Ham On Rye - Charles Bukowski [82]
His friends moved in and picked him up, they held him up, talked to him, “Hey, Jim, you O.K.?”
“What’d the son-of-a-bitch do to you, Jim? We’ll clean his drawers, Jim. Just give us the word.”
“Take me home,” Jim said.
I watched them go down the stairway, all of them trying to hold him up, one guy carrying his shirt and undershirt…
I went downstairs to get my cart. Justin Phillips was waiting.
“I didn’t think you’d be back,” he smiled disdainfully.
“Don’t fraternize with the unskilled help,” I told him.
I pushed off. My face, my clothes—I was pretty badly messed up. I walked to the elevator and hit the button. The albino came in due time. The doors opened.
“The word’s out,” he said. “I hear you’re the new heavyweight champion of the world.”
News travels fast in places where nothing much ever happens.
Ferris of the sliced ear was waiting.
“You just don’t go around beating the shit out of our customers.”
“It was only one.”
“We have no way of knowing when you might start in on the others.”
“This guy baited me.”
“We don’t give a damn about that. That’s what happens. All we know is that you were out of line.”
“How about my check?”
“It’ll be mailed.”
“O.K., see you…”
“Wait, I’ll need your locker key.”
I got out my key chain which only had one other key on it, pulled off the locker key and handed it to Ferris.
Then I walked to the employees’ door, pulled it open. It was a heavy steel door which worked awkwardly. As it opened, letting in the daylight, I turned and gave Ferris a small wave. He didn’t respond. He just looked straight at me. Then the door closed on him. I liked him, somehow.
48
“So you couldn’t hold a job for a week?”
We were eating meatballs and spaghetti. My problems were always discussed at dinner time. Dinner time was almost always an unhappy time.
I didn’t answer my father’s question.
“What happened? Why did they can your ass?”
I didn’t answer.
“Henry, answer your father when he speaks to you!” my mother said.
“He couldn’t hack it, that’s all!”
“Look at his face,” said my mother, “it’s all bruised and cut. Did your boss beat you up, Henry?”
“No, Mother…”
“Why don’t you eat, Henry? You never seem to be hungry.”
“He can’t eat,” said my father, “he can’t work, he can’t do anything, he’s not worth a fuck!”
“You shouldn’t talk that way at the dinner table, Daddy,” my mother told him.
“Well, it’s true!” My father had an immense ball of spaghetti rolled on his fork. He jammed it into his mouth and started chewing and while chewing he speared a large meatball and plunged it into his mouth, then worked in a piece of French bread.
I remembered what Ivan had said in The Brothers Karamazov, “Who doesn’t want to kill the father?”
As my father chewed at the mass of food, one long string of spaghetti dangled from a corner of his mouth. He finally noticed it and sucked it in noisily. Then he reached, put two large teaspoons of white sugar into his coffee, lifted the cup and took a giant mouthful, which he immediately spit out across his plate and onto the tablecloth.
“That shit’s too hot!”
“You should be more careful, Daddy,” said my mother.
I combed the job market, as they used to say, but it was a dreary and useless routine. You had to know somebody to get a job even as a lowly bus boy. Thus everybody was a dishwasher, the whole town was full of unemployed dishwashers. I sat with them in Pershing Square in the afternoons. The evangelists were there too. Some had drums, some had guitars, and the bushes and restrooms crawled with homosexuals.
“Some of them have money,” a young bum told me. “This guy took me to his apartment for two weeks. I had all I could eat and drink and he bought me some clothes but he sucked me dry, I couldn’t stand up after a while. One night when he was asleep I crawled out of there. It was horrible. He kissed me once and I knocked him across the room. ‘You ever do that again,’ I told him, ‘and I’ll kill you!’”
Clifton’s Cafeteria was nice. If you didn’t have much money, they let you pay what you could. And if you didn’t have any money, you