Tales of Ordinary Madness

by Charles Bukowski

  Jack tore up 4 five dollar win tickets. Kant and cunt, I should go home now. save the roll. this is one of those nights.

  the 2nd race, a one mile pace, happened to be simple. you didn’t need a time-class breakdown. the crowd was buying Ambro Indigo, because of an inside post, early foot and Joe O’Brien in the bike. the other contender, Gold Wave was stuck on the outside, post 9, with the unheralded Don Mcllmurray. if they were all that easy he would have been in Beverly Hills ten years ago. but still, because the first race had gone bad, because of Kant and cunt, Jack went 5 win.

  then Good Candy got the late action on the total money-earned gimmick and all the boys came running to get on Good Candy. Candy had dropped from a morning line of 20 down to 9. now it read 8. the boys went insane. Jack smelled the fish and just tried to get out of the way. then a GIANT came rushing at him – the son of a bitch must have been 8 feet tall – where’d he come from? Jack had never seen him before.

  the GIANT wanted CANDY and all he could see was the window, and the car was rolling the gate toward the beginning line. the guy was young, tall. wide, stupid. pounding the floor toward Jack. Jack tried to duck. too late. the giant gave him an elbow across the temple, knocked him 15 feet. red, blue, yellow, blue shots of light spun the air.

  “hey, you son of a bitch!” Jack yelled at the giant. but the giant was leaning into the win window buying losing tickets. Jack got back to his seat.

  Gold Wave came around the curve with 3 lengths at the top of the stretch. and stepping easy. it was a walkaway at 4 to one. but Jack only had 5 win, which put him $6.50 up. well, it beat sweeping shit.

  he lost the 3rd., 4th. and 5th. races, hooked Lady Be Fast, 6 to one in the 6th., went to Beautiful Handover, 8/5 in the 7th., got away with it and was riding a mere $30 high, merely on instinct, then put 20 win on Propensity in the 8th., 3 to one, and Propensity broke at the start and there went that.

  one more scotch and water. this whole thing, no pre-race setup, it was like trying to screw a beachball in a dark closet. go home – dying was a little easier with a breather now and then at Acapulco.

  Jack looked over at the girls showing it from the chairs against the wall. that clubhouse stuff was nice and clean, good to look at. but it was there to take the money away from the winners. he allowed himself to enjoy the girls’ legs for a few moments. then turned to the tote. he felt a hip and leg up against him. a touch of breast, the faintest of perfume.

  “say, mista, pardon me.”

  “sure.”

  she put her flank against him good. all he had to do was say the magic words and he had a 50 dollar piece of ass, but he’d never seen a piece of ass worth 50 dollars.

  “yeh.” he asked.

  “who’s the 3 horse?”

  “May Western.”

  “you think she’ll win?”

  “not against these. maybe next time in a little better spot.”

  “I just need a horse in the money. who do you think will be in the money?”

  “you will,” Jack said and then slid away from her flank.

  cunt and Kant and a happy home.

  they were still buying May Western and Brisk Risk was dropping.

  ONE MILE PACE, FILLIES AND MARES, NON-WINNERS OF $10,000 IN 1968. horses made more than most men did, only they couldn’t spend it.

  a stretcher on rollers slid by with an old grey-haired woman under the blankets.

  the tote whirled around. Brisk Risk dropped again. May Western flicked up a notch.

  “hey, mista!”

  it was a man’s voice behind him.

  Jack was concentrating on the tote.

  “yeah?”

  “lemme have a quarter.”

  Jack didn’t turn around. he reached into his pocket and got the quarter. he put it into the palm of his hand and put the hand around behind his back. he felt the fingers dip into his hand, get the quarter.

  he never saw the guy. the board read zero.

  “here they come!”

  oh, shit.

  he hit the ten dollar window, got one win ticket on PIXIE DEW, 20 to one and two tickets on CECELIA, 7/2. he didn’t know what he was doing. there was a certain way of doing things, of fighting bulls of making love of frying eggs of drinking water and wine, and if you didn’t do them right you choked on them, they could kill you.

  Cecelia took the lead and took them down the backstretch. Jack checked the stride of the horse. a chance. it wasn’t straining yet and the driver had a light hold. a fair shot. so far. but the horse behind looked better. Jack checked the program. Kimpam, 12 on the line, off at 25, the crowd hadn’t wanted it. the horse had Joe O’Brien in the bike but Joe had failed on the same horse at 9 to one, two races back. the perfect blind. Lighthill let out all the string on Cecelia, Cecelia was open, throttle down, Lighthill had to steal it or chuck it. there was a chance. he had 4 lengths at the head of the stretch. O’Brien let Lighthill take the 4. then he leaned forward and let Kimpam go. shit, no, not at 25 to one, thought Jack. high-rein that mare, Lighthill. we got 4. let’s go. 20 win at 7/2 can be 98 bucks. we can save the night.

  he checked Cecelia. the legs were not lifting high at the knees. cunt and Kant and Kimpam. Cecelia shortened stride, almost stopped at midstretch. O’Brien sailed by with his 25 to one, rocking in the bike, flipping the reins, talking to the horse.

  then Pixie Dew came running on out from the outside, Ackerman giving the 20 to one shot all the string it needed and going to the whip – 20 times ten, 200 bucks plus change. Ackerman closed down to a length and a few Chinese tokens to O’Brien, and that’s the way they came down – O’Brien holding that space open, clucking to his horse, sailing by, smiling just a bit, as he does, and it was over. Kimpam, chestnut mare 4, by Irish-Meadow Wick. Irish? and O’Brien? shit, it was too much. the insane hat-pin ladies from the madhouses of hell had finally got themselves one.

  the two dollar win and two dollar show windows were filled with little old ladies on pension checks with half pints of gin in their purses.

  Jack took the stairway down. the escalators were jammed. he switched his wallet to left front pocket to get the pickpockets off. they hit his left rear pocket 5 or 6 times a night, but all he ever gave them was a broken-toothed comb and an old handkerchief.

  he got to his car, got out with the jam, managed not to get a fender ripped off, the fog was coming down good now. but he made it up North without trouble, except getting near his place he saw something good in the fog, young, short dress, hitch-hiking, oh mother, he tapped his brake, good legs but by the time he slowed he was 50 yards from her with other cars behind him. well, let her get raped by some idiot. he wasn’t going to circle back.

  he checked for lights in his place, nobody there, good. he made it in, sat down, split the next day’s Form with his thumb, opened the half pint, a can of beer and got to work. he’d been there 5 minutes when the phone began to ring. he looked up, gave the phone the finger, bent down over the Form again. the old pro was back in business.

  in two hours a tall six pack was gone and a half pint of whiskey and he was in bed, asleep, the next day’s card completely worked out, and a small smile of surety on his face. there were dozens of ways a man could go mad.

  GOODBYE WATSON

  it’s after a bad day at the track that you realize that you will never make it, coming in stinking at the socks, a few wrinkled dollars in your wallet, you know that the miracle will never arrive, and worse, thinking about the really bad bet you made on the last race on the eleven horse, knowing it couldn’t win, the biggest sucker bet on the board at 9/2, all the knowledge of your years ignored, you going lip to the ten buck window and saying, “eleven twice!” and the old grey-haired boy at the window, asking again: “eleven?” he always asks again when I pick a real bad one. he may not know the actual winner but he knows the sucker bets, and he gives me the saddest of looks and takes the twenty. then to go out and watch that dog run last all the way, not even working at it, just loafing as your brain starts
saying, “what the fuck, I gotta be crazy.”

  I’ve discussed this thing with a friend of mine who has many years at the track. he’s often done the same thing and he calls it the “death-wish,” which is old stuff. we yawn at the term now, but strangely, there’s still some basis in it yet. a man does get tired as the races progress and there IS this tendency to throw the whole game overboard. the feeling can come upon one whether he is winning or losing and then the bad bets begin. But, I feel, a more real problem is that you ACTUALLY want to be somewhere else – sitting in a chair reading Faulkner or making drawings with your child’s crayons. the racetrack is just another JOB, finally, and a hard one too. when I sense this and I am at my best, I simply leave the track; when I sense this and I am not at my best I go on making bad bets. another thing that one should realize is that it is HARD to win at anything; losing is easy. it’s grand to be The Great American Loser – anybody can do it; almost everybody does.

  a man who can beat the horses can do almost anything he makes up his mind to do. he doesn’t belong at the racetrack. he should be on the Left Bank with his mother easel or in the East Village writing an avant-garde symphony. or making some woman happy. or living in a cave in the hills.

  but to go the racetrack helps you realize yourself and the mob too. there’s a lot of murky downgrading of Hemingway now by critics who can’t write, and old ratbeard wrote some bad things from the middle to the end, but his head was becoming unscrewed, and even then he made the others look like schoolboys raising their hands for permission to make a little literary peepee. I know why Ernie went to the bull-fights – it was simple: it helped his writing. Ernie was a mechanic: he liked to fix things on paper. the bullfights were a drawingboard of everything: Hannibal slapping elephant ass over mountain or some wino slugging his woman in a cheap hotel room. and when Hem got in to the typer he wrote standing up. he used it like a gun. a weapon. the bullfights were everything attached to anything. it was all in his head like a fat butter sun: he wrote it down.

  with me, the racetrack tells me quickly where I am weak and where I am strong, and it tells me how I feel that day and it tells me how much we keep changing, changing ALL the time, and how little we know of this.

  and the stripping of the mob is the horror movie of the century. ALL of them lose. look at them. if you are able. one day at a racetrack can teach you more than four years at any university. if I ever taught a class in creative writing, one of my prerequisites would be that each student must attend a racetrack once a week and place at least a 2 dollar win wager on each race. no show betting. people who bet to show REALLY want to stay home but don’t know how.

  my students would automatically become better writers, although most of them would begin to dress badly and might have to walk to school.

  I can see myself teaching Creative Writing now.

  “well, how did you do Miss Thompson?”

  “Host $18.”

  “who did you bet in the feature race?”

  “One-Eyed Jack.”

  “sucker bet. the horse was dropping 5 pounds which draws the crowd in but also means a step-up in class within allowance conditions. the only time a class-jump wins is when he looks bad on paper. One-Eyed Jack showed the highest speed-rating, another crowd draw, but the speed rating was for 6 furlongs and 6 furlong speed ratings are always higher, on a comparative basis, than speed ratings for route races. furthermore, the horse closed at 6 so the crowd figured he would be there at a mile and a sixteenth. One-Eyed Jack has now shown a race around in 2 curves in 2 years. this is no accident. the horse is a sprinter and only a sprinter. that he came in last at 3 to one should not have been a surprise.”

  “how did you do?”

  “I lost one hundred and forty dollars.”

  “who did you bet in the feature race?”

  “One-Eyed Jack. class dismissed.” –

  before the racetrack and before the sterilized unreal existence of the t.v. brain-suck, I was working as a packer in a huge factory that turned out thousands of overhead lighting fixtures to blind the world, and knowing the libraries useless and the poets carefully complaining fakes, I did my studying at the bars and boxing matches.

  those were the nights, the old days at the Olympic. they had a bald little Irishman making the announcements (was his name Dan Tobey?), and he had style, he’d seen things happen, maybe even on the riverboats when he was a kid, and if he wasn’t that old, maybe Dempsey-Firpo anyhow. I can still see him reaching up for that cord and pulling the mike down slowly, and most of us were drunk before the first fight, but we were easy drunk, smoking cigars, feeling the light of life, waiting for them to put 2 boys in there, cruel but that was the way it worked, that is what they did to us and we were still alive, and, yes, most of with a dyed redhead or blonde. even me. her name was Jane and we had many a good ten-rounder between us, one of them ending in a k.o. of me. and I was proud when she’d come back from the lady’s room and the whole gallery would begin to pound and whistle and howl as she wiggled that big magic marvelous ass in that tight skirt – and it was a magic ass: she could lay a man stone cold and gasping, screaming love-words to a cement sky. then she’d come down and sit beside me and I’d lift that pint like a coronet, pass it to her, she’d take her nip, hand it back, and I’d say about the boys in the galley: “those screaming jackoff bastards, I’ll kill them.”

  and she’d look at her program and say, “who do you want in the first?”

  I picked them good – about 90 percent – but I had to see them first. I always chose the guy who moved around the least, who looked like he didn’t want to fight, and if one guy gave the Sign of the Cross before the bell and the other guy didn’t you had a winner – you took the guy who didn’t. but it usually worked together. the guy who did all the shadow boxing and dancing around usually was the one who gave the Sign of the Cross and got his ass whipped.

  there weren’t many bad fights in those days and if there were it was the same as now – mostly between the heavyweights. but we let them know about it in those days – we tore the ring down or set the place on fire, busted up the seats. they just couldn’t afford to give us too many bad ones. the Hollywood Legion ran the bad ones and we stayed away from the Legion. even the Hollywood boys knew the action was at the Olympic. Raft came, and the others, and all the starlets, hugging those front row seats. the gallery boys went ape and the fighters fought like fighters and the place was blue with cigar smoke, and how we screamed, baby baby, and threw money and drank our whiskey, and when it was over, there was the drive in, the old lovebed with our dyed and vicious women. you slammed it home, then slept like a drunk angel. who needed the public library? who needed Ezra? T.S.? E.E.? D.H.? H.D.? any of the Eliots? any of the Sitwells?

  I’ll never forget the first night I saw young Enrique Balanos. at the time. I had me a good colored boy. he used to bring a little white lamb into the ring with him before the fight and hug it, and that’s corny but he was tough and good and a tough and good man is allowed certain leeways, right?

  anyway, he was my hero, and his name might have been something like Watson Jones. Watson had good class and the flair – swift, quick quick quick, and the PUNCH, and he enjoyed his work. but then, one night, unannounced, somebody slipped this young Balanos in against him, and Balanos had it, took his time, slowly worked Watson down and took him over, busted him up good near the end. my hero. I couldn’t believe it. if I remember, Watson was kayoed which made it a very bitter night, indeed. me with my pint screaming for mercy, screaming for a victory that simply would not happen. Balanos certainly had it – the fucker had a couple of snakes for arms, and he didn’t move – he slid, slipped, jerked like some type of evil spider, always getting there, doing the thing. I knew that night that it would take a very excellent man to beat him and that Watson might as well take his little lamb and go home.

  it wasn’t until much later that night, the whiskey pouring into me like the sea, fighting with my woman, cursing her sitting there s
howing me all that fine leg, that I admitted that the better man had won.

  “Balanos. good legs. he doesn’t think. just reacts. better not to think. tonight the body beat the soul. it usually does. goodbye Watson, goodbye Central Avenue, it’s all over.”

  I smashed the glass against the wall and went over and grabbed me some woman. I was wounded. she was beautiful. we went to bed. I remember a light rain came through the window. we let it rain on us. it was good. it was so good we made love twice and when we went to sleep we slept with our faces toward the window and it rained all over us and in the morning the sheets were all wet and we both got up sneezing and laughing, “jesus christ! jesus christ!” it was funny and poor Watson laying somewhere, his face slugged and pulpy, facing the Eternal Truth, facing the 6 rounders, the 4 rounders, then back to the factory with me, murdering 8 or ten hours a day for pennies, getting nowhere, waiting on Papa Death, getting your mind kicked to hell and your spirit kicked to hell, we sneezed, “jesus christ!” it was funny and she said, “you’re blue all over, you’ve turned all BLUE! jesus, look at yourself in the mirror!” and I was freezing and dying and I stood in front of the mirror and I was all BLUE! ridiculous! a skull and shit of bones! I began to laugh, I laughed so hard I fell down on the rug and she fell down on top of me and we both laughed laughed laughed, jesus christ we laughed until I thought we were crazy, and then I had to get up, get dressed, comb my hair, brush my teeth, too sick to eat, heaved when I brushed my teeth, I went outside and walked toward the overhead lighting factory, just the sun feeling good but you had to take what you could get.

  GREAT POETS DIE IN STEAMING POTS OF SHIT

  let me tell you about him. with sick hangover I crawled out from under the sheets the other day to try to get to the store, buy some food, place food inside of me and make the job I hate. all right. I was in this grocery store, and this little shit of a man (he must have been as old as I) but perhaps more comfortable and stupid and idiotic, a chipmunk full of beatlenuts and BOW WOW and no regard for anything except the way he felt or thought or expressed ... he was a hyena-chipmunk, a piece of sloth. a slug. he kept staring at me. then he said: