Ham On Rye - Charles Bukowski [55]
But there were changes in my life. My father found a job. He passed an examination at the L.A. County Museum and got a job as a guard. My father was good at exams. He loved math and history. He passed the exam and finally had a place to go each morning. There had been three vacancies for guards and he had gotten one of them.
L.A. County General Hospital somehow found out and Miss Ackerman told me one day, “Henry, this is your last treatment. I’m going to miss you.”
“Aw come on,” I said, “stop your kidding. You’re going to miss me like I’m going to miss that electric needle!”
But she was very strange that day. Those big eyes were watery. I heard her blow her nose.
I heard one of the nurses ask her, “Why, Janice, what’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing. I’m all right.”
Poor Miss Ackerman. I was 15 years old and in love with her and I was covered with boils and there was nothing that either of us could do.
“All right,” she said, “this is going to be your last ultra-violet ray treatment. Lay on your stomach.”
“I know your first name now,” I told her. “Janice. That’s a pretty name. It’s just like you.”
“Oh, shut up,” she said.
I saw her once again when the first buzzer sounded. I turned over, Janice re-set the machine and left the room. I never saw her again.
My father didn’t believe in doctors who were not free. “They make you piss in a tube, take your money, and drive home to their wives in Beverly Hills,” he said.
But once he did send me to one. To a doctor with bad breath and a head as round as a basketball, only with two little eyes where a basketball had none. I didn’t like my father and the doctor wasn’t any better. He said, no fried foods, and to drink carrot juice. That was it.
I would re-enter high school the next term, said my father.
“I’m busting my ass to keep people from stealing. Some nigger broke the glass on a case and stole some rare coins yesterday. I caught the bastard. We rolled down the stairway together. I held him until the others came. I risk my life every day. Why should you sit around on your ass, moping? I want you to be an engineer. How the hell you gonna be an engineer when I find notebooks full of women with their skirts pulled up to their ass? Is that all you can draw? Why don’t you draw flowers or mountains or the ocean? You’re going back to school!”
I drank carrot juice and waited to re-enroll. I had only missed one term. The boils weren’t cured but they weren’t as bad as they had been.
“You know what carrot juice costs me? I have to work the first hour every day just for your god-damned carrot juice!”
I discovered the La Cienega Public Library. I got a library card. The library was near the old church down on West Adams. It was a very small library and there was just one librarian in it. She was class. About 38 but with pure white hair pulled tightly into a bun behind her neck. Her nose was sharp and she had deep green eyes behind rimless glasses. I felt that she knew everything.
I walked around the library looking for books. I pulled them off the shelves, one by one. But they were all tricks. They were very dull. There were pages and pages of words that didn’t say anything. Or if they did say something they took too long to say it and by the time they said it you already were too tired to have it matter at all. I tried book after book. Surely, out of all those books, there was one.
Each day I walked down to the library at Adams and La Brea and there was my librarian, stern and infallible and silent. I kept pulling the books off the shelves. The first real book I found was by a fellow named Upton Sinclair.