The Bell Tolls for No One

  “The balls too.”

  “Then what happens?”

  “Forget it,” he said. “You know when we were kids it was hard to get fucked. Now everybody fucks. Even the dolts and morons get it. But when we were kids it was something else. Remember the old Stink-Finger?”

  “Yeah, I remember it.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “these guys used to come around and hold their finger under your nose and say, ‘Smell that, baby, you know where it’s been?’”

  “The old Stink-Finger.”

  “You could get it,” he said, “by rubbing your finger against mutton. Guys used to go around rubbing their fingers against mutton. That’s what it smells like: mutton.”

  “It sure does,” I said. “And remember the old Dry-Fuck?”

  “Memories,” he said. “Stop it, you’re going to make me cry.”

  “The Dry-Fuck,” I said. “The girls didn’t want to give it up. The word got out too fast and that killed marriage prospects. Girls used to want to get married.”

  “Stop it,” he said, “you’re going to make me cry.”

  “Grass used to be called Tea, and if you had some Tea the girls sometimes gave way because they claimed they were under the influence and it didn’t really count. You couldn’t get them to drink though, and most of us couldn’t get any Tea.”

  “Yeah, mostly the musicians had it.”

  “So you’d go to work on a girl in the back seat. Hot kisses. We’d kiss 5 or 6 hours. You’d get one hot enough you’d finally get that finger up under those tight panties and get it in there. Or you’d dry-fuck. Once in a while you’d climax. But mostly you’d bluff it. ‘Oh, my GOD, I’m coming!’ And the girl would laugh, she’d like that. And you’d get out behind the car and pretend to wipe off with a hanky. Then you’d get back in. Sometimes you’d do that 2 or 3 times and the girls really liked it, they’d thought they’d brought you on.”

  “How about the old rumble seat and the banjo?” he asked.

  “I don’t go back to Jack Oakie, the raccoon coat and the college banner. I’m old but not that old.”

  “Yeah. Now everybody fucks,” he said. “It’s just like breathing.”

  “Better,” I said, “no smog.”

  “You mean smog can’t get into that thing?”

  “I guess it can. Everything else does.”

  “You’re talking about my mother. That’s sacred.”

  “Sure,” I said, “but to go on when you got a real wild one you’d get the hand-job. You’d pull the thing out and she’d sit there whacking you off. That was pretty exciting when you came, that semen spurting out and her watching.”

  “Still, I’m glad we have modern times,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, “we’ve fucked so much we don’t even need it anymore. We shit on windshields.”

  “The delicate perversions,” he said, “leather and leather and leather—thongs, dildoes, automatic pussies, beatings, cagings, murder . . . ”

  “It’s a much better life,” I said.

  “Socially acceptable,” he said.

  “Socially acceptable,” I said.

  “Freedom,” he said.

  “Freedom,” I said, “we’re liberated.”

  Then we sat silent, drinking our beer.

  “We have all of us been scoundrels in our time”

  —Sir Lord Henry Hawkins

  Karen and I fought continually; it was a misunderstanding of wills and ways, mostly my will and her way. Anyhow, it had been something over a wrong number, a telephone call by a stranger that I felt had been exceeded in length and intimacy on Karen’s part, especially after we had just finished making love, oral, regular, and otherwise. Trivialities can sometimes be more destructive than tragedies. Anyhow, I decided to get out for a while and Karen told me, “If you go to the goddamned racetrack now I won’t be here when you get back.”

  I got in my car and drove to the racetrack. It was a fairly good card and I managed to make $28. When I came back Karen was gone—clothes, possessions and all. I took a bath, changed into clean clothes and drove down to the liquor store for a fifth of whiskey and a couple of six packs. I got back in, turned on the radio and proceeded to get drunk. I drank for a week: days and nights, noons and evenings ran together. One morning the phone rang:

  “Bukowski?”

  “Yeh?”

  It was Karen.

  “How you doing?”

  “Just fine.”

  “I’m in Wyoming,” she said, “will you please forward my mail? I’d do the same for you.”

  She gave me the address and I hung up. For the first time in a week I walked out on the back porch. There was an air cooler sitting there with a note on it and a bottle of pills. I read the note:

  “Here’s your air cooler and some pills for your tired blood. I took your watch to pay for all my tears. Here’s to one very important wrong number. And here’s a pair of panties to masturbate in.”

  Karen had lived in a court three doors down, although I had slept there every night. We had been together a year and a half. Which just about fit my theory: about all you can expect out of any run is two years. I took the pills, the vitamin E’s and the panties, a yellow pair. I threw the panties in a drawer and opened a beer.

  I got out Lila Wiggins’ phone number. I had met her years back—though not intimately—while I was working for Open City. And I had met her again recently, by accident, and had gotten her phone number. She had gone up from being a sophisticated hippie. She was now president of a record company. Her secretary put me through. I told her that I was loose and disoriented. Lila said she was working late that night but to come by any time.

  I arrived at the record company that night, drunk. Quite. Lila Wiggins was in the back with a fairly famous female vocalist. They were running off a tape. There were two male instrumental accompanists. Lila sang backup. She did it well. I sat there with my pint and smoked and listened. They kept going over the same song trying to get it right. It became monotonous. When they began again I joined in. It made everybody very unhappy. I stopped and listened while Lila and the female vocalist berated me. Then I read them both off good and walked toward the door. Lila followed me to the door. We kissed in the doorway.

  “Some other time,” she said . . .

  The next night it was at her house, in her bedroom, her “Arabian tent bedroom” as she called it. A large rug hung down over the ceiling. There were braids and trinkets everywhere. There were pills, dope, good wine, and champagne. And a huge colored television set.

  “Pain, pain, pain,” I said, “that bitch killed me by running off. You have no idea of the pain. It’s immense, immense, like a buffalo charging through my guts! Lila, save me, save me, you’ll never regret it!”

  She just looked at me.

  “And I’m a great lover, I’m the world’s greatest lover, you’ll see!”

  Lila waited. She waited four days and four nights.

  “Listen,” she said, “you told me you were the world’s greatest lover and you haven’t even done anything. How long do I have to wait?”

  I mounted her and gave her a standard old-fashioned screw, rolled off.

  “Was that it?” she asked.

  “No, that was hardly it,” I said, “you’ll just have to wait.”

  She waited another couple of nights and then I did it. Lila screamed and talked and moaned all the way through it. “YES!YES!YES! Oh, my god! My god!”

  I had worked all the tricks and movements on her that Karen had taught me and I had added some of my own.

  “You are the best,” she said, “you are the best of all the men I’ve had . . . really . . . ”

  “I’ll bet you tell that to all the boys.”

  “No, I mean it.”

  “Listen, do you have any more of those green pills and those yellow pills and some of that champagne?”

  “Of course, my darling . . . ”

  After that when I awakened each morning there would be a love note wait
ing for me. Some bothered me more than they flattered me, like: “This is what it all means, all the days and all the years have come down to this, this is what it means, my love . . . ”

  I’d read the notes, make the bed, put the heart-shaped pillow up against the headboard. Then I’d look at television for a while, get into my car, drive to my place, check the mail, change my clothes and drive to the racetrack, lose out there. Lila asked me, “Do you have the rent money?”

  “Sure,” I said, “it’s all right. I have it.”

  I knew I was getting in deep so I told her one morning, “You know, this isn’t love. I’m still in love with Karen but that’s all over. I want you to know where it is.”

  “It’s all right, I understand.”

  Lila took me to dinners and rock concerts, long weekend drives up and down the coasts and into the mountains. She wanted to keep me away from telephone calls to Karen in Wyoming. I was bored with rides and I was bored with her rock and roll stars, publicists, agents, writers, artists. She knew everybody. “I’m going to have dinner with Paul Krassner,” she said, “do you want to meet Paul Krassner?” “No,” I said. Robert Crumb came by one night followed through the door by 17 admirers. Crumb was all right but the whole rock music world gang was inept, facile, and sycophantic. They made subtle little jokes and dropped names and dropped names and dropped names all night long. And none of them had the guts to get drunk. I cursed and railed against them and retreated to the Arabian tent with my bottle and watched the large colored tv while they giggled and gossiped and gagged on their lives in the other room. The tv was almost as bad but not quite. And when my friends came over with their crude and straightforward longshoremen acts, Lila then retreated to the Arabian. So, as far as that went we were even. I managed to get to my place and phone Karen several times but she was still cool. She had her sisters there to guide her against the beast that was Bukowski. I supposed that she was getting some good advice . . . .

  A photographer friend of Lila’s came over and took about 50 photos of Lila and myself about the house. The situation was getting nervous. Next I knew Lila was on vacation and she had me on an island looking out of a second floor window at the ocean and the bathers and the boats and the tourists while I crouched over her electric typewriter. I couldn’t write. I laid around and drank beer and watched the small black and white tv. I watched the doctor programs and the cowboy movies. Lila ran about the shops, talked to people, rode boats, took photos. “This is it,” she said, “I could live here forever.” There wasn’t a racetrack within 50 miles. We ate at every café, nightclub, and restaurant on that island. And the man at the liquor store got to know me very well. After two weeks of dismal drudgery and damnation we made it back.

  We stopped at my place to check the mail. There was quite a bit of it. Lila lay on the bed while I read it. The phone rang. I went out to answer it. Lila usually took the phone off the hook when we weren’t there, afraid that Karen would call. I had told her never to do it again. I walked toward the phone. Lila began to moan. It made me angry. I answered the phone. It was Karen.

  “Yes,” I answered her, “sure I’ll come up.”

  Lila’s moans got louder.

  “Yes, I still love you, of course, I love you. It never stopped.”

  Lila moaned louder and louder. I covered the mouthpiece when I could; I was afraid Karen would hear. Lila’s dramatics pissed me. Karen and I talked quite awhile. When I hung up, I went to the refrigerator for a beer and sat in a chair and looked out the window. Lila was quiet. I finished the beer and walked into the bedroom. Lila appeared to be asleep. She had a very strange look about her. I lifted one of her arms and it fell back like something almost not attached to her. I lifted the other arm, I moved her body, her head. She had a strange and limp heaviness. “Lila! Lila! What the hell have you done?” I finally awakened her. “Listen, have you taken any sleeping pills?” “I swallowed the bottle,” she said. Her voice was heavy, dark, garbled. “You’re trying to scare me. You’re playacting.” “No,” she said.

  I stuck my hand in her mouth to induce vomiting. She vomited, then stopped and I stuck my hand down her throat again and again. She kept vomiting. “More, more,” I said, “keep it up!” I stuck my hand in her mouth again and an upper plate leaped out, it leaped through the air like a frog and landed on the sheets. “My teeth, oh, my teeth . . . I didn’t want you to know . . . o, my god . . . my teeth . . . I didn’t want you to know about my teeth . . . o . . . ”

  “Fuck it! I don’t care about your teeth! Keep vomiting!”

  Lila reached for her teeth and tried to put them in. She was too out of it. I took the teeth and put them in an ashtray out of reach. I put my hand down her throat again. “All right, I’m not going to Wyoming! I’ll phone Karen in the morning and tell her I can’t make it!”

  “My teeth, o, my teeth . . . I didn’t want you to know!”

  I was thinking of taking Lila to a hospital for a stomach pump but as she kept vomiting I noticed that her body was losing the heavy and disattached feel. I finally gave off and drove her over to her place, back to the Arabian tent. I washed her face and neck and hands and we sat there and drank a little wine and smoked some pot.

  “If you ever write that scene about my attempted suicide and my teeth I am going to kill you,” she said.

  “Listen, Lila,” I said, “I may be a son of a bitch but I’m not that much of a son of a bitch.”

  Some days later it was my birthday and my car had a flat. I put the spare on and we drove down to Mark C. Bloome’s in Hollywood and Lila got me two tires and two shock absorbers for my birthday. The bill was over $70 . . .

  In September Karen had to come back to Los Angeles and put her boy in school. Also, her ex-husband lived in North Hollywood and wanted to see the boy each weekend. I found out where she was living and went over. At first she wouldn’t let me in. I pushed in and began talking. I turned on all the charm and reason and dialogue. I have never known I had had all that. But it took that, and some more. That, in itself, is almost a separate story. Story? Anyhow, in three or four days we were together again and in a week we were living together again. Karen confessed to an affair of her own in Wyoming. I didn’t like that but it did tend to equalize things and made a truce and new beginning more possible . . . Meanwhile, there was Lila Wiggins, record company executive. I told Karen that I must go to see her and explain why everything was as it was . . .

  I phoned and her friend Judy was staying with her. Judy said Lila was in and I said to keep her there. I’d be right over. It wasn’t a long drive and I parked in the same old place and got out, walked through the garden and up to the sliding glass doors at the side of the house and tapped. I had phoned Lila several days back that I was with Karen again and that it was over between us. Judy let me in and pointed toward the Arabian tent. “She’s back there.”

  I walked on back. Lila was on her stomach on the bed. All she had on were a pair of blue panties. An empty pint of whiskey was on the floor and there was a dishpan on the floor filled with vomit. A very sour smell was in the air. I sat down on the edge of the bed. “Lila . . . .”

  She turned her head. “You . . . ”

  “I just wanted to explain . . . ”

  “You rotten lousy bastard . . . ”

  “Lila, listen . . . ”

  “You rotten foul stinking . . . ”

  “Listen, Lila, I’ve been left, too. I’ve been left cold a few times by myself by the female . . . no note, no sound, no word . . . I’d like to be as human as possible about it . . . ”

  Lila got up on her knees. She moved across the bed toward me. “Human? Human? You stink all the way to hell and back!”

  She doubled her fists and started winging at me. I sat there. Some of the punches hit me on the chest, some missed, others got me about the face. She kept swinging and swinging. My nose bled and some of it dripped on my shirt. Finally I grabbed her hands.

  “Lila, I told you it wasn’t love. I told you I loved Ka
ren . . . ”

  She put her head over the edge of the bed and vomited into the dishpan. Then she stretched out on the bed.

  “Just hold me. Hold me a little . . . ”

  I held her. “Kiss me . . . ”

  I kissed her. Her mouth tasted stale, sour.

  “Don’t go back . . . Don’t go back to her. Stay with me. The world’s so horrible out there. You’re crazed, you’re so crazed . . . but you’re a great writer . . . I want to protect you from that world.”

  “A great writer? That’s got nothing to do with anything.”

  “I’ve always loved you, from the first time I saw you years ago. You were down at Open City drunk and laughing and cursing . . . ”

  “I don’t remember that . . . ”

  “I remember that . . . ”

  I held her and didn’t say anything. Suddenly she sat up again. “You rotten bastard, o, you rotten rotten bastard!”

  She began swinging again. She got me some good ones.

  “Listen, Lila, all you do is kick the shit out of me . . . ”

  “You have it coming! Hold still so I can give you some more.”

  I held still as her fists punched against my face. Then she stopped. “You’re going back to her, really?”

  “Really. Listen, Lila, you won’t try to do anything.”

  “What for? For you? You’re not worth it!”

  “You’re right. Well, listen, I’ll be going now.”

  “You won’t forget me, you’ll see, you’ll never forget me.”

  “Of course I won’t.”

  I got up and turned away from the bed, began to walk away. The empty pint whiskey bottle flew after me over my right shoulder. I knew then why you had to leave them cold instead of humanly: it was kinder.

  I slid the glass doors back and walked through the garden. Her two cats were out there. They knew me. They rubbed against my legs and followed me as I walked away.

  The POW propaganda plant is still grinding against all sensibilities. We lost the war, got our asses kicked out by starving men and women half our size. We couldn’t bomb, con, or beg them into submission so we got out and while getting out, somebody had to come up with a smokescreen to make the populace forget we got our asses kicked. Let’s build the POW angle, they said, and so it began. Bob Hope became concerned about the POWs; his wartime Santa Claus kick had rather petered out in the last two trips. The word was out and the act was in. The arrival of the first POWs was put on tv. Here came the plane in. And we waited and waited and the plane taxied and taxied. You never saw a plane taxi that much in any airport at any time in the world. The cameras waited and they bled it to death. Then out came the first grand POW and patriotism was back.