The Bell Tolls for No One. Charles Bukowski

and the vomit of sell-out, and I’d feel it but stand silent in some morning hangover shade, rather cleaved in half again about how low the human being could descend without effort. And I’d be thinking this thing and then I’d hear her voice: “That son of a bitch! I can’t STAND him! He makes me sick!” Then she’d laugh and she always made up some nickname for the creature—like Greenjaws or Anteyes or Deadears.

      But to get on with it, one time we were sitting around our room drinking our port wine and she said, “Ya know, I think you’d like to meet the F.B.I.” She worked as a maid in the place and knew the roomers.

      “Forget it, sweetie,” I told her, “I’ve already met the F.B.I.”

      “Well, o.k.”

      We gathered the half empty wine bottle and the two or three full ones and I followed her down the hall. It was the darkest hall of hell, dozens of people leaning up against the wallpaper, all behind in the rent, drinking wine, rolling cigarettes, living on boiled potatoes, rice, beans, cabbage, hogshead soup. We walked a little way down and then Jane knocked, the insistent little knock that said: this is not trouble.

      “It’s Jane. It’s Jane.”

      The door opened and here stood a fat little bitch, rather ugly, a bit dangerous, demented, but still all right.

      “Come in, Jane.”

      “This is Hank,” she introduced me.

      “Hello,” I said.

      I came in and sat down in a straightback chair and one of the ladies went around filling the large waterglasses full of deathstink wine.

      Meanwhile, in the bed, unintroduced, sat, no sprawled, was this male creature ten years later than I.

      “What goes, shithead?” I asked him.

      He didn’t answer. He just looked at me. When you get a man who doesn’t care to rejoinder in common conversation, you’ve got a wild one, you’ve got a natural. I knew that I was in deep. He just SPRAWLED there under that dirty bedsheet, wineglass in hand, and worse, he looked quite handsome. That is, if you think the vulture is handsome and I think that he is. It is. He had the beak and eyes of living and he lifted that glass and ran the wine down his throat, one run down, all that deathstink wine, without a blink, since I was the heaviest drinker born in the last two centuries there was nothing for me to do but throw that filthy poison into my stomach, hold mentally to the sides of the chair and keep the straight pokerface.

      A refill. He did it again. I did it again. The two ladies just sat and watched. Filthy wine into filthy sadness. We went around a couple more. Then he started to babble. The sentences were energetic but muddled in content. Still, they made me feel better. And all the time, this big bright electric light overhead and these two drunken madwomen talking about something. Something.

      Then it happened—the sprawl was over. He pushed upward in the bed. The beautiful vulture eyes and the big electric light was upon us. He said it very quietly and with easy authority.

      “I am the F.B.I. You are under arrest.”

      And he would arrest us all, his woman, mine, me, and that was all. We would submit, then, the rest of the night would go on. I don’t know how many times in the next year that he put me under arrest, but it was always the magic moment of each evening. I never saw him get out of bed. When he crapped or urinated or ate or drank water or shaved, I had no idea. Finally, I decided that he just didn’t do these things—they happened in another way, like sleep or atomic warfare or snow melting. He realized that the bed is man’s greatest invention—most of us are born there, sleep there, fuck there, die there. Why get out? I tried to make his woman one night but she said that he would kill me if he ever found out. That would have been one way to get him out from under the sheets. Killed by an F.B.I. agent in dirty underwear. I let her go; she didn’t look that good.

      Then there was another night when Jane set me up for another. We were drinking. The same cheap stuff, of course. I had gone to bed once or twice with her and there wasn’t much else to do when she said: “Howja like to meet a killer?”

      “Wouldn’t mind,” I said, “wouldn’t mind a-tall.”

      “Less go.”

      She explained the whole thing to me on the way. Who he’d killed and why. He was now out on parole. The parole officer was a good guy, kept getting him these dishwasher jobs, but he kept getting drunk and losing them.

      Jane knocked and we went on in. Like I never saw the F.B.I. agent out of bed, I never saw the killer’s girlfriend get out of bed. She had this totally black hair on her head and this whitewhitewhitewhite skim milk terribly white SKIN. She was dying. Medical science be damned: all that was keeping her alive was port wine.

      I was introduced to the killer:

      “Ronnie, Hank. Hank, Ronnie.”

      He sat there in a dirty undershirt. And he didn’t have a face. Just runs of skin. Veins. Little fart eyes. We shook hands and started in on the wine. I don’t know how long we drank. One hour or 2, but he seemed to get angrier and angrier, which is rather commonplace with commonplace drinkers, especially on the wine. Yet we kept talking, talking, I don’t know about what.

      Then, suddenly, he reached over and grabbed his black and white wife and picked her out of bed and began using her like a willow rod. He just kept banging her head against the headboard:

      bang bang

      bang bang bang

      bang bang bang bang

      bang

      Then I said, “HOLD IT!”

      He looked over at me. “Wuzzat?”

      “You hit her head one more time on the headboard and I am going to kill you.”

      She was whiter than ever. He placed her back in bed, straightened the strands of her hair. She seemed almost happy. We all began drinking again. We drank until the crazy traffic began running up and down the streets far below. Then the sun was really up. Bright, and I got up and shook his hand. I said, “I have to go; I hate to go; you are a good kid; I gotta go anyhow.”

      Then there was Mick. The place was on Mariposa Ave. Mick didn’t work. His wife worked. Mick and I drank a lot together. I gave him 5 dollars once to wax my car. I didn’t have a bad car at the time, but Mick never waxed it. I’d find him sitting on the steps. “It looks like rain. No use waxing if it looks like rain. I’m gonna do a good job. Don’t want it spoiled.” He’d be sitting on those steps drunk. “O.K., Mick.” Next time he’d be sitting there drunk and see me. “I’m just sittin’ here lookin’, deciding what I’m gonna do. You see, you got those scratches on there. First thing I’m gonna do, I’m gonna paint in those scratches. I’m gonna get me some paint . . . ”

      “Jesus Christ, Mick. Forget it!”

      He did, but a fine fellow he was. One night he insisted that I was drunk although he was the one who was drunk. And he insisted that he help me up the 3 flights of stairs. Actually, I helped him up. But it was a lumbersome, cumbang bang bang bang bersome journey and I think we awakened everybody in the apartment building with our cussing and falling against walls and doors and stair-rails. Anyhow, I got the door opened, and then I tripped over one of his big feet. Down I went, straight and flat upon a coffeetable with a one-quarter-inch glass covering. The whole table smashed straight to the floor—I weigh around 218—and all 4 legs crushed under, the top of the table cracked in 4 places, but the slab of glass itself remained perfect, unmarred. I got up. “Thanks, old buddy,” I told him. “Nothin’ to it,” he said. And then I sat there and listened to him crashing into doorways and falling down the steps. It was like the whole building was under bombardment. He made it on down, gravity was on his side.

      He had a good wife. I remember one time they cleaned up my face with cotton and some kind of sterilizer when it was all smashed-in from a bad night out. They seemed very tender and concerned and serious about my smashedin face, and it was a very odd feeling to me, that care.