Ham On Rye - Charles Bukowski [101]
The wine tasted great. I had another.
The war. Here I was a virgin. Could you imagine getting your ass blown off for the sake of history before you even knew what a woman was? Or owned an automobile? What would I be protecting? Somebody else. Somebody else who didn’t give a shit about me. Dying in a war never stopped wars from happening.
I could make it. I could win drinking contests, I could gamble. Maybe I could pull a few holdups. I didn’t ask much, just to be left alone.
I finished the first bottle of wine and started in on the second.
Halfway through the second bottle, I stopped, stretched out. My first night in my new place. It was all right. I slept.
I was awakened by the sound of a key in the door. Then the door pushed open. I sat up on the cot. A man started to step in.
“GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!” I screamed.
He left fast. I heard him running off.
I got up and slammed the door.
People did that. They rented a place, stopped paying rent and kept the key, sneaking back to sleep there if it was vacant or robbing the place if the occupant was out. Well, he wouldn’t be back. He knew if he tried it again that I’d bust his sack.
I went back to my cot and had another drink.
I was a little nervous. I was going to have to pick up a knife.
I finished my drink, poured another, drank that and went back to sleep.
57
After English class one day Mrs. Curtis asked me to stay.
She had great legs and a lisp and there was something about the legs and the lisp together that heated me up. She was about 32, had culture and style, but like everybody else, she was a god-damned liberal and that didn’t take much originality or fight, it was just more Franky Roosevelt worship. I liked Franky because of his programs for the poor during the Depression. He had style too. I didn’t think he really gave a damn about the poor but he was a great actor, great voice, and he had a great speech writer. But he wanted us in the war. It would put him into the history books. War presidents got more power and, later, more pages. Mrs. Curtis was just a chip off old Franky only she had much better legs. Poor Franky didn’t have any legs but he had a wonderful brain. In some other country he would have made a powerful dictator.
When the last student left I walked up to Mrs. Curtis’ desk. She smiled up at me. I had watched her legs for many hours and she knew it. She knew what I wanted, that she had nothing to teach me. She had only said one thing which I remembered. It wasn’t her own idea, obviously, but I liked it:
“You can’t overestimate the stupidity of the general public.”
“Mr. Chinaski,” she looked up at me, “we have certain students in this class who think they are very smart.”
“Yeh?”
“Mr. Felton is our smartest student.”
“O.K.”
“What is it that troubles you?”
“What?”
“There’s something…troubling you.”
“Maybe.”
“This is your last semester, isn’t it?”
“How did you know?”
I’d been giving those legs a goodbye look. I’d decided the campus was just a place to hide. There were some campus freaks who stayed on forever. The whole college scene was soft. They never told you what to expect out there in the real world. They just crammed you with theory and never told you how hard the pavements were. A college education could destroy an individual for life. Books could make you soft. When you put them down, and really went out there, then you needed to know what they never told you. I had decided to quit after that semester, hang around Stinky and the gang, maybe meet somebody who had guts enough, to hold up a liquor store or better yet, a bank.
“I knew you were going to quit,” she said softly.
“‘Begin’ is a better word.”
“There’s going to be a war. Did you read ‘Sailor Off The Bremen’?”
“That New Yorker stuff doesn’t work for me.”
“You’ve got to read things like that