I walked into the poolroom of the ranch-house where they were dancing. I lifted the homosexual high over my head, but decided not to crack his skull on the ceiling. I set him down and then gave my own drunken version of the Dance—the Great White Bird Flying.
When I finished, the fag walked up and said, “Pardon me.”
I gave way and he danced with Nina and nobody seemed to object, not even I . . .
Time and things went on, they do, you know.
I gave a few poetry readings, got some minor royalties from a novel. Then I was up in Utah with Nina waiting for the big Fourth of July dance.
“That’s the only time when things happen up here,” she told me.
So we made the little town big-time dance, and Nina met her big, dumb cowboy. Or maybe he wasn’t big and dumb.
I watched him a bit and I thought, hell, he’d even make a writer if something got up and really sliced his soul, showed him where it was at. But nothing had bothered him too much, and so, let’s say he had soul of a sort and Nina knew it. She kept looking back at me as she kept offering it to him in the Dance. And I thought—here I am, a stranger in a shit town. I just wish I could get out and leave the Nina’s and their people and themselves to each other, but Nina kept slicing in closer and closer and offering herself.
And that was it for me, because if she wanted him, she could have him. That was my way of thinking: the two that wanted each other should have each other.
But she had to keep bringing him back to me after each dance. “Charlie,” she said, “this is Marty. Doesn’t Marty dance nice?”
“I don’t know much about dancing. I guess he does.”
“I want you two guys to be friends,” she said.
Then the floor squared off and they danced together, everybody clapping and laughing and joyous. I smoked a cigarette and talked to some big-titted lady about taxes. Then I looked up and Nina and Marty were kissing while they were dancing.
I was hurt but I knew Nina. I shouldn’t have been hurt. As they danced they kept on kissing. Everybody applauded. I applauded too. “More, more!” I demanded.
They danced again and again.
The townspeople became more exhilarated. I simply lost hope, came down to reality, and became terribly bored. Bored, that’s the only state I can name it. There is something about the beat of dance music. It can only hold me so long then I feel as if I have been flattened with hard and meaningless hammers.
Nina and I had been living in a tent at the edge of town. I was sitting alone against a tree one evening outside the tent when she came running down the road, “Charlie, Charlie, I don’t want Marty, I want you! Please believe me, goddamn you!”
Her car was parked along the downward road and evidently Marty was chasing her in the moonlight. The big, dumb cowboy was on a horse. He caught up with her in the path and lassoed her and she screamed in front of me in the dirt. He pulled her blue jeans and panties off and put it in. Her legs raised into the pitch black sky.
I couldn’t watch anymore so I walked down the pathway to the main road.
I had a good five-mile walk to the nearest bus station in town.
I felt good.
I knew that they were finished by then and that I was free. I thought of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. And as I walked along, I knew that for the first time in years, my heart was free.
The gravel that crunched under my feet provided the best dance of all. Better than all the kissing and dancing that Nina could offer me.
“You ain’t a real cowboy until you got some steer dung on your boots.” . . .
Pall Mall McEvers—July 29, 1941
Phoenix, Jan. 13th, 1972
Well, being a writer means doing many things so that the writing is not too lousily aligned from one base, and one doesn’t always choose the obvious—like Paris or San Francisco or a COSMEP meeting—so here I am typing standing up, à la Hemingway, only on an overturned table spool somewhere in an Arizona desert, a yellow monoplane with propeller going overhead—Africa and the lions far away—the lessons of Gertie Stein ingested and ignored—I have just stopped a dogfight between a small mongrel dog and a German police dog—and that takes some minor guts—and the mongrel lays on the cable spool below my feet—grateful and dusty and chewed—and I left the cigarettes elsewhere—I stand under a limp and weeping tree in Paradise Valley and smell the horseshit and remember my beaten court in Hollywood, drinking beer and wine with 9th rate writers and after extracting what small juices they have, throwing them physically out the door.
Now a little girl walks up and she says, “Bukowski, what are you doing, you dummy?”
Now I am called in for a sandwich in the place to my right. Literature can wait. There are 5 women in there. They are all writing novels. Well, what can you do with 5 women?
The sandwiches are good and the conversation begins:
“Well, I worked for this lawyer once and he had this guru on his desk and I got hot and took it into the woman’s john, and the head was just right, the whole thing was shaped just right, it was pretty good. When I finished I put the thing back on the lawyer’s desk. It took the paint right off the thing when I did it and the lawyer came back and noticed it and said, ‘What the hell happened to my guru?’ and I said, ‘What’s the matter? Is something wrong with it?’ Then he phoned up the company he got the thing from and complained because the paint had come off after he’d only had the thing a week . . . ”
The girls laughed, “Oh hahaha ha, oh, hahaha!” I smiled.
“I read in The Sensuous Woman,” said another of the novelists, “that a woman can climax 64 times in a row, so I tried it . . . ”
“How’d you make out?” I asked.
“I made it 13 times . . . ”
“All these horny guys walking around,” I said, “you ought to be ashamed.”
Here I am, I thought, sitting with these women, sleeping with the most beautiful one of them, and where are the men? Branding cattle, punching timeclocks, selling insurance . . . How can I bitch about my lot as a starving writer? I’ll find a way . . . Tomorrow I’ll go to Turf Paradise and see if the gods are kind. Surely I can outbet these cowboys and the old folks who come out here to die? Then there’s the poem. Patchen died Saturday night of a heart attack and John Berryman jumped off a bridge into the Mississippi Friday and they haven’t found his body yet. Things are looking better. These young guys write like Oscar Wilde with a social consciousness. There’s room at the top and nothing at the bottom. I can see myself walking through TIMES SQUARE and all the young girls saying, “Look there goes Charles Bukowski!” Isn’t that the meaning of living immortality? Besides free drinks?
I finish my sandwich, let the beautiful one know that I still love her, soul and her body, then walk back into the desert to my overturned wooden reel, and I sit here typing now. I stand here typing now, looking at horses and cows, and over to my left are mountains shaped differently than those tiresome mountains north of L.A., and I’ll be
