Ham On Rye - Charles Bukowski [56]
I went back for more. I read each book in a single evening.
I was walking around one day sneaking glances at my librarian when I came upon a book with the title Bow Down To Wood and Stone. Now, that was good, because that was what we were all doing. At last, some fire! I opened the book. It was by Josephine Lawrence. A woman. That was all right. Anybody could find knowledge. I opened the pages. But they were like many of the other books: milky, obscure, tiresome. I replaced the book. And while my hand was there I reached for a book nearby. It was by another Lawrence. I opened the book at random and began reading. It was about a man at a piano. How false it seemed at first. But I kept reading. The man at the piano was troubled. His mind was saying things. Dark and curious things. The lines on the page were pulled tight, like a man screaming, but not “Joe, where are you?” More like Joe, where is anything? This Lawrence of the tight and bloody line. I had never been told about him. Why the secret? Why wasn’t he advertised?
I read a book a day. I read all the D. H. Lawrence in the library. My librarian began to look at me strangely as I checked out the books.
“How are you today?” she would ask.
That always sounded so good. I felt as if I had already gone to bed with her. I read all the books by D. H. And they led to others. To H. D., the poetess. And Huxley, the youngest of the Huxleys, Lawrence’s friend. It all came rushing at me. One book led to the next. Dos Passos came along. Not too good, really, but good enough. His trilogy, about the U.S.A., took longer than a day to read. Dreiser didn’t work for me. Sherwood Anderson did. And then along came Hemingway. What a thrill! He knew how to lay down a line. It was a joy. Words weren’t dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.
But back at home…
“LIGHTS OUT!” my father would scream.
I was reading the Russians now, reading Turgenev and Gorky. My father’s rule was that all lights were to be out by 8 p.m. He wanted to sleep so that he could be fresh and effective on the job the next day. His conversation at home was always about “the job.” He talked to my mother about his “job” from the moment he entered the door in the evenings until they slept. He was determined to rise in the ranks.
“All right, that’s enough of those god-damned books! Lights out!”
To me, these men who had come into my life from nowhere were my only chance. They were the only voices that spoke to me.
“All right,” I would say.
Then I took the reading lamp, crawled under the blanket, pulled the pillow under there, and read each new book, propping it against the pillow, under the quilt. It got very hot, the lamp got hot, and I had trouble breathing. I would lift the quilt for air.
“What’s that? Do I see a light? Henry, are your lights out?”
I would quickly lower the quilt again and wait until I heard my father snoring.
Turgenev was a very serious fellow but he could make me laugh because a truth first encountered can be very funny. When someone else’s truth is the same as your truth, and he seems to be saying it just for you, that’s great.
I read my books at night, like that, under the quilt with the overheated reading lamp. Reading all those good lines while suffocating. It was magic.
And my father had found a job, and that was magic for him…
36
Back at Chelsey High it was the same. One group of seniors had graduated but they were replaced by another group of seniors with sports cars and expensive clothes. I was never confronted by them. They left me alone, they ignored me. They were busy with the girls. They never spoke