The Pleasures of the Damned

  neither does this mean

  the dead are

  at the door

  begging bread

  before

  the stockpiles

  blow

  like all the

  storms and hell

  in one big love,

  but anyhow

  I rented a 6 dollar a week

  room

  in Chinatown

  with a window as large as the

  side of the world

  filled with night flies and neon,

  lighted like Broadway

  to frighten away rats,

  and I walked into a bar and sat down,

  and the Chinaman looked at my rags

  and said

  no credit

  and I pulled out a hundred-dollar bill

  and asked for a cup of Confucius juice

  and 2 China dolls with slits of eyes

  just about the size of the rest of them

  slid closer

  and we sat

  and we

  waited.

  the world’s greatest loser

  he used to sell papers in front:

  “Get your winners! Get rich on a dime!”

  and about the 3rd or 4th race

  you’d see him rolling in on his rotten board

  with roller skates underneath.

  he’d propel himself along on his hands;

  he just had small stumps for legs

  and the rims of the skate wheels were worn off.

  you could see inside the wheels and they would wobble

  something awful

  shooting and flashing

  imperialistic sparks!

  he moved faster than anybody, rolled cigarette dangling,

  you could hear him coming

  “god o mighty, what was that?” the new ones asked.

  he was the world’s greatest loser

  but he never gave up

  wheeling toward the 2-dollar window screaming:

  “IT’S THE 4 HORSE, YOU FOOLS! HOW THE HELL YA

  GONNA BEAT THE

  4?”

  up on the board the 4 would be reading

  60 to 1.

  I never heard him pick a winner.

  they say he slept in the bushes. I guess that’s where he

  died. he’s not around any

  more.

  there was the big fat blonde whore

  who kept touching him for luck, and

  laughing.

  nobody had any luck. the whore is gone

  too.

  I guess nothing ever works for us. we’re fools, of course—

  bucking the inside plus a 15 percent take,

  but how are you going to tell a dreamer

  there’s a 15 percent take on the

  dream? he’ll just laugh and say,

  is that all?

  I miss those

  sparks.

  human nature

  it has been going on for some time.

  there is this young waitress where I get my coffee

  at the racetrack.

  “how are you doing today?” she asks.

  “winning pretty good,” I reply.

  “you won yesterday, didn’t you?” she

  asks.

  “yes,” I say, “and the day before.”

  I don’t know exactly what it is but I

  believe we must have incompatible

  personalities. there is often a hostile

  undertone to our conversations.

  “you seem to be the only person

  around here who keeps winning,”

  she says, not looking at me,

  not pleased.

  “is that so?” I answer.

  there is something very strange about all

  this: whenever I do lose

  she never seems to be

  there.

  perhaps it’s her day off or sometimes she works

  another counter?

  she bets too and loses.

  she always loses.

  and even though we might have

  incompatible personalities I am sorry for

  her.

  I decide the next time I see her

  I will tell her that I am

  losing.

  so I do.

  when she asks, “how are you doing?”

  I say, “god, I don’t understand it,

  I’m losing, I can’t hit anything, every horse

  I bet runs last!”

  “really?” she asks.

  “really,” I say.

  it works.

  she lowers her gaze

  and here comes one of the largest smiles

  I have ever seen, it damn near cracks

  her face wide open.

  I get my coffee, tip her well, walk

  out to check the

  toteboard.

  if I died in a flaming crash on the freeway

  she’d surely be happy for a

  week!

  I take a sip of coffee.

  what’s this?

  she’s put in a large shot of cream!

  she knows I like it black!

  in her excitement,

  she’d forgotten.

  the bitch.

  and that’s what I get for lying.

  the trash men

  here they come

  these guys

  gray truck

  radio playing

  they are in a hurry

  it’s quite exciting:

  shirt open

  bellies hanging out

  they run out the trash bins

  roll them out to the fork lift

  and then the truck grinds it upward

  with far too much sound…

  they had to fill out application forms

  to get these jobs

  they are paying for homes and

  drive late model cars

  they get drunk on Saturday night

  now in the Los Angeles sunshine

  they run back and forth with their trash bins

  all that trash goes somewhere

  and they shout to each other

  then they are all up in the truck

  driving west toward the sea

  none of them know

  that I am alive

  REX DISPOSAL CO.

  a gold pocket watch

  my grandfather was a tall German

  with a strange smell on his breath.

  he stood very straight

  in front of his small house

  and his wife hated him

  and his children thought him odd.

  I was six the first time we met

  and he gave me all his war medals.

  the second time I met him

  he gave me his gold pocket watch.

  it was very heavy and I took it home

  and wound it very tight

  and it stopped running

  which made me feel bad.

  I never saw him again

  and my parents never spoke of him

  nor did my grandmother

  who had long ago

  stopped living with him.

  once I asked about him

  and they told me

  he drank too much

  but I liked him best

  standing very straight

  in front of his house

  and saying, “hello, Henry, you

  and I, we know each

  other.”

  talking to my mailbox…

  boy, don’t come around here telling me you

  can’t cut it, that

  they’re pitching you low and inside, that

  they are conspiring against you,

  that all you want is a chance but they won’t

  give you a

  chance.

  boy, the problem is that you’re not doing

  what you want to do, or

  if you’re doing what you want to do, you’re

>   just not doing it

  well.

  boy, I agree:

  there’s not much opportunity, and there are

  some at the top who are

  not doing much better than you

  are

  but

  you’re wasting energy haranguing and

  bitching.

  boy, I’m not advising, just suggesting that

  instead of sending your poems to me

  along with your letters of

  complaint

  you should enter the

  arena—

  send your work to the editors and

  publishers, it will

  buck up your backbone and your

  versatility.

  boy, I wish to thank you for the

  praise for some of my

  published works

  but that

  has nothing to do with

  anything and won’t help a

  purple shit, you’ve just got to

  learn to hit that low, hard

  inside pitch.

  this is a form letter

  I send to almost everybody, but

  I hope you take it

  personally,

  man.

  I liked him

  I liked D. H. Lawrence

  he could get so indignant

  he snapped and he ripped

  with wonderfully energetic sentences

  he could lay the word down

  bright and writhing

  there was the stink of blood and murder

  and sacrifice about him

  the only tenderness he allowed

  was when he bedded down his large German

  wife.

  I liked D. H. Lawrence—

  he could talk about Christ

  like he was the man next door

  and he could describe Australian taxi drivers

  so well you hated them

  I liked D. H. Lawrence

  but I’m glad I never met him

  in some bistro

  him lifting his tiny hot cup of

  tea

  and looking at me

  with his worm-hole eyes.

  one for the shoeshine man

  the balance is preserved by the snails climbing the

  Santa Monica cliffs;

  the luck is in walking down Western Avenue

  and having the girls in a massage

  parlor holler at you, “Hello, Sweetie!”

  the miracle is having 5 women in love

  with you at the age of 55,

  and the goodness is that you are only able

  to love one of them.

  the gift is having a daughter more gentle

  than you are, whose laughter is finer

  than yours.

  the peace comes from driving a

  blue 67 Volks through the streets like a

  teenager, radio tuned to The Host Who Loves You

  Most, feeling the sun, feeling the solid hum

  of the rebuilt motor as you needle through traffic.

  the grace is being able to like rock music,

  symphony music, jazz…anything that contains the original energy of

  joy.

  and the probability that returns

  is the deep blue low

  yourself flat upon yourself

  within the guillotine walls

  angry at the sound of the phone

  or anybody’s footsteps passing;

  but the other probability—

  the lilting high that always follows—

  makes the girl at the checkstand in the

  supermarket look like

  Marilyn

  like Jackie before they got her Harvard lover

  like the girl in high school that we

  all followed home.

  there is that which helps you believe

  in something else besides death:

  somebody in a car approaching

  on a street too narrow,

  and he or she pulls aside to let you

  by, or the old fighter Beau Jack

  shining shoes

  after blowing the entire bankroll

  on parties

  on women

  on parasites,

  humming, breathing on the leather,

  working the rag

  looking up and saying:

  “what the hell, I had it for a

  while. that beats the other.”

  I am bitter sometimes

  but the taste has often been

  sweet. it’s only that I’ve

  feared to say it. it’s like

  when your woman says,

  “tell me you love me,” and

  you can’t.

  if you see me grinning from

  my blue Volks

  running a yellow light

  driving straight into the sun

  I will be locked in the

  arms of a

  crazy life

  thinking of trapeze artists

  of midgets with big cigars

  of a Russian winter in the early 40s

  of Chopin with his bag of Polish soil

  of an old waitress bringing me an extra

  cup of coffee and laughing

  as she does so.

  the best of you

  I like more than you think.

  the others don’t count

  except that they have fingers and heads

  and some of them eyes

  and most of them

  legs and all of them

  good and bad dreams

  and a way to go.

  justice is everywhere and it’s working

  and the machine guns and the frogs

  and the hedges will tell you

  so.

  the proud thin dying

  I see old people on pensions in the

  supermarkets and they are thin and they are

  proud and they are dying

  they are starving on their feet and saying

  nothing. long ago, among other lies,

  they were taught that silence was

  bravery. now, having worked a lifetime,

  inflation has trapped them. they look around

  steal a grape

  chew on it. finally they make a tiny

  purchase, a day’s worth.

  another lie they were taught:

  thou shalt not steal.

  they’d rather starve than steal

  (one grape won’t save them)

  and in tiny rooms

  while reading the market ads

  they’ll starve

  they’ll die without a sound

  pulled out of rooming houses

  by young blond boys with long hair

  who’ll slide them in

  and pull away from the curb, these

  boys

  handsome of eye

  thinking of Vegas and pussy and

  victory.

  it’s the order of things: each one

  gets a taste of honey

  then the knife.

  shot of red-eye

  I used to hold my social security card

  up in the air,

  he told me,

  but I was so small

  they couldn’t see it,

  all those big

  guys around.

  you mean the place with the

  big green screen?

  I asked.

  yeah. well, anyhow, I finally got on

  the other day

  picking tomatoes, and Jesus Christ,

  I couldn’t get anywhere

  it was too hot, too hot

  and I couldn’t get anything in my sack

  so I lay under the truck

  in the shade and drank

  wine. I didn’t make a

  dime.

  have a drink, I said.

  sure, he said.

  two big women came in and

  I mean BIG

&
nbsp; and they sat next to

  us.

  shot of red-eye, one of them

  said to the bartender.

  likewise, said the other.

  they pulled their dresses up

  around their hips and

  swung their legs.

  um, umm. I think I’m going mad, I told

  my friend from the tomato fields.

  Jesus, he said, Jesus and Mary, I can’t

  believe what I see.

  it’s all

  there, I said.

  you a fighter? the one next to me

  asked.

  no, I said.

  what happened to your

  face?

  automobile accident on the San Berdoo

  freeway. some drunk jumped the divider. I was

  the drunk.

  how old are you, daddy?

  old enough to slice the melon, I said,

  tapping my cigar ashes into my beer to give me