Tales of Ordinary Madness

by Charles Bukowski

  2,000 years of Christianity and what do you end up with? squad-car radios trying to hold rotting shit together, and what else? tons of wars, little air raids, muggers in streets, knifings, so many insane that you just forget it, you just let them run the streets in policeman’s uniforms or out of them.

  so we went inside and the kid kept saying,

  “hey, let’s go out there and tell the police what happened?”

  “no, kid, please. if you are drunk you are guilty no matter what happens.”

  “but they are right outside, let’s go tell them.”

  “there’s nothing to tell.”

  the kid looked at me as if I were some kind of chickenshit coward. I was. the longest he had ever been in jail was 7 hours under some kind of east L.A. campus protestation.

  “kid, I think that the night is over.”

  I threw him a blanket for the couch and he went to sleep. I took 2 quarts of beer, opened both, set them on the headboard of my rented bed, took a big swallow, stretched out, waited on my death as Cummings must have done, Jeffers, the garbage man, the newspaper boy, the tout ...

  I finished off the beers.

  the kid woke up about 9:30 a.m. I can’t understand early risers. Micheline was another early riser. running around ringing doorbells, waking everybody up. they were nervous, trying to push down walls. I always figured a man was a damn fool if he got up before noon. Norse had the best idea – sit around in silk robe and pajamas and let the world go its way.

  I let the kid out the door and off he went into the world. the green paint was dry on the street. Maeterlinck’s bluebird was dead. Hirschman sat in a dark room with a bloody right nostril.

  and I had written another FOREWORD to another book of somebody’s poetry. how many more?

  “hey, Bukowski, I’ve got this book of poems here. I thought you might read the poems and say something.”

  “say something? but I don’t like poetry, man.”

  “that’s all right. just say something.”

  the kid was gone. I had to take a shit. the toilet was clogged; the landlord gone for 3 days. I took the shit and put it in a brown paper bag. then I went outside and walked with the paperbag like a man going to work with his lunch. then when I got to the vacant lot I threw the bag. three forewords. 3 bags of shit. nobody would ever understand how Bukowski suffered.

  I walked back toward my place, dreaming of supine women and everlasting fame. the former would be nicer. and I was running out of brown bags. I mean, paper bags. 10 a.m. there was the mailman. a letter from Beiles in Greece. he said it was raining there too.

  fine, then, and inside I was alone again, and the madness of the night was the madness of the day. I arranged myself upon the bed, supine, staring upward and listened to the cocksucking rain.

  PURPLE AS AN IRIS

  One side of the ward was marked A-l, A-2, A-3, so forth and the men were kept on that side and the other side was marked B-l, B-2, B-3, and they kept the women over there. But then they decided it would be good therapy to let us mix now and then, and it was very good therapy – we fucked in the closets, out in the garden, behind the barn, everywhere. Many of the women were in there pretending to be crazy because their husbands had caught them doing the business with other men, but it was all a con – they asked to be committed, getting the old man’s pity and then coming out and doing it all over again. Then going back in, coming out, so forth. But while the girls were in they had to have it and we did the best we could to help them. And, of course, the staff was so busy – doctors screwing nurses and orderlies screwing each other that they hardly knew what we were doing. That was all right.

  I’d seen more crazy people outside – everywhere you looked: in dime stores, factories, post offices, pet shops, baseball games, political offices – than I ever saw in there. You sometimes wondered what they were in for. There was one guy, quite level, you could talk to him easily, Bobby his name was, he looked o.k.; in fact he looked a hell of a lot better than some of the shrinks who were trying to cure us. You couldn’t talk to a shrink any length of time without feeling crazy yourself. The reason most shrinks become shrinks is because they are worried about their own minds. And examining your own mind is the worst thing a crazy man can do, all the theories to the contrary being bullshit. Every now and then some nut would ask something like this:

  “Hey, where’s Dr. Malov? Haven’t seen him today. Is he on vacation? Or maybe he transferred out?”

  “He’s on vacation,” another nut would answer, “and he transferred out.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Butcher knife. Wrists and throat. He didn’t leave a note.”

  “He was such a nice fellow.”

  “Oh, shit yes.”

  That’s one thing I could never understand. I mean about the grapevine in places like that. The grapevine is never wrong. In factories, large institutions like that ... word either drips down that such and such has happened to so and so; and worse, days, weeks ahead of time you heard things that turned out to be true – Old Joe who had been there 20 years was going to get layed off or we were all going to get layed off, or anything like that, it was always true. Another thing about shrinks, getting back to shrinks, is that I could never figure out why they had to go the hard way when they had all those pills on hand. Not a brain in the whole lot of them.

  Well, anyhow, getting back to it – the more advanced cases (advancing toward a seeming cure, I mean) were let out at 2 each afternoon on Mondays and Thursdays and were to return by 5:30 that evening or they lost privileges. The theory to this was that we could adjust to society slowly. You know, instead of just jumping out of the nut ward into the street. One look around could put you right back in. Looking at all those other nuts out there.

  I was allowed my Monday and Thursday privileges, during which time I visited a doctor I had a little dirt on and stocked up on free dexies, bennies, meth, rainbows, librium and all the like. I sold these to the patients. Bobby ate them like candy and Bobby had a lot of money. In fact, most of them did. As I said, I often wondered why Bobby was in there. He was all right in almost all areas of behavior. He just had one little trick: every now and then he’d get up and put both of his hands in his pockets and lift his pants legs way up high and walk 8 or ten steps while giving out this dull little whistling sound from his lips. Some kind of tune that was in his head; not very musical, but some kind of tune, and always the same one. It only lasted a few seconds. That’s all that was wrong with him. But he kept doing that, maybe 20 or 30 times a day. The first few times you saw it, you thought he was joking and thought, my god, what a droll and wonderful fellow. Then, later, you knew he had to do it.

  O.k. Where was I? All right. They let the girls out at 2 p.m. too and then we had a better chance with them. It got hot fucking in those closets all the time. But we had to hustle fast because the cruisers were around. Guys with cars who knew the hospital schedule and they’d drive up with their cars and whisk our fine and helpless ladies away from us.

  Before I got into the dope racket I didn’t have much money and there was plenty of trouble. I had to take one of the best ones, Mary, into the ladies room of a Standard Service Station one time. We had quite some trouble finding a position – nobody wants to lay on the floor of a pisshouse – and it wasn’t right standing – quite awkward – and then I remembered a trick I had once learned. In a train crapper passing through Utah. With a nice young Indian woman drunk on wine. – I told Mary to throw one leg up over the sink bowl. I worked a leg up over that bowl and stuck it in. It worked fine. Remember that one. You may need it sometime. You can even let hot water run on your balls for added sensation.

  Anyhow, Mary came out of the ladies restroom first and then I walked out. The Standard Station attendant saw me.

  “Hey, man, what were you doing in the ladies room?”

  “Oh, good heavens, man!” I gave my wrist a delicate little twist. “You really are a little fart of a flirt, aren’t you?” I wig
gled off. He didn’t seem to question me. That worried hell out of me for about two weeks, then I forgot about it ...

  I think I forgot about it. Anyhow, the dope moved well. Bobby swallowed anything. I even sold him a couple of birth control pills. He swallowed them.

  “Fine stuff, man. Get me some more, will ya?”

  But Pulon was the strangest of them all. He just sat in a chair by the window and never moved. He never went to the dining room. Nobody ever saw him eat. Weeks went by. He just sat in his chair. He really related to the far-out nuts – people who never spoke to anybody, not even the shrinks. They’d stand there and talk to Pulon. They’d speak back and forth, nodding, laughing, smoking. Outside of Pulon, I was best with relating to the far-out cases. The shrinks would ask us, “How do you guys break them down?”

  Then we’d both stare back and not answer.

  But Pulon could talk to people who hadn’t spoken for 20 years. Get them to answer questions and tell him things. Pulon was very strange. He was one of those brilliant men who would go to their death without ever letting it out – which was why maybe it kept that way. Only a fathead has bags full of advice and answers to every question.

  “Listen, Pulon,” I said, “you never eat. I never see you eat food. How do you stay alive.”

  “Heeehehehehehehehehe. Heeeheeeheeeheehehehe ...”

  I volunteered for special jobs just to get out of the ward, just to get around the place. I was kind of like Bobby, only I didn’t pull up my pants and whistle some off-tune version of Bizet’s Carmen. I had this suicide complex and these heavy depressive fits and I couldn’t stand crowds of people and, especially, I couldn’t bear standing in a long line waiting for anything. And that’s all society is becoming: long lines and waiting for something. I’d tried suicide by gas and it didn’t work. But I had another problem. My problem was getting out of bed. I hated to get out of bed, ever. I used to tell people, “Man’s two greatest inventions are the bed and the atomic bomb; the first keeps out out of it and the second gets you out of it.” They thought I was crazy. Children’s games, that’s all people play: children’s games – they go from the cunt to the grave without ever being touched by the horror of life.

  Yes, I hated to get out of bed in the mornings. That meant starting life again and after you’ve been in bed all night you’ve built a special kind of privacy that is very difficult to surrender. I was always a loner. Forgive me, I guess I am off in the head, but I mean, except for a quickie piece of ass it wouldn’t matter to me if all the people in the world died. Yes, I know it’s not nice. But I’d be as contended as a snail; it was, after all, the people who had made me unhappy.

  It was the same every morning:

  “Bukowski, get up!”

  “Waaaarf?”

  “I said, ‘Bukowski, get up!’ ”

  “Yek?”

  “Not ‘YEK!’ Up! Rise and shine, you freak!”

  “... arrr ... go fuck your little sister ...”

  “I’ll get Dr. Blasingham.”

  “Fuck him too.”

  And here would come Blasingham trotting up, disturbed, a little bit put-out, you know, he’d been finger-fucking one of the student nurses in his office who was dreaming of marriage and vacations on the French Rivi ... with an old sub-normal who couldn’t even get his pecker hard. Dr. Blasingham. Bloodsucker of county funds. A trickster and a shit. Why he hadn’t been elected president of the United States I couldn’t figure out. Maybe they had never seen him – he was so busy fingering and slobbering over nurse’s panties ...

  “All right, Bukowski. UP!”

  “There’s nothing to do. There’s absolutely nothing to do. Don’t you see?”

  “Up. Or you’ll lose all privileges.”

  “Shit. That’s like saying you’ll lose your rubber when there’s nothing to fuck.”

  “O.k., bastard ... I, Dr. Blasingham, I am counting ... Now, here we go ... ‘One ... Two ...’ ”

  I leaped up. “Man is the victim of an environment which refuses to understand his soul.”

  “You lost your soul in kindergarten, Bukowski. Now wash up and get ready for breakfast.” ...

  I was given the job of milking the cows, finally, and it got me up earlier than anybody. But it was kind of nice, pulling at those cows’ tits. And I made an arrangement with Mary to meet me out in the barn on this morning. All that straw. It would be fine, fine. I was pulling the tits when Mary came around the side of a cow.

  “Let’s make it, Python.”

  She called me ‘Python.’ I had no idea why. Maybe she thinks I’m Pulon? I used to think. But what the hell good does thinking do a man? Only leads to trouble.

  Anyway, we got up in the loft, undressed; both of us naked as sheared sheep, quivering, that clean hard straw sticking into us like icepicks. Hell, this was the stuff you read about in the old-time novels, by god, we were there!

  I worked it in. It was great. I just got going good when it seemed as if the whole Italian army had burst into the barn –

  “HEY! STOP! STOP! UNHAND THAT WOMAN!”

  “DISMOUNT IMMEDIATELY!”

  “GET YOUR PECKER OUT OF THERE!”

  A bunch of male orderlies, fine fellows all, most of them homosexual, hell, I had nothing against them, yet – look: here they came climbing up the ladder –

  “NOT ANOTHER STROKE, YOU BEAST!”

  “IF YOU COME, IT’S OFF WITH YOUR BALLS!”

  I speeded-up but it wasn’t any use. There were 4 of them. They pulled me off and rolled me on my back.

  “GOD O MIGHTY, LOOK AT THAT THING!”

  “PURPLE AS AN IRIS AND HALF THE LENGTH OF A MAN’S ARM! PULSATING, GIGANTIC, UGLY!”

  “SHOULD WE?”

  “We might lose our jobs.”

  “It might well be worth it.”

  Just then Dr. Blasingham walked in. That solved everything.

  “What’s going on up there?” he asked.

  “We have this man under our control, Dr.”

  “How about the woman?”

  “The woman?”

  “Yes, the woman.”

  “Oh ... she’s madder than hell.”

  “All right, get them into their clothes and into my office. One at a time. The woman first!”

  They made me wait out there, outside of Blasingham’s private God-ward. I sat between 2 orderlies on this hard bench, switching back and forth between a copy of the Atlantic Monthly and the Reader’s Digest. It was torture, like dying of thirst in the desert and being asked which I’d prefer – to suck on a dry sponge or to have 9 or ten grains of sand thrown down my throat ...

  I guess Mary got quite a tongue-lashing from the good Dr.

  Then they rather carried Mary out and pushed me in. Blasingham seemed quite stuffy about the whole thing. He told me that he had been watching me through field glasses for some days. I had been under suspicion for weeks. 2 unexplained pregnancies. I told the doctor that depriving a man of sex was not the healthiest way to help him recover his mind. He claimed that sexual energy could be transferred up the spine and reconverted to other more gratifying uses. I told him that I believed this was possible if it were voluntary but that if it were enforced, the spine just didn’t damn well feel like transferring energies for other more gratifying uses.

  Well, it all ended up, I lost my privileges for two weeks. But someday before I cash in, I hope to make it in the straw. Breaking my stroke like that, they owe me one, at least.

  EYES LIKE THE SKY

  some time back Dorothy Healey came to see me. I had a hangover and a 5-day beard. I had forgotten about this until the other night over a quiet beer her name came up. I mentioned to the young man across the room that she had been by.

  “why’d she come to see you?” he asked.

  “I dunno.”

  “what’d she say?”

  “I don’t remember what she said. all I remember is she had on a pretty blue dress and her eyes were this beautiful glowing blue.”

  “you
don’t remember what she said?”

  “not a thing.”

  “did you make her?”

  “of course not. Dorothy must be very careful who she goes to bed with. think of the bad publicity if she unwittingly went to bed with an F.B.I. agent or the owner of a chain of shoe stores.”

  “I guess Jackie Kennedy’s mates must be carefully selected too.”

  “sure. the Image. she’ll probably never go to bed with Paul Krassner.”

  “I’d like to be there if she did.”

  “holding the towels?”

  “holding the pieces,” he said.

  and Dorothy Healey’s eyes had this beautiful glowing blue ...

  the comic strips have long ago gone serious and since they have they are truly more comic than ever. in a sense, the comic strip has taken over for the old time radio soap operas. both have in common the fact that they tend to project a serious, a very serious reality, and therein lies their humor – their reality is such plastic dime store stuff that you have to laugh at it a bit if you are not having too much stomach trouble.

  in the current Los Angeles Times (as this is being written) we are having the wind-up of a Hippie-Beatnik scene in Mary Worth. we have had here the campus rebel, bearded and in turtleneck sweater running off with the campus queen, a long-haired blonde girl with perfect figure (I almost got rocks looking at her). what the campus rebel stands for we are never quite sure except in a few short speeches which say very little. anyhow I will not bore you with the story line. it ends up with big bad poppa in necktie and expensive suit and baldheaded and eaglefaced giving out a few dictums of his own to the bearded one, then offering him a job with his outfit so that he can properly support his sexy daughter. the Hippie-Beatnik at first refuses and vanishes off the page and poppa and daughter are packing to leave him, to leave him there in his own idealistic slime, when the Hippie-Beatnik returns. “Joe! ... What have you done?” says the sexy daughter. and Joe enters SMILING and BEARDLESS: “I thought it only fair for you to know what your husband really looked like, sweetheart ... before it was too late!” then he turns to poppa: “Also, I figured that a beard would be more of a handicap than a help, Mr. Stevens ... ON A REAL-ESTATE SALESMAN!” “Does this mean you’ve finally come to YOUR SENSES young man?” asks poppa. “It means that I’m willing to pay the price you put on your daughter, sir!” (ah, sex, ah love, ah FUCK!) “But,” continues our x-hippie, “I still intend to fight INJUSTICE ... wherever I find it!” well, that’s good because our x-hip is going to find a lot of injustice in the real-estate business. then, as a parter poppa gives his line: “However, you’re in for a big SURPRISE, Joe! ... when you discover that we old mossbacks want a better world too! We just don’t believe in BURNING the house down to get rid of the termites!”