The Bell Tolls for No One

  Nina just brought sex right on out, she did that well, but it was hardly great dancing.

  I once saw a white woman in a Turkish café one night. It was one of those places where you ate downstairs, then went upstairs to drink. The dark girls were doing their natural quiet movements alone, and then the American woman, a nicely-shaped blonde got up and did her thing. She did it well but it was ugly because it was so obvious. They asked the woman and her escort to leave and the white American woman screamed obscenities at us—all the way down the stairway. What she never realized was the difference between art and artlessness. Then I turned my eyes upon the dancing dark girls who flowed like rivers of realness to the sea . . .

  Besides the parties, I got other bits of information from Nina, mostly upon the love bed, before or after. One might call them confessions or perhaps, in her case, exhilarations.

  “Yeah. Well, there was this clothing store. I went in to get my husband something. There was this guy there. He was very sarcastic to me. Oh, I always go for these sarcastic guys . . . ”

  She looked at me but I avoided her cruel eyes.

  “He took me behind a curtain and kissed me. There was a little room in the back. He walked behind me and had his cock out and there were some guys there and everybody laughed. I came back later and I told him, ’You’re just a queer, aren’t you? You’re just a queer!’ ”

  “Was he?” I asked.

  “I think so.”

  “O.K. . . .”

  “You know,” she continued, “I didn’t cheat on my husband much. Just maybe once or twice. This one guy, well, I told my husband I had taken his cock out and kissed it but I hadn’t screwed him though.” More stories: she’d placed an ad in an underground newspaper and gotten 50 answers. One guy left his phone number so Nina called him. She met the young, thin guy in a coffee shop. Then he asked her to drive him down to the park because he’d left his car at the park. “I drove him down,” Nina told me, “but I should have known better. He got me real hot, he knew he had me hot, and he had this huge curving cock like a scythe. I never saw anything so big. But he wouldn’t tell me his name. I didn’t want to get pregnant so I said no. He got angry and said, ‘I’d rather screw a guy—at least they don’t bother me with all this shit!’ ”

  “And you let him go?”

  “Yes, and you should have seen it—Huge, curving, like a scythe!”

  I don’t know. There were many battles and many turnings between us. I made a living as a writer which meant I didn’t have much money but much time. Time to think—time to love. I suppose that I was in love with Nina. Even though I was 20 years older than her.

  One weekend I drove her all the way to Arizona where she put on a special three-hour dance show in a ranch-house with a homosexual. She wore a pair of red pajamas with strands that flopped open to show her belly and bellybutton.

  I drank most of the night in the game room, looking at dead and mounted animals, feeling quite a knowledgeable relationship with them.

  Finally, I walked into the poolroom of the ranch-house where they were dancing. I lifted the homosexual high over my head, but decided not to crack his skull on the ceiling. I set him down and then gave my own drunken version of the Dance—the Great White Bird Flying.

  When I finished, the fag walked up and said, “Pardon me.”

  I gave way and he danced with Nina and nobody seemed to object, not even I . . .

  Time and things went on, they do, you know.

  I gave a few poetry readings, got some minor royalties from a novel. Then I was up in Utah with Nina waiting for the big Fourth of July dance.

  “That’s the only time when things happen up here,” she told me.

  So we made the little town big-time dance, and Nina met her big, dumb cowboy. Or maybe he wasn’t big and dumb.

  I watched him a bit and I thought, hell, he’d even make a writer if something got up and really sliced his soul, showed him where it was at. But nothing had bothered him too much, and so, let’s say he had soul of a sort and Nina knew it. She kept looking back at me as she kept offering it to him in the Dance. And I thought—here I am, a stranger in a shit town. I just wish I could get out and leave the Nina’s and their people and themselves to each other, but Nina kept slicing in closer and closer and offering herself.

  And that was it for me, because if she wanted him, she could have him. That was my way of thinking: the two that wanted each other should have each other.

  But she had to keep bringing him back to me after each dance. “Charlie,” she said, “this is Marty. Doesn’t Marty dance nice?”

  “I don’t know much about dancing. I guess he does.”

  “I want you two guys to be friends,” she said.

  Then the floor squared off and they danced together, everybody clapping and laughing and joyous. I smoked a cigarette and talked to some big-titted lady about taxes. Then I looked up and Nina and Marty were kissing while they were dancing.

  I was hurt but I knew Nina. I shouldn’t have been hurt. As they danced they kept on kissing. Everybody applauded. I applauded too. “More, more!” I demanded.

  They danced again and again.

  The townspeople became more exhilarated. I simply lost hope, came down to reality, and became terribly bored. Bored, that’s the only state I can name it. There is something about the beat of dance music. It can only hold me so long then I feel as if I have been flattened with hard and meaningless hammers.

  Nina and I had been living in a tent at the edge of town. I was sitting alone against a tree one evening outside the tent when she came running down the road, “Charlie, Charlie, I don’t want Marty, I want you! Please believe me, goddamn you!”

  Her car was parked along the downward road and evidently Marty was chasing her in the moonlight. The big, dumb cowboy was on a horse. He caught up with her in the path and lassoed her and she screamed in front of me in the dirt. He pulled her blue jeans and panties off and put it in. Her legs raised into the pitch black sky.

  I couldn’t watch anymore so I walked down the pathway to the main road.

  I had a good five-mile walk to the nearest bus station in town.

  I felt good.

  I knew that they were finished by then and that I was free. I thought of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. And as I walked along, I knew that for the first time in years, my heart was free.

  The gravel that crunched under my feet provided the best dance of all. Better than all the kissing and dancing that Nina could offer me.

  “You ain’t a real cowboy until you got some steer dung on your boots.” . . .

  Pall Mall McEvers—July 29, 1941

  Phoenix, Jan. 13th, 1972

  Well, being a writer means doing many things so that the writing is not too lousily aligned from one base, and one doesn’t always choose the obvious—like Paris or San Francisco or a COSMEP meeting—so here I am typing standing up, à la Hemingway, only on an overturned table spool somewhere in an Arizona desert, a yellow monoplane with propeller going overhead—Africa and the lions far away—the lessons of Gertie Stein ingested and ignored—I have just stopped a dogfight between a small mongrel dog and a German police dog—and that takes some minor guts—and the mongrel lays on the cable spool below my feet—grateful and dusty and chewed—and I left the cigarettes elsewhere—I stand under a limp and weeping tree in Paradise Valley and smell the horseshit and remember my beaten court in Hollywood, drinking beer and wine with 9th rate writers and after extracting what small juices they have, throwing them physically out the door.

  Now a little girl walks up and she says, “Bukowski, what are you doing, you dummy?”

  Now I am called in for a sandwich in the place to my right. Literature can wait. There are 5 women in there. They are all writing novels. Well, what can you do with 5 women?

  The sandwiches are good and the conversation begins:

  “Well, I worked for this lawyer once and he had this guru on his desk and I got hot and took it into the woman’s
john, and the head was just right, the whole thing was shaped just right, it was pretty good. When I finished I put the thing back on the lawyer’s desk. It took the paint right off the thing when I did it and the lawyer came back and noticed it and said, ‘What the hell happened to my guru?’ and I said, ‘What’s the matter? Is something wrong with it?’ Then he phoned up the company he got the thing from and complained because the paint had come off after he’d only had the thing a week . . . ”

  The girls laughed, “Oh hahaha ha, oh, hahaha!” I smiled.

  “I read in The Sensuous Woman,” said another of the novelists, “that a woman can climax 64 times in a row, so I tried it . . . ”

  “How’d you make out?” I asked.

  “I made it 13 times . . . ”

  “All these horny guys walking around,” I said, “you ought to be ashamed.”

  Here I am, I thought, sitting with these women, sleeping with the most beautiful one of them, and where are the men? Branding cattle, punching timeclocks, selling insurance . . . How can I bitch about my lot as a starving writer? I’ll find a way . . . Tomorrow I’ll go to Turf Paradise and see if the gods are kind. Surely I can outbet these cowboys and the old folks who come out here to die? Then there’s the poem. Patchen died Saturday night of a heart attack and John Berryman jumped off a bridge into the Mississippi Friday and they haven’t found his body yet. Things are looking better. These young guys write like Oscar Wilde with a social consciousness. There’s room at the top and nothing at the bottom. I can see myself walking through TIMES SQUARE and all the young girls saying, “Look there goes Charles Bukowski!” Isn’t that the meaning of living immortality? Besides free drinks?

  I finish my sandwich, let the beautiful one know that I still love her, soul and her body, then walk back into the desert to my overturned wooden reel, and I sit here typing now. I stand here typing now, looking at horses and cows, and over to my left are mountains shaped differently than those tiresome mountains north of L.A., and I’ll be back to L.A., it’s the only place for the literary hustler: at least I hustle best there, it’s my Paris, and unless they run me out like Villon I have to die there. My landlady drinks beer from the quart bottle and forces them upon me and takes ten bucks off the rent (a month) because I take out the tenants’ garbage cans and bring them back in. That’s more advantageous than a Great Writer’s Course.

  I got worried about the girls, though, they dance sexy with the cowboys at the local tavern and make big cow eyes at them; sun-tanned raw dudes who ain’t even read Swinburne yet . . . Nothing to do but drink beer, act stoical, indifferent, human, and literary.

  The little girl comes back:

  “Hi, Bukowski, dummy! Without no shirt on, without no shoes on, without no pants on, without no panties on, bare-naked typing outside . . . .”

  She’s 3 years old and drives a toy tractor by, stops, looks back again:

  “Hi, Bukowski, dummy! No pants on, no panties on, bare-naked typing in the sun . . . No hair on, bare-butt typing, drowning in the water . . . ”

  No hair on? The female, of course, is the eternal problem as long as that thing stands up. And living 50 years doesn’t bring a man any closer to solutions. Love still arrives 2 or 3 times in a lifetime for most of us, and the rest is sex and companionship, and it’s all problems and pain and glory . . .

  And here she comes across the dust, 31 years’ worth, cowboy boots, long red brown hair, dark brown eyes, tight blue pants, turtleneck sweater; she’s smiling . . .

  “Whatcha doin’, man?”

  “Writing . . . ”

  We embrace and kiss; her body folds into mine and those brown eyes reflect birds and rivers and sun; they are hot bacon, they are chili and beans, they are nights past and nights future, they are enough, they are more than enough . . . Where she learned to kiss I’ll never know. As we part, something stands out in front of me.

  “We’ll go to the track tomorrow,” she says.

  “Sure,” I say, “and how about this thing?”

  I look down.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of it,” she says.

  We walk about and lock again over by the rabbit pen. Appropriate.

  “You’re the horniest old man I ever met . . . ”

  I send her away soon so I can finish this column. I watch the movement of her ass as she walks across the desert toward the house. She bends over to pet a dog. Freud, this is what the wars are all about, you had some truth going there, even though it was slightly hyped . . .

  I stop another dog fight. This time 2 young girls walk through with a larger dog. The German police dog attacks. It is a good fight. I leap in with a stick, grab the large dog by the collar.

  “Thanks,” says one of the girls.

  She reminds me of one I knew, married wrong, who used to beat on my door for consolation . . .

  Charles Bukowski—his writing style . . .

  Well, he designed it by drinking beer from quart bottles, rolling Prince Albert in Zig Zag and interfering in dog fights . . .

  Now I see that I have fallen into one of my bad habits: I have written this in both the present and past tense. Instead of correcting it I will throw it at the editors to test their liberality . . . Now two kids come home from school and the boy throws me a ball. I’ve got all my sharp and catch it, wing it back with a deft and nonchalant accuracy . . . Ernie would have been proud. Now, I’d like to tell you something about Phoenix whorehouses . . . but that’s going to take a bit of research. A blind writer told me yesterday that it’s the 3rd largest dope center in the U.S. The blind writer also told me that he thought those (writers) who had lasted through the ages were badly chosen. I’ve had that thought for some time. Such boring fellows.

  Now if you think I’ve always stood out in the desert standing up by an overturned reel, mixing my tenses and clowning, you’re wrong, babies. I’ve starved in tiny ratfilled, roachfilled rooms without enough money for stamps. I used to lay down drunk in alleys waiting for trucks to run me over . . . Here are those two kids standing here . . .

  “We’ve come to bug you, man!”

  “Yeah? I say.

  “Do you like 7-UP?”

  “Hell no. I like hard liquor.”

  Now the young girl is climbing up on my precious reel, bugging me. But since the brought me some 7-UP I will tolerate their indecencies. Now the young boy gets up on my precious reel and dances. Now here comes two more kids. One gets up on the table.

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  “Genie,” he says.

  “You guys do something exciting so I can write about it. Then GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!”

  They don’t do anything but bug, bug, bug . . . How would Ernie handle this? Who owns all these? There they go . . .

  There’s hardly enough sex to this column . . . I thought if I stayed in the desert I would get me some solitude. This is worse than Hollywood with all those drunks getting me out of bed at 11 a.m. to hear the sounds of their diminishing souls. I can’t recommend outdoor writing. At least the birds haven’t shit on me. One of those desert kids suggested that I wrote my next on horseback. Well, I tried Phoenix and Phoenix tried me. The sun’s going down now and my legs are immensely disgusted. I suppose it’s too obvious: Writing on an overturned reel in this place. I probably brought some Hollywood with me. If the races aren’t any better than this writing, then I’m a sure loser tomorrow. Meanwhile, it’s pack this machine back and sit down and listen to the ladies tell about screwing broom handles, cucumbers and the like . . . which reminds me of the guy who told me he stuck his into a vacuum cleaner . . . quack, quack, quack. I hear ducks. I whirl with this machine and stride toward that houseful of dirty female novelists . . .

  Iawakened in a strange bedroom in a strange bed with a strange woman in a strange town. I was up against her back and my penis was inserted into her cunt dog-fashion. It was hot in there and my penis was hard. I moved it a little and she moaned. She appeared to be asleep. Her hair was long and dark, quite lo
ng; in fact, a portion of it lay across my mouth—I brushed it away to breathe better, then stroked again. I felt hungover. I dropped out and rolled on my back and tried to reconstruct.

  I had flown into town a few days earlier and had given a poetry reading . . . . when? . . . the night before. It was a hot town. Kandel had read there 2 weeks earlier. And just before that the National Guard had managed to bayonet a few folk on campus. I liked an action town. My reading had gone all right. I had opened a pint and gone on through it. The regents and the English dept. had backed down at the last moment and I had to go on backed by student funds.

  After the reading there had been a party. Vodka, beer, wine, scotch, gin, whiskey. We sat on the rug and drank and talked. There had been one next to me . . . . long black hair, one tooth missing in the front when she smiled. That missing tooth had endeared me. That was it, and there I was.

  I got up to get a drink of water. Nice place. Large. I saw two babies crawling in a crib. No, it was one baby. One was in the crib, crawling. The other was outside walking around naked. A clock said 9:45 a.m. Well, it didn’t say 9: 45 a.m. I went into the kitchen and sterilized a bottle and warmed some milk. I gave the baby the bottle and he went right at it. I gave the walking kid an apple. I couldn’t find any seltzer. There were 2 beers left in the refrigerator. I drank another glass of water and opened the beer. Nice kitchen. Nice young girl. Missing tooth. Nice missing tooth.

  I finished the one beer, opened the other, cracked 2 eggs, put on chili powder and salt, and ate. Then I walked into the other room and this kid said, “I can see your Peter.” And I told him, “I can see your Peter too.” Over on the mantle I saw a letter, opened, addressed to a Mrs. Nancy Ferguson. I walked back into the bedroom, placed myself down behind her again.

  “Nancy?”

  “Yes, Hank?”

  “I gave the kid a bottle, the other one an apple.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Your husband?”