Women - Charles Bukowski [237]
“You met Manny,” she said to me, “down at Bobby’s?”
“Yeh.”
“I had to kick his ass out. He was too fucking jealous. He even hired a private dick to follow me! Imagine that! That simple sack of shit!”
“Yeh.”
“I hate men who are beggars! I hate little toadies!”
“‘A good man nowadays is hard to find,’” I said. “That’s a song. Out of World War Two. They also had, ‘Don’t sit under the apple tree with anybody else but me.’”
“Hank, you’re babbling….” said Sara.
“Have another drink, Edie,” I said and I poured her one.
“Men are such shits!” she continued. “I walked into a bar the other day. I was with four guys, close friends. We sat around chugalugging pitchers of beer, we’re laughing, you know, just having a good time, we weren’t bothering anybody. Then I got the idea that I would like to shoot a game of pool. I like to shoot pool. I think that when a lady shoots pool it shows her class.”
“I can’t shoot pool,” I said. “I always rip up the green. And I’m not even a lady.”
“Anyway, I go up to the table and there’s this guy shooting pool all by himself. I go up to him and I say, ‘Look, you’ve had this table a long time. My friends and myself want to shoot a little pool. Do you mind letting us have the table for a while?’ He turned and looked at me. He waited. Then he sneered, and he said, ‘All right.’”
Edie became animated and bounced around as she spoke and I peeked at her things.
“I went back and told my friends, ‘We got the table.’ Finally this guy shooting is down to his last ball when a buddy of his walks up and says, ‘Hey, Ernie, I hear you’re giving up the table.’ And you know what he tells this guy? He says, ‘Yeah, I’m giving it up to that bitch!’ I heard it and I saw RED! This guy is bent over the table to cue in on his last ball. I grabbed a pool stick and while he was bent over I hit him over the head as hard as I could. The guy dropped on the table like he was dead. He was known in the bar and so a bunch of his friends rush over but meanwhile my four buddies rush over too. Boy, what a brawl! Bottles smashing, broken mirrors…. I don’t know how we got out of there but we did. You got some shit?”
“Yeah but I don’t roll too good.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
Edie rolled a tight thin joint, just like a pro. She sucked it up, hissing, then passed it to me.
“So I went back the next night, alone. The owner who is the bartender, he recognizes me. His name is Claude. ‘Claude,’ I told him, ‘I’m sorry about yesterday but that guy at the table was a real bastard. He called me a bitch.’”
I poured more drinks all around. In another minute her breasts would be out.
“The owner said, ‘It’s O.K., forget it.’ He seemed like a nice guy. ‘What do you drink?’ he asked me. I hung around the bar and had two or three free drinks and he said, ‘You know, I can use another waitress.’”
Edie took a hit on the joint and continued. “He told me about the other waitress. ‘She pulled the men in but she made a lot of trouble. She played one guy against the other. She was always on stage. Then I found out she was tricking on the side. She was using MY place to peddle her pussy!’”
“Really?” Sara asked.
“That’s what he said. Anyhow, he offered me a position as a waitress. And he said, ‘No tricking on the job!’ I told him to cut the shit, I wasn’t one of those. I thought maybe now I’ll be able to save some money and go to U.C.L.A., to become a chemist and to study French, that’s what I’ve always wanted to do. Then he said, ‘Come on back here, I want to show you where we store our excess stock and also I’ve got an outfit I’d like you to try on. It’s never been worn and I think it’s your size.’ So I went into this dark little room with him and he tried to grab me. I pushed him off. Then he said, ‘Just