Ham On Rye - Charles Bukowski [61]
So we got on our bikes and started out. It was fifteen miles. That didn’t bother me. I had the legs.
I breezed with Jimmy all the way to Culver City. Then I gradually began to pedal faster. Jimmy pumped, trying to keep up. I could see him getting winded. I pulled out a cigarette and lit it, held out the pack to him. “Want one, Jim?”
“No…thanks…”
“This beats shooting birds with a beebee gun,” I told him. “We ought to do this more often!”
I began pumping harder. I still had plenty of reserve strength.
“This really gets it,” I told him. “This beats whacking-off!”
“Hey, slow up a little!”
I looked back at him. “There’s nothing like a good friend to go biking with. Come on, friend!”
Then I gave it all I had and pulled away. The wind was blowing in my face. It felt good.
“Hey, wait! WAIT, GOD DAMN IT!” yelled Jimmy.
I started laughing and really opened up. Soon Jim was half-a-block back, a block, two blocks. Nobody knew how good I was, nobody knew what I could do. I was some kind of miracle. The sun tossed yellow everywhere and I cut through it, a crazy knife on wheels. My father was a beggar in the streets of India but all the women in the world loved me…
I was traveling at full speed as I reached the signal. I shot through inside the row of waiting cars. Now even the cars were back there behind me. But not for long. A guy and his girl in a green coupe pulled up and drove alongside me.
“Hey, kid!”
“Yeah?” I looked at him. He was a big guy in his twenties with hairy arms and a tattoo.
“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” he asked me.
He was trying to show off in front of his girl. She was a looker, her long blond hair blowing in the wind.
“Up yours, buddy!” I told him.
“What?”
“I said, ‘Up yours!’”
I gave him the finger.
He kept driving along beside me.
“You gonna take shit off that kid, Nick?” I heard his girl ask him.
He kept driving along beside me.
“Hey, kid,” he said, “I didn’t quite hear what you said. Would you mind saying that again?”
“Yeah, say that again,” said the looker, her long blond hair blowing in the wind.
That pissed me. She pissed me.
I looked at him. “All right, you want trouble? Park it. I’m trouble.”
He zoomed ahead of me about half a block, parked, and swung the door open. As he got out I swung wide around him almost into the path of a Chevy who gave me the horn. As I swung around into a side street I could hear the big guy laughing.
After the guy was gone I wheeled back onto Washington Boulevard, went a few blocks, got off the bike and waited for Jim on a bus stop bench. I could see him coming along. When he pulled up I pretended that I was asleep.
“Come on, Hank! Don’t give me that shit!”
“Oh, hello, Jim. You here?”
I tried to get Jim to pick a spot on the beach where there weren’t too many people. I felt normal standing there in my shirt but when I undressed I was exposed. I hated the other bathers for their unmarred bodies. I hated all the god-damned people who were sunbathing or in the water or eating or sleeping or talking or throwing beachballs. I hated their behinds and their faces and their elbows and their hair and their eyes and their bellybuttons and their bathing suits.
I stretched out on the sand thinking, I should have punched that fat son-of-a-bitch. What the hell did he know?
Jim stretched out beside me.
“What the hell,” he said, “let’s go swimming.”
“Not yet,” I said.
The water was full of people. What was the fascination of the beach? Why did people like the beach? Didn’t they have anything better to do? What chicken-brained fuckers they were.
“Just think,” said Jim, “women go into the water and they piss in there.”
“Yeah, and you swallow it.”
There would never be a way for me to live comfortably with people. Maybe I’d become a monk. I’d pretend to believe in God and live in a cubicle, play an organ and stay drunk on wine. Nobody would fuck with me. I could go into a cell for months of meditation where