The Most Beautiful Woman in Town & Other Stories

  “Stand still,” said the technician, “just stand there.”

  “Stand still,” said the nurse.

  I could feel myself falling. I fell over backwards.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “God damn you!” the technician screamed, “you made me waste two films! Those god damned films cost money!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Take him out of here,” said the technician.

  The nurse helped me up and put me back on the roller. The humming nurse rolled me back to the elevator, humming.

  They did take me out of that cellar and put me into a large room, a very large room. There were about 40 people dying in there. The wires to the buttons had been cut and large wooden doors, thick wooden doors coated with slabs of tin on both sides closed us away from the nurses and the doctors. They had put the sides up around my bed and I was asked to use the bedpan but I didn’t like the bedpan, especially to vomit blood into and far less to shit into. If a man ever invents a comfortable and usable bedpan he will be hated by doctors and nurses for eternity and beyond.

  I kept having a desire to shit but not much luck. Of course, all I was getting was milk and the stomach was ripped open so it couldn’t very well send too much down to the asshole. One nurse had offered me some tough roast beef with half-cooked carrots and half-mashed potatoes. I refused. I knew they just wanted another empty bed. Anyhow, there was still this desire to shit. Strange. It was my second or third night in there. I was very weak. I managed to unattach one side and get out of bed. I made it to the crapper and sat there. I strained and sat there and strained. Then I got up. Nothing. Just a little whirlpool of blood. Then a merry-go-round started in my head and I leaned against the wall with one hand and vomited up a mouthful of blood. I flushed the toilet and walked out. I got halfway to my bed and another mouthful came up. I fell. Then on the floor I vomited up another mouthful of blood. I didn’t know that there was so much blood inside of people. I let go another mouthful.

  “You son of a bitch,” an old man hollered at me from his bed, “shut up so we can get some sleep.”

  “Sorry, comrade,” I said, and then I was unconscious …

  The nurse was angry. “You bastard,” she said, “I told you not to take down the sides of your bed. You fuckin’ creeps sure make my night a drag!”

  “Your pussy stinks,” I told her, “you belong in a Tijuana whore house.”

  She lifted my head by the hair and slapped me hard across the left side of my face and then backhanded me across the right.

  “Take that back!” she said. “Take that back!”

  “Florence Nightingale,” I said, “I love you.”

  She put my head back down and walked out of the room. She was a lady of true spirit and fire; I liked that. I rolled over into my own blood, getting my smock wet. That’d teach her.

  Florence Nightingale came back with another female sadist and they put me in a chair and slid the chair across the room toward my bed.

  “Too much god damned noise!” said the old man. He was right.

  They got me back into bed and Florence put the bed side back up. “Son of a bitch,” she said, “stay in there now or next time I’m gonna lay on you.”

  “Suck me off,” I said, “suck me off before you leave.”

  She leaned over the railing and looked into my face. I have a very tragic face. It attracts some women. Her eyes were wide and passionate and looked into mine. I pulled the sheet down and pulled up my smock. She spit into my face, then walked out…

  Then the head nurse was there.

  “Mr. Bukowski,” she said, “we can’t let you have any blood. You don’t have any blood credit.”

  She smiled. She was letting me know that they were going to let me die.

  “All right,” I said.

  “Do you want to see the priest?”

  “What for?”

  “We have on your admissions card that you are a Catholic.”

  “I just put that down.”

  “Why?”

  “I used to be. You put down ‘no religion,’ people always ask a lot of questions.”

  “We have you down as a Catholic, Mr. Bukowski.”

  “Listen, it’s hard for me to talk. I’m dying. All right, all right, I’m a Catholic, have it your way.”

  “We can’t let you have any blood, Mr. Bukowski.”

  “Listen, my father works for the county. I think they have a blood program. L.A. County Museum. A Mr. Henry Bukowski. He hates me.”

  “We’ll check it out.” …

  There was something about my papers going down while I was upstairs. I didn’t see a doctor until the fourth day and by then they found that my father who hated me was a good guy who had a job and who had a drunken dying son without a job and the good guy had given blood to the blood program and so they hooked up a bottle and poured it to me. 13 pints of blood and 13 pints of glucose without stop. The nurse ran out of places to stick the needle …

  I awakened once and the priest was standing over me.

  “Father,” I said, “please go away. I can die without this.”

  “You want me to leave, my son?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Have you lost the faith?”

  “Yes, I’ve lost the faith.”

  “Once a Catholic always a Catholic, my son.”

  “Bullshit, Father.”

  An old man in the next bed said, “Father, Father, I’ll talk to you. You talk to me, Father.”

  The priest went over there. I waited to die. You know god damned well I didn’t die then or I wouldn’t be telling you this now…

  They moved me into a room with a black guy and a white guy. The white guy kept getting fresh roses every day. He raised roses which he sold to florists. He wasn’t raising any roses right then. The black guy had busted open like me. The white guy had a bad heart, a very bad heart. We lay around and the white guy talked about breeding roses and raising roses and how he could sure use a cigarette, my god, how he needed a cigarette. I had stopped vomiting blood. Now I was just shitting blood. I felt like I had it made. I had just emptied a pint of blood and they had taken the needle out.

  “I’ll get you some smokes, Harry.”

  “God, thanks, Hank.”

  I got out of bed. “Give me some money.”

  Harry gave me some change.

  “If he smokes he’ll die,” said Charley. Charley was the black guy.

  “Bullshit, Charley, a couple of little smokes never hurt anybody.”

  I walked out of the room and down the hall. There was a cigarette machine in the waiting lobby. I got a pack and walked back. Then Charley and Harry and I lay there smoking cigarettes. That was morning. About noon the doctor came by and put a machine on Harry. The machine spit and farted and roared.

  “You’ve been smoking, haven’t you?” the doctor asked Harry.

  “No doctor, honest, I haven’t been smoking.”

  “Which of you guys bought him these smokes?”

  Charley looked at the ceiling. I looked at the ceiling.

  “You smoke another cigarette and you’re dead,” said the doctor.

  Then he took his machine and walked out. As soon as he left I took the pack out from under the pillow.

  “Lemme have one,” said Harry.

  “You heard what the doctor said,” said Charley.

  “Yeah,” I said, exhaling a sheath of beautiful blue smoke, “you heard what the doctor said: ‘You smoke another cigarette and you’re dead.’ ”

  “I’d rather die happy than live in misery,” said Harry.

  “I can’t be responsible for your death, Harry,” I said, “I’m going to pass these cigarettes to Charley and if he wants to give you one he can.”

  I passed them over to Charley who had the center bed.

  “All right, Charley,” said Harry, “let’s have ’em.”

  “I can’t do it, Harry, I can’t kill you Harry.”

  Charley
passed the cigarettes back to me.

  “Come on, Hank, lemme have a smoke.”

  “No, Harry.”

  “Please, I beg you, man, just one smoke just one!”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

  I threw him the whole pack. His hand trembled as he took one out.

  “I don’t have any matches. Who’s got matches?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said.

  I threw him the matches .. .

  They came in and hooked me to another bottle. About ten minutes my father arrived. Vicky was with him, so drunk she could hardly stand up.

  “Lover!” she said, “Lover boy!”

  She staggered up against the edge of the bed.

  I looked at the old man. “You son of a bitch,” I said, “you didn’t have to bring her up here drunk.”

  “Lover boy, don’t you wanna see me, huh? Huh, lover boy?”

  “I warned you not to get involved with a woman like that.”

  “She’s broke. You bastard, you bought her whiskey, got her drunk and brought her up here.”

  “I told you she was no good, Henry. I told you she was a bad woman.”

  “Don’t you love me anymore, lover boy?”

  “Get her out of here … NOW!” I told the old man.

  “No, no, I want you to see what kind of a woman you have.”

  “I know what kind of woman I have. Now get her out of here now, or so help me Christ I’m going to pull this needle out of my arm and whip your ass!”

  The old man moved her out. I fell back on the pillow.

  “She’s a looker,” said Harry.

  “I know,” I said, “I know.” .. .

  I stopped shitting blood and I was given a list of what to eat and I was told that the first drink would kill me. They had also told me that I would die without an operation. I had had a terrible argument with a female Japanese doctor about operation and death. I had said “No operation” and she had walked out, shaking her ass at me in anger. Harry was still alive when I left, nursing his cigarettes.

  I walked along in the sunlight to see how it felt. It felt all right. The traffic went by. The sidewalk was as sidewalks had always been. I was wondering whether to take a bus in or try to phone somebody to come and get me. I walked into this place to phone. I sat down first and had a smoke.

  The bartender walked up and I ordered a bottle of beer.

  “What’s new?” he asked.

  “Nothing much,” I said. He walked off. I poured the beer into a glass, then I looked at the glass a while and then I emptied half of it. Somebody put a coin in the juke box and we had some music. Life looked a little better. I finished that glass, poured another and wondered if my pecker would ever stand up again. I looked around the bar: no women. I did the next best thing: I picked up the glass and drained it.

  THE DAY WE TALKED ABOUT JAMES THURBER

  I was down on my luck or my talent was finished. It was Huxley, or one of his characters, I believe, who said in Point Counter Point: “Anybody can be a genius at twenty-five: at fifty it takes some doing.” Well, I was forty-nine, which isn’t fifty — short a few ‘months. And my paintings weren’t moving. There had recently been a small book of poems: The Sky Is the Biggest Cunt of Them All, for which I received a hundred dollars four months ago, and now the thing is a collector’s item, listing at twenty-dollars at rare book dealers. I didn’t even have a copy of my own book. A friend had stolen it while I was drunk. A friend?

  My luck was down. I was known by Genet, Henry Miller, Picasso, so on and so on, and I couldn’t even get a job as a dishwasher. I tried in one place but only lasted one night with my bottle of wine. A big fat lady, one of the owners, proclaimed, “Why this man doesn’t know how to wash dishes!” Then she showed me how one part of the sink — it had an acid of some sort in it — was where you first put the dishes, then you transferred them over to the soap and water side. They fired me that night. But meanwhile I had drunk two bottles of wine and eaten half a leg of lamb which they had left just behind me.

  It was, in a sense, terrifying to end up a zero, but what hurt more was that there was a five-year-old daughter of mine up in San Francisco, the only person in the world I loved, who needed me, and shoes and dresses and food and love and letters and toys and an occasonal visit.

  I was forced to live with some great French poet who was now living in Venice, California, and this guy went both ways — I mean he fucked men and women and was fucked by men and women. He had likable ways, and a humorous and brilliant way of speaking. And he wore a little wig which kept slipping, and had to keep setting the damned thing straight as he talked to you. He spoke seven languages but he had to speak English while I was around. And he spoke each language as if it were his natural tongue.

  “Ah, don’t worry, Bukowski,” he would smile, “I will take care of you!”

  He had this twelve-inch dick, limp, and he had appeared in some of the underground newspapers when he had arrived in Venice, with notices and reviews of his power as a poet (one of the reviews had been written by me), but some of the underground papers had printed this photo of the great French poet — naked. He was about five feet tall and had hair all over his chest and arms. The hair ran all the way down from his neck to his balls — black, grizzly, stinking mass of stuff — and here in the middle of the photo was this monstrous thing hanging there, round-headed, thick: a bull’s cock upon a tinkertoy of a man.

  Frenchy was one of the greatest poets of the century. All he did was sit around and write his shitty little immortal poems and he had two or three sponsors who sent him money. Who wouldn’t:(?): immortal cock, immortal poems. He knew Corso, Burroughs, Ginsberg, kaja. He knew all that early hotel gang who lived at the same place, popped together, fucked together, and created separately. He’d even met Miro and Hem walking down the avenue, Miro carrying Hem’s boxing gloves as they walked toward the battleground where Hemingway was hoping to kick the shit outa somebody. Of course, they all knew each other and paused a moment to flip off a little brilliant conversational crap.

  The immortal French poet had seen Burroughs crawling along the floor “blind drunk” at B’s place.

  “He reminds me of you, Bukowski. There’s no front. He drinks until he drops, until his eyes glaze. And this night he was crawling along the rug too drunk to get up and he looked up at me and he said to me, ‘They fucked me! They got me drunk! I signed the contract. I sold all the movie rights to Naked Lunch for fivehundred dollars. Well, shit, it’s too late!’ ”

  Of course Burroughs was lucky — the option ran out and he had the five hundred dollars. I got hung up drunk for fifty bucks on some of my shit, two-year option, and I still have eighteen months to sweat. They caught Nelson Algren the same way – Man With the Golden Arm; they made millions, Algren got peanut shells. He had been drunk and failed to read the small print.

  They played me good on movie rights to Notes of a Dirty Old Man. I was drunk and they brought in an eighteen-year-old cunt with a mini up to her hips, high heels, and long stockings. I hadn’t had a piece of ass for two years. I signed away my life. And I probably could have driven a Railway Express truck through her vagina. I never even found out.

  So there I was, down and out, fifty, outa luck and outa talent, couldn’t even get a job as a newspaper boy, janitor, dishwasher, and the French poet immortal always had something going at his place — young men and young women always knocking at his door. And such a clean apartment! His john looked like nobody’d ever shit in it. All the tiles gleaming white clean, and with these little fat fluffy rugs everywhere. New sofas, new chairs. A refrigerator which shined like a mad and enlarged tooth that had been scrubbed until it cried. Everything, everything, touched of the delicacy of no-pain, no-worry, no-world out there at all. Meanwhile everybody knew what to say and do and how to act — it was a code — discreet and without sound: huge reamings and suckings and fingers up into the asshole and everywhere else. Men, women, children indulged. Boys.

&n
bsp; And there was the Big C. Big H. And Hash. Mary. Name it.

  It was an Art quietly done, everybody gently smiling, waiting, then doing. Leaving. Then coming back again.

  There was even whiskey, beer, wine, for such clods as I — cigars and the stupidity of the past.

  The immortal French poet went on and on with his various things. He rose early and did various yoga exercises, and would then stand looking at himself in the full-length mirror, brushing his hands over his tiny bit of sweat, and then, reaching and touching his huge cock and sacks — saving the cock and sacks for last — lifted them, savoring them, then letting them go: PLUNK.

  About then I’d go into the bathroom and vomit. Come out.

  “You didn’t get any of it on the floor, did you, Bukowski?”

  He didn’t ask me if I were dying. He was only worried about his clean bathroom floor.

  “No, Andre, I deposited all the vomit into the proper channels.”

  “Good boy!”

  Then just to show off, knowing that I was sicker than seven hells, he would go over to the corner, stand on his head in his fucking bermuda shorts, cross his legs, look at me upside down like that, and say: “You know, Bukowski, if you would ever sober up and put on a tuxedo, I promise you this — if you ever walked into a room dressed that way, every woman in the room would faint.”

  “I don’t doubt that.”

  Then he did a little flipover, landed on his feet: “Care for breakfast?”

  “Andre, I haven’t cared for breakfast for the last thirty-two years.”

  Then there’d be a knock on the door, lightly, oh so delicately you’d think it was a fucking bluebird tapping with one wing, dying, asking for a sip of water.

  Mostly it would be two or three young men, with strawlike, shitty-looking beards.

  It was usually men, although now and then it was a young girl, quite lovely, and I always hated to leave when it was a girl. But he had the twelve inches limp plus the immortality. So I always knew my role.

  “Listen, Andre, this headache … I think I’ll take a little stroll along the beach.”

  “Oh, no, Charles! No need, really!”