Ham On Rye - Charles Bukowski [30]
I kept falling out with Chuck, Eddie and Gene and then we’d get back together and then we’d fall out all over again.
One afternoon I was just standing around. I wasn’t exactly in good or in bad with the gang, I was just waiting around for them to forget the last thing I had done that had made them angry. There wasn’t anything else to do. Just white air and waiting. I got tired of standing around and decided to walk up the hill to Washington Boulevard, east to the movie house and then back down to West Adams Boulevard. Maybe I’d walk past the church. I started walking. Then I heard Eddie:
“Hey, Henry, come here!”
The guys were standing in a driveway between two houses. Eddie, Frank, Chuck and Gene. They were watching something. They were bent over a large bush watching something.
“Come here, Henry!”
“What is it?”
I walked up to where they were bending over.
“It’s a spider getting ready to eat a fly!” said Eddie.
I looked. The spider had spun a web between the branches of a bush and a fly had gotten caught in there. The spider was very excited. The fly shook the whole web as it tried to pull free. It was buzzing wildly and helplessly as the spider wound the fly’s wings and body in more and more spider web. The spider went around and around, webbing the fly completely as it buzzed. The spider was very big and ugly.
“It’s going to close in now!” yelled Chuck. “It’s going to sink its fangs!”
I pushed in between the guys, kicked out and knocked the spider and the fly out of the web with my foot.
“What the hell have you done?” asked Chuck.
“You son-of-a-bitch!” yelled Eddie. “You’ve spoiled it!”
I backed off. Even Frank stared at me strangely.
“Let’s get his ass!” yelled Gene.
They were between me and the street. I ran down the driveway into the backyard of a strange house. They were after me. I ran through the backyard and behind the garage. There was a six-foot lattice fence covered with vines. I went straight up the fence and over the top. I ran through the next backyard and up the driveway and as I ran up the driveway I looked back and saw Chuck just reaching the top of the fence. Then he slipped and fell into the yard landing on his back. “Shit!” he said. I took a right and kept running. I ran for seven or eight blocks and then sat down on somebody’s lawn and rested. There was nobody around. I wondered if Frank would forgive me. I wondered if the others would forgive me. I decided to stay out of sight for a week or so…
And so they forgot. Not much happened for a while. There were many days of nothing. Then Frank’s father committed suicide. Nobody knew why. Frank told me he and his mother would have to move to a smaller place in another neighborhood. He said he would write. And he did. Only we didn’t write. We drew cartoons. About cannibals. His cartoons were about troubles with cannibals and then I’d continue the cartoon story where his left off, about the troubles with the cannibals. My mother found one of Frank’s cartoons and showed it to my father and our letter writing was over.
5th grade became 6th grade and I began to think about running away from home but I decided that if most of our fathers couldn’t get jobs how in the hell could a guy under five feet tall get one? John Dillinger was everybody’s hero, adults and kids alike. He took the money from the banks. And there was Pretty Boy Floyd and Ma Barker and Machine Gun Kelly.
People began going to vacant lots where weeds grew. They had learned that some of the weeds could be cooked and eaten. There were fist fights between men in the vacant lots and on street corners. Everybody was angry. The men smoked Bull Durham and didn’t take any shit from anybody. They let the little round Bull Durham tags hang out of their