Women - Charles Bukowski [133]
“You’re O.K.”
When we got outside I began vomiting, all the beer and the wine came up. It poured and splattered into the brush—across the sidewalk—a gusher in the moonlight. Finally I straightened up and wiped my mouth with my hand.
“That guy worried you, didn’t he?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It almost seemed like a fuck, maybe better.”
“It didn’t mean anything, it was just dancing.”
“Suppose that I grabbed a woman on the street like that? Would music make it all right?”
“You don’t understand. Each time I finished dancing I came back and sat down next to you.”
“O.K., O.K.,” I said, “wait a minute.”
I puked up another gusher on somebody’s dying brush. We walked down the hill out of the Echo Park district toward Hollywood Boulevard.
We got into the car. It started and we drove west down Hollywood toward Vermont.
“You know what we call guys like you?” asked Lydia.
“No.”
“We call them,” she said, “party-poopers.”
7
We came in low over Kansas City, the pilot said the temperature was 20 degrees, and there I was in my thin California sports coat and shirt, lightweight pants, summer stockings, and holes in my shoes. As we landed and taxied toward the ramp everybody was reaching for overcoats, gloves, hats, mufflers. I let them all get off and then climbed down the portable stairway. There was Frenchy leaning against a building and waiting. Frenchy taught drama and collected books, mostly mine. “Welcome to Kansas Shitty, Chinaski!” he said and handed me a bottle of tequila. I took a good gulp and followed him into the parking lot. I had no baggage, just a portfolio full of poems. The car was warm and pleasant and we passed the bottle.
The roadways were frozen over with ice.
“Not everybody can drive on this fucking kind of ice,” said Frenchy. “You got to know what you’re doing.”
I opened the portfolio and began reading Frenchy a love poem Lydia had handed me at the airport:
“…your purple cock curved like a…
“…when I squeeze your pimples, bullets of puss like sperm…”
“Oh SHIT!” hollered Frenchy. The car went into a spin. Frenchy worked at the steering wheel.
“Frenchy,” I said, lifting the tequila bottle and taking a hit, “we’re not going to make it.”
We spun off the road and into a three foot ditch which divided the highway. I handed him the bottle.
We got out of the car and climbed out of the ditch. We thumbed passing cars, sharing what was left of the bottle. Finally a car stopped. A man in his mid-twenties, drunk, was at the wheel. “Where you fellows going?”
“A poetry reading,” said Frenchy.
“A poetry reading?”
“Yeah, at the University.”
“All right, get in.”
He was a liquor salesman. The back seat of his car was packed with cases of beer.
“Have a beer,” he said, “and get me one too.”
He got us there. We drove right up into the campus center and parked on the lawn in front of the auditorium. We were only 15 minutes late. I got out, vomited, then we all walked in together. We had stopped for a pint of vodka to get me through the reading.
I read about 20 minutes, then put the poems down. “This shit bores me,” I said, “let’s talk to each other.”
I ended up screaming things at the audience and they screamed back at me. That audience wasn’t bad. They were doing it for free. After about another 30 minutes a couple of professors got me out of there. “We’ve got a room for you, Chinaski,” one of them said, “in the women’s dormitory.”
“In the women’s dorm?”
“That’s right, a nice room.”
…It was true. Up on the third floor. One of the profs had brought a fifth of whiskey. Another gave me a check for the reading, plus air fare, and we sat around and drank the whiskey and talked. I blacked out. When I came to everybody was gone and there was half a fifth left. I sat there drinking and thinking, hey, you’re Chinaski, Chinaski the legend. You’ve got an image. Now you’re in the women’s dorm. Hundreds of women in this place, hundreds of them.
All I had on were my shorts and stockings. I walked out into the hall up to the nearest door. I knocked.
“Hey, I’m Henry Chinaski, the immortal writer!