The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way. Charles Bukowski

      He picked up the bottle to hit it again. I ripped it out of his hand.

      I told you, mother, the rest is mine.

      They told me later that he was crazy, everybody was afraid of him, he was always on acid but hung around the university even though they had kicked him out.

      That showed his weakness.

      I took the bottle from him and climbed back on stage.

      The second half was better than the first. They gave me good applause, even the crazy one.

      Then I got on out. Almost. The teacher who’d brought me in knew a prof and the prof was at the reading, and the next thing I was at a party at the prof’s house. Sell-out Bukowski. The guy who hated profs drinking with them.

      I’d signed a contract to read at another college 150 or 200 miles away. Anyhow, I was a literary hustler and I was stuck with it. I stood around at the party because my ride was there, the young guy with the shag of yellow hair, the nice guy, and to help myself along I drank myself into a standing stupidity. I had a reading at this other place at 11:30 a.m. in the morning but you wouldn’t have known it looking at me, peeling off tens and twenties: “Hey, man, go down to the liquor store and stock up for these good people. Looks like we’re running short.”

      My host was an English teacher who looked just like Ernest Hemingway. Of course, he wasn’t. But I was drunk.

      “Ernie,” I staggered up to him, “I’ll be a son of a bitch in hell! I thought you blew your head off!”

      My Hemingway was a staid and rather dull member of the English department.

      He just stood there talking about poets and poetry. He was insane. I walked over to the couch and started necking with his wife. She didn’t resist. He just stood there over us, talking about poets and poetry. I stuck my tongue deep into her mouth, mauled her breasts.

      “T.S. Eliot,” he said, “was entirely too safe.”

      I ran my hand up under her dress.

      “Auden had no lasting power.”

      She stuck her tongue deep into my mouth.

      The party went on and on, but for it all, I awakened in bed alone. I was in an upper bedroom, hungover and sick. I turned over to go back to sleep.

      “Bukowski! Wake up!” somebody said.

      “Go away,” I said.

      “We’ve got to make that 11:30 a.m. reading. It’ll take us 2 or 3 hours.”