Absence of the Hero

by Charles Bukowski

  Obnoxious type K-5b is the one in the left lane ahead of you. He is going at a good speed toward the corner while the right lane is cluttered with sun-dreamers. You follow him along figuring that you will finally cut to the right lane and get clearance so you won’t have to look at his bumper sticker which usually says something like: “Honk if you’re horny.” My bumper sticker would like to say: “Honk if you can’t come.” Anyway, type K-5b will apply his brakes and his brake lights won’t work and either his left blinker won’t work or he doesn’t use it and he walls you in there as the sun-dreamers in the right lane pass by. Then he makes his left turn and leaves you at the red light.

  Type K-5c will be sitting in the left lane and the sun-dreamers again will have the right lane blocked for one-half the distance to the goal line, and you will pull up behind type K-5c, believing that you will pull out behind him as the signal changes. But no. As the signal changes he’ll hit his left-turn blinker and you’ll sit there behind him, locked, and his bumper sticker will say: “God is Love.”

  Types 45 KLx will not even know each other but their psyches will hang from the same stem. They will each possess one lane apiece in a two-lane street (I mean going in the same direction) (which ought to get us into Driver Examination Tests soon). And they will each be driving at 18 mph in a 35 mph zone. And behind each of them will be rows of automobiles. It would seem a conspiracy, and one wonders. I find myself usually directly behind one of the two leading cars. Finally after much patience and some luck, I am able to break through and pass one of the cars. What happens then? One of the slow cars that has been blocking traffic suddenly accelerates with me trying to keep even.

  The total ugliness and indifference of the worst features of the human race come out in their driving habits. To those who believe that the assassination of world leaders might move us forward into some direction—perhaps the removal of small non-world leaders and asshole drivers, golfers and Safeway bag-boys might bring better results, although I am for neither method. But if we have to have one or the other I’d suggest the latter, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Crime and P. and the Christ-structure of morals and non-movement be frigged.

  Oh, yes. And well. Then there is type 62 4fa. He or she will take the one lane going in the same direction at 18 mph. They deserve to read the collected works of Edgar Guest and probably have, but you can’t honk—that makes them happy. I use various in-tricks like falling back and then roaring up to their bumper. Another device is to put it in neutral and glide along behind them and rev your engine up to top roar. Of course, you’re reacting and that’s what they want. Type 62 4fa is clever. Their quite flaunting and vicious move—after holding you back for five miles—is to run a red light at the last moment, leaving you there staring at their vanishing bumper sticker which says something like: “If Nixon makes a comeback I’ll let you clean the rings out of my grandmother’s bathtub.”

  I did mention (earlier?) the Driver’s Examinations. I mean the ones on paper. They are easy enough. One simply uses the old common sense. One is asked a question and is told to mark one of three choices. But on each examination I have ever taken, there is always one question where two answers are correct and one is false. Not that it matters. But it is an irritant, and if you believe it is a deliberate foil, of course, there’s something wrong with you. But there is always one. Example:

  If you are approaching the crest of a hill, you must not change lanes in a divided highway with a lane going in each direction:

  a)If you’ve just had a fight with your girlfriend

  b)If your dog has just shit on the backseat

  c)If you’ve just picked up a Communist hitchhiker

  Now it’s obvious that either a) or b) is the correct answer, either or both, but no matter which one you mark, the other will be correct. . . .

  One can talk (or write) almost as long about the oddities of driving as one can talk about the oddities of sex and all the braggadocio that goes along with it. It’s bad enough just driving along the streets of anywhere with other people, but along with that cars do develop characters and characteristics of their own. Strange things happen among all that tin. That tin ingests things. Car junkyards are much sadder and more real to me than human graveyards. The human graveyard lacks definition—it doesn’t hum and clash, throw back the sun; it quits. Old cars, old junkyards fight on like punch-drunk fighters. I’m not a car freak but one finally falls in love with what one lives with. I doubt that any man can walk into Pep Boys without at least getting a spiritual hard-on. I can’t speak for the ladies.

  I had one car that would refuse to start again if I parked it on the parking lot of this liquor store at Hollywood and Normandie. The car would be running quite well, but each time I came out with my liquor and got in the car to drive off, it would not start. I would have to push it off of the parking area outside the liquor store and then onto the street and then it would start. After three or four repeats of this, I would just leave the car in the street. I suppose it was a technical matter, something about an unworkable carburetor level or some such but, then, you really didn’t know.

  Or maybe the car just didn’t like certain things I did. I remember once I had a fight with my girlfriend, and I ran out of her house to leap into my car and drive off and the forward gears wouldn’t work. I’d never had that trouble before. The car would only run in reverse. It refused to run forward. I checked the transmission level. It was all right. For a moment I considered driving the car backwards all the way to my room. But convenience can sometimes overtake madness. So I swallowed my bile and went back: “Look, baby, hahaha,” I said, “I want to tell you something funny. My car only runs backwards.” “Only runs backwards?” “Yeah, I can’t leave. I don’t know what the hell.” “Come on, show me.”

  I walked her out to my car and got in. “Now look,” I said, “it will only drive backwards. I’ll put it in forward and it won’t move.”

  I put it in forward and she yelled after me, “Hey! Where the hell you going?”

  I did my U-turn and parked on the other side of the street. Then I got out. “I don’t understand it.”

  So that’s how we got back together—that time. . . .

  And there are the car geniuses, too. I bought this car off this man one time and he told me all about it. “Now this car is going to give you trouble now and then. Now when it does, there are two buttons over on the left side of your dashboard. Now if the car runs rough or won’t start, just push this No. 1 button. That will cure your trouble. If it doesn’t, still try to keep using it. If that doesn’t cure it, then finally go to your No. 2 button. That will automatically get it going.” I sometimes did have to go to button No. 2, but it never failed and when I resold the car, I passed the message on. . . .

  Automobile mechanics, body-shop men, brake-shop men, transmission repairmen have a special swagger and aplomb that far out-hotdogs our M.D.s and lawyers. And don’t forget that red light in your rearview mirror. As he walks toward you, it is almost like the approach of a god. You’ve done something with your car that shouldn’t be done, you know. But it’s almost worth it—he’ll seem kindly, judicious, won’t fart or tell a bad joke. He’ll just hand you a piece of paper and then tool his bike off and you can do it all over again. Like sex.

  Endurance is important in our society, and some luck, but show me a man with a good car and a good woman and most surely a special light will fall upon him: the love of dependency and the dependency of love. You will be moved if you chose what moves wisely. And next week we’ll get back to dirty stories. I haven’t lost my mind. And as I drove this copy down to the Free Press, a small metal Maltese cross leaped about as it hung from a shoestring from the rearview mirror. And my automobile insurance is paid up for a year in advance.

  The Big Dope Reading

  They had mailed the tickets, and I came flying into this little town off the east coast of Florida. I waited for the passengers to climb out, and then I got up and walked down the ramp and saw the two poetry-h
ound types waiting, so I walked up to them: “I’m Chinaski,” I said, and they grinned and grinned. We walked over and waited for the bags, and then I said, “Shit, let’s not wait here; let’s make the bar.” So we went into the bar—Clyde and Tommy and me—and there were more poetry hounds: “They all want to meet you, daddy.” I looked them over. Lots of women, eyes hot with reading my erotic shit. I glanced at them, shifted from face to face, from body to body. One of the bodies looked really heavy, but she looked ready. I was introduced around. “Oh, Mr. Chinaski,” one of them said, “I really liked your story My X-pert Hock!”

  (I write stories, poems, and novels. I usually write my stuff along the sex trail to keep them awake, and while they’re awake I give them the rest of it. I sneak it to them. I give them morphine and then pull out their slim souls.)

  It was near midnight, and the airport bar closed at midnight, so we drank up. Tommy got the tab for the drinks, and we left for Clyde’s place, after picking up my baggage. At Clyde’s, a lot of beer and grass—Colombian—went around while flat, loud music blasted on the stereo. I drifted around and checked out the female bodies. “Oh, Mr. Chinaski, I really loved your poem about the man who cut off his balls and flushed them away like apricots!” I kissed that one, and a flashbulb popped somewhere in the room.

  I was rotten: I sucked upon their adulation like virgin pussy. We smoked and smoked and drank and drank, and soon people began leaving. The first poetry reading was 9 P.M. at the Jiz-Wiz Club, the next night. Then I had to stroke it up again the next night. Two readings for $500 plus airfare, lodging, maybe some food, and probably some ass. Ginsberg got a thousand for a reading, but then he sat on a rug and did mantras and hollered out pretty damned good. I just get drunk and fucked up.

  Anyhow, people kept leaving and leaving, and it was about 4 A.M., so Clyde left for his bedroom and said the couch was mine. I was left with a lady of about 22 with this rag tied around her head. She had a fairly good body, wild eyes, and kept talking about retarded children. She taught retarded children, so she talked a lot about them. I was next to her on the couch. Every now and then I would interrupt her conversation about the children with a long kiss. She knew how to kiss. Or I knew how to kiss. Anyway, the kisses were furiously warming. Oh, hell, they were divinely ecstatic. You furnish the words; it’s my genuine bullshit that keeps me going. Well, after each kiss, she got back to the retarded children as if the kiss hadn’t even happened, and this heated me more. She had a good trick going, with that rag around her head and those wild, glowing eyes. Schoolteachers always make everybody hot; they even make you hotter than nuns do.

  Her name was Holly, and when she left, I left. I got into the car with her, and when she started the engine, we embraced.

  It was a long drive, and Holly kept talking about the retarded children, their problems, how to help them, how to approach them, and my cock got harder and harder. We stopped at a signal, and I reached up and undid the rag from her head and all this long blonde hair spilled out. “Christ,” I said, “why do you hide that? I’m going to yank on it.”

  “It gets filled with cigarette ashes at parties,” she said.

  She had a fairly private apartment on the bottom floor. She parked, and we went to her place. Holly opened the door, and I followed her in. “My husband’s out of town for a week. Business. He introduced me to your writing; he really worships you.”

  “Yeah?”

  Holly went into the bathroom, and I walked to the bedroom and undressed and then got into bed. “How far away is your husband?” I asked.

  “Forty miles.”

  “Is he jealous?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been unfaithful.”

  I heard the toilet flush. In the dark, I could see my cock pushing up the covers. Holly was going to have another retarded child to fathom. When she came out of the bathroom, she was naked; so she climbed under the blanket. I thought, well, now I’ll have something to write about. I pressed into her, and her teacher’s tongue flicked in and out of my mouth. I caught it in the center with my teeth and sucked on it. She gagged, had trouble breathing. I played with her pussy; it gradually opened, getting wetter. I could feel the clit, and I circled it with my finger. Did Céline ever do this? I thought. Or Hemingway? Hemingway probably didn’t do it enough to as many. Hemingway lacked humor and vitamin E. That’s why he blew his brains away and then fell into the orange juice. Also, he got up too early in the morning. The world always looks worse before noon because too many ambitious people still have energy to burn.

  I ducked my head down to eat her pussy, and she pushed me away, saying “No, no!” Most like it; some don’t. I never forced that part. I got back up and grabbed her hair and yanked her head back until her mouth fell open, and then I drove my lips inside of her lips. It was like entering the guts of a flower. She was nailed to the sun and I was the sun. Then I fell from her mouth, sucked her left breast, then the right. Then I turned her, my right arm underneath her body and my left arm coming over the top, and I took both of her hands and held them from the outside. I just let my cock poke and slide its way; it knew, and I waited on it. It found the opening and the head entered. Then gradually the cunt opened, and the remainder of my cock entered. It was tight and wet in there, and I let my cock lay on in, not moving. She began wiggling, and I still held my cock motionless. Then I let it jump without moving my body. It was one of my tricks. Then I slowly pulled my cock out and just entered the head and a tiny portion of the cock back into the cunt, making slow movements. “Jesus!” she said, “do it!” I kept on teasing the rim and the inside of her cunt. Hemingway just didn’t know, I thought, and Céline never wrote about it, and Henry Miller never really knew how to fuck.

  I finally gave her half of my cock, feeling her grip me. Then I worked it in gradually, barely increasing the speed. Then I lost my technique and just started ripping. I stopped just before climaxing and held it still. I allowed myself to cool and then began again. I repeated the process four or five times, and then I lost control and let her have it. Holly came first, and as she did I followed. We both hollered like juveniles, and as I came I kept looking at all that hair on her head, thinking, Christ, Christ, I’ve got the luck, the luck and the way. Nobody can beat me now.

  Holly got up and went to the bathroom. I reached down and got one of my stockings from under the bed and wiped myself off with it. I didn’t want her husband coming home to hard spots on the sheets. A pro always made little clever moves like that. Yeats or Dante would never have known how to do that.

  When Holly came back, she fell asleep with her backside to me. She had a gentle little snore, very sexy, and my cock half-hardened and I let it slide into her ass. It was warm and comfortable there, and I thought, well, look, Chinaski, once again you’re in bed with a woman 30 years younger than you, and you can’t dance, shoot pool, or bowl. They all want to fuck immortality, and as long as they think you’re immortal, you can go ahead and fuck them, and when they find out that you’re not, well, you’ve got all that young ass stored up, and you can go back to your one-thumb, four-finger love.

  My problem is that I fall in love with every woman I fuck. I fuck good, but I am overemotional. To me, when a woman gives me her body, I feel as if she is giving me her soul; that’s part of what makes me hot. And then the whole act has overtones of death and murder and conquest. But mostly I just feel a rush of fondness and love, and I can’t overcome it.

  I throbbed throughout for the woman I had just fucked. I wasn’t worldly that way, and it cost me, but I couldn’t correct it. Most people shrug off a fuck like they shrug off a picnic. I don’t understand that attitude.

  The alarm awakened us, and Holly shut it off. “Look,” I said, “take a day off. Let’s sleep. Maybe later we’ll do it again.”

  “No,” said Holly, “I’m out of sick leave, and besides, the children need me.”

  I pulled the covers up and stretched out.

  When I awakened, Holly was gone. I got up and walked around
her apartment. Hangovers always make me horny. Drinking makes me horny. Not drinking makes me horny. But hangovers make me horniest of all. I found two of her shoes in the front room, standing side by side near a chair. There was a strange loneliness and warmth there—like buttered toast or cries from people shoved over cliffs.

  The heels and the base of the shoes were made of wood, and the heels (although sadly thick) were high. The shoes heated me. I am a leg and shoe man. Breasts mean little to me, although I suck on them because women like it. But legs and shoes set me off, and I don’t fight it.

  I had a hard-on, and I picked one of the shoes and ran my cock in and out of it. The bottom of my cock ran along the wood, and the top was held by the soft fabric that ran up from the toe.

  Maybe, I thought, someday I’ll marry a shoe.

  “Do you, Henry, take this shoe as your. . . .”

  I ran my cock in and out, then withheld the impulse. I had to preserve my sperm. I went back into the bedroom and looked in the closet. I found a pair of blue panties—no shit stains—and I rubbed them back and forth over my cock. It was good. I almost gave way.

  Some people, I thought, think that I am America’s greatest poet. Suppose this shit got out? I’d be doomed. I threw the panties back into the closet. Then I saw a shoe. Just one shoe, alone, with a high spiked heel. That shoe was a hot shoe. I picked it up and started fucking it. I walked around the room, giving it to that shoe. I even made a few swift runs in circles, giving it to that shoe. Then, at the last moment, I ripped it away and threw it back into the closet.

  Then I had to take a shit, bad. I went and did it. All that beer. I’d never die of constipation. There’s no doubt that when a man sees his shit the first thing he thinks of is, I have a chance to live, ah! At least, that is what I think of. And then if you have hemorrhoids, you get a double break. I had hemorrhoids. And I looked over at the toilet paper holder, and there wasn’t any paper. I ran into the kitchen and found a box of tissues, and I took eight or ten tissues and started getting off wiping my ass and making sounds. Then I was rubbed bare and raw, and the turds and the paper stuffed the bowl as I flushed. Some of it went down, then the water rose and the tissues and turds started rising. They came up to the level of the lid and held. I knew better, but I flushed again, and then it came: turds, tissues, water, all over the floor in front of the toilet. I took the back lid off and started playing with the big ball, the chain, the black rubber stopper.