“All right, man, what’s your all time outfield?”
“Well, Willie Mays, Ted Williams, Cobb.”
“What? What?”
“That’s right, baby!”
“What about the Babe? Whatta ya gonna do with the Babe?”
“O.K., O.K., who’s your all star outfield?”
“All time, not all star!”
“O.K., O.K., you know what I mean, baby, you know what I mean!”
“Well, I’ll take Mays, Ruth and Di Maj!”
“Both you guys are nuts! How about Hank Aaron, baby? How about Hank?”
At one time, all miscellaneous jobs were put on bid. Bids were filled mostly on a basis of seniority. The miscellaneous crew went about and ripped the bids out of the order books. Then they had nothing to do. Nobody filed a complaint. It was a long dark walk to the parking lot at night.
I began getting dizzy spells. I could feel them coming. The case would begin to whirl. The spells lasted about a minute. I couldn’t understand it. Each letter was getting heavier and heavier. The clerks began to have that dead grey look. I began to slide off my stool. My legs would barely hold me up. The job was killing me.
I went to my doctor and told him about it. He took my blood pressure.
“No, no, your blood pressure is all right.”
Then he put the stethoscope to me and weighed me.
“I can find nothing wrong.”
Then he gave me a special blood test. He took blood from my arm three times at intervals, each time lapse longer than the last.
“Do you care to wait in the other room?”
“No, no, I’ll go out and walk around and come back in time.”
“All right but come back in time.”
I was on time for the second blood extraction. Then there was a longer wait for the third one, 20 or 25 minutes. I walked out on the street. Nothing much was happening. I went into a drugstore and read a magazine. I put it down, looked at the clock and went outside. I saw this woman sitting at the bus stop. She was one of those rare ones. She was showing plenty of leg. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I crossed the street and stood about 20 yards away.
Then she got up. I had to follow her. That big ass beckoned me. I was hypnotized. She walked into a post office and I walked in behind her. She stood in a long line and I stood behind her. She got two postcards. I bought 12 airmail postcards and two dollars worth of stamps.
When I came out she was getting on the bus. I saw the last of that delicious leg and ass get on the bus and the bus carried her away.
The doctor was waiting.
“What happened? You’re five minutes late!”
“I don’t know. The clock must have been wrong.”
“THIS THING MUST BE EXACT!”
“Go ahead. Take the blood anyhow.”
He stuck the needle into me …
A couple of days later, the tests said there was nothing wrong with me. I didn’t know if it was the five minutes difference or what. But the dizzy spells got worse. I began to clock out after four hours work without filling out the proper forms.
I’d walk in around 11 p.m. and there would be Fay. Poor pregnant Fay.
“What happened?”
“I couldn’t take any more,” I’d say, “too sensitive …”
—POST OFFICE
A Shipping Clerk with a Red Nose
When I first met Randall Harris he was 42 and lived with a grey haired woman, one Margie Thompson. Margie was 45 and not too handsome. I was editing the little magazine Mad Fly at the time and I had come over in an attempt to get some material from Randall.
Randall was known as an isolationist, a drunk, a crude and bitter man but his poems were raw, raw and honest, simple and savage. He was writing unlike anybody else at the time. He worked as a shipping clerk in an auto parts warehouse.
I sat across from both Randall and Margie. It was 7:15 p.m. and Harris was already drunk on beer. He set a bottle in front of me. I’d heard of Margie Thompson. She was an old-time communist, a worldsaver, a do-gooder. One wondered what she was doing with Randall who cared for nothing and admitted it. “I like to photograph shit,” he told me, “that’s my art.”
Randall had begun writing at the age of 38. At 42, after three small chapbooks (Death Is a Dirtier Dog Than My Country, My Mother Fucked an Angel, and The Piss-Wild Horses of Madness), he was getting what might be called critical acclaim. But he made nothing on his writing and he said, “I’m nothing but a shipping clerk with the deep blue blues.” He lived in an old front court in Hollywood with Margie, and he was weird, truly. “I just don’t like people,” he said. “You know, Will Rogers once said, ‘I never met a man I didn’t like.’ Me, I never met a man I liked.”
But Randall had humor, an ability to laugh at pain and at himself. You liked him. He was an ugly man with a large head and a smashed-up face—only the nose seemed to have escaped the general smashup. “I don’t have enough bone in my nose, it’s like rubber,” he explained. His nose was long and very red.
I had heard stories about Randall. He was given to smashing windows and breaking bottles against the wall. He was one nasty drunk. He also had periods where he wouldn’t answer the door or the telephone. He didn’t own a T.V., only a small radio and he only listened to symphony music—strange for a guy as crude as he was.
Randall also had periods when he took the bottom off the telephone and stuffed toilet paper around the bell so it wouldn’t ring. It stayed that way for months. One wondered why he had a phone. His education was sparse but he’d evidently read most of the best writers.
“Well, fucker,” he said to me, “I guess you wonder what I’m doing with her?” he pointed to Margie.
I didn’t answer.
“She’s a good lay,” he said, “and she gives me some of the best sex west of St. Louis.”
This was the same guy who had written four or five great love poems to a woman called Annie. You wondered how it worked.
Margie just sat there and grinned. She wrote poetry too but it wasn’t very good. She attended two workshops a week which hardly helped.
“So you want some poems?” he asked me.
“Yes, I’d like to look some over.”
Harris walked over to the closet, opened the door and picked some torn and crushed papers off the floor. He handed them to me. “I wrote these last night.” Then he walked into the kitchen and came out with two more beers. Margie didn’t drink.
I began to read the poems. They were all powerful. He typed with a very heavy hand and the words seemed chiseled in the paper. The force of his writing always astounded me. He seemed to be saying all the things we should have said but had never thought of saying.
“I’ll take these poems,” I said.
“O.k.,” he said. “Drink up.”
When you came to see Harris, drinking was a must. He smoked one cigarette after another. He dressed in loose brown chino pants two sizes too large and old shirts that were always ripped. He was around six feet and 220 pounds, much of it beerfat. He was round-shouldered, and peered out at you from behind slitted eyelids. We drank a good two hours and a half, the room heavy with smoke. Suddenly Harris stood up and said, “Get the hell out of here, fucker, you disgust me!”
“Easy now, Harris …”
“I said NOW!, fucker!”
I got up and left with the poems.
I returned to that front court two months later to deliver a couple of copies of Mad Fly to Harris. I had run all ten of his poems. Margie let me in. Randall wasn’t there.
“He’s in New Orleans,” said Margie, “I think he’s getting a break. Jack Teller wants to publish his next book but he wants to meet Randall first. Teller says he can’t print anybody he doesn’t like. He’s paid the air fare both ways.”
“Randall isn’t exactly endearing,” I said.
“We’ll see,” said Margie. “Teller’s a drunk and an ex-con. They might make a lovely pair.”
Teller put out the magazine
Rifraff and had his own press. He did very fine work. The last issue of Rifraff had had Harris’ ugly face on the cover sucking at a beer-bottle and had featured a number of his poems.
Rifraff was generally recognized as the number one lit mag of the time. Harris was beginning to get more and more notice. This would be a good chance for him if he didn’t botch it with his mean tongue and his drunken manners. Before I left Margie told me she was pregnant—by Harris. As I said, she was 45.
“What’d he say when you told him?”
“He seemed indifferent.”
I left.
The book did come out in an edition of 2,000, finely printed. The cover was made of cork imported from Ireland. The pages were vari-colored, of extremely good paper, set in rare type and interspersed with some of Harris’ India ink sketches. The book received acclaim, both for itself and its contents. But Teller couldn’t pay royalties. He and his wife lived on a very narrow margin. In ten years the book would go for $75 on the rare book market. Meanwhile Harris went back to his shipping clerk job at the auto parts warehouse.
When I called again four or five months later Margie was gone.
“She’s been gone a long time,” said Harris. “Have a beer.”
“What happened?”
“Well, after I got back from New Orleans, I wrote a few short stories. While I was at work she got to poking around in my drawers. She read a couple of my stories and took exception to them.”
“What were they about?”
“Oh, she read something about my climbing in and out of bed with some women in New Orleans.”
“Were the stories true?” I asked.
“How’s Mad Fly doing?” he asked.
The baby was born, a girl, Naomi Louise Harris. She and her mother lived in Santa Monica and Harris drove out once a week to see them. He paid child support and continued to drink his beer. Next I knew he had a weekly column in the underground newspaper L.A. Lifeline. He called his columns Sketches of a First Class Maniac. His prose was like his poetry—undisciplined, antisocial, and lazy.
Harris grew a goatee and grew his hair longer. The next time I saw him he was living with a 35-year-old girl, a pretty redhead called Susan. Susan worked in an art supply store, painted, and played fair guitar. She also drank an occasional beer with Randall which was more than Margie had done. The court seemed cleaner. When Harris finished a bottle he threw it into a paper bag instead of throwing it on the floor. He was still a nasty drunk, though.
“I’m writing a novel,” he told me, “and I’m getting a poetry reading now and then at nearby universities. I also have one coming up in Michigan and one in New Mexico. The offers are pretty good. I don’t like to read, but I’m a good reader. I give them a show and I give them some good poetry.”
Harris was also beginning to paint. He didn’t paint very well. He painted like a five-year-old drunk on vodka but he managed to sell one or two for $40 or $50. He told me that he was considering quitting his job. Three weeks later he did quit in order to make the Michigan reading. He’d already used his vacation for the New Orleans trip.
I remember once he had vowed to me, “I’ll never read in front of those bloodsuckers, Chinaski. I’ll go to my grave without ever giving a poetry reading. It’s vanity, it’s a sell-out.” I didn’t remind him of his statement.
His novel Death in the Life of All the Eyes on Earth was brought out by a small but prestige press which paid standard royalties. The reviews were good, including one in The New York Review of Books. But he was still a nasty drunk and had many fights with Susan over his drinking.
Finally, after one horrible drunk, when he had raved and cursed and screamed all night, Susan left him. I saw Randall several days after her departure. Harris was strangely quiet, hardly nasty at all.
“I loved her, Chinaski,” he told me. “I’m not going to make it, baby.”
“You’ll make it, Randall. You’ll see. You’ll make it. The human being is much more durable than you think.”
“Shit,” he said. “I hope you’re right. I’ve got this damned hole in my gut. Women have put many a good man under the bridge. They don’t feel it like we do.”
“They feel it. She just couldn’t handle your drinking.”
“Fuck, man, I write most of my stuff when I’m drunk.”
“Is that the secret?”
“Shit, yes. Sober, I’m just a shipping clerk and not a very good one at that …”
I left him there hanging over his beer.
I made the rounds again three months later. Harris was still in his front court. He introduced me to Sandra, a nice-looking blonde of 27. Her father was a superior court judge and she was a graduate of U.S.C. Besides being well-shaped she had a cool sophistication that had been lacking in Randall’s other women. They were drinking a bottle of good Italian wine.
Randall’s goatee had turned into a beard and his hair was much longer. His clothes were new and in the latest style. He had on $40 shoes, a new wristwatch and his face seemed thinner, his fingernails clean … but his nose still reddened as he drank the wine.
“Randall and I are moving to West L.A. this weekend,” she told me. “This place is filthy.”
“I’ve done a lot of good writing here,” he said.
“Randall, dear,” she said, “it isn’t the place that does the writing, it’s you. I think we might get Randall a job teaching three days a week.”
“I can’t teach.”
“Darling, you can teach them everything.”
“Shit,” he said.
“They’re thinking of doing a movie of Randall’s book. We’ve seen the script. It’s a very fine script.”
“A movie?” I asked.
“There’s not much chance,” said Harris.
“Darling, it’s in the works. Have a little faith.”
I had another glass of wine with them, then left. Sandra was a beautiful girl.
I wasn’t given Randall’s West L.A. address and didn’t make any attempt to find him. It was over a year later when I read the review of the movie Flower Up the Tail of Hell. It had been taken from his novel. It was a fine review and Harris even had an acting bit in the film.
I went to see it. They’d done a good job on the book. Harris looked a little more austere than when I had last seen him. I decided to find him. After a bit of detective work I knocked on the door of his cabin in Malibu one night about 9:00 p.m. Randall answered the door.
“Chinaski, you old dog,” he said. “Come on in.”
A beautiful girl sat on the couch. She appeared to be about 19, she simply radiated natural beauty. “This is Karilla,” he said. They were drinking a bottle of expensive French wine. I sat down with them and had a glass. I had several glasses. Another bottle came out and we talked quietly. Harris didn’t get drunk and nasty and didn’t appear to smoke as much.
“I’m working on a play for Broadway,” he told me. “They say the theatre is dying but I have something for them. One of the leading producers is interested. I’m getting the last act in shape now. It’s a good medium. I was always splendid on conversation, you know.”
“Yes,” I said.
I left about 11:30 that night. The conversation had been pleasant … Harris had begun to show a distinguished grey about the temples and he didn’t say “shit” more than four or five times.
The play Shoot Your Father, Shoot Your God, Shoot Away the Disentanglement was a success. It had one of the longest runs in Broadway history. It had everything: something for the revolutionaries, something for the reactionaries, something for lovers of comedy, something for lovers of drama, even something for the intellectuals, and it still made sense. Randall Harris moved from Malibu to a large place high in the Hollywood Hills. You read about him now in the syndicated gossip columns.
I went to work and found the location of his Hollywood Hills place, a three-story mansion which overlooked the lights of Los Angeles and Hollywood.
I parked, got out of the car, and walked up the p
ath to the front door. It was around 8:30 p.m., cool, almost cold; there was a full moon and the air was fresh and clear.
I rang the bell. It seemed a very long wait. Finally the door opened. It was the butler. “Yes, sir?” he asked me.
“Henry Chinaski to see Randall Harris,” I said.
“Just a moment, sir.” He closed the door quietly and I waited. Again a long time. Then the butler was back. “I’m sorry, sir, but Mr. Harris can’t be disturbed at this time.”
“Oh, all right.”
“Would you care to leave a message, sir?”
“A message?”
“Yes, a message.”
“Yes, tell him ‘congratulations.’”
“‘Congratulations’? Is that all?”
“Yes, that’s all.”
“Goodnight, sir.”
“Goodnight.”
I went back to my car, got in. It started and I began the long drive down out of the hills. I had that early copy of Mad Fly with me that I had wanted him to sign. It was the copy with ten of Randall Harris’ poems in it. He probably was busy. Maybe, I thought, if I mail the magazine to him with a stamped return envelope, he’ll sign.
It was only about 9:00 p.m. There was time for me to go somewhere else.
—SOUTH OF NO NORTH
girl in a miniskirt reading the bible outside my window
Sunday. I am eating a
grapefruit, church is over at the Russian
Orthodox to the
west.
she is dark
of Eastern descent,
large brown eyes look up from the Bible
then down, a small red and black
Bible, and as she reads
her legs keep moving, moving,
she is doing a slow rhythmic dance
reading the Bible …
long gold earrings;
2 gold bracelets on each arm,
and it’s a mini-suit, I suppose,
the cloth hugs her body,
the lightest of tans is that cloth,
she twists this way and that,
long young legs warm in the sun …