you are like me, baby, the life and the way is killing you—it may come out in the chest or the asshole or the belly…something HOLLERS…Krist, I’d like to say the SOUL hollers?? ah ah, we are DeMop in the rowboat, orange huge muscles and mind and siff of the soul and nothing to cure it. ouch! you and I have seen enough factories and hunkies and beasts and straw bosses and layoffs and breadlines and unemployment lines and hangovers and hospitals and jails and rotten women to make anybody’s stomach want to drop out and crawl off into a hairless hole to hide forever until the bomb until the whiskey god of love and easiness (DEATH) shows up. those chest pains of yours are from ugly work and nerves and senselessness; you have 2 clock hands drilling into your heart, and it’s an ugly clock too, very. you need time more than the first 5,000 people you pass on the street and you know it. I do too. don’t kid yourself—many people want SLAVERY, a job, 2 jobs, anything to keep them running in the cage. and when they call overtime night after night, sucking the last blood from our limp bravery, see them smile, smile their greasy overtime smiles, they love it. my god, they have a phrase for it down where I sometimes work. a word. “PORKCHOPS!” they say and lick their greasy lips when the word roars down at us, as God shits on us from the speakers above that are turned as LOUD as the machinery allows: “YOU ARE REQUIRED,” says God, “TO WORK ONE HOUR OVERTIME!” that’s the new word: required. then you make that hour and then God screams down, with just 2 minutes to go, that you are REQUIRED to work another. then, the same plan: another, another, until you get your lousy 12. all right, 12 and 8 hours for sleep, that’s 20. hour lunch, that’s 21. breakfast, dinner, travel, shit, shave, dress, undress, say something to your kid, look at the wall a minute, and all the odd things, haircut, buy shoes, get a tooth pulled, try to get the car started, kill a fly…that’s 24, and you’re back. more PORKCHOPS. you know all this. I thought I’d let you know that I know it too. and there’s never any money. for it all, there’s never any money. you have as much money working 40 hours a week as you do 72 or 32. strange, but it’s true. you have a family, I have child support. we do not beg off. it is something we did and we run it through. I love my little girl ten thousand times 402. fine. all right. but we’re crazy too. we’d like to walk down some beach with a knapsack and a cheap bottle of wine. we’d like to stare at the moon for 3 hours or just sit there and smell the stink of dead fish, of another death; we’d like to sit there and mug and tickle the shadow of China there across the waves, VVVASSSSH!! we’d like to do nothing for HOURS HOURS HOURS, gentle do-nothingness. filling like a sink with hot water. feeling our cotton brains up there. feeling mice between our ears. even wondering about Christ, wondering if there were 13 at the table, wondering if it ever happened, wondering if anybody spilled wine on their sleeve or farted. wondering all the easy things. comparing the sun to a lemon. falling in love with the color yellow like a big-assed whore. yellow, yellow, that’s me, and it’s my favorite color too. good. luckily I knew a lot of the traps from watching my father, from studying my father. I worked myself a lot of lay-around time in. I always lived with old drunken women, very OLD women because I didn’t want children, I didn’t want the trap. “Bukowski,” the few guys I knew used to say, “you can do better than THAT!” “sshish!” I’d tell them, “she’s coming in with the wine.” I even used to amuse myelf when I’d introduce my women. “Hey, this is Mary.” “Mary, this is Joe.” and I’d glim Joe’s face as he took in the sagging bellied, wine-struck, age-struck Bukowski cow. I never alibied. actually most of my cows were pretty good women. I mean, all they wanted was me and something to drink. I figured that these were pretty endearing qualities. meanwhile, no babies, no marriage, no squeeze, and I didn’t look so good either and I didn’t feel so good either and I either felt equal to or inferior to many of my cows. sure, some of them were vicious sluts, dirty and hardened as 3 week old and unwashed dishtowels and so was I, straight, I felt too like cursing all the walls and landlords and fuzz and children and the stars and the queers and the money-grabbers and the stink of life. it was a good bargain: I knew where I belonged, I was clever. I slipped once, and out of compassion more than anything, found myself with a 23 year old wife. she neither had the bone, the wisdom, the chapters of life behind her. she was a snit, a snob…hypersensitive to the smallest criticism, but meanwhile taken in by the grand phonies, the liars, the movie-trained Romantics, the dead-souled pretenders of Grace. fine. but ridiculous. lucky for me, there was a miscarriage. that rather did it. her phonies moved in and told her what a beast I was, or rather, by pretending no-beast they showed the beast in me. which was there. which was truly there. of course. shit. so divorce. escape. I walked down to the beach and tried to read Faulkner again. I layed on the sand with all my clothes on in mid day so they couldn’t see my scars. I’ve got these bloody hideous scars all over my back from some former hideous disease. show me something and I’ll catch it. why I never got the siff or the gon, I’ll never know. only the crabs. and I’ve screwed the filthiest lousiest stuff in bars from Coast to Coast. deliberately. did I tell you the time I picked up this young whore, around 19, 20 in this bar, a real fine piece as the boys would say, only the madam, some old hag around 55, insisted on coming along to see that I didn’t spoil or mutilate her young fine meat income. o.k., I said. we sat up at my place and had a few drinks, more than a few, it was an old place up the hill by the Grand Central Market. I still thought I was a writer or something and was living on potatoes and boiled fishheads. everything went all right until I had another drink or so and then decided it was time for the great lover, Rupert Brooke Bukowski, to screw to fuck. by training and instinct, of course, I grabbed for the 55 year old hag instead of that fine 19 year old meat. training runs deep, pal. I’ll always remember this hag with a face like a killer (I don’t know if they wore a Green Beret) and she had one hand missing at the wrist and attached was an iron hand, very shiny and large and silver, with, I remember, one VERY LARGE HOOK protruding. and I mean protruding, baby! after the first grab at the hag, I think she was a lez to top it all, she backed off and swung the hook—S W I S H!—“hey, this son of a bitch is NUTS!” she hollered. and I remember that hook swinging again and again and myself ducking, ducking around the room. meanwhile, the 19 year old meat very puzzled. me too. I ran out of the room and left them in there with my immortal short stories, to burn them if they wanted to, to fuck each other if they wanted to…. where was I? yeah? down at the beach reading Faulkner. trying him again. trying to convince myself that he wasn’t a phoney to me. he’d won all the prizes. his photo even looked like a man. what was wrong? I felt like he was slipping me the smooth bologna. I am still puzzled. he can’t write. he slicks it. he’s celluloid. clever. cute. what’s wrong with me? some monkeys were playing with a beachball and they’d bounce it near me, sand all over Faulkner, all over me, in my mouth, ears. I stayed on there, right in the middle of their game, right in the middle of Faulkner’s game as my x-wife ran off with a cultured Turk with a purple stickpin and a cultured accent, a kind of Boyer, and he knew how, he owned a drive-in movie.