The Pleasures of the Damned

  there…”

  THE PRUSSIAN OFFICER

  THE DARING YOUNG MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE

  TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT

  YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN.

  sit and endure

  well, first Mae West died

  and then George Raft,

  and Eddie G. Robinson’s

  been gone

  a long time,

  and Bogart and Gable

  and Grable,

  and Laurel and

  Hardy

  and the Marx Brothers,

  all those Saturday

  afternoons

  at the movies

  as a boy

  are gone now

  and I look

  around this room

  and it looks back at me

  and then out through

  the window.

  time hangs helpless

  from the doorknob

  as a gold

  paperweight

  of an owl

  looks up at me

  (an old man now)

  who must sit and endure

  these many empty

  Saturday

  afternoons.

  Goldfish

  my goldfish stares with watery eyes

  into the hemisphere of my sorrow;

  upon the thinnest of threads

  we hang together,

  hang hang hang

  in the hangman’s noose;

  I stare into his place and

  he into mine…

  he must have thoughts,

  can you deny this?

  he has eyes and hunger

  and his love too

  died in January; but he is

  gold, really gold, and I am gray

  and it is indecent to search him out,

  indecent like the burning of peaches

  or the rape of children,

  and I turn and look elsewhere,

  but I know that he is there behind me,

  one gold goblet of blood,

  one thing alone

  hung between the reddest cloud

  of purgatory

  and apt. no. 303.

  god, can it be

  that we are the same?

  finish

  the hearse comes through the room filled with

  the beheaded, the disappeared, the living

  mad.

  the flies are a glue of sticky paste

  their wings will not

  lift.

  I watch an old woman beat her cat

  with a broom.

  the weather is unendurable

  a dirty trick by

  God.

  the water has evaporated from the

  toilet bowl

  the telephone rings without

  sound

  the small limp arm petering against the

  bell.

  I see a boy on his

  bicycle

  the spokes collapse

  the tires turn into

  snakes and melt

  away.

  the newspaper is oven-hot

  men murder each other in the streets

  without reason.

  the worst men have the best jobs

  the best men have the worst jobs or are

  unemployed or locked in

  mad houses.

  I have 4 cans of food left.

  air-conditioned troops go from house to

  house

  from room to room

  jailing, shooting, bayoneting

  the people.

  we have done this to ourselves, we

  deserve this

  we are like roses that have never bothered to

  bloom when we should have bloomed and

  it is as if

  the sun has become disgusted with

  waiting

  it is as if the sun were a mind that has

  given up on us.

  I go out on the back porch

  and look across the sea of dead plants

  now thorns and sticks shivering in a

  windless sky.

  somehow I’m glad we’re through

  finished—

  the works of Art

  the wars

  the decayed loves

  the way we lived each day.

  when the troops come up here

  I don’t care what they do for

  we already killed ourselves

  each day we got out of bed.

  I go back into the kitchen

  spill some hash from a soft

  can, it is almost cooked

  already

  and I sit

  eating, looking at my

  fingernails.

  the sweat comes down behind my

  ears and I hear the

  shooting in the streets and

  I chew and wait

  without wonder.

  dreaming

  I live alone in a small room

  and read the newspapers

  and sleep alone in the dark

  dreaming of crowds.

  (uncollected)

  my special craving

  what is it about lobsters and crabs?

  those white-pink shells

  that always make me hungry just

  looking at them there

  in the butcher’s display case

  tossed casually one upon the other

  so kind and pink and waiting.

  even alive they make me hungry.

  I used to unload them from trucks

  for the kitchen at the Biltmore Hotel,

  and they looked dangerous

  moving about in their slatted boxes

  but still they made me

  hungry. there is something about

  crabs and lobsters

  they deserve to be eaten,

  they go so well with

  french fries, french bread, radishes

  and beer. they tell me that they boil them

  alive, and this does

  cause some minor sense of disturbance within

  me, but outside of that

  lobsters and crabs are one of the few things

  that make the earth a happy place.

  I suppose that this is my special

  craving. when driving along the beachfront

  and I see a sign,

  LOBSTER HOUSE, my car turns in of its own

  accord. (if a man can’t allow himself a

  few luxuries

  he just isn’t going to last very

  long.) crabs, beer, lobsters,

  an occasional lady,

  2 or 3 days a week at the track,

  my small daughter bringing me a bottle of beer

  from the refrigerator while

  grinning proudly,

  there are some wonderful things in life,

  (let each man find his own)

  I say lighting my cigar,

  thinking about Sunday night lobster dinner,

  love love love

  running wild,

  it feels good sometimes just to be living

  with something so nice

  in store.

  (uncollected)

  A Love Poem

  all the women

  all their kisses the

  different ways they love and

  talk and need.

  their ears they all have

  ears and

  throats and dresses

  and shoes and

  automobiles and ex-

  husbands.

  mostly

  the women are very

  warm they remind me of

  buttered toast with the butter

  melted

  in.

  there is a look in the

  eye: they have been

  taken they have been

  fooled. I don’t quite know what to

  do for

  them.

  I am

  a fair cook a good

&nb
sp; listener

  but I never learned to

  dance—I was busy

  then with larger things.

  but I’ve enjoyed their different

  beds

  smoking cigarettes

  staring at the

  ceilings. I was neither vicious nor

  unfair. only

  a student.

  I know they all have these

  feet and barefoot they go across the floor as

  I watch their bashful buttocks in the

  dark. I know that they like me, some even

  love me

  but I love very

  few.

  some give me oranges and vitamin pills;

  others talk quietly of

  childhood and fathers and

  landscapes; some are almost

  crazy but none of them are without

  meaning; some love

  well, others not

  so; the best at sex are not always the

  best in other

  ways; each has limits as I have

  limits and we learn

  each other

  quickly.

  all the women all the

  women all the

  bedrooms

  the rugs the

  photos the

  curtains, it’s

  something like a church only

  at times there’s

  laughter.

  those ears those

  arms those

  elbows those eyes

  looking, the fondness and

  the wanting I have been

  held I have been

  held.

  one writer’s funeral

  there was a rock-and-mud slide

  on the Pacific Coast Highway and we had to take a

  detour and they directed us up into the Malibu hills

  and traffic was slow and it was hot, and then

  we were lost.

  but I spotted a hearse and said, “there’s the

  hearse, we’ll follow it,” and my woman said,

  “that’s not the hearse,” and I said, “yes, that’s the

  hearse.”

  the hearse took a left and I followed

  it as it went up

  a narrow dirt road and then pulled over and I

  thought, “he’s lost too.” there was a truck and a man

  selling strawberries parked there

  and I pulled over

  and asked

  where the church was and he gave me directions and

  my woman told the strawberry man, “we’ll buy some

  strawberries on the way back.” then I swung

  onto the road and the hearse started up again

  and we continued to drive along

  until we reached that

  church.

  we were going

  to the funeral of a great man

  but

  the crowd was very sparse: the

  family, a couple of old screenwriter friends,

  two or three others. we

  spoke to the family and to the wife of the deceased

  and then we went in and the ser vice began and the

  priest wasn’t so good but one of the great man’s

  sons gave a fine eulogy, and then it was over

  and we were outside again, in our car,

  following the hearse again, back down the steep

  road

  passing the strawberry truck again and my

  woman said, “let’s not stop for strawberries,”

  and as we continued to the graveyard, I thought,

  Fante, you were one of the best writers ever

  and this is one sad day.

  finally we were at the graveside, the priest

  said a few words and then it was over.

  I walked up to the widow who sat very pale and

  beautiful and quite alone on a folding metal chair.

  “Hank,” she said, “it’s hard,” and I tried in vain

  to say something that might comfort her.

  we walked away then, leaving her there, and

  I felt terrible.

  I got a friend to drive my girlfriend back to

  town while I drove to the racetrack, made it

  just in time for the first race, got my bet

  down as the mutuel clerk looked at me in wonder and

  said, “Jesus Christ, how come you’re wearing a

  necktie?”

  the wine of forever

  re-reading some of Fante’s

  The Wine of Youth

  in bed

  this mid-afternoon

  my big cat

  BEAKER

  asleep beside

  me.

  the writing of some

  men

  is like a vast bridge

  that carries you

  over

  the many things

  that claw and tear.

  Fante’s pure and magic

  emotions

  hang on the simple

  clean

  line.

  that this man died

  one of the slowest and

  most horrible deaths

  that I ever witnessed or

  heard

  about…

  the gods play no

  favorites.

  I put the book down

  beside me.

  book on one side,

  cat on the

  other…

  John, meeting you,

  even the way it

  was was the event of my

  life. I can’t say

  I would have died for

  you, I couldn’t have handled

  it that well.

  but it was good to see you

  again

  this

  afternoon.

  the pile-up

  the 3 horse clipped the heels of

  the 7, they both went down and

  the 9 stumbled over them,

  jocks rolling, horses’ legs flung

  skyward.

  then the jocks were up, stunned

  but all right

  and I watched the horses

  rising in the late afternoon,

  it had not been a good day for

  me

  and I watched the horses rise,

  please, I said inside, no broken

  legs!

  and the 9 was all right

  and the 7

  and the 3 also,

  they were walking,

  the horses didn’t need the van,

  the jocks didn’t need the

  ambulance.

  what a beautiful day,

  what a perfectly beautiful day,

  what a wondrously lovely

  day—

  3 winners in a

  single race.

  my big night on the town

  sitting on a 2nd-floor porch at 1:30 a.m.

  while

  looking out over the city.

  it could be worse.

  we needn’t accomplish great things, we only

  need to accomplish little things that make us feel

  better or

  not so bad.

  of course, sometimes the fates will

  not allow us to do

  this.

  then, we must outwit the fates.

  we must be patient with the gods.

  they like to have fun,

  they like to play with us.

  they like to test us.

  they like to tell us that we are weak

  and stupid, that we are

  finished.

  the gods need to be amused.

  we are their toys.

  as I sit on the porch a bird begins

  to serenade me from a tree nearby in

  the dark.

  it is a mockingbird.

  I am in love with mockingbirds.

  I make bird sounds.

  he waits.
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  then he makes them back.

  he is so good that I laugh.

  we are all so easily pleased,

  all of us living things.

  now a slight drizzle begins to

  fall.

  little chill drops fall on my

  hot skin.

  I am half asleep.

  I sit in a folding chair with my

  feet up on the railing

  as the mockingbird begins

  to repeat every bird song

  he has heard that

  day.

  this is what we old guys do

  for amusement

  on Saturday

  nights:

  we laugh at the gods, we

  settle old scores with

  them,

  we rejuvenate

  as the lights of the city

  blink below,

  as the dark tree

  holding the mockingbird

  watches over us,

  and as the world,

  from here,

  looks as good as it ever

  will.

  close encounters of another kind

  are we going to the movies or not?

  she asked him.

  all right, he said, let’s go.

  I’m not going to put any pan ties on

  so you can finger-fuck me in the

  dark, she said.

  should we get buttered popcorn?

  he asked.