Women - Charles Bukowski [29]
I went back to sweeping up the glass. I got it all swept up and put away. Then I reached down into the original paper bag and found one undamaged bottle of beer. It looked very good. I really needed it. I was about to unscrew the cap when someone grabbed it out of my hand. It was Lydia again. She ran up to Nicole’s door with the bottle and hurled it at the glass. She hurled it with such velocity that it went straight through like a large bullet, not smashing the entire window but leaving just a round hole.
Lydia ran off and I walked up the stairway. Nicole was still standing there. “For god’s sake, Chinaski, leave with her before she kills everybody!”
I turned and walked back down the stairway. Lydia was sitting in her car at the curbing with the engine running. I opened the door and got in. She drove off. Neither of us spoke a word.
24
I began receiving letters from a girl in New York City. Her name was Mindy. She had run across a couple of my books, but the best thing about her letters was that she seldom mentioned writing except to say that she was not a writer. She wrote about things in general and men and sex in particular. Mindy was 25, wrote in longhand, and the handwriting was stable, sensible, yet humorous. I answered her letters and was always glad to find one of hers in my mailbox. Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.
Then Mindy sent some photographs. If they were faithful she was quite beautiful. We wrote for several more weeks and then she mentioned that she had a 2 week vacation coming up.
Why don’t you fly out? I suggested.
All right, she replied.
We began to phone one another. Finally she gave me her arrival date at L.A. International.
I’ll be there, I told her, nothing will stop me.
25
I kept the date in mind. It was never any problem creating a split with Lydia. I was naturally a loner, content just to live with a woman, eat with her, sleep with her, walk down the street with her. I didn’t want conversation, or to go anywhere except the racetrack or the boxing matches. I didn’t understand t.v. I felt foolish paying money to go into a movie theatre and sit with other people to share their emotions. Parties sickened me. I hated the game-playing, the dirty play, the flirting, the amateur drunks, the bores. But parties, dancing, small talk energized Lydia. She considered herself a sexpot. But she was a little too obvious. So our arguments often grew out of my wish for no-people-at-all versus her wish for as-many-people-as-often-as-possible.
A couple of days before Mindy’s arrival I started it. We were on the bed together.
“Lydia, for Christ’s sake, why are you so stupid? Don’t you realize I’m a loner? A recluse? I have to be that way to write.”
“How can you learn anything about people if you don’t meet them?”
“I already know all about them.”
“Even when we go out to eat in a restaurant, you keep your head down, you don’t look at anybody.”
“Why make myself sick?”
“I observe people,” she said. “I study them.”
“Shit!”
“You’re afraid of people!”
“I hate them.”
“How can you be a writer? You don’t observe!”
“O.K., I don’t look at people, but I earn the rent with my writing. It beats tending sheep.”
“You’re not going to last. You’ll never make it. You’re doing it all wrong.”
“That’s why I’m making it.”
“Making it? Who the hell knows who you are? Are you famous like Mailer? Like Capote?”
“They can’t write.”
“But you can! Only you, Chinaski, can write!”
“Yes, that’s how I feel.”
“Are you famous? If you went to New York City, would anybody know you?”
“Listen I don’t care about that. I just want