The Bell Tolls for No One

  Here were men who had flown in bombers and dropped thousands of tons of explosives upon cities and people. Here were killers being honored as heroes. The sympathy pangs, of course, were for these poor fellows whose aircraft had happened to get hit, forcing them to bail out, become captured and imprisoned where they were forced to eat meals not chosen from a menu. We here in America have imprisoned men for much less, fed them badly, and they were hardly heroes when they came out.

  George Wallace got himself trapped. The man who once vowed to maintain segregation forever in Alabama was photographed shaking hands with Sgt. Thomas W. Davis, former POW, who returned to his hometown in Eufaula, Alabama. Sgt. Davis is black.

  A POW is a man who went to war knowingly, knowing he might kill or be killed, capture or be captured, maim or be maimed. There is no special quality of heroism in this. There are few real patriots anymore, there have been too many useless wars and they have come too fast.

  Most American men of war age merely took a gamble; they figured by going that the odds against them actually getting killed were high. By going and returning, whether they believed in the war or not, they would still retain their decent citizen status and be able to return to their women and their jobs and their homes and their baseball games, their new cars. By refusing to go they faced imprisonment and/or hiding.

  Most weighed it all and considered that going to war was the easier way, especially those with college educations and ROTC training who were able to fly above the muck and blood, only pushing buttons. That some of them became POWs was just tough shit of the spinning of the wheel and they know it better than anybody. And if they are given a free fuck now or a free automobile or applause or a good job, they’re going to take that, too.

  The other night at the Olympic Auditorium boxing matches, a former POW was introduced and he got up into the ring and was given a standing ovation. I once had an almost-admiration for boxing fans. I now see them in a different magenta lavender brownsmear hue . . .

  A friend came over the other night with some stories about the Arctic. They had been up there filming the life of a drunk, he said, who looked just like me. Anyhow, this drunk took an airplane up there and used it regular, helping people out, flying supplies, rescuing, stunting and making money. One of the tricks of this drunk was to stand on his head and drink a tumbler of scotch.

  Anyway, for the average civilized man not at all used to the space and silence and the six month’s night and the six month’s day, it’s crack-up territory. There’s a term for it which I have forgotten. Anyhow, it gets to many men.

  There was a cook up there and the cook kept frying eggs for the men. And you know how it is with eggs. Some want them straight up, some want them scrambled, some want them boiled (soft, hard, medium-hard, medium-soft), some want them over easy, some want them over medium. Everybody seems to want his eggs in a different way and that way must be just so. If it isn’t just so, they become terribly annoyed. Ask your waitress or cook at your local café. They have suffered enormous swarms of annoyed egg-eaters.

  I was sitting in this place one time when a guy in a baseball cap and a black sweater with holes in the sleeves walked in and said, “Baste two.” I asked the waitress, “Now what does he mean, ‘baste two’?” “God,” she said, “I don’t know what he means. I’ll just let the cook worry about it.”

  Well, this cook in the Arctic also had space, time, silence, eggs, snow . . . he went on and on doing different eggs for different men, all of them without women, making money and waiting . . . all day or all night. Finally, one day (or one night?) the cook took all the eggs in camp, every last egg and hard-fried them all. He let them dry out a bit and then took them all to his room and nailed them to his walls. When it came time for breakfast they couldn’t find the cook so they went to his room and there he sat in a chair. He said, “There’s your eggs. Just cut down what you want.”

  The new cook was a boy from Boston who kept talking about John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson and Fats Domino every time he got drunk . . .

  They tell me that there are Eskimos and Indians up there, the Indians a little further south and that the Eskimos don’t like the Indians and the E’s favorite thing is to watch cowboy movies and get their sperm with each Indian killed.

  I suppose that the extreme north is the last west in the world, or as my buddy John Thomas might infer, the Last Frontier. Jack London got some gravy out of it. Old London was the Hemingway of the frozen nothingness, wolves instead of lions, the bible of Joe Conrad in his pocket. All I know about is Wile Post, A. Earhart, and Will Rogers being lost forever in the whiteness, and also a millionaire ex-wife who couldn’t stand me who married a Japanese fisherman with very nice manners in upper Alaska.

  There’s room for artistry and the word up there and I might suggest that some of you people who sit on those benches by the parking lot at the end of Rose Avenue in Venice and hit me for 20 cents everytime I go into that Jewish market for a corned beef sandwich, I might suggest that you go up there and give it a run.

  Then there’s another one. They have these guys in outstations, usually in twos. So it happened, you know. There’s nothing to do but do your job and drink. Sometimes your job is to intercept coded messages from the Russians and Chinese, sometimes your job is hardly a job at all but somebody is paying you and there aren’t any women and there’s nothing to do but drink. And as any wise man knows, sometimes even where there are women, the best thing to do is to drink.

  There were these two guys in the out-station. They did their job but there was nothing. Waiting and drinking. One of the finest things about drinking up there is you can get very drunk, extremely drunk, and all you have to do is to step outside the door into all that clear cold pure whiteness of oxygen and just breathe it in and you sober up and can get drunk all over again. It’s the same with a hangover, you just walk outside, breathe, and the hangover is gobbled up by the whiteness.

  So, once upon a time, one night, one of these two guys walks outside and breathes in the whiteness. It felt good out there. He just stayed out there a while. His buddy just kept drinking and listening to old Eartha Kitt records. Then he missed something. He went outside to look for it. His buddy was frozen. There was nothing to do but leave him out there. It would be four months before human contact would bring them back to civilization. Open another bottle, set the machine, get the coded message that the Red Chinese bastards are meaning to H-bomb every thrift shop in the city of Pasadena.

  Time went on and there really isn’t any time up there. It sits still. It doesn’t move. You may urinate and defecate, but there isn’t any such thing as time, not in that white silence frozen. There isn’t anything at all if nothing is there. You need to be reminded that something is there. He needed to be reminded that something was there. And he got a little lonely. So he went out and got his buddy and leaned him up against a chair. He opened the window so his buddy would stay solidified and he kept his buddy by the window. And he began drinking and talking to him.

  Things seemed better. He drank and talked to his buddy. He made it better by having his buddy answer him. He’d say something and his buddy would answer him. It was like old times.

  But one night (day?) it got bad. It got to be over Clare. He had always felt that his buddy had crossed him with Clare the time he had gone to Sears to get the new muffler, although both of them (Clare and his buddy) had always denied it. The argument mounted; denial followed accusation, accusation followed denial and the drinks flowed. The anger and the lie became too much and after a triple jolt of hundred proof he got a gun and shot his buddy. Then he slept.

  The months did go. When they arrived they found him and a dead man who had been shot. He was accused of murder. Luckily the autopsy proved that his buddy had been dead long before he had been shot.

  I liked the one about the cook better.

  This Sunday, April 15, 1973, was the first Sunday of horse racing in the State of California. It was a crowd just a bit different from a S
aturday crowd, although some of the Saturday crowd was back; at least those with anything left from the paycheck. The crowd was 40,954 and for some it was the first day at the track.

  Tables were set up and booklets handed out free, explaining the delicacies of the game. There were more babies in strollers than I had ever seen before. And you could tell that much of the crowd was new; they stood gangedup and squeezed together at the finish line. Where these people once hid on Saturdays is your guess. But something had to be done to jive up the attendance so the track asked to trade their Tuesday for a Sunday. I believe the track was given three Sundays to work with as a beginning. After that, it was to pass through Sacramento.

  The churches and other Sunday business groups are fighting hard against Sunday racing. But I would surmise that nothing will hold it back now, even God Himself. The track and the state roughly divide the take on each betting dollar, which is about 15 percent. The extra tax revenue from Sunday racing will be almost impossible to reject.

  Hollywood Park states that over two million dollars a day is wagered at the track. This doesn’t mean that 40,000 people come to the track with two million dollars. It means that the same people bet the same money back into the mutual machines for nine races (those who stay) and that the state and the track take their bite over and over again from the same dollar.

  For instance, it’s possible to go to the race with two dollars, and with a win here and there, it’s possible to bet that same two dollars back again and again for nine races. You may even lose it at the end, but meanwhile that mutual machine out there that flashes the numbers has automatically extracted 15 percent of $18 (nine times two). It’s magic, isn’t it? You might say that if you bet two dollars nine times with a 15 percent take, that you are bucking a take of nine times 15 percent, which on that theory is bucking a 135 percent take, which might explain why most people leave all they brought with them at the track.

  Other math boys say, no, it’s not so, the take remains at 15 percent. I don’t know. I only know that only one person out of 20 leaves the track a winner. In all decency those places should be closed, but the tax dollar just won’t allow it. It’s just like rebuilding Vietnam, there’s just too much money made by blowing it to hell and gone in a shit wind. That’s magic too: profit in destroying and profit in rebuilding. But both are done under the guise of morality and righteousness.

  Of course, somebody suffers someplace in between. The racetrack is a war, too. Get yourself a camera and get those faces leaving after the ninth race. Tricked again. The workings of a democracy. The tortured submit to the torture, volunteer for it.

  Sunday racing is with us to stay. The war is everywhere and the little man will never be let go of. He will be squeezed and taxed and tricked and percentage-wised out of a chance. And he’ll scream and drink green beer, he’ll lose everything, and on the way out he’ll say, “Well, hell, I lost but I had a good time.” What he means is that he didn’t have the imagination to know what to do with his time or his money so he moved it over to somebody else who solved that problem. What he means by a good time is that he didn’t have to be inventive and he just slid down the slide. And Monday morning the timeclock will be there and somebody else will arrange things for him to do.

  You see why I go to the racetrack? I learn all these things about humanity.

  Anyway, Sunday racing is in just like the massage parlors. I’ll see you out there this Easter Sunday. I am a solid California citizen. I am paving the roads and building the schools and paying the cops and trying to keep some of the insane asylums open. And if you approach me quietly and with any manner of grace I might suggest the winner of the up-coming race. If you think I’m just a guy who goes around writing dirty stories, you’re crazy. Although next week I should be back with one. This straight writing lacks the divinity and the flame. How can those other guys keep on doing it? I don’t even know how to end one of these things. I guess like this: END.

  It was in Washington, D.C., a private party but well-attended, a little over 200, and Danny James (it was rumored that he had given $50,000 to the administration for the last election) and his girlfriend were standing about, drinks in hand. Danny James, former entertainer, now retired. Not entirely retired for it was rumored that he had blown a Master of Ceremonies role to Bob Hope—losing his temper when the Secret Service refused to allow one of his Las Vegas buddies to perform without security clearance. Among other rumors was one that James often entertained the Vice President at his home.

  While Danny and his girlfriend were standing there with drinks in hand, Danny was approached by a woman columnist who asked a question. James answered, “Who the hell do you think you are? If you want to see me, write me a letter.”

  The woman columnist vanished to be replaced by another. Danny said: “Get away from me, you scum. Go home and take a bath. I don’t want to talk to you. I’m getting out of here to get away from the stench of you.” He turned to his girlfriend: “That stench you smell is from her.”

  Then Danny James turned back to the woman columnist: “You’re nothing but a $2.00 cunt. C-U-N-T, you know what that means, don’t you? You’ve been laying down for $2.00 all your life!”

  Mrs. Blanche Delmore, the female columnist, laughed at first. Then she moved off and began to cry. Danny James had stuffed $2.00 into her cocktail glass, along with the remark, “Here’s $2.00, baby, that’s what you’re used to.”

  Her husband, Henry Delmore, found a paper towel and Mrs. Delmore cried into it. Everybody at the party had heard the remarks. Her husband consoled her a bit more, then took her home. Henry poured two drinks when they arrived at home and they talked about it as they undressed.

  “Oh, Henry, it’s awful, awful, awful! I think I’m going to die!” She threw herself face-down on the bed.

  “You’ll feel better in the morning, dear.” Henry drank his drink, then drank Blanche’s. He turned off the light and they slept . . . .

  After Henry left for work that morning, Blanche sat up in bed with her pink telephone. First she dialed the office: “Briget? Oh, Briget, I just can’t come to work this morning . . . . I . . . .oh, it’s in the papers? All of them? Oh, Lord, no!” She hung up quickly, then sat over the pink telephone, thinking. She got up, went to the bathroom and urinated. She was back at the bed, sitting by the pink telephone when her mother entered.

  “My god, Blanche, you look AWFUL! What happened?”

  “It was the party. Danny James insulted me! It was just terribly awful! I’ve never had such a gross, unjust thing happen to me in my whole life!”

  “What did he say?”

  “Oh, mother, please!”

  “Blanche, I want to know!”

  “Mother, please!”

  “Blanche, I am your mother!”

  “He called me a $2.00 cunt.”

  “What’s a ‘cunt,’ Blanche?”

  “What?”

  “I said, ‘What’s a cunt?’ ”

  “Oh, mother, you must be joking. I don’t feel like joking. Not at all. Hardly.”

  “I want to know what a ‘cunt’ is, Blanche.”

  “Mother, please leave me alone! Please, please, please!” Blanche’s mother left the room and she lifted the pink telephone, dialed it.

  “Hello, Annie. Is Wayne Brimson in? What? He died last night? In an elevator? Oh, my god, what’s happening? What’s happening?”

  Blanche hung up. Wayne Brimson had been her attorney.

  The door opened and Blanche’s mother appeared.

  “Mother, will you leave me the hell alone? Will you, before I go crazy?”

  The door closed.

  I’ve got to get another lawyer, she thought. But Wayne and I were such good friends, and he was reasonable.

  The phone rang. She picked it up. It was a man’s voice, deep, low, slow and full.

  “Your $2.00 cunt stinks like a monkey’s hemorrhoid asshole.”

  He hung up.

  Then she remembered John Manley. He was a fairly decent a
ttorney and his reputation was good. She dialed. John answered.

  “Listen, John . . . . Oh, you’ve heard? It was terrible, John, and all true . . . . What? No, no, that’s all right. All I want is an apology. That’s all, just an apology. That isn’t asking too much, is it, John? Yes, Henry’s doing just fine. Of course, he’s as upset about this thing as I am. All right, you’ll go to work on it? Just an apology, that’s all I ask.”

  She hung up, walked around the room, looked out the window, then sat down at the dresser and began combing her hair. The phone rang. She walked over and picked it up.

  It was a man’s voice again, but this time higher-pitched and much more juvenile.

  “Listen, baby, you may have a $2.00 cunt, but I don’t mind. I’ll stick my cock right into that $2.00 cunt and I’ll jam it home, 12 inches, I’ll come, I’ll squirt this white juice right into that $2.00 cunt. Doesn’t that make you hot, thinking about it? It makes me hot. I’ll squirt right into—”

  Blanche hung up. She walked into the bathroom and let the water run into the tub. She took a slow, hot bath, took a sleeping pill, toweled herself, brushed her teeth, got back into her nightgown and went back to bed. After an hour of waiting, she slept.

  She had no idea how long she slept but the phone awakened her. It was John Manley to tell her Danny James refused to apologize, at least in writing.

  “But why? Why?”

  John answered that he didn’t know, he had only spoken to James’ lawyer, but he’d follow it up, try to find out more.