as the last minutes,
the last
seconds
rushed toward
you.
then to get on the
route with the people
and the dogs,
to make the rounds
on a new
route,
making your legs
go,
making your feet
walk
as the sun baked
you alive,
you fought through
your first
round
with 6 or 7 more to
go.
never time for lunch,
you’d get a write-up
if you were 5 minutes
late.
a few too many writeups
and you were
finished,
they moved you
out.
it was a living, a
deathly
living, to somehow
finish your route,
come in and often
be told
you were assigned
to the night pickup
run, another
ball-buster.
or
if you got out of that
to drive on in
to your place
to find your lady
already drunk,
dirty dishes in the
sink,
the dog unfed,
the flowers unwatered,
the bed
unmade,
the ashtrays full of
punched-out
lipstick-smeared
cigarettes.
then to get in the tub
with a beer.
you were no longer
young,
you were no longer
anything,
just worn down and
out
with your lady in the
other room
lisping inanities and
insanities,
pouring her glasses
of cheap
wine.
you were always going
to get rid of her,
you were working on
that,
you were caught between
the post office and
her,
it was the vise of
death,
each side crushing in
upon you.
“Jesus, baby, please,
please, just shut up for
a little while…”
“ah, you asshole!
what’re you doing in
there, playing with
yourself?”
to come roaring out
of that tub, all the impossibilities
of that day and that life
corkscrewing through you
ripping away
everything.
out of that tub,
a naked, roaring rocket
of battered body and
mind:
“YOU GOD DAMNED WHORE,
WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT
ANYTHING?
SITTING THERE ON YOUR
DEAD ASS AND
SUCKING AT THE VINO!”
to rush into the other room,
looking all about,
the walls whirling,
the entire world tilting in
against you.
“DON’T HIT ME! DON’T HIT
ME!
YOU’D HIT ME BUT YOU
WOULDN’T HIT A
MAN!”
“HELL NO, I WOULDN’T
HIT A MAN, YOU THINK
I’M CRAZY?”
to grab the bottle from
her,
to drain damn near
half of it.
to find another bottle,
open it,
pour a tall waterglass
full,
then to smash the glass
against a
wall,
to explode it like
that
in purple glory.
to find a new glass,
sit down and pour a
full one.
she’d be quiet
then.
we’d drink an
hour or so
like that.
then, to get
dressed,
cigarette dangling,
you are feeling somewhat
better.
then you are moving
toward the
door.
“hey! where the hell
you going?”
“I’m going to the fucking
bar!”
“not without me!
not without me, buster!”
“all right, get your ass
into gear!”
to walk there together.
to get our stools.
to sit before the long mirror.
the mirror you always hated to
look into.
to tell the bartender,
“vodka 7.”
to have her tell the bartender,
“scotch and water.”
everything was far away
then,
the post office, the world,
the past and the
future.
to have our drinks arrive.
to take the first hit in the
dark bar.
life couldn’t get any
better.
the word
there was Auden, I don’t remember
which small room I first read him
in
and there was Spender and I don’t
know which small room
either
and then there was Ezra
and I remember that room,
there was a torn screen
that the flies came through
and it was Los Angeles
and the woman said to me,
“Jesus Christ, you reading those
Cantos again!”
she liked e. e. cummings, though,
she thought he was really
good and she was
right.
I remember when I read Turgenev,
though, I had just come out of the
drunk tank and I was living
alone
and I thought he was really a
subtle and funny son of a
bitch.
Hemingway I read everywhere,
sometimes a few times over
and he made me feel brave
and tough
until one day
it all just stopped cold for me
and worse than that,
Ernie became an
irritant.
my Jeffers period was sometime
in Los Angeles, some room, some
job,
the same woman was back
and she said,
“Jesus, how can you read this
crap?”
one time when she was gone
I found many magazines
under the bed.
I pulled them out
and found that the contents were
all about murder
and it was all about women
who were tortured, killed,
dismembered and so
forth with the
lurid photos
in black and
white.
that stuff wasn’t for
me.
my first encounter with Henry
Miller was via paperback
on a bus through Arizona.
he was great when he stuck
to reality
but when he got ethereal
when he got to philosophizing
he got as dry and boring as
the passing
landscape.
I left him in the men’s crapper
br />
at a hamburger
stop.
I got hold of Celine’s Journey
and read it straight through
while in bed eating crackers.
I kept reading, eating the
crackers and reading, reading,
laughing out loud,
thinking, at last I’ve met a man
who writes better than
I.
I finished the book and then
drank much water.
the crackers swelled up
inside of me
and I got the worst
god damned stomach
ache of my
life.
I was living with my first
wife.
she worked for the L.A.
Sheriff’s Dept.
and she came in to
find me doubled up
and moaning.
“Oh, what happened?”
“I’ve just read the world’s
greatest
writer!”
“But you said you were.”
“I’m second, baby…”
I read F. D.’s Notes from the
Underground
in a small El Paso
library
after sleeping the night
on a park bench
during a sand
storm.
after reading that book
I knew I had a long way
to go as a
writer.
I don’t know where I read
T. S. Eliot.
he made a small dent
which soon ironed
out.
there were many rooms,
many books,
D. H. Lawrence, Gorky,
A. Huxley, Sherwood
Anderson, Sinclair Lewis,
James Thurber, Dos Passos,
etc
Kafka.
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
Rabelais.
Hamsun.
as a very young man
I worked as a shipping clerk,
made the bars at
night,
came into the roominghouse,
went to bed
and read the
books.
I had 3 or 4 of them in
bed with me (what a
man!) and then I would
sleep.
my landlady finally told
me, “You know, you read those
books in bed and about every
hour or so one of them will
fall to the floor.
You are keeping everybody
awake!”
(I was on the 3rd floor.)
what days and nights those
were.
now I can’t read anything,
not even the newspaper.
and, of course, I can’t watch
tv except for the boxing
matches.
I do hear some news
on the car radio
while driving the freeway
and waiting for the
traffic
reports.
but you know, my former
life as a bibliophile, it
possibly kept me from
murdering somebody,
myself
included.
it kept me from being an
industrialist.
it allowed me to endure
some women
that most men would never
be able to live
with.
it gave me space, a
pause.
it helped me to write
this
(in this room,
like the other rooms)
perhaps for some young man
now
needing
to laugh at the
impossibilities
which are here
always
after we are
not.
shooting the moon in the eye
it was just a small room, no bathroom,
hot plate, bed, 2 chairs, a bed, sink,
phone in hall.
I was on the 2nd floor of a hotel.
I had a job.
I got in about 6:30 p.m.
and by 8 p.m.
there would be 4 or 5 people
in the room,
all drunks,
all drinking wine.
sometimes there would be
6 or 7.
most of them sat on the
bed.
oh, there was a radio,
we played the radio,
drank and
talked.
it was strange, there was
always a sense of
excitement there,
some laughter and
sometimes serious
arguments that were
somewhat
stupid.
we were never asked
to be quiet,
the manager never
bothered us,
or the
police.
with an exception
or two,
there were no
physical
confrontations.
I’d always call an
end to the parties
around 3 a.m.
“ah, come on Hank!
we’re just getting
started!”
“come on, come
on, everybody
out!”
and,
with an exception
or two,
I always slept
without a
lady.
we called
that place,
the Hotel from
Hell.
I had no idea
what we were
trying to
do.
I think we were
just celebrating
being
alive.
that small room
full of smoke and
music and
voices,
night after night
after
night.
the poor, the mad,
the lost.
we lit up that hotel
with our twisted
souls
and it loved
us.
nirvana
not much chance,
completely cut loose from
purpose,
he was a young man
riding a bus
through North Carolina
on the way to
somewhere
and it began to snow
and the bus stopped
at a little cafe
in the hills
and the passengers
entered.
he sat at the counter
with the others,
he ordered and the
food arrived.
the meal was
particularly
good
and the
coffee.
the waitress was
unlike the women
he had
known.
she was unaffected,
there was a natural
humor which came
from her.
the fry cook said
crazy things.
the dishwasher,
in back,
laughed, a good
clean
pleasant
laugh.
the young man watched
the snow through the
windows.
he wanted to stay
in that cafe
forever.
the curious feeling
swam through him
that everything
was
beautiful
there,
that it would always
stay beautiful
there.
then the bus driver
told the passengers
that it was time
to board.
the young man
thought, I’ll just sit
here, I’ll just stay
here.
but then
he rose and followed
the others into the
bus.
he found his seat
and looked at the cafe
through the bus
window.
then the bus moved
off, down a curve,
downward, out of
the hills.
the young man
looked straight
forward.
he heard the other
passengers
speaking
of other things,
or they were
reading
or
attempting to
sleep.
they had not
noticed
the
magic.
the young man
put his head to
one side,
closed his
eyes,
pretended to
sleep.
there was nothing
else to do—
just listen to the
sound of the
engine,
the sound of the
tires
in the
snow.
an invitation
hey Chinaski: