Absence of the Hero

by Charles Bukowski

  He laughed. “You know some of the girls, white girls, come in and they only want black dildoes. So we sell them to them.”

  “Big ones?”

  “Yeah. Right along with the myth.”

  “Is it a myth?”

  “I hope so. . . .”

  Laura sat down and we nostriled in the snow. I never much cared for it. The non-lasting qualities of it pissed me off. Coke was for chicken shits who wanted to get on and off real fast so they wouldn’t get nailed. It was like fucking 8 or 10 times a night but never really coming. Maybe real coke was another number but it would never find me.

  Tod looked up.

  “I deal. Since you’re my friend, I can get you down for half-price.”

  “You’re on.”

  “Tod loves you,” said Laura. “I mean in spirit. He’s got all your books!”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, man, how about autographing them?”

  “What do I get?”

  “You can touch Laura’s knee. . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  Tod went into the bedroom and brought out 6 or 7 paperbacks. The Night I Fucked a Chicken with My Mother in the Bed. Your Water-Resistant Pussy Belches Coors. Limp in Nirvana with Greta Garbo. Suck Me, Suck You, Suck Suck. Others of the same ilk. Ink.

  “I can’t sign this shit. I mean, Shakespeare wrote lousy but he never knew it. I know it when I do it.”

  “Let me bribe you. I deal grass. . . .”

  Tod threw a packet down, mostly seeds and stems.

  I began inscribing.

  We went 3 or 4 more coke rounds and then I went back to my place. I sat down to the typer and the keys just looked at me and I looked at them. Fucking Tod, the ladies man. What did I have? He had coke. I got down to my shorts and rolled a joint of seeds and stems. It was funny. The seeds got red hot and dropped out of the paper and fell onto my undershirt, and beneath it, burning me. I ripped them out. I had to drink 5 or 6 cans of beer to come around and walk into the bedroom and sleep. . . . The next morning I had these little red burn-dots all over my chest and gut. . . .

  This night I was sitting with one of my numbers, Ursella. Ursella had long red hair which came down to her ass. She was a pill freak. She had a sharp mind but a vicious one. I just liked to look at all that long red hair and drink. We had some sex but it wasn’t major. With Ursella I just liked to relax and try to figure out how she had gotten so goddamned hard. I never wanted to get that hard and I thought that maybe by studying it I might avoid it. And not become something that hardly added to the little joy that there was in the world.

  She had met Tod Hudson, The Ladies Man of East Hollywood, one night when Tod had come down with Laura. That night I had been very conscious of Tod’s perfectly-fitted clothing. I mean, each piece of material gripped to his tiny ass. And his little knit shirts had clung to him. The belt fitted nicely into the notch. My belt dangled out, warped. I had buttons missing from my shirts. Cigarette holes therein. I forgot to comb my hair and I had an untrimmed beard. My pantlegs were either too long or too short. My shorts slipped up into the crotch of my ass and my face was red and puffy from the booze. Tod was like a paper cut-out. Even his farts were probably vanilla-scented.

  The phone rang. It was Tod. It was a Thursday night. Laura was a nudie dancer at a nightclub on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights. Like I said, it was a Thursday night. Tod was lonely.

  “What are you doing, man?” he asked.

  “I’m tired.”

  “Why don’t you come down here?”

  “No, man, I don’t want to.”

  “Oh, come on, man!”

  “No, man. . . .”

  “Well, FUCK YOU!” he said and hung up.

  I walked back on into Ursella.

  “That was Tod, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He wanted to see you, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You hurt his feelings!”

  “Jesus Christ, his woman’s working tonight. He can’t handle it. . . .”

  “When’s she work to?”

  “Two A.M.”

  “You hurt his feelings! I’m going to see him!”

  “That’s up to you.”

  She grabbed her purse, opened the door, slammed it, and was gone.

  How about my feelings? I thought.

  Then, feeling that was not a rational thought, I went in and poured a tall scotch from the hidden fifth in the broom closet. It was always nice to have an ace. Sometimes without the ace it was over for you.

  I finished the drink, then took my shoes off, and toed on down to Tod’s court. I peeked between the blinds and saw the mound of coke spread between the dildoes. Ursella was going to get fucked by the Ladies Man. Frankly, it hurt me. Then I remembered the boxing matches were on at the Olympic Auditorium. I went back to my place, had a half-glass of scotch and beer chaser, and drove out there. . . .

  I went down to Tod’s court a couple nights later for my discount coke. I also purchased the usual bag of grass that was mostly stems and seeds. Tod was dressed in his usual clean fashion, the usual tailor-fit. The guy never had any dirt on him, never a spot. He never needed a shave, there was never a hair sticking out of his nostril. He was Mr. Cool. The only time I had ever seen him pissed was the time that guy had come on his movie machine. He was reading a copy of New York. Laura was practicing one of her dances. She danced into the other room to do a change of costume.

  Tod looked up. “Hey, man, you should have been with us the other night. We went to see these cartoonists. I phoned you but you weren’t in or didn’t answer. . . . Those cartoonists are something else. Damn near everybody was there but Crumb. Anyhow, I made some sales. They started snorting. Then the guy’s house we were at, I went for a walk with his wife. I brought here over here and fucked her, then brought her back.

  “Did you know her very well?”

  “Met her about 5 minutes once. . . .”

  “How do you do it?”

  “What?”

  “Fuck at the drop of a leaf. . . .”

  Tod smiled. “Hey, man, it’s no problem. . . .”

  Around then Laura danced back in and Tod spread some coke. He always spread better than he sold so I decided to stay. There was also beer and gin. Besides, I was making a study of the Ladies Man. One thing I knew: it wasn’t his conversation, that was pretty dull. Maybe it was the things he didn’t say. I had this habit of putting people off for life with just a simple sentence. Not that I minded so much but it had cost me a great deal of ass. And maybe that wasn’t so bad either. Then maybe too, that’s what guys like me pretended to think.

  The night moved on. Not much said. Tod suggested that I give a reading, a poetry reading at his porno shop.

  While we wasted the hours I got thinking on Tod. All the fucks he told me about, he never mentioned that one of them was exceptional or that one of them was bad, and he never spoke of caring for a woman. Maybe that was his style, not mentioning it. Some women revved on indifference; they took it as worldliness. But whatever he did, whatever he had, it was working for him. The Fuck Master of East Hollywood. And he wasn’t that hung. Or so Ursella had claimed when I had phoned her in curiosity, and asked what he carried. “He shoulda used a dildo,” she told me.

  The night went on. Gin, snow and beer, grass. Laura talked about the freaks at the nudie dance place. She claimed they were jack-offs, they really tipped, and they fell in love. I talked a bit about the racetrack. The other came about a bit suddenly. Tod leaned forward with this sneer on his face and said, “Hey, man, you are always talking about how good you can eat pussy!”

  “Ah, come on, Tod. . . .”

  “No, man, every time you get high you brag about how good you eat pussy!”

  “He’s right, Hank,” Laura said.

  I always remembered what this guy big Tommy had said one day at the factory I was working down on Alameda when the guys were going on about how good they were
at eating pussy: “Hey, any guy who eats pussy will suck a dick!”

  Somehow that lasted on in my brain. I got to eating pussy at the behest of this young number who claimed she would leave me if I didn’t. Well, after 4 years she did, but I had really sharpened my technique and somehow when I got high I got on to what a master I was, although in truth I had no great taste for it.

  “I thought,” Tod said, “that you might watch me eat some pussy and tell me if I’m any good or not.”

  “Ah, hell, man. . . .”

  “No, I mean it.”

  Laura marched off to the bedroom. Tod followed her. I poured a gin and seltzer. The March to the Gallows played on the overhead.

  “Hey,” Tod yelled, “come on, man!”

  I walked on in. They were both nude. Laura had her legs spread. Tod looked up. “Now, watch me, man!”

  He went at it. It was too bland, like him.

  “Jesus,” I said, “show more passion! Go mad! Let go!”

  Tod tried. He was very bad. It was like a dull joke. It really hurt my senses, all that waste. Laura just stretched there like a cardboard cutout.

  “Christ, man, let me show you how!”

  Tod pulled out. “O.K., show me!”

  I downed my gin and leaped in. I pulled at my memory and got out my old Van Gogh strokes. I teased, plunged, relented, attacked again, let off, continued, finally staying, destroying. Laura was out of it. I decided to get off and let Tod go at it but I found I couldn’t and next I knew one head was out and the other was in, my cock was driving home, Laura was ripping my back with her nails, then I heard Tod:

  “O.K., YOU SON OF A BITCH! GET OUT OF HERE! NOW!”

  I looked up. There was Tod standing there nude pointing the .45 at me.

  “GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”

  I heard the safety catch click off. He had the .45 pointed at my bellybutton. I climbed off the bed.

  “Hey, cool, Daddy Tod! You’ve lost your cool, daddy!”

  “I SAID, ‘GET THE FUCK OUT!’ NOW!”

  I picked up my clothes and put them over my arm. I walked out of the bedroom with Tod following me with the .45. I opened the front door and walked out into the night. I didn’t look back. I walked down toward my court in the back. It was early morning and there wasn’t anybody around. My dick was limp, quite. I reached into my pants for my keys and they were gone. Shit. They had dropped out of my pants somewhere along the way. I got into my shorts and started searching the walkway. I re-traced my steps all the way but I couldn’t find the keys. The morning was getting cold. I walked back to Tod’s door and knocked. There was no response. They were probably fucking. I had certainly warmed her up for him.

  I knocked again.

  I heard Tod: “GIVE THE SON OF A BITCH HIS KEYS!”

  The door opened. It was Laura in the nude. She just handed me the keys. Then she closed the door.

  I walked back to my place, keys and balls dangling. Inside, I drank two cans of ale and slept. . . .

  Nothing was ever mentioned about that night. It were as if it had never happened. Meanwhile, my coke habit, even at cut-rates, was cutting into my resources. I forgot the poem and went back to the dirty story. Most of my dirty stories were funny, like there was one where this guy gets his balls nailed to the headboard of the bed while his man-hating lady slowly sprays him to death with cans of roach poison while she talks to her girlfriends on the telephone telling them that no man is ever going to fuck her over again.

  Anyhow, I was back at Tod’s this night. Laura was at her nudie dance spot. It was a slow night. We were on the beer. Tod said he wanted to open a string of porno shops and he wanted me to manage one of them. He claimed that I was one of the few guys he could trust. I told him I’d brood on it. Then there was a knock on the door. A knock could tell you much if you could read it. This was an ugly knock, somehow like bad darkness knocking. I mean, the read on that knock wasn’t a good read. Not at all.

  Tod went to the door. He had two chains on the door. He dropped one of the chains off, slid the door open a chink, looked out. Then he turned to me.

  “It’s my supplier, my main man.”

  “I’ll leave then, right now.”

  “No, stay, it’s all right.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  Tod opened the door. First, this thin guy moved in. His little rat’s eyes checked the room. He slid into the bedroom. He checked the can. The walls, under the rugs. He took off lampshades. He even opened the refrigerator. After this, in walked the Big Guy. Big and fat. Dressed in a dirty black cheap suit. He was sweating. There was probably no such thing as evil but if there was, there was most of it: Mr. Evil. He reeked of murder. He was like a guy who wanted to kill just to get rid of a nervous itch. I felt all that, plenty. And I felt fear because it was catching: it was coming off of him, waves and rolls of it. I had never seen a guy like that in the movies or in life or anywhere else. You couldn’t invent anybody like that. He was just there.

  He looked at Tod. “WHO’S THIS GUY?”

  “He’s all right. . . .”

  “What’s he want? What’s he do?”

  “He’s a writer. He was just having a beer.”

  “Tell him to clear out!”

  The sweat was rolling from Big Guy’s forehead and it was running down his face. The thin guy came around and stood next to him. What would Clint Eastwood do?

  I drained my beer, looked at Tod: “I need an ale.”

  Tod walked toward the kitchen.

  “Hey, what the fuck is this?” said the big man. “He needs an ALE? What the fuck IS this?”

  Tod came back with my ale, my favorite kind in the green can. I tore the clip and had a hit.

  “Who is this guy? What the fuck does he want?” the big guy asked Tod.

  “I told you,” said Tod, “no problem.” Then he smiled weakly, “I even let him eat Laura’s pussy.”

  “That don’t cut no fucking ice with me! My brother was killed by a sack of shit who looked just like this guy!”

  I took a good hit of the ale. Frankly, I was scared, not of death, just of this Big Guy. I could understand most people no matter how much I disliked them. But with the Big Guy, there was no understanding. It just ran off the edge and vanished. You think, you know, after you’ve been around 5 or 6 decades that you’ve met them all. But there’s always that one extra that they work in on you and nothing you’ve ever known or experienced helps at all.

  “I’m going,” I said, “one more gulp.”

  “Gulp it fast,” said the Big Guy.

  “Yeah,” the thin guy finally spoke.

  This pissed me off a little, not much, but a little so I didn’t gulp the ale as fast as I had intended. They just stood there, Tod, the thin boy, the Big Guy, and they watched me as I drained the can.

  “O.K.” I said, “I’m leaving.”

  Then I stood up and pulled out a cigarette and put it to my lips.

  “Anybody got a light?” I asked.

  Big Guy walked forward, took the cigarette out of my mouth and crushed it, then this big hand came out and grabbed my jaw and my mouth opened and he threw the cigarette shreds into my mouth and slammed my mouth shut. My tongue came down on some of my teeth and I felt the blood almost immediately. And the pain.

  “Now, you leave, huh?” asked the Big Guy.

  I did. And as I went down the walkway I could hear Big Guy asking Tod, “Who the FUCK was that guy? . . .”

  Well, we talked a little bit about that afterwards, Tod and I, that is, but not too much. Meanwhile, Tod scored on another of my numbers but I almost expected that. But he did fail on another who told me, “That guy reminds me of a jelly doughnut.” But for my money he was still the fuckmaster of East Hollywood and all those girls just weren’t coke-whores. I mean, I would really ponder it: did they like the way his pants fit so tightly against his tiny crotch? Or was it his always-shined shoes with the pointed glistening toes? Or his gartered stockings? Or his white-eyed face with windswept ha
ir touched with a yellow almost borrowed from the sun? Or was it that he smelled like a man who would never grow old? Always cool, lazy, knowing . . . knowing something that the rest of us would never know? Generally, I thought of him as an Advertisement of what a Ladies Man should look like. And he wasn’t dumb; he was bland but not dumb. Many things that fooled other people didn’t fool him. He had some fucking perceptions. In fact, take 5 or 6 men, Tod would still be the best to talk to a bit some night. It was easy enough that way. But what bothered me was how he so quickly got into bed with almost any strange woman that he desired. I felt that there was some password, some words he must have said, so I stayed around trying to key in, like pretending to be a writer, I wanted to know the essence of his fuck-secret, I felt it was all a little bit beyond the obvious. Maybe something I could use, or maybe something we could all laugh at. . . .

  Well, I think it was a Thursday night, maybe a Friday, I had been to the harness races and I was driving in, fairly drunk. I seldom drank at the races but this night I had. One of my numbers had started cranking down on me demanding that we go to Vegas and get married. It just came out like that and she just kept demanding. Some madness. It upset me. It couldn’t have been my money. In fact, she had been one of those who had fucked the Ladies Man of East Hollywood. She kept saying, “Let’s get married right now before we change our minds!” And worse, this number was one of those who fucked everybody: pizza delivery boys, religious fanatics, symphony orchestra violinists, termite men, mayors, carwash boys. My life was already hell, top-grade hell. I had failed at suicide 4 or 5 times but I still had hope. But married to this number I knew I would be in a triple Dante’s Inferno. So, I escaped her by driving off to the harness races.

  So I drank at the bar out there, trying to erase all her bullshit and I lost on top of that, maybe a couple of hundred. . . .

  I drove in slowly. I was trying to contemplate where I was in Existence and I didn’t arrive with very much. I even ran out of cigarettes. Things got bad, but there was no place to go when they got bad. If you went to a shrink, he just read to you from the book but when you looked at him, you knew he didn’t know what you were talking about. You were just talking to a contented person. When what you really needed when you were going crazy was another crazy who read exactly what you were saying, but not from the book, from the street.