Women - Charles Bukowski [158]
“I’ll take that one.” I pointed to Lydia sitting in the chair, all pissed over herself.
“All right, sir, are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
The cops walked off and there I was with Lydia again.
29
The phone rang the next morning. Lydia had gone back to her place. It was Bobby, the kid who lived in the next block and worked in the porno bookstore. “Mindy’s down here. She wants you to come and talk to her.”
“All right.”
I walked over with 3 bottles of beer. Mindy was dressed in high heels and a black see-through outfit from Frederick’s. It resembled a doll’s dress and you could see her black panties. There was no brassiere. Valerie wasn’t around. I sat down and twisted the beer caps off, passed the bottles.
“Are you going back to Lydia, Hank?” Mindy asked.
“Sorry, yes. I’m back.”
“That was rotten, what happened. I thought you and Lydia were finished?”
“I thought we were. Those things are very strange.”
“All my clothes are down at your place. I’ll have to come get them.”
“Of course.”
“Are you sure she’s gone?”
“Yes.”
“She acts like a bull, that woman, she acts like a dyke.”
“I don’t think she is.”
Mindy got up to go to the bathroom. Bobby looked at me. “I fucked her,” he said. “Don’t blame her. She had no other place to go.”
“I don’t blame her.”
“Valerie took her to Frederick’s to cheer her up. Got her a new outfit.”
Mindy came out of the bathroom. She’d been crying.
“Mindy,” I said, “I’ve got to go.”
“I’ll be down later for my clothes.”
I got up and walked out the door. Mindy followed me out there. “Hold me,” she said.
I held her. She was crying.
“You’re never going to forget me…never!”
I walked back to my place thinking, I wonder if Bobby fucked Mindy? Bobby and Valerie were into lots of strange new things. I didn’t care for their lack of common feeling. It was the way they did everything without any show of emotion. The same way another person might yawn or boil a potato.
30
To pacify Lydia I agreed to go to Muleshead, Utah. Her sister was camping in the mountains. The sisters actually owned much of the land. It had been inherited from their father. Glendoline, one of the sisters, had a tent pitched in the woods. She was writing a novel, The Wild Woman of the Mountains. The other sisters were to arrive any day. Lydia and I arrived first. We had a pup tent. We squeezed in there the first night and the mosquitoes squeezed in with us. It was terrible.
The next morning we sat around the campfire. Glendoline and Lydia cooked breakfast. I had purchased $40 worth of groceries which included several 6-packs of beer. I had them cooling in a mountain spring. We finished breakfast. I helped with the dishes and then Glendoline brought out her novel and read to us. It wasn’t really bad, but it was very unprofessional and needed a lot of polishing. Glendoline presumed that the reader was as fascinated by her life as she was—which was a deadly mistake. The other deadly mistakes she had made were too numerous to mention.
I walked to the spring and came back with 3 bottles of beer. The girls said no, they didn’t want any. They were very anti-beer. We discussed Glendoline’s novel. I figured that anybody who would read their novel aloud to others had to be suspect. If that wasn’t the old kiss of death, nothing was.
The conversation shifted and the girls started chatting about men, parties, dancing, and sex. Glendoline had a high, excited voice, and laughed nervously, laughed constantly. She was in her mid-forties, quite fat and very sloppy. Besides that, just like me, she was simply ugly.
Glendoline must have talked non-stop for over an hour, entirely about sex. I began to get dizzy. She waved her arms over her head, “I’M THE WILD WOMAN OF THE MOUNTAINS! O WHERE O WHERE IS THE MAN, THE REAL MAN WITH THE COURAGE TO TAKE ME?”
Well, he’s certainly not here, I thought.
I looked at Lydia. “Let’s go for a walk.”
“No,” she said, “I want to read this book.” It was called Love and Orgasm: A Revolutionary Guide to Sexual Fulfillment.
“All right,” I said, “I’ll take a walk then.