typing and reading printed rejection
slips.
it was when I reached 137 pounds that I said, to hell with it, quit
typing and concentrated on drinking and the streets and the ladies of
the streets—at least those people didn’t read Harper’s, The Atlantic or
Poetry, a magazine of verse.
and frankly, it was a fair and refreshing ten year lay-off
then I came back and tried it again to find that the editors still had
their heads up their asses and/or etc.
but I was up to 225 pounds
rested
and full of background music—
ready to give it another shot in the
dark.
a good gang, after all
I keep hearing from the old dogs,
men who have been writing for
decades,
poets all,
they’re still at their
typers
writing better than
ever
past wives and wars and
jobs<
br />
and all the things that
happen.
many I disliked for personal
and artistic
reasons…
but what I overlooked was
their endurance and
their ability to
improve.
these old dogs
living in smoky rooms
pouring the
bottle…
they lash against the
typer ribbons: they came
to
fight.
this
being drunk at the typer beats being with any woman
I’ve ever seen or known or heard about
like
Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Garbo, Harlow, M.M. or
any of the thousands that come and go on that
celluloid screen
or the temporary girls I’ve seen so lovely
on park benches, on buses, at dances and parties, at
beauty contests, cafes, circuses, parades, department
stores, skeet shoots, balloon flys, auto races, rodeos,
bull fights, mud wrestling, roller derbies, pie bakes,
churches, volleyball games, boat races, county fairs,
rock concerts, jails, laundromats or wherever
being drunk at this typer beats being with any woman
I’ve ever seen or
known.
hot
there’s fire in the fingers and there’s fire in the shoes and there’s
fire in walking across a room
there’s fire in the cat’s eyes and there’s fire in the cat’s
balls
and the wrist watch crawls like a snake across the back of the
dresser
and the refrigerator contains 9,000 frozen red hot dreams
and as I listen to the symphonies of dead composers
I am consumed with a glad sadness
there’s fire in the walls
and the snails in the garden only want love
and there’s fire in the crabgrass
we are burning burning burning
there’s fire in a glass of water
the tombs of India smile like smitten motherfuckers
the meter maids cry alone at one a.m. on rainy nights
there’s fire in the cracks of the sidewalks
You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense Page 12
