Ham On Rye - Charles Bukowski [89]
I did. I rode it in. I made it down Westview Street, walked down 21st Street, turned south down Longwood Avenue to 2122. I walked up the neighbor’s driveway, found the berry bush, crawled over it, through the open screen and into my bedroom. I undressed and went to bed. I must have consumed over a quart of whiskey. My father was still snoring, just as he had been when I had left, only at the moment it was louder and uglier. I slept anyhow.
As usual I approached Mr. Hamilton’s English class thirty minutes late. It was 7:30 a.m. I stood outside the door and listened. They were at Gilbert and Sullivan again. And it was still all about going to the sea and the Queen’s Navy. Hamilton couldn’t get enough of that. In high school I’d had an English teacher and it had been Poe, Poe, Edgar Allan Poe.
I opened the door. Hamilton went over and lifted the needle from the record. Then he announced to the class, “When Mr. Chinaski arrives we always know that it is 7:30 a.m. Mr. Chinaski is always on time. The only problem being that it is the wrong time.”
He paused, glancing at the faces in his class. He was very, very dignified. Then he looked at me.
“Mr. Chinaski, whether you arrive at 7:30 a.m. or whether you arrive at all will not matter. I am assigning you a ‘D’ for English I.”
“A ‘D,’ Mr. Hamilton?” I asked, flashing my famous sneer. “Why not an ‘F’?”
“Because ‘F,’ at times, equates with ‘Fuck.’ And I don’t think you’re worth a ‘Fuck.’”
The class cheered and roared and stomped and stamped. I turned around, walked out, closed the door behind me. I walked down the hallway, still hearing them going at it in there.
52
The war was going very well in Europe, for Hitler. Most of the students weren’t very vocal on the matter. But the instructors were, they were almost all left-wing and anti-German. There seemed to be no right-wing faction among the instructors except for Mr. Glasglow, in Economics, and he was very discreet about it.
It was intellectually popular and proper to be for going to war with Germany, to stop the spread of fascism. As for me, I had no desire to go to war to protect the life I had or what future I might have. I had no Freedom. I had nothing. With Hitler around, maybe I’d even get a piece of ass now and then and more than a dollar a week allowance. As far as I could rationalize, I had nothing to protect. Also, having been born in Germany, there was a natural loyalty and I didn’t like to see the whole German nation, the people, depicted everywhere as monsters and idiots. In the movie theatres they speeded up the newsreels to make Hitler and Mussolini look like frenetic madmen. Also, with all the instructors being anti-German I found it personally impossible to simply agree with them. Out of sheer alienation and a natural contrariness I decided to align myself against their point of view. I had never read Mein Kampf and had no desire to do so. Hitler was just another dictator to me, only instead of lecturing me at the dinner table he’d probably blow my brains out or my balls off if I went to war to stop him.
Sometimes as the instructors talked on and on about the evils of nazism (we were told always to spell “nazi” with a small “n” even at the beginning of a sentence) and fascism I would leap to my feet and make something up:
“The survival of the human race depends upon selective accountability!”
Which meant, watch out who you go to bed with, but only I knew that. It really pissed everybody off.
I don’t know where I got my stuff:
“One of the failures of Democracy is that the common vote guarantees a common leader who then leads us to a common apathetic predictability!”
I avoided