“Are you Henry Chinaski?” It was a young male voice.
“Yes.”
“Are you Henry Chinaski, the writer?”
“Yeah.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, we’re a gang of guys from Bel Air and we really dig your stuff, man! We dig it so much that we’re going to reward you, man!”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, we’re coming over with some six packs of beer.”
“Stick that beer up your ass.”
“What?”
“I said, ‘Stick it up your ass!’”
I hung up.
“Who was that?” asked Sara.
“I just lost three or four readers from Bel Air. But it was worth it.”
The turkey was done and I pulled it out of the oven, put it on a platter, moved the typer and all my papers off the kitchen table, and placed the turkey there. I began carving as Sara came in with the vegetables. We sat down. I filled my plate, Sara filled hers. It looked good.
“I hope that one with the tits doesn’t come by again,” said Sara. She looked very upset at the thought.
“If she does I’ll give her a piece.”
“What?”
I pointed to the turkey. “I said, ‘I’ll give her a piece.’ You can watch.”
Sara screamed. She stood up. She was trembling. Then she ran into the bedroom. I looked at my turkey. I couldn’t eat it. I had pushed the wrong button again. I walked into the front room with my drink and sat down. I waited 15 minutes and then I put the turkey and the vegetables in the refrigerator.
Sara went back to her place the next day and I had a cold turkey sandwich about 3 PM. About 5 PM there was a terrific pounding on the door. I opened it up. It was Tammie and Arlene. They were cruising on speed. They walked in and jumped around, both of them talking at once.
“Got anything to drink?”
“Shit, Hank, ya got anything to drink?”
“How was your fucking Christmas?”
“Yeah. How was your fucking Christmas, man?”
“There’s some beer and wine in the icebox,” I told them.
(You can always tell an old-timer: he calls a refrigerator an icebox.)
They danced into the kitchen and opened the icebox.
“Hey, here’s a turkey!”
“We’re hungry, Hank! Can we have some turkey?”
“Sure.”
Tammie came out with a leg and bit into it. “Hey, this is an awful turkey! It needs spices!”
Arlene came out with slices of meat in her hands. “Yeah, this needs spices. It’s too mellow! You got any spices?”
“In the cupboard,” I said.
They jumped back into the kitchen and began sprinkling on the spices.
“There! That’s better!”
“Yeah, it tastes like something now!”
“Organic turkey, shit!”
“Yeah, it’s shit!”
“I want some more!”
“Me too. But it needs spices.”
Tammie came out and sat down. She had just about finished the leg. Then she took the leg bone, bit and broke it in half, and started chewing the bone. I was astonished. She was eating the leg bone, spitting splinters out on the rug.
“Hey, you’re eating the bone!”
“Yeah, it’s good!”
Tammie ran back into the kitchen for some more.
Soon they both came out, each of them with a bottle of beer.
“Thanks, Hank.”
“Yeah, thanks, man.”
They sat there sucking at the beers.
“Well,” said Tammie, “we gotta get going.”
“Yeah, we’re going out to rape some junior high school boys!”
“Yeah!”
The both jumped up and they were gone out the door. I walked into the kitchen and looked into the refrig. That turkey looked like it had been mauled by a tiger—the carcass had simply been ripped apart. It looked obscene.
Sara drove over the next evening.
“How’s the turkey?” she asked.
“O.K.”
She walked in and opened the refrigerator door. She screamed. Then she ran out.
“My god, what happened?”
“Tammie and Arlene came by. I don’t dunk they had eaten for a week.”
“Oh, it’s sickening. It hurts my heart!”
“I’m sorry. I should have stopped them. They were on uppers.”
“Well, there’s just one thing I can do.”
“What’s that?”
“I can make you a nice turkey soup. I’ll go get some vegetables.”
“All right.” I gave her a twenty.
Sara prepared the soup that night. It was delicious. When she left in the morning she gave me instructions on how to heat it up.
Tammie knocked on the door around 4 PM. I let her in and she walked straight to the kitchen. The refrigerator door opened.
“Hey, soup, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it any good?”
“Yeah.”
“Mind if I try some?”
“O.K.”
I heard her put it on the stove. Then I heard her dipping in there.
“God! This stuff is mild! It needs spices!”
I heard her spooning the spices in. Then she tried it.
“That’s better! But it needs more! I’m Italian, you know. Now … there … that’s better! Now I’ll let it heat up. Can I have a beer?”
“All right.”
She came in with her bottle and sat down.
“Do you miss me?” she asked.
“You’ll never know.”
“I think I’m going to get my job back at the Play Pen.”
“Great.”
“Some good tippers come in that place. One guy he tipped me five bucks each night. He was in love with me. But he never asked me out. He just ogled me. He was strange. He was a rectal surgeon and sometimes he masturbated as he watched me walking around. I could smell the stuff on him, you know.”
“Well, you got him off....”
“I think the soup is ready. Want some?”
“No thanks.”
Tammie went in and I heard her spooning it out of the pot. She was in there a long time. Then she came out.
“Could you lend me a five until Friday?”
“No.”
“Then lend me a couple of bucks.”
“No.”
“Just give me a dollar then.”
I gave Tammie a pocketful of change. It came to a dollar and 37 cents.
“Thanks,” she said.
“It’s all right.”
Then she was gone out of the door.
Sara came by the next evening. She seldom came by this often, it was something about the holiday season, everybody was lost, half-crazy, afraid. I had the white wine ready and poured us both a drink.
“How’s the Inn going?” I asked her.
“Business is crappy. It hardly pays to stay open.”
“Where are your customers?”
“They’ve all left town; they’ve all gone somewhere.”
“All our schemes have holes in them.”
“Not all of them. Some people just keep making it and making it.”
“True.”
“How’s the soup?”
“Just about finished.”
“Did you like it?”
“I didn’t have too much.”
Sara walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door.
“What happened to the soup? It looks strange.”
I heard her tasting it. Then she ran to the sink and spit it out.
“Jesus, it’s been poisoned! What happened? Did Tammie and Arlene come back and eat soup too?”
“Just Tammie.”
Sara didn’t scream. She just poured the remainder of the soup into the sink and ran the garbage disposal. I could hear her sobbing, trying not to make any sound. That poor organic turkey had had a
rough Christmas.
—WOMEN
metamorphosis
a girlfriend came in
built me a bed
scrubbed and waxed the kitchen floor
scrubbed the walls
vacuumed
cleaned the toilet
the bathtub
scrubbed the bathroom floor
and cut my toenails and
my hair.
then
all on the same day
the plumber came and fixed the kitchen faucet
and the toilet
and the gas man fixed the heater
and the phone man fixed the phone.
now I sit here in all this perfection.
it is quiet.
I have broken off with all 3 of my girlfriends.
I felt better when everything was in
disorder.
it will take me some months to get back to
normal:
I can’t even find a roach to commune with.
I have lost my rhythm.
I can’t sleep.
I can’t eat.
I have been robbed of
my filth.
Dr. Nazi
Now, I’m a man of many problems and I suppose that most of them are self-created. I mean with the female, and gambling, and feeling hostile toward groups of people, and the larger the group, the greater the hostility. I’m called negative and gloomy, sullen.
I keep remembering the female who screamed at me: “You’re so goddamned negative! Life can be beautiful!”
I suppose it can, and especially with a little less screaming. But I want to tell you about my doctor. I don’t go to shrinks. Shrinks are worthless and too contented. But a good doctor is often disgusted and/or mad, and therefore far more entertaining.
I went to Dr. Kiepenheuer’s office because it was closest. My hands were breaking out with little white blisters—a sign, I felt, either of my actual anxiety or possible cancer. I wore workingman’s gloves so people wouldn’t stare. And I burned through the gloves while smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.
I walked into the doctor’s place. I had the first appointment. Being a man of anxiety I was 30 minutes early, musing about cancer. I walked across the sitting room and looked into the office. Here was the nurse-receptionist squatted on the floor in her tight white uniform, her dress pulled almost up to her hips, gross and thunderous thighs showing through tightly-pulled nylon. I forgot all about the cancer. She hadn’t heard me and I stared at her unveiled legs and thighs, measured the delicious rump with my eyes. She was wiping water from the floor, the toilet had overrun and she was cursing, she was passionate, she was pink and brown and living and unveiled and I stared.
She looked up. “Yes?”
“Go ahead,” I said, “don’t let me disturb you.”
“It’s the toilet,” she said, “it keeps running over.”
She kept wiping and I kept looking over the top of Life magazine. She finally stood up. I walked to the couch and sat down. She went through her appointment book.
“Are you Mr. Chinaski?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you take your gloves off? It’s warm in here.”
“I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.”
“Dr. Kiepenheuer will be in soon.”
“It’s all right. I can wait.”
“What’s your problem?”
“Cancer.”
“Cancer?”
“Yes.”
The nurse vanished and I read Life and then I read another copy of Life and then I read Sports Illustrated and then I sat staring at paintings of seascapes and landscapes and piped-in music came from somewhere. Then, suddenly, all the lights blinked off, then on again, and I wondered if there would be any way to rape the nurse and get away with it when the doctor walked in. I ignored him and he ignored me, so that went off even.
He called me into his office. He was sitting on a stool and he looked at me. He had a yellow face and yellow hair and his eyes were lusterless. He was dying. He was about 42. I eyed him and gave him six months.
“What’s with the gloves?” he asked.
“I’m a sensitive man, Doctor.”
“You are?”
“Yes.”
“Then I should tell you that I was once a Nazi.”
“That’s all right.”
“You don’t mind that I was once a Nazi?”
“No, I don’t mind.”
“I was captured. They rode us through France in a boxcar with the doors open and the people stood along the way and threw stink bombs and rocks and all sorts of rubbish at us—fishbones, dead plants, excreta, everything imaginable.”
Then the doctor sat and told me about his wife. She was trying to skin him. A real bitch. Trying to get all his money. The house. The garden. The garden house. The gardener too, probably, if she hadn’t already. And the car. And alimony. Plus a large chunk of cash. Horrible woman. He’d worked so hard. Fifty patients a day at ten dollars a head. Almost impossible to survive. And that woman. Women. Yes, women. He broke down the word for me. I forget if it was woman or female or what it was, but he broke it down into Latin and he broke it down from there to show what the root was—in Latin: women were basically insane.
As he talked about the insanity of women I began to feel pleased with the doctor. My head nodded in agreement.
Suddenly he ordered me to the scales, weighed me, then he listened to my heart and to my chest. He roughly removed my gloves, washed my hands in some kind of shit and opened the blisters with a razor, still talking about the rancor and vengeance that all women carried in their hearts. It was glandular. Women were directed by their glands, men by their hearts. That’s why only the men suffered.
He told me to bathe my hands regularly and to throw the goddamned gloves away. He talked a little more about women and his wife and then I left.
My next problem was dizzy spells. But I only got them when I was standing in line. I began to get very terrified of standing in line. It was unbearable.
I realized that in America and probably everyplace else it came down to standing in fine. We did it everywhere. Driver’s license: three or four lines. The racetrack: lines. The movies: lines. The market: lines. I hated lines. I felt there should be a way to avoid them. Then the answer came to me. Have more clerks. Yes, that was the answer. Two clerks for every person. Three clerks. Let the clerks stand in line.
I knew that lines were killing me. I couldn’t accept them, but everybody else did. Everybody else was normal. Life was beautiful for them. They could stand in line without feeling pain. They could stand in line forever. They even liked to stand in line. They chatted and grinned and smiled and flirted with each other. They had nothing else to do. They could think of nothing else to do. And I had to look at their ears and mouths and necks and legs and asses and nostrils, all that. I could feel death-rays oozing from their bodies like smog, and listening to their conversations I felt like screaming “Jesus Christ, somebody help me! Do I have to suffer like this just to buy a pound of hamburger and a loaf of rye bread?”
The dizziness would come, and I’d spread my legs to keep from falling down; the supermarket would whirl, and the faces of the supermarket clerks with their gold and brown mustaches and their clever happy eyes, all of them going to be supermarket managers someday, with their white scrubbed contented faces, buying homes in Arcadia and nightly mounting their pale blond grateful wives.
I made an appointment with the doctor again. I was given the first appointment. I arrived half an hour early and the toilet was fixed. The nurse was dusting in the office. She bent and straightened and bent halfway and then bent right and then bent left, and she turned her ass toward me and bent over. That white uniform twitched and hiked, climbed, lifted; here was dimpled knee, there was thigh, here was haunch, there was the whole body. I sat down and opened a copy of Life.
She stopped dusting and stuck her head out at me, smiling. “You got rid of your glo
ves, Mr. Chinaski.”
“Yes.”
The doctor came in looking a bit closer to death and he nodded and I got up and followed him in.
He sat down on his stool.
“Chinaski: how goes it?”
“Well, Doctor …”
“Trouble with women?”
“Well, of course, but …”
He wouldn’t let me finish. He had lost more hair. His fingers twitched. He seemed short of breath. Thinner. He was a desperate man.
His wife was skinning him. They’d gone to court. She slapped him in court. He’d liked that. It helped the case. They saw through that bitch. Anyhow, it hadn’t come off too badly. She’d left him something. Of course, you know lawyer’s fees. Bastards. You ever noticed a lawyer? Almost always fat. Especially around the face. “Anyhow, shit, she nailed me. But I got a little left. You wanna know what a scissors like this costs? Look at it. Tin with a screw. $18.50. My God, and they hated the Nazis. What is a Nazi compared to this?”
“I don’t know, Doctor. I’ve told you that I’m a confused man.”
“You ever tried a shrink?”
“It’s no use. They’re dull, no imagination. I don’t need the shrinks. I hear they end up sexually molesting their female patients. I’d like to be a shrink if I could fuck all the women; outside of that, their trade is useless.”
My doctor hunched up on his stool. He yellowed and greyed a bit more. A giant twitch ran through his body. He was almost through. A nice fellow though.
“Well, I got rid of my wife,” he said, “that’s over.”
“Fine,” I said, “tell me about when you were a Nazi.”
“Well, we didn’t have much choice. They just took us in. I was young. I mean, hell, what are you going to do? You can only live in one country at a time. You go to war, and if you don’t end up dead you end up in an open boxcar with people throwing shit at you …”
I asked him if he’d fucked his nice nurse. He smiled gently. The smile said yes. Then he told me that since the divorce, well, he’d dated one of his patients, and he knew it wasn’t ethical to get that way with patients …
“No, I think it’s all right, Doctor.”
“She’s a very intelligent woman. I married her.”
“All right.”