The Bell Tolls for No One. Charles Bukowski

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 back to L.A., it’s the only place for the literary hustler: at least I hustle best there, it’s my Paris, and unless they run me out like Villon I have to die there. My landlady drinks beer from the quart bottle and forces them upon me and takes ten bucks off the rent (a month) because I take out the tenants’ garbage cans and bring them back in. That’s more advantageous than a Great Writer’s Course.

      I got worried about the girls, though, they dance sexy with the cowboys at the local tavern and make big cow eyes at them; sun-tanned raw dudes who ain’t even read Swinburne yet . . . Nothing to do but drink beer, act stoical, indifferent, human, and literary.

      The little girl comes back:

      “Hi, Bukowski, dummy! Without no shirt on, without no shoes on, without no pants on, without no panties on, bare-naked typing outside . . . .”

      She’s 3 years old and drives a toy tractor by, stops, looks back again:

      “Hi, Bukowski, dummy! No pants on, no panties on, bare-naked typing in the sun . . . No hair on, bare-butt typing, drowning in the water . . . ”

      No hair on? The female, of course, is the eternal problem as long as that thing stands up. And living 50 years doesn’t bring a man any closer to solutions. Love still arrives 2 or 3 times in a lifetime for most of us, and the rest is sex and companionship, and it’s all problems and pain and glory . . .

      And here she comes across the dust, 31 years’ worth, cowboy boots, long red brown hair, dark brown eyes, tight blue pants, turtleneck sweater; she’s smiling . . .

      “Whatcha doin’, man?”

      “Writing . . . ”

      We embrace and kiss; her body folds into mine and those brown eyes reflect birds and rivers and sun; they are hot bacon, they are chili and beans, they are nights past and nights future, they are enough, they are more than enough . . . Where she learned to kiss I’ll never know. As we part, something stands out in front of me.

      “We’ll go to the track tomorrow,” she says.

      “Sure,” I say, “and how about this thing?”

      I look down.

      “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of it,” she says.

      We walk about and lock again over by the rabbit pen. Appropriate.

      “You’re the horniest old man I ever met . . . ”

      I send her away soon so I can finish this column. I watch the movement of her ass as she walks across the desert toward the house. She bends over to pet a dog. Freud, this is what the wars are all about, you had some truth going there, even though it was slightly hyped . . .

      I stop another dog fight. This time 2 young girls walk through with a larger dog. The German police dog attacks. It is a good fight. I leap in with a stick, grab the large dog by the collar.

      “Thanks,” says one of the girls.

      She reminds me of one I knew, married wrong, who used to beat on my door for consolation . . .

      Charles Bukowski—his writing style . . .

      Well, he designed it by drinking beer from quart bottles, rolling Prince Albert in Zig Zag and interfering in dog fights . . .

      Now I see that I have fallen into one of my bad habits: I have written this in both the present and past tense. Instead of correcting it I will throw it at the editors to test their liberality . . . Now two kids come home from school and the boy throws me a ball. I’ve got all my sharp and catch it, wing it back with a deft and nonchalant accuracy . . . Ernie would have been proud. Now, I’d like to tell you something about Phoenix whorehouses . . . but that’s going to take a bit of research. A blind writer told me yesterday that it’s the 3rd largest dope center in the U.S. The blind writer also told me that he thought those (writers) who had lasted through the ages were badly chosen. I’ve had that thought for some time. Such boring fellows.

      Now if you think I’ve always stood out in the desert standing up by an overturned reel, mixing my tenses and clowning, you’re wrong, babies. I’ve starved in tiny ratfilled, roachfilled rooms without enough money for stamps. I used to lay down drunk in alleys waiting for