The Most Beautiful Woman in Town & Other Stories

“You have a child?”

  “Yeh.”

  “How old?”

  “Four.”

  “You’re not married?”

  “No.”

  “Do you pay child support?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much?”

  “About standard.”

  Then he leaned back and we sat there. The three of us said nothing for a good four or five minutes.

  Then a stack of the underground newspaper Open Pussy appeared.

  “Do you write these columns? Notes of a Dirty Old Man?” Mr. Washington asked.

  “Yeh.”

  He handed a copy to Mr. Los Angeles.

  “Have you seen this one?”

  “No, no, I haven’t.”

  Across the top of the column was a walking cock with legs, a huge HUGE walking cock with legs. The story was about a male friend of mine I had screwed in the ass by mistake, while drunk, believing that it was one of my girlfriends. It took me two weeks to finally force my friend to leave my place. It was a true story.

  “Do you call this writing?” Mr. Washington asked.

  “I don’t know about the writing. But I thought it was a very funny story. Didn’t you think it was humorous?”

  “But this … this illustration across the top of the story?”

  “The walking cock?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t draw it.”

  “You have nothing to do with the selection of illustrations?”

  “The paper is put together on Tuesday nights.”

  “And you are not there on Tuesday nights?”

  “I am supposed to be here on Tuesday nights.”

  They waited some time, going through Open Pussy, looking at my columns.

  “You know,” said Mr. Washington, tapping the Open Pussies again with his hand, “you would have been all right if you had kept writing poetry, but when you began writing this stuff. ..”

  He again tapped the Open Pussies.

  I waited two minutes and thirty seconds. Then I asked: “Are we to consider the postal officials as the new critics of literature?”

  “Oh, no no,” said Mr. Washington, “we didn’t mean that.”

  I sat and waited.

  “There is a certain conduct expected of postal employees. You are in the Public Eye. You are to be an example of exemplary behavior.”

  “It appears to me,” I said, “that you are threatening my freedom of expression with a resultant loss of employment. The A.C.L.U. might be interested.”

  “We’d still prefer you didn’t write the column.”

  “Gentlemen, there comes a time in each man’s life when he must choose to stand or run. I choose to stand.”

  Their silence.

  Wait.

  Wait.

  The shuffling of Open Pussies.

  Then Mr. Washington: “Mr. Bukowski?”

  “Yeh?”

  “Are you going to write any more columns about the Post Office?”

  I had written one about them which I thought was more humorous than demeaning — but then, maybe my mind was twisted.

  I let them wait this time. Then I answered: “Not unless you make it necessary for me to do so.”

  Then they waited. It was kind of an interrogation chess game where you hoped the other man would make the wrong move: blurt out his pawns, knights, bishops, king, his queen, his guts. (And meanwhile, as you read this, here goes my goddamned job. Groovy, baby. Send dollars for beer and wreaths to The Charles Bukowski Rehabilitation Fund at . . .)

  Mr. Washington stood up.

  Mr. Los Angeles stood up.

  Mr. Charles Bukowski stood up.

  Mr. Washington said: “I think that the interview is over.”

  We all shook hands like sun-maddened snakes.

  Mr. Washington said: “Meanwhile, don’t jump off of any bridges…”

  (Strange: I hadn’t even thought about it.)

  “… we haven’t had a case like this in ten years.”

  (In ten years? Who was the last poor sucker?)

  “So?” I asked.

  “Mr. Bukowski,” said Mr. Los Angeles, “report back to your position.”

  I really had an unquieting time (or is it disquieting?) trying to find my way back to the work floor from that underground Kafkaesqueish maze, and when I did, here all my subnormal fellow workers (good pricks all) started chirping at me:

  “Hey, baby, where ya been?”

  “What’d they want, daddieo?”

  “You knocked up another black chick, big daddy?”

  I gave them the Silence. One learns from dear old Uncle Sammy.

  They kept chirping and flipping and fingering their mental assholes. They were really frightened. I was Old Kool and if they could break Old Kool they could break any of them.

  “They wanted to make me Postmaster,” I told them.

  “And what happened, daddieo?”

  “I told them to jam a hot turd up their siffed-up snatch.”

  The foreman of the aisle walked by and they all gave him the proper obeisance but me, but I, but Bukowski, I lit a cigar with an easy flourish, threw the match on the floor and stared at the ceiling as if I were having great and wonderful thoughts. It was con; my mind was blank; I only wanted a halfpint of Grandad and six or seven tall cool beers . . .

  The fucking paper grew, or seemed to, and moved to a place on Melrose. I always hated to go there with copy, though, because everybody was so shitty, so truly shitty and snobby and not quite right, you know. Nothing changed. The history of the Man-beast was very slow. They were like the shits I’d faced when I first walked into the copy room of the L.A. City College newspaper in 1939 or 1940 — all these little hoity-toity dummies with little newspaper hats over their heads while writing stale, stupid copy. So very important — not even human enough to acknowledge your presence. Newspaper people were always the lowest of the breed; janitors who picked up women’s cuntrags in the crappers had more soul — naturally.

  I looked at those college freaks, walked out, never went back.

  Now. Open Pussy. Twenty-eight years later.

  Copy in my hand. There was Cherry at a desk. Cherry was on the telephone. Very important. Couldn’t speak. Or Cherry not at the telephone. Writing something on a piece of paper. Couldn’t speak. The same old con of always. Thirty years hadn’t broken the dish. And Joe Hyans running around, doing big things, running up and down the stairs. He had a little place on top. Rather exclusive, of course. And some poor shit in a back room with him there where Joe could watch him getting copy ready for the printer on the IBM. He gave the poor shit thirty-five a week for a sixty-hour week and the poor shit was glad, grew a beard and lovely soulful eyes and the poor shit hacked out the third-rate piteous copy. With the Beatles playing full volume over the intercom and the phone ringing continually, Joe Hyans, editor, was always RUNNING OFF TO SOMEPLACE IMPORTANT SOMEWHERE. But when you read the paper the next week you’d wonder where he’d run. It wasn’t in there.

  Open Pussy went on, for a while. My columns continued to be good, but the paper itself was half-ass. I could smell the death-cunt of it…

  There was a staff meeting every other Friday night. I busted up a few of them. And after hearing the results, I just didn’t go anymore. If the paper wanted to live, let it live. I stayed away and just slid my stuff under the door in an envelope.

  Then Hyans got me on the phone: “I’ve got an idea. I want you to get me together the best poets and prose writers that you know and we are going to put out a literary supplement.”

  I got it together for him. He printed it. And the cops busted him for “obscenity.”

  But I was a nice guy. I got him on the phone. “Hyans?”

  “Yeh?”

  “Since you done got busted for the thing, I’m a gonna let you have my column for free. That ten bucks you been paying me, it goes for the Open Pussy defense fund.”

  “Thanks very much,” he said.

  So there he
was, getting the best writing in America for nothing …

  Then Cherry phoned me one night.

  “Why don’t you come to our staff meetings anymore? We all miss you, terribly.”

  “What? What the hell you saying, Cherry? You on the stuff?”

  “No, Hank, we all love you, really. Do come to our next staff meeting.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “It’s dead without you.”

  “And death with me.”

  “We want you, old man.”

  “I’ll think about it, Cherry.”

  So, I showed. I had been given the idea by Hyans, himself, that since it was the first anniversary of Open Pussy the wine and the pussy and the life and the love would be flowing.

  But coming in very high and expecting to see fucking on the floor and love galore, I only saw all these little love-creatures busily at work. They reminded me very much, so humped and dismal, of the little old ladies working on piecework I used to deliver cloth to, working my way up through rope hand-pulled elevators full of rats and stink, one hundred years old, piecework ladies, proud and dead and neurotic as all hell, working, working to make a millionaire out of somebody … in New York, in Philadelphia, in St. Louis.

  And these, for Open Pussy, were working without wages, and there was Joe Hyans, looking a bit brutal and fat, walking up and down behind them, hands folded behind his back, seeing that each volunteer did his (her) duty properly and exactly.

  “Hyans! Hyans, you filthy cocksucker!” I screamed as I walked in. “You are running a slave-market, you are a lousy pewking Simon Legree! You cry for justice from the police and from Washington D.C. and you are the biggest lousiest swine of them all! You are Hitler multiplied by a hundred, you slave-labor bastard! You write of atrocities and then triple them yourself! Who the fuck you think you’re fooling, mother? Who the fuck you think you are?”

  Luckily for Hyans, the rest of the staff was quite used to me and they thought that whatever I said was foolishness and that Hyans Himself stood for Truth.

  Hyans Himself walked up and put a stapler in my hand.

  “Sit down,” he said, “we are trying to increase the circulation. Just sit down and clip one of these green ads to each of newspapers. We are sending out leftover copies to potential subscribers.. ..”

  Dear old Freedom Loveboy Hyans, using big business methods to put over his crap. Brainwashed beyond himself.

  He finally came up and took the stapler out of my hand.

  “You’re not stapling fast enough.”

  “Fuck you, mother. There was supposed to be champagne all over this place. Now I’m eating staples …”

  “Hey, Eddie!”

  He called over another slave-labor member — thin-cheeked, wire-armed, penurious. Poor Eddie was starving. Everybody was starving for the Cause. Except Hyans and his wife, and they lived in a two-story house and sent one of their children to a private school, and there was old Poppa back in Cleveland, one of the head stiffs of the Plain Dealer, with more money than anything else.

  So Hyans ran me out and also a guy with a little propeller on the top of a beanie cap, Lovable Doc Stanley I believe he was called, and also Lovable Doc’s woman, and as the three of us left out the back door quite calmly, sharing a bottle of cheap wine, there came the voice of Joe Hyans: “And get out of here, and don’t any of you ever come back, but I don’t mean you, Bukowski!”

  Poor fuck, he knew what kept the paper going …

  Then there was another bust by the police. This time for printing the photo of a woman’s cunt. Hyans, at this time, as always, was mixed up. He wanted to hype the circulation, by any means, or kill the paper and get out. It was a vise he couldn’t seem to work properly and it drew tighter and tighter. Only the people working for nothing or for thirty-five dollars a week seemed to have any interest in the paper. But Hyans did manage to lay a couple of the younger female volunteers so he wasn’t wasting his time.

  “Why don’t you quit your lousy job and come work for us?” Hyans asked me.

  “How much?”

  “Forty-five dollars a week. That includes your column. You will also distribute to the boxes on Wednesday night, your car, I’ll pay the gas, and you write up special assignments. Eleven a.m. to 7:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays off.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Hyans’ old man came in from Cleveland. We got drunk together over at Hyans’ house. Hyans and Cherry seemed very unhappy with Pops. And Pops could put away the whiskey. No grass for him. I could put away the whiskey too. We drank all night.

  “Now the way to get rid of the Free Press is to bust up their stands, run the peddlers off the streets, bust a few heads. That’s what we used to do in the old days. I’ve got money. I can hire some hoods, some mean sons of bitches. We can hire Bukowski.”

  “God damn it!” screamed young Hyans, “I don’t want to hear your shit, you understand?”

  Pops asked me, “What do you think of my idea, Bukowski?”

  “I think it’s a good idea. Pass the bottle over here.”

  “Bukowski is insane!” screamed Joe Hyans.

  “You print his column,” said Pops.

  “He’s the best writer in California,” said young Hyans.

  “The best insane writer in California,” I corrected him.

  “Son,” Pops went on, “I have all this money. I want to put your paper over. All we gotta do is bust a few …”

  “No. No. No!” Joe Hyans screamed. “I won’t have it!” Then he ran out of the house. What a wonderful man Joe Hyans was. He ran out of the house. I reached for another drink and told Cherry that I was going to fuck her up against the bookcase. Pops said he’d take seconds. Cherry cussed us while Joe Hyans ran off down the street with his soul…

  The paper went on, coming out once a week somehow. Then the trial about the photo of the female cunt came up.

  The prosecuting attorney asked Hyans: “Would you object to oral copulation on the steps of the City Hall?”

  “No,” said Joe, “but it would probably block traffic.”

  Oh, Joe, I thought, you blew that one! You shudda said, “I’d prefer for oral copulation to go on inside the City Hall where it usually does.”

  When the judge asked Hyans’ lawyer what the meaning of the photo of the female sex organ was, Hyans’ lawyer answered, “Well, that’s just the way it is. That’s the way it is, daddy.”

  They lost the trial, of course, and appealed for a new one.

  “A roust,” said Joe Hyans to the few and scattered news media about, “nothing but a police roust.”

  What a brilliant man Joe Hyans was…

  Next I heard from Joe Hyans was over the phone: “Bukowski, I just bought a gun. One hundred and twelve dollars. A beautiful weapon. I’m going to kill a man!”

  “Where are you now?”

  “In the bar, down by the paper.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  When I got there he was walking up and down outside the bar.

  “Come on,” he said, “I’ll buy you a beer.”

  We sat down. The place was full. Hyans was talking in a very loud voice. You could hear him all the way to Santa Monica.

  “I’m going to splatter his brains out against the wall – I’m going to kill the son of a bitch!”

  “What guy, kid? Why do you want to kill this guy, kid?”

  He kept staring straight ahead.

  “Groove, baby. Why ya wanna kill this sunabitch, huh?”

  “He’s fucking my wife, that’s why!”

  “Oh.”

  He stared some more. It was like a movie. It wasn’t even as good as a movie.

  “It’s a beautiful weapon,” said Joe. “You put in this little clip. It fires ten shots. Rapid-fire. There’ll be nothing left of the bastard!” Joe Hyans.

  That wonderful man with the big red beard.

  Groovy, baby.

  Anyhow I asked him, “How about all these anti-war articles you’ve
printed? How about the love bit? What happened?”

  “Oh come on now Bukowski, you’ve never believed in all that pacifism shit?”

  “Well, I don’t know.… Well, I guess not exactly.”

  “I’ve warned this guy that I am going to kill him if he doesn’t stay away, and I walk in and there he is sitting on the couch in my own house. Now what would you do?”

  “You’re making this a personal property thing, don’t you understand? Just fuck it. Forget it. Walk away. Leave them there together.”

  “Is that what you’ve done?”

  “After the age of thirty — always. And after the age of forty, it gets easier. But in my twenties I used to go insane. The first burns are the hardest.”

  “Well, I am going to kill the son of a bitch! I’m going to blow his goddamned brains out!”

  The whole bar was listening. Love, baby, love.

  I told him, “Let’s get out of here.”

  Outside the bar door Hyans dropped to his knees and screamed, a long milk-curdling four-minute scream. You could hear him all the way to Detroit. Then I got him up and walked him to my car. As he got to the car door on his side, he grabbed the handle, dropped to his knees and let go another hog-caller to Detroit. He was hooked on Cherry, poor fellow. I got him up, put him in the seat, got in the other side, drove north to Sunset and then east along Sunset and at the signal, red, at Sunset and Vermont, he let go another one. I lit up a cigar. The other drivers stared at the red beard screaming.

  I thought, he isn’t going to stop. I’ll have to knock him out.

  But then as the signal turned green he ended it and I shifted it out of there. He sat there sobbing. I didn’t know what to say. There wasn’t anything to say.

  I thought, I’ll take him to see Mongo the Giant of the Eternal High. Mongo’s full of shit. Maybe he can dump some shit on Hyans. Me, I hadn’t lived with a woman for four years. I was too far out of it to see it anymore.

  Next time he screams, I thought, I’ve got to knock him out. I can’t stand another one of those.

  “Hey! Where we going?”

  “Mongo’s.”

  “Oh no! Not Mongo’s! I hate that guy! He’ll only make fun of me! He’s a cruel son of a bitch!”

  It was true. Mongo had a good mind but a cruel one. It wasn’t any good going over there. And I couldn’t handle it either. We drove along.